do you think education or income is any measure of how smart someone is?

from portfolio

How We Did It: Judging Smart Cities
by G. Scott Thomas Dec 01 2010

A closer look at how Portfolio.com determined which of the 200 largest metropolitan areas in the United States were the smartest and which might want to go back to school.

Brain Bounty or Brain Busted? Brain Bounty or Brain Busted?

How smart is your community? If it's anything like Boulder, Colorado, then it's tops in terms of brainpower, according to a Portfolio.com survey of the 200 largest U.S. markets.

What separates a city like Boulder, Colorado from a place like Merced, California? One word: education.

Portfolio.com devised a formula to rate the brainpower of U.S. metropolitan areas. Here are the details:

Goal: The study’s objective was to identify those markets with the strongest collective brainpower, as indicated by their residents’ educational attainment.

Areas: The study focused on America’s 200 largest metros. The markets ranged in size from the New York City area, with 19.07 million residents, down to Burlington, Vermont, with 207,600.

Source: All raw data used in the study came from the American Community Survey, which was conducted in 2009 and released in September 2010 by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Factors: Portfolio.com established scores for five levels of educational attainment, based on the relative earning power of adult workers (25 or older). Scores were determined by comparing the 2007 median income for all workers ($33,452) with the median income for those workers at a specified educational level. Medians and the resulting scores are listed below:

* Dropped out before high-school graduation (median of $19,405; 0.58 points)
* Stopped at high-school diploma (median of $26,894; 0.80 points)
* Stopped at associate degree or attended college, but stopped without any degree (median of $32,874; 0.98 points)
* Stopped at bachelor’s degree (median of $46,805; 1.40 points)
* Earned graduate and/or professional degree (median of $61,287; 1.83 points)

Scoring: Each adult was assigned a score based on his or her highest level of educational attainment. Points for all adults (25 or older) within a market were averaged, yielding a raw figure that was converted to a final score. Above-average performances received positive scores, while below-average results received negative scores. Final scores ranged from 3.941 for Boulder, Colorado, to minus-2.558 for Merced, California.

For a slideshow of the 25 smartest U.S. metropolitan areas, click here. And to get the entire list comparing 200 markets, download a PDF here.

Obviously not.

I'm sure I know a few high school drop outs that are smarter than the average bear.

How smart? Not really... There are some people who are naturally smart, naturally creative, or natural at business, and they do really well at life, regardless of education. But in general, people who are very smart can figure out how to make money, regardless of their outlook on society. But in general, happiness trumps education, income, and intelligence. But that depends on your view of what is important in life. I think being happy is the goal. So if someone is happy being dumb, and is happy just having kids and watching football on TV, then good for them! And other people are happy designing spaceships that go to Mars, or doing brain surgery. So good for them too! I think way too many people spend their whole lives very angry and stressed, because they are attempting to reach unattainable goals, or meet unrealistic expectations of others. You only have one life. It would suck to live it feeling miserable the whole time. I say be smart enough to learn how to get what you need to be happy.

Education is necessary for intelligence but there are a lot of ways to get educated. William Kamkwamba educated himself, but most are not as motivated as he is. But, as a general rule, educated people are smarter than people who are not educated. Yeah, everyone knows the guy with a masters who is dumb despite it, or the person with "street smarts" who never finished high school, but those are the outliers.Even if you have a natural aptitude for learning, you have to get educated, and school is one of the easier methods. On average, more school means more smart.

Income is a little trickier. You don't have to be smart to inherit money, or connections, or just be part of a wealthier society. And even very smart people can find themselves in financial straights due to things like culture.

Overall, I think the survey is flawed though, it does not take into account that you need a certain income to live in certain places, which skews the numbers.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cafe_Post_Mortem

Education is necessary for intelligence but there are a lot of ways to get educated. William Kamkwamba educated himself, but most are not as motivated as he is. But, as a general rule, educated people are smarter than people who are not educated. Yeah, everyone knows the guy with a masters who is dumb despite it, or the person with "street smarts" who never finished high school, but those are the outliers.Even if you have a natural aptitude for learning, you have to get educated, and school is one of the easier methods. On average, more school means more smart.

---

I don't know whether a naturally smart person can fail to educate themselves, one way or another. Even if we define intelligence as only a capacity for learning (acquiring knowledge, which seems to be your final measure of 'smart') - rather than also the direct ability to draw conclusions on logic alone, which is at least equally valid - a person with an above-average measure of it is going to learn about anything they do or get exposed to. Their area of expertise may end up being farming, cooking or sex or something equally un-academical, but their knowledge will be no less valid for that.

I think your argument requires an unwarranted value call distinguishing knowledge typical to intellectual culture from other kinds of knowledge; environment will determine what you learn, but only lack of stimulation (which comes in many more forms than schools can offer) can hamper the amount.

sometimes I wish that I was educated..........then I would be smart enough to say "I don't do that"....then people might stop bugging me

Degrees in What Ever = the ability to jump through hoops and to do it long enough for it to pay off.

My wife is a good example of someone who is very intelligent and has years experience in her field, but will never get a better job because she does not have a four year degree. I on the other hand am working on my masters and find it interesting that their is a strong push for a change in the way teachers teach due to technology, circle schools, home schools, designerly ways, and no school. The common way of teaching is to keep the kids busy and focused so you will have less discipline issues. The new way is to allow as much freedom as possible, to guide rather then control. to reach a goal of the student becoming a self motivated learner.
This may sound like philosophical bullshit but I think it may be just the schools trying to keep up and stay in business. The ease to gather information via the web is fast replacing the need for knowledge and technology has been replacing the need for skills for centuries.

(skipping a few paragraphs that would lead up to this statement) Its the exponential growth to artificial intelligence that scares me.

knowledge, no matter how it is gained, seems like a good benchmark for smart. Someone can gain knowledge without eduction, but education, especially in a university environment, provides things learning on you own will not.

• The first is a broader base of stimulation. Going to a university will provide you with a greater base of knowledge than you are likely to pick up on your own. Again, their are outliers, but they are the exception.
• The next thing a schools provide is resources. Labs, libraries, professors and peers. No matter how smart you are, tools are useful. People with experience are useful. People learning with you, making mistakes with you are useful.
• The other thing is critical review, someone with knowledge of the field to discuss what you do good and bad. That is hard to find outside of a school. It can be done, but honesty and knowledge of your field are a rare combination.

Whether it is math, science, farming, cooking or even sex, these are useful tools. Of course, there are good schools and bad schools, good teachers and bad teachers, but this is true with any learning method.

Now the internet has provided more people more access to information, but you really have to be determined to sort the good information from the bad and it takes a special kind of person to set aside ego and look at what they truly know. Peer review helps that a lot.

Experience helps as well, but education enhances experience and experience enhances education. I person who spends 4 years with hands on learning is likely to know things a person with four years of book learning will not, but the reverse is also true.

As far as natural smarts goes, I think that is over rated. Short of a learning disorder, everyone has the capacity for intelligence. Some people have a natural talent for certain things, but i will take someone with drive and curiosity over a lazy smart person any day. I have watched people breeze through learning difficult tasks and I have watched people struggle with them, in the end the found their way to the same place.

And yes, a lot of earning a degree is based on determination (or jumping through hoops as some call it) and some don't see the need for broad education, but part of the reason some employers respect degrees is not just because of what they think you learn in class, but what you learn in school. Finishing a BA or BA is four years of school is a lot of work you don't always want to do. It is no surprise employers look for that level of dedication (when they do)

I am not saying that education is the only benchmark of smart, but it is a pretty good one. It is very difficult to get a four year degree and still be stupid. Possible, but difficult.

Peer review = say what they want to hear or do three times the work to say what you believe.
Oh yeah, I forget - most students are clay.

Get over yourself, its the end of a semester - vent

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cafe_Post_Mortem

knowledge, no matter how it is gained, seems like a good benchmark for smart. Someone can gain knowledge without eduction, but education, especially in a university environment, provides things learning on you own will not.

---

And vice versa.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cafe_Post_Mortem

• The first is a broader base of stimulation. Going to a university will provide you with a greater base of knowledge than you are likely to pick up on your own. Again, their are outliers, but they are the exception.
• The next thing a schools provide is resources. Labs, libraries, professors and peers. No matter how smart you are, tools are useful. People with experience are useful. People learning with you, making mistakes with you are useful.
• The other thing is critical review, someone with knowledge of the field to discuss what you do good and bad. That is hard to find outside of a school. It can be done, but honesty and knowledge of your field are a rare combination.

---

'First point is simply false. Life provides a far broader base of stimulation than universities. I don't see how anybody could think otherwise, having thought about it for more than a second.

Resources are good, but plentiful in the world at large. The internet has more free information than any library, and if you really need to know something you have to pay for it'll still be endlessly cheaper than uni. Peers and people with experience are also everywhere - less topic-focused than you'll find them in schools, but also more pluriform - and absent the taint of educational hierarchy, where you are steered to 'learn' only what your teachers have concluded before you.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cafe_Post_Mortem

Whether it is math, science, farming, cooking or even sex, these are useful tools. Of course, there are good schools and bad schools, good teachers and bad teachers, but this is true with any learning method.

Now the internet has provided more people more access to information, but you really have to be determined to sort the good information from the bad and it takes a special kind of person to set aside ego and look at what they truly know. Peer review helps that a lot.

---

So information from the internets is just like schools and teachers, then. =P

And peer review may help with that, but ranks and titles associated with knowledge achieve quite the opposite. Placing someone in the role of teacher by any name tends to feed ego, 'make that person feel entitled to be right. This taint is passed on to meeker students, who in turn mark a professor's opinion as being from an authoritative source, to the detriment of critical attention paid to its content and defensibility.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cafe_Post_Mortem

As far as natural smarts goes, I think that is over rated. Short of a learning disorder, everyone has the capacity for intelligence. Some people have a natural talent for certain things, but i will take someone with drive and curiosity over a lazy smart person any day. I have watched people breeze through learning difficult tasks and I have watched people struggle with them, in the end the found their way to the same place.

---

Only if the task at hand is the exclusive basis for judgement. In the broader picture, the smarter person will have spent less time, and has probably picked up a bunch of other things from context.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cafe_Post_Mortem

And yes, a lot of earning a degree is based on determination (or jumping through hoops as some call it) and some don't see the need for broad education, but part of the reason some employers respect degrees is not just because of what they think you learn in class, but what you learn in school. Finishing a BA or BA is four years of school is a lot of work you don't always want to do. It is no surprise employers look for that level of dedication (when they do)

---

Well, that's the problem. Determination can only be usefully measured towards a goal the individual believes worthy; declining to take an obstacle course when you can clearly see that it isn't the most practical route to the finish is a lack of suggestibility, not self-discipline. By attaching symbolic value to results achieved by more orthodox means, employers circumvent the filter of merit that is supposed to be one of capitalism's selling points.

I've noticed that people who do the education thing (properly) have developed the skills to research a subject quite efficiently............me, I've aquired a lot of information, but only because I tend to get around..........

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Raza

'First point is simply false. Life provides a far broader base of stimulation than universities. I don't see how anybody could think otherwise, having thought about it for more than a second.

Resources are good, but plentiful in the world at large. The internet has more free information than any library, and if you really need to know something you have to pay for it'll still be endlessly cheaper than uni. Peers and people with experience are also everywhere - less topic-focused than you'll find them in schools, but also more pluriform - and absent the taint of educational hierarchy, where you are steered to 'learn' only what your teachers have concluded before you.

---

I have thought about it, quite a bit. Most people don't live in an affluent, multicultural society with strong social safety nets. If I recall correctly you can, even with minimal employment, hop a train to another country and have access to libraries, cultures, ang generally get outside of your culture. In most of the world, that is just not the case.

And the broadness comes not just from the libraries, but the requirements. How many things have you studied outside of school that you were not interested in? You seem to think expanding your field of study beyond what you care about is bad, I think it can only be good. If I went towards what interested me when I was young instead being exposed beyond my interests, I would not be as smart as I am today.

And that is putting aside that it was likely grade schools that taught you to read, write and many of the other skills you use to survive today.

Maybe it is the general anti-education vibe rolling through my culture today, but there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of the advantages of education. Education puts the tools in one box, one location. Most teachers and professors I know do not try to stifle learning to push their dogmas, and I have known quite a few. Even growing up it was a very limited number of teachers that stifled me or slowed me down. Most of them encouraged learning and are not as ego bound as you seem to think.

And perhaps if you paid more attention to education you would realize that capitalism is an economic system and it doesn't care about merit, only profit.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cafe_Post_Mortem

I have thought about it, quite a bit. Most people don't live in an affluent, multicultural society with strong social safety nets. If I recall correctly you can, even with minimal employment, hop a train to another country and have access to libraries, cultures, ang generally get outside of your culture. In most of the world, that is just not the case.

---

You're still looking for capital-C Culture and ignoring all the everyday and not-so-everyday things to learn about in your immediate environment. Influence from other cultures loses a lot of its importance when all the learning within an area is not happening concentrated in one place and community, as this would naturally diversify perspectives.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cafe_Post_Mortem

And the broadness comes not just from the libraries, but the requirements. How many things have you studied outside of school that you were not interested in? You seem to think expanding your field of study beyond what you care about is bad, I think it can only be good. If I went towards what interested me when I was young instead being exposed beyond my interests, I would not be as smart as I am today.

---

Why would I want to learn anything that I'm not interested in, when the things that I am interested in would already take multiple lifetimes to fully explorey?

High school stifled my curiosity by forcing information down my throat. I spent it learning only to pass the next test, in isolation from my everyday frame of reference and self-image. Consequently, I barely remember a tenth of it all.

Only in the years of freedom after school have I come to see learning as something enjoyable and valuable. You can tell a person a thousand times that something will be useful 'later in life', even make them believe it in a dissociate sense, but if they do not personally experience why a given that knowledge is valuable? It won't make the connections to identity and behaviour necessary to apply it beyond the ability to put down text-book answers on a test. (Most real-life cases will fall somewhere in between, but in school situations rarely close to the ideal.)

I devote a lot of time to learning now, and you know what my main reason not to use that dusty highschool diploma to start a bachelors or masters? It's that I have too many passionate interests to want to dedicate myself full-time for four years of my life to learning a single subject, narrowed down to a financially viable 'profession'. I've attended information days, read pamphlets and websites; every last one required for too many things to be given up for the convenience of that centralised box of tools. University is too narrow to provide adequate course for the interests I built up in real life.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cafe_Post_Mortem

And that is putting aside that it was likely grade schools that taught you to read, write and many of the other skills you use to survive today.

---

I'm not arguing against learning to read or write at a young age. I do believe that much to the focus on 'correct' language and spelling once a person can read and write is unnecessary posturing, though.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cafe_Post_Mortem

Maybe it is the general anti-education vibe rolling through my culture today, but there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of the advantages of education. Education puts the tools in one box, one location. Most teachers and professors I know do not try to stifle learning to push their dogmas, and I have known quite a few. Even growing up it was a very limited number of teachers that stifled me or slowed me down. Most of them encouraged learning and are not as ego bound as you seem to think.

---

Whatever anti-education vibe is prominent in your culture is unlikely to be at the roots of my own perspective. There are many poor arguments against education, but this doesn't keep a specific few from validity.

And I don't doubt that teachers are getting generally more well-intending, building some awareness of dogma and ego and how to avoid their perils, but for every single one of them there is still going to be a balance of those factors at work.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cafe_Post_Mortem

And perhaps if you paid more attention to education you would realize that capitalism is an economic system and it doesn't care about merit, only profit.

---

Lol. I was wondering when you'd get that attitude out, considering the topic.

I'm well aware that capitalism does not produce much merit, but it is our present economic system, and "people will automatically find out and use the best way to do things because it is in their interest" remains a staple argument for its benefits. I was merely pointing out one of the many ways by which our current capitalist society avoids living up to that promise.

I don't recall any promises ever made by our capitalist society that it had to live up to

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Raza

I'm not arguing against learning to read or write at a young age. I do believe that much to the focus on 'correct' language and spelling once a person can read and write is unnecessary posturing, though.

---

This is the sort of thing i am talking about with being required to look beyond you own interests. "correct" language and spelling is all about easing communication. If in 20 years l337 speak is easier to understand than standard spelling, we will be teaching l337. Or, as a particularly talented English teacher taught me, "Ain't ain't a word, till it is, then I'll teach it."

But this can go back and forth, so I will leave it in the hands of a particularly clever satirist,

Quote:

---

The self-taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers; and, besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself had done. There are those who imagine that the unlucky accidents of life - life's "experiences" - are in some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never knew one of them to happen twice. They always change off and swap around and catch you on your inexperienced side. If personal experience can be worth anything as an education, it wouldn't seem likely that you could trip Methuselah; and yet if that old person could come back here it is more than likely that one of the first things he would do would be to take hold of one of these electric wires and tie himself all up in a knot. Now the surer thing and the wiser thing would be for him to ask somebody whether it was a good thing to take hold of. But that would not suit him; he would be one of the self-taught kind that go by experience; he would want to examine for himself. And he would find, for his instruction, that the coiled patriarch shuns the electric wire; and it would be useful to him, too, and would leave his education in quite a complete and rounded-out condition, till he should come again, some day, and go to bouncing a dynamite-can around to find out what was in it.

---

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cafe_Post_Mortem

This is the sort of thing i am talking about with being required to look beyond you own interests. "correct" language and spelling is all about easing communication. If in 20 years l337 speak is easier to understand than standard spelling, we will be teaching l337. Or, as a particularly talented English teacher taught me, "Ain't ain't a word, till it is, then I'll teach it."

---

I'm not wholly convinced people couldn't be relied on to learn to read and write out of interest too, under more ideal cultural conditions. And it is their unique position as the key to so many other fields that places them ahead of other skills in this matter; the same arguments do not apply nearly as strongly to things like history, biology or advanced maths.

And I disagree. 'Correct' language is all about delaying the evolution of language (as you've acknowledged it) to benefit the tastes of a conservative older generation. People naturally imitate one another's speach and writing - including spelling, grammar, sentence structure - to produce a useful, more or less synchronized language. The only difference we would see without texbook rules for correct language is that 'u' would be recognised as a word today, rather than some fifteen years down the road when e-speak has its moment as a short lived fad among university linguists. The reality is that it is a word today, and some people are just wilfully behind on the times.

Raza, accidentally you had me thinking pro school. You had thrown out a reference to some philosophies that I thought were particular to my field. Philosophies that I have animosity toward. Now this is the second time in a month that I have heard this info from an outside source, leading me to believe that this school of thought is more pervasive then I originally considered. This caused me to feel maybe I can be more accepting of these ideas; a lot of other people seem to believe in it. If only I could be accepting of this knowledge, achieving my degree would be done with a great deal more ease. But it comes down to trust, and before I can trust anyone else I have to trust my own ability to process information. I am a person that has sought experiences for the sake of learning and I trust them because they are my own. I am a person currently working on an education degree, not because I feel the need to teach but because I want to spend the rest of my life learning. But this degree in education is hard, its not my area of interest. My interest is the subject I will teach. As for these philosophies that we continually repackage, I compare them to something I know, diagnostics. I may diagnose a problem, discuss it with other engineers that know their shit and we all agree, based on the information, everything fits, the logic is good - fix it. The part gets replaced and surprise the problem still exists - the diagnosis was wrong. The think tank was wrong, the school of thought was wrong. Not always, not typical but not uncommon. So if I sit down with the guru of this school of thought and say: teacher, I question these particular points of the school of thought, and the guru with sweet and gentle speech explains away all my misconceptions with great knowledge and logic; should I be as clay and let him mold me?
My favorite professor is finally up for his tenured position (just getting hired but he has worked here for years, semester to semester due to the economy) He is an incredible teacher not only because he knows his subject better then anyone else could but because he teaches to the lowest level students and yet keeps the upper level students engaged. Chances are he will not be hired though due to his old school mentality (politics). If he would learn the current school of thought he would be beloved by all and he wouldn't even have to change to fit in, he would merely have to use its vocabulary. And if he did, it wouldn't surprise me if the gurus would be asking him for lessons.

PS - Cafe_Post_Mortem, in the end I may come to find this school of thought to be good and correct but if I do, I will have put three times the effort/research into it due to my approach.

..................I suppose if I had an education I'd be able to process all that........but, if I was smart I suppose I'd have found a way to pay my expenses with only an hour or two effort every week.

Obviously there is a difference between "street smarts" and "formal education".

There are some things that simply can't be learned through real world experience.

Someone might know a lot about how the world works, and how people work,
and have good business sense, but that's not the same as going to school
to learn about law, medicine, biology, advanced mathematics, or history.

Now if you learn that stuff on your own, via books, etc, that's the same
as being "educated". To me, the difference is that education is things
you learn from others, where street smarts is the stuff you learn on
your own, through your own life experiences.

The original question is if "education" or income, is any indication of how smart
someone is. Obviously the answer is no. Because someone can have an insanely
high level of natural intelligence, but never had any formal education at all.
We all start out with zero knowledge. You are educated through parents,
teachers, books, television, other people, etc. And generally, the more
useful stuff you know, the better you do in life. The more advanced
the knowledge and skills, the more people are willing to pay you.
Doctors and lawyers make a lot of money, because medicine
and law have an insane amount of stuff you have to learn and
memorize to be effective. Same with computer programmers, etc.

But of course it all depends what society deems worthwhile.
Some people spend decades in school, learning philosophy,
or history, and then have no real-world use for the knowledge.
Other than becoming teachers themselves.

it's also smart to get an education because that shows that you invested some money to have someone tell you if your doing it right

Well, I believe there are many kinds of smarts, some of which wont be acquired through reading books. Experience is necessary for learning too. We all do the best we can to make the best decisions for ourself, with whatever information and resourceswe have available. Sometimes the info is limited and so we make a misstep. Then you got the prodigy that never realizes their potential because they dont come from a place where their skill/assets are appreciated.

Then you got the real cliche anecdote of the straight A student that does not do well surviving the urban jungle because he/she never went out and experienced the life. Maybe he/she was sheltered or lived out away from extreme crime areas. When they move to a rougher area where street smarts separate the survivors from the victims, they dont always get things right.

Clever people climb the ladders. Smart people build them.

~K