• Question: who is the smartest

    Asked by send520yoga on 14 Mar 2025.
    • Photo: Rachel Edwards

      Rachel Edwards answered on 14 Mar 2025:

      I have no idea! But there are lots of different types of intelligence. Some people are really good at maths, while other people are really good at building things, and others are really good at figuring out how people work. We all have something that we’re good at.

    • Photo: Zoe Vance

      Zoe Vance answered on 21 Mar 2025:

      Out of everyone ever? Hard to say and depends how you measure ‘smartest’! As Rachel says, people are good at different things so to only consider someone smart because say, they’re good at maths, or good at taking exams would miss out a lot of very talented people.

      How ‘smart’ you seem probably also depends on what chances you’ve been given – the exact same person could seem a lot more or less ‘smart’ depending on whether they got the chance to go to school for example.

      Scientists get called smart a lot which is probably because a lot of us know a lot about very specialist topics that people outside science aren’t often familiar with so it all seems impossible to get – but I think it’s really just a case of being a specialist in what you do.

    • Photo: Graeme Dykes

      Graeme Dykes answered on 24 Mar 2025:

      How do you decide what “smartest” means? How would you measure it?
      Famously, Einstein was considered a genius but by traditional school exams, he wasn’t great at maths!
      Many people have tried to come up with scales for testing intelligence such as IQ but these are well known to have limitations.

      Let Douglas Adams make his point:

      “For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
      ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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