People who are (properly) educated can often appraise situations because they have learned some sort of “critical thinking” skills. These are things learned in “libreal arts” which are slowly drifting out of our list of important things-to-learn as our society becomes more specialized.

On a somewhat related note, you have the question of originality vs perfection. This is most often seen in art or music. I think two types of intelligence emerge here–especially in music. You have the guys who came up with the licks, and then there’s the guys who can play all of them pitch perfect without everyone hitting a bad note, but they couldn’t write a decent song if they spent their life on it.

Back to how society values intelligence… It is interesting that a much larger percent of our population probably pushes their children to be great atheletes than the percentage that pushes their children to be really educated. As a result, I think, we really value sports figures and we want winners. Winning is good in sports.

Winning is not quite as good in the classroom. Sure, everyone is suppose to “study” so they can “get a job”, but I think a lot of people stop it at that. Perhaps the problem is that they think some people are “smart” and some are not–”I’m just not a math person” or something like that. I think that this is a terrible attitude to have because, as I said, intellectuals can be made. Anyone can be educated if they try. I know a lot of educated people really look down on people who focus on sports. I am not one of them. It requires an incredible amount of discipline to become a good athlete. It is much the same mentally as focusing academically. If people would just want to “win” in learning like they do in sports, then we’d have a much different society.