There is a much simpler way in which “village idiot” is right next to “Einstein” on the intelligence graph. If you have done any work in computer vision, computer hearing, navigation, or robotics, you might realize that a mouse beats beats decades of work by the smartest people in your field. Most people wouldn’t think to brag that they can find their way home from over a block away! If Einstein were missing, lets say, the visual cortex, auditory cortex, nor the chunk of brain required to even read braille, the village idiot would probably pass as smarter. It’s only a small portion of the brain that is vaguely dedicated to the sort of thing the IQ test is supposed to measure, plus lots of the specialized bits of the brain can be commandeered to assist (eg the visual cortex for visualizing). Long story short, maybe 80% of Einstein’s brain is specialized for tasks any village idiot can do, and his bonus to intelligence is mostly the other ~20% (prefrontal cortex) plus no doubt a better ability to commandeer the other parts into doing more interesting tasks.
To this, add as prerequisites some luck to have the right problems and resources, and the fact that you have to beat the rest of humanity to it, which requires way more work ethic than most humans have (and I get the impression mental work ethic is different than for physical labor). All this makes it really easy to greatly discount the village idiots intelligence and greatly overstate Einstein’s intelligence. If there’s a mouse on your intelligence chart, Einstein and the village idiot will be nearly touching.
There is a much simpler way in which “village idiot” is right next to “Einstein” on the intelligence graph. If you have done any work in computer vision, computer hearing, navigation, or robotics, you might realize that a mouse beats beats decades of work by the smartest people in your field. Most people wouldn’t think to brag that they can find their way home from over a block away! If Einstein were missing, lets say, the visual cortex, auditory cortex, nor the chunk of brain required to even read braille, the village idiot would probably pass as smarter. It’s only a small portion of the brain that is vaguely dedicated to the sort of thing the IQ test is supposed to measure, plus lots of the specialized bits of the brain can be commandeered to assist (eg the visual cortex for visualizing). Long story short, maybe 80% of Einstein’s brain is specialized for tasks any village idiot can do, and his bonus to intelligence is mostly the other ~20% (prefrontal cortex) plus no doubt a better ability to commandeer the other parts into doing more interesting tasks.
To this, add as prerequisites some luck to have the right problems and resources, and the fact that you have to beat the rest of humanity to it, which requires way more work ethic than most humans have (and I get the impression mental work ethic is different than for physical labor). All this makes it really easy to greatly discount the village idiots intelligence and greatly overstate Einstein’s intelligence. If there’s a mouse on your intelligence chart, Einstein and the village idiot will be nearly touching.