Well here I am back again between first and second sleep thinking about intelligence and ready to offer a general theory.
It could be that potential intelligence is equal in everyone. There may be no difference in the size of the smarts-reservoir we all lug around*, no hardware difference at all. It may be that it is just a trait we acquire in regard to our willingness to persist in the face of cognitive dissonance. The 'smart' person may simply be the one still nosing around when the scent of an idea grows faint. Messages we receive about the nature of intelligence and doubts we build up about our own would predictably feed back on that. Of course, it could well be that we develop more confidence in some fields than in others and with it more willingness to persist. A happy expectation of success may be both the reward of fruits won in past pursuits and the thing itself when it comes to 'intelligence'.
*With obvious rare exceptions of course. I did once have a student with microcephaly in an algebra class. He had many good qualities as a person and some capacity to reason with numbers in normal contexts. But to reason about reasoning with numbers forever seemed a bridge too far for him.
It could be that potential intelligence is equal in everyone. There may be no difference in the size of the smarts-reservoir we all lug around*, no hardware difference at all. It may be that it is just a trait we acquire in regard to our willingness to persist in the face of cognitive dissonance. The 'smart' person may simply be the one still nosing around when the scent of an idea grows faint. Messages we receive about the nature of intelligence and doubts we build up about our own would predictably feed back on that. Of course, it could well be that we develop more confidence in some fields than in others and with it more willingness to persist. A happy expectation of success may be both the reward of fruits won in past pursuits and the thing itself when it comes to 'intelligence'.
*With obvious rare exceptions of course. I did once have a student with microcephaly in an algebra class. He had many good qualities as a person and some capacity to reason with numbers in normal contexts. But to reason about reasoning with numbers forever seemed a bridge too far for him.
