would allow for success) in certain tasks with trends that are not discernible to the experimenter. Now I’ll show my hand. I want to claim that what we mean by calling someone intelligent in the ‘original’ social context is not simply, among other putative implications, that they have incredible passion or motivation or intensity, as John Stuart Mill might say. Although these qualities, and related ones, may very well be necessary causes of someone’s appearance to us as intelligent, none is sufficient to explain this phenomenon. Motivation in itself won’t get us intelligence; what matters more is precisely what the motivation is directed at. I don’t pretend to offer some fixed set of necessary and sufficient conditions for our judging someone to be intelligent. In fact, I’d be skeptical of anyone who attempts such a quixotic project, and even more so of anyone who claims to have solved it— skeptical of both what they have to say and their motives for doing so. But I do have another necessary condition to offer: what happens when we call someone a genius is that the person who receives this loaded judgment (and often dangerous compliment) is in a sense masking the development, the hard work and focused attention, which their apparent effortlessness belies. This concealment may be deliberate (if one is trying to impress) or it may not be. But, either way, something crucial is hidden from the judge — not everything is
hidden, of course, which is why a computer can pass the Turing test and yet we still might not want to call it truly intelligent — but something crucial is hidden, or left mysterious to the judge, and that makes all the difference. Consider how once one spells out the process whereby some product has emerged—a product worthy enough for us to deem its producer ‘intelligent’—invariably the ‘genius’ or ‘intelligent’ label is mollified, and sometimes exposed as mistaken, like when a magician reveals the secrets to his illusion... Take, for instance, the theatrics, deception, and overall mystery of Sherlock Holmes as well as the depictions of other ‘genius’-types in literature. Invariably, certain (usually banal) aspects of these characters are left out, creating incomplete, flawless personae, whom we, in our dumbfounded ignorance, judge to be superior to the ordinary person. But all we know about these kinds of characters are contrived pictures of their personality and behavior— contrived to accord with our preconceptions. Though we are certain of his genius, we know nothing of Sherlock Holmes’s IQ and SAT scores—although we would love to know them, wouldn’t we? And, even more, wouldn’t these writers just love to give these characters absurdly high IQ and SAT scores so as to fit their personalities neatly into that most precious box which all their viewers/readers are just waiting to fill? What 51