It's very easy to feel intelligent. I've done plenty of this myself, especially in childhood: I learned how to read when I was quite young and soon learned that I could immerse myself in dense and cerebral material, feeling that I soaking up wisdom and genius merely because I was basking in diagrams and formulae, and having fun with memorizing and savoring polysyllabic words. I wasn't exactly wasting my time; there's something to be said for getting that kind of first enjoyable glimpse of a vast topic before trying to learn it. But I wasn't learning much—little of what I saw stuck permanently in my brain and, especially in childhood, I wasn't examining the state of my own knowledge very closely. But I felt like a prodigy, as though I were L'Uomo Universale, merely because I was going through a huge stack of brainy books on a wide range of topics.
It's my general opinion, based admittedly on not much beyond reading some articles and enduring several years of Twitter chatter from Musk fans and Jordan Peterson believers and similar, that most of what passes for "intelligence" in contemporary American culture is simply...what I've just described. Thanks to the Internet it's never been easier to feel like you're drowning in information. Much of this purportedly informative "content" is what I'd call edutainment: podcasts, YouTube videos, popular books and websites whose chief audience is the world of business and money-chasing. Edutainment can be genuinely informative but it doesn't need to be, and the people who consume "informational content" (see chart) aren't likely to care too much whether they're actually learning anything from it. Nobody's going to test them, especially if they're a corporate executive. The only people they need to impress are other persons chiefly devoted to playing the games of money and power, where there's a distinct advantage in being good at technobabble.
Knowledge and wisdom aren't the goal here; it's the ability to construct an imposing memetic edifice—a knockout sales pitch for wowing investors and putting underlings in their place, full of big words and weighty concepts and solemn invocations of principles assumed to be self-evident. If you're good at this game, you're "intelligent" by the standards of the business world. One must already possess a sufficient degree of social privilege in order to be able to play the game at all; the pastier-skinned you are, for example, the more "intelligent" you're likely to be. With sufficient "intelligence" of this sort, you can achieve a kind of glorious freedom in never being questioned about the status of your intelligence. Sufficient "intelligence" means impunity from pesky criticisms. Elon Musk doesn't need to explain himself, and it's rude to quiz him on his understanding. Only a "stupid" and "dumb" person would ever dare to question Musk's scientific and engineering genius. He's the boss, after all.
I admit that I'm inspired to type out this bile out of irritation at yet another of those puff-pieces about a celebrity CEO's favorite books, Sam Altman in this case; I could link the article but what would be the point? We've all seen heaps of such articles, because famous rich assholes have always loved to brag about their book collections. Sam Altman has some Italian-Renaissance counterpart—imagine a Milanese merchant-prince boasting that he's got a copy of every book Aldus Manutius ever published, and maybe even pretending to have read them all, because of course there's absolutely no way to demonstrate that merely because Altman (or the Milanese merchant-prince) can reel off a list of famous book titles, he therefore understands what's in the books or has even bothered to read them. I am however being so unkind as to suggest that even if Altman has read all those books, he didn't get anything out of them beyond a few choice selections that he weaves into conversations afterwards. Indeed, he probably thinks that superficial reading in order to grab memetic chunks is better, proof that his genius mind can immediately skip past all the fluff and get only what's important.
~Χαρά