Knowledge is the collection of skills and information a person has acquired through experience. Intelligence is the ability to apply knowledge. Just because someone lacks knowledge of a particular subject doesn’t mean they can’t apply their intelligence to help solve problems.
Knowledge is wonderful, but it fades as techniques and technologies come and go. Intelligence sustains.
Knowledge vs. Intelligence
by Anthony Colangelo
(2014)
http://alistapart.com/blog/post/knowledge-vs-intelligence
About a week ago, I was running into major issues during development of one of my side projects. After a few nights working to resolve whatever was breaking, I was getting frustrated with my lack of progress.
The next night, I was video chatting with Olivier Lacan, and we started discussing the problem. Since he’s a good friend, he suggested sharing my screen and helping me work through it. I was working in Laravel, the new era PHP framework, which Olivier has never worked with (nor does he work with PHP). But he’s intelligent and a great developer, so I quickly took him up on his offer.
We pored through the codebase together—I walked him through the application and the framework, and he asked probing questions about what was happening internally. Since Olivier isn’t deeply familiar with Laravel, he asks different questions than I do, and those questions led us to interesting parts of the framework that I wouldn’t have gotten to alone. After about an hour of debugging, we identified the root issue and fixed it.
I’ve talked about “switch programming” before—trading computers with someone and working through each others’ issues separately—but this is something different. It’s more akin to traditional “rubber ducking,” except with a trusted, intelligent friend.
The difference between knowledge and intelligence is key here. Knowledge is the collection of skills and information a person has acquired through experience. Intelligence is the ability to apply knowledge. Just because someone lacks knowledge of a particular subject doesn’t mean they can’t apply their intelligence to help solve problems.
Knowledge is wonderful, but it fades as techniques and technologies come and go. Intelligence sustains. Its borders extend beyond any technique or technology, and that makes all the difference.