When a person is beautiful, you can see it. That’s what beauty is, looking good. And we like beautiful people, sometimes inappropriately so, attributing positive traits based solely on person appearance. Beauty is a proxy for assessing someone’s health, and we might be interested in health for various reasons. Like choosing mating partner, or choosing allies for a tribal coup.
But nowadays physical health is not as important as the mental one is. Say you wanna establish a Mars colony, or more mundanely, enter a university, whom you’d better consult, Stephen Hawking or some random healthy-looking guy? Sure, we need strong healthy people a lot, astronauts, fire fighters, construction workers, to name a few, pure thought cannot do stuff, however clever it is. Yet. Though I suppose, technology advances achieved by intelligence go a long way; feeble farmer on a combine will do better than a strong one with a shovel. So often I’d prefer intelligence to health.
The problem is, it’s hard to know how intelligent someone is. If it were easy we wouldn’t have idiots on influential positions, there wouldn’t be dedicated head hunting agencies, no one would be able to hide behind clever sounding talk. Intelligence is quite a new feature of our species. We weren’t able do evolve any reliable mechanism to measure it in our fellow tribesmen. Nice try was to harness existing beauty detection for this task. Imagine, you see a guy on the street, how would you know whether he is a renowned physicist as opposed to just a bongo player. Stereotypes are often misleading.
My dream is that it’d be possible to guess someone’s intelligence and knowledge just be appearance. How much time would be saved. I won’t spend time discovering people I won’t like eventually. And I wouldn’t bug people much smarter than me, who are just too polite to send me off their lawn. I would instantly see whom I can learn from, and whose advices I can ignore. Seeing that someone knows what she’s saying would allow people to safely trust doctors and other professionals (I suppose that incompetent personnel won’t stay long).
Health via beauty detection may be fooled to some extent, that what cosmetics is for. Maybe this hypothetical wisdom detection would not be infallible. But at least it won’t be as hopeless as it is now.
I cannot imagine how such intelligence-sense might work though, except for magic. This “wisdom level” hides awful lot of information in it, and this information needs to be perceived somehow. To know that your interlocutor knows biology for example you need to see all his biology knowledge and also evaluate it’s adequacy. Which is especially difficult to do, if you don’t know biology yourself. I don’t see any reliable shortcuts to this. You might quickly “see”, how confident he is in his own knowledge, but, well, fools are often quite self-confident too. We are already using one’s perceived self-confidence as a heuristic, and it’s not very accurate. Also, health is measured almost the same way as thousands of years ago. But knowledge is not. Someone knowing everything that the whole of humanity knew thousand years ago is not very knowledgeable by today’s standards (except for miraculous historical reference). Only pure intelligence as a processing power might be that stable. Or it might be not.
I wonder whether more direct mind-to-mind communication would help. Say if you don’t use slow several bits per second voice channel to exchange information, but instead use some other several orders of magnitude more dense way to communicate, maybe you’d be able to know person better and faster. I also wonder whether I’d be able to process information as quickly as I’m receiving it.