The measure of intelligence is the ability to change

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "The measure of intelligence is the ability to change" in the context of "Earliest sources found on google books date to 2013 (for example, p. 123 of Learning PHP Design Patterns), earliest version found on twitter is this tweet from January 2009, with the variant "intelligence is the ability to change your mind" posted in this November 2008 tweet, and the variant "intelligence is the ability to adapt to change" attributed to Stephen Hawking in this October 2008 tweet and posted without attribution in this September 2008 tweet. There are also earlier published sources that define intelligence as "the ability to adapt to change" without attribution, like the 1991 book Uncommon Sense Leadership (p. 41); science fiction author Frank Herbert also used this phrase in his 1983 book Without Me You're Nothing: The Essential Guide to Home Computers, where he wrote on p. 209 "We define intelligence as the ability to adapt to change." The definition of "intelligence" as "the ability to adapt to change" predates this however—the earliest source found on google books is in a collection of issues of Proceedings of the Industrial Engineering Institute, with a comment here that "intelligence is often defined as the ability to adapt to change." (this was from the 1956 issue available in PDF form here, on p. 31) Earlier sources give a similar definition with different wordings, like the April 1922 issue of the journal Psyche which on p. 306 says "the ability to adapt oneself quickly and efficiently to a new situation is what many persons agree to call intelligence". In William Stern's 1914 book The Psychological Methods of Testing Intelligence, Stern writes on p. 3: "my definition is this: Intelligence is a general capacity of an individual consciously to adjust his thinking to new requirements: it is general mental adaptability to new problems and conditions of life."" to mean that wisdom is timeless.