Intellect/intelligence is not a tool, it's a trait, as are skills. You don't use somebody's intelligence the way you do a machine. You have a very loose definition of tool.
I mean it is your own tool, the tool of the haver.
Yourself in particular may care about a person's raw intelligence, but people in general typically don't (employers, the market etc.).
they do by proxy. I'll take employment for now, but I'll come back to other forms later: really high paying jobs (>1m per year) require particular sets of skills, true, but these are usually not acquirable by the average person, or by someone with average intelligence. if they were, these jobs wouldn't be high paying.
Not all intelligence is equal. People have strengths and weaknesses. Not everybody of equal intelligence is the exact same blank slate.
true there are differences in specific pre-dispositions, but intelligence is generally observable across various markers. that's why the concept of the g factor exists, because there's strong correlation between vastly different markers of intelligence.
You're veering off from your main point of, "people care about your intelligence, because they can use it as a tool."
that is an explanation of the existence of people who profess to be intelligent but have nothing to show for it, no skills, no success in any field. In other words, I believe that many of the people claiming to be smart and yet unsuccessful, are not that smart to begin with.
Just say "all else being equal." The Latin is unnecessary and doesn't strengthen your point.
it is a common expression, much shorter and to me much more familiar than "all else being equal"
The example illustrates that it's the results and skills that you ultimately should (and do) care about out in the world, not the intrinsic trait of intelligence. We measure and value competence by effectiveness, efficiency, and success rate of a job's tasks, not IQ scores (or similar and related metrics).
Again, they care about it by proxy.
it's not much about what others have you doing, but much more about what you yourself do out of your own initiative, and that requires intelligence and intuition.
All of this is unrelated to the points either of us are making wrt to valuing intelligence in others.
it isn't, since you were originally claiming that others not perceiving intelligence as useful explains the existence of "smart" unsuccessful people, as if intelligence isn't important for the pursuit of wealth. It points out that in attempting to reach these ambitious goals, one, virtually without any exception, needs that innate advantage, and intelligence is a great innate advantage. Just having a "skill" as an average person won't get you far, as there's no path to wealth which involves the passive use of some set of skills which the average person can just acquire and use. it is a much more pro- and interactive pursuit, which bars people (ignoring obscene strokes of luck in re-allocating productive means at random, but that's less likely than winning the lottery) without innate advantage