This sounds like a map/territory confusion. “Intelligence” is a concept in the map, used to summarize the common correlations in success across domains. There is no assumption that fully general cross-domain optimizers exist; it’s an empirical observation that most of the variance in performance across cognitive tasks happens along a single dimension). Contrast this with personality, where most of the variance is along five dimensions. We could talk about how each person reacts in each possible situation or “island”, but most of this information can be compressed into five numbers.
We could always drill down and talk about more factors, ie fluid vs crystallized intelligence or math vs verbal. More factors gives us more predictive power, though additional factors are increasingly less useful when chosen well.
Though a single-factor model works well for humans, this isn’t necessarily the case for more general minds. I suspect the broad concept of intelligence carves reality at its joints fairly well, but assuming so would be a mistake.
For everyone else, the general factor accounts for 45% of the variance, right about the amount g does on IQ tests. The factor seems to be roughly whether you have a positive or negative personality, tracking whether you are emotionally stable, extroverted, agreeable, conscientious, and open (in order of importance) or not.
Two factor models have also been suggested, tracking plasticity (extroversion and openness) and stability (stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness), which accounts for ~80% of variance.
I suppose part of my confusion came from reading in Eyesenck about the alarmingly large number of geniuses that scored as prodigies, but over a longitudinal study, ended up living unhappy lives in janitor-level jobs. Eyesenck deals with this by discussing correlations between intelligence and some more negative personality traits, but I would have expected great enough intelligence to invent routines to compensate for that. In any case, I think this points to my further being confused about how ‘success’ was being defined.
I’m also puzzled at the apparent disconnect between solving problems in one’s own life and solving problems on paper.
This sounds like a map/territory confusion. “Intelligence” is a concept in the map, used to summarize the common correlations in success across domains. There is no assumption that fully general cross-domain optimizers exist; it’s an empirical observation that most of the variance in performance across cognitive tasks happens along a single dimension). Contrast this with personality, where most of the variance is along five dimensions. We could talk about how each person reacts in each possible situation or “island”, but most of this information can be compressed into five numbers.
We could always drill down and talk about more factors, ie fluid vs crystallized intelligence or math vs verbal. More factors gives us more predictive power, though additional factors are increasingly less useful when chosen well.
Though a single-factor model works well for humans, this isn’t necessarily the case for more general minds. I suspect the broad concept of intelligence carves reality at its joints fairly well, but assuming so would be a mistake.
Incidentally, some psychologists have recently suggested that there’s a general personality factor too!
Huh, intriguing.
For everyone else, the general factor accounts for 45% of the variance, right about the amount g does on IQ tests. The factor seems to be roughly whether you have a positive or negative personality, tracking whether you are emotionally stable, extroverted, agreeable, conscientious, and open (in order of importance) or not.
Two factor models have also been suggested, tracking plasticity (extroversion and openness) and stability (stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness), which accounts for ~80% of variance.
Thanks for this! I’ve really found it helpful.
I suppose part of my confusion came from reading in Eyesenck about the alarmingly large number of geniuses that scored as prodigies, but over a longitudinal study, ended up living unhappy lives in janitor-level jobs. Eyesenck deals with this by discussing correlations between intelligence and some more negative personality traits, but I would have expected great enough intelligence to invent routines to compensate for that. In any case, I think this points to my further being confused about how ‘success’ was being defined.
I’m also puzzled at the apparent disconnect between solving problems in one’s own life and solving problems on paper.