A popular competitor to IQ is the theory of multiple intelligences. It sounds very nice and plausible, the only problem is that the actual data do not support the theory. When you measure them, most of the intelligences correlate strongly with each other, and the ones that correlate less are the ones that stretch the meaning of “intelligence” a bit too far (things like “dancing intelligence”).
Another problem is that no one agrees on the standard list of those multiple intelligences (different lists of various lengths have been proposed), because all those lists are a result of armchair reasoning. The proper way to do that would be to collect lots of data first, and then do factor analysis and see what you get as a result. But when you actually do that, what you get is… IQ.
If we think of the quantified abilities as the logarithms of the true abilities, then taking the log has likely massively increased the correlations by bringing the outliers into the bulk of the distribution.
The correlations are the important part.
A popular competitor to IQ is the theory of multiple intelligences. It sounds very nice and plausible, the only problem is that the actual data do not support the theory. When you measure them, most of the intelligences correlate strongly with each other, and the ones that correlate less are the ones that stretch the meaning of “intelligence” a bit too far (things like “dancing intelligence”).
Another problem is that no one agrees on the standard list of those multiple intelligences (different lists of various lengths have been proposed), because all those lists are a result of armchair reasoning. The proper way to do that would be to collect lots of data first, and then do factor analysis and see what you get as a result. But when you actually do that, what you get is… IQ.
If we think of the quantified abilities as the logarithms of the true abilities, then taking the log has likely massively increased the correlations by bringing the outliers into the bulk of the distribution.