Intelligence is not only analytical skills, rhetoric, pattern recognition, more abstract things. Working memory tests might measure g but not overall intelligence, Krakauer defines intelligence and stupidity in specific ways:
Intelligence is, as I say to people, one of the topics about which we have been most stupid. All our definitions of intelligence are based on measurements that can only be applied to humans—by and large, humans that speak English or what have you. An IQ test is not interesting if you’re trying to calculate the intelligence of an octopus—which I would like to know, because I believe in evolution. I think we need to understand where these things come from, and having a definition that applies just to one particular species doesn’t help us. We’ve talked about entropy and computation, and they’re going to be the keys to understanding intelligence.
Let’s go back to randomness. The example I like to give is Rubik’s cube, because it’s a beautiful little mental model, a metaphor. If I gave you a cube and asked you to solve it, and you just randomly manipulated it, since it has on the order of 10 quintillion solutions, which is a very large number, if you were immortal, you would eventually solve it. But it would take a lifetime of several universes to do so. That is random performance. Stupid performance is if you took just one face of the cube and manipulated that one face and rotated it forever. As everyone knows, if you did that, you would never solve the cube. It would be an infinite process that would never be resolved. That, in my definition, would be stupid. It is significantly worse than chance.
Now let’s take someone who has learned how to manipulate a cube and is familiar with various rules that allow you, from any initial configuration, to solve the cube in 20 minutes or less. That is intelligent behavior, significantly better than chance. This sounds a little counterintuitive, perhaps, until you realize that’s how we use the word in our daily lives. If I sat down with an extraordinary mathematician and I said, “I can’t solve that equation,” and he said, “Well, no, it’s easy. Here, this is what you do,” I’d look at it and I’d say, “Oh, yes, it is easy. You made that look easy.” That’s what we mean when we say someone is smart. They make things look easy.
If, on the other hand, I sat down with someone who was incapable, and he just kept dividing by two, for whatever reason, I would say, “What on earth are you doing? What a stupid thing to do. You’ll never solve the problem that way.”
So that is what we mean by intelligence. It’s the thing we do that ensures that the problem is efficiently solved and in a way that makes it appear effortless. And stupidity is a set of rules that we use to ensure that the problem will be solved in longer than chance or never and is nevertheless pursued with alacrity and enthusiasm.
You can ask when you’re a neurospinozist and have logic as your core value, what is the problem which we are given? To understand the world, God, but what else? Why do we have this amazing brain with neuroplasticity, and why do most of us use it to feed something like comfort or validation when looking at neuroscience these things are so flawed?
Personally might be social conditioning, I click into it when I am writing this because it’s just right there in front of us.
Seems like the worship of science stops when science starts contradicting your claims. :P
Seriously, there are some valid objections against IQ tests, but it feels like you have dismissed the topic too easily here. Almost as if you know there is actually nodragon in the garage.
But that’s not true, science hasn’t contradicted any of my claims. In fact, it is in full support at this moment, the scientific process is in ongoing.
Sorry about that. What I mean you can quantify intelligence as per Krakauer’s definition as well before and after. It’s unlikely g—general intelligence is increased (working memory) but maybe, then tests can be done easily, before and after in a clinical setting. Two trials of a test shouldn’t have a big of a training effect but that can be taken into consideration as well as with all other variables.
Intelligence is not only analytical skills, rhetoric, pattern recognition, more abstract things. Working memory tests might measure g but not overall intelligence, Krakauer defines intelligence and stupidity in specific ways:
You can ask when you’re a neurospinozist and have logic as your core value, what is the problem which we are given? To understand the world, God, but what else? Why do we have this amazing brain with neuroplasticity, and why do most of us use it to feed something like comfort or validation when looking at neuroscience these things are so flawed?
Personally might be social conditioning, I click into it when I am writing this because it’s just right there in front of us.
Seems like the worship of science stops when science starts contradicting your claims. :P
Seriously, there are some valid objections against IQ tests, but it feels like you have dismissed the topic too easily here. Almost as if you know there is actually no dragon in the garage.
But that’s not true, science hasn’t contradicted any of my claims. In fact, it is in full support at this moment, the scientific process is in ongoing.
Sorry about that. What I mean you can quantify intelligence as per Krakauer’s definition as well before and after. It’s unlikely g—general intelligence is increased (working memory) but maybe, then tests can be done easily, before and after in a clinical setting. Two trials of a test shouldn’t have a big of a training effect but that can be taken into consideration as well as with all other variables.
:)