“A specialist is like a boil: its fullness is one-sided”—Kozma Prutkov
A (semi-fictional) example that comes to mind is the protagonist of Rain man, and similar idiot savant stereotypes.
I think a better approach would be not black and white orthogonality, but the degree of correlation. In humans there is definitely a variety of specialization at high intelligence levels (e.g. there are polymaths like Feynman who can excel in many disparate activities to the degree an average human would not, but also those who only excel in one area, say, music, and suck at life in general), but also hints that smarter people are on average smarter in multiple areas. There are probably studies out there that research correlation between intelligence and specialization, I wonder if you did a literature review?
I think what people mean by intelligence is how well someone or something does on tests, stuff you measure with precision and recall. Then you do some arithmetic and you get a number, whether it’s how many pieces of music you wrote or how many answers you got correct. Anything about intelligence outside of this context is actually a misnomer. They are rather talking about the process where the measure of intelligence can be deduced. A lot of it is dependent on the measurement of speed. That’s why they usually give you time limit for shit like this.
I think you have it backwards. Tests measure or purport to measure intelligence, but most people can tell a smart person from a not so smart one, though this can vary by domain.
Since intelligence is an arbitrary value on completely different processes in different context, I don’t know if you can call tests a measurement of such construct. Generally, it’s mostly a measure of 1) good memory and 2) the speed of the look up. If you have good memory but slow, you won’t be able to make practical use of the good memory, or at least maximizing its potential. If you have shit memory but fast look up, then you can specialize and do that for the rest of your life and be good at it, improving your look up time over the years. 3) The next layer is measuring the quality of the look up. 1 is dataset, 2 is running time, 3 is tuning the weights.
The term intelligence bears no actual meaning without some form of concrete measurement.
A (semi-fictional) example that comes to mind is the protagonist of Rain man, and similar idiot savant stereotypes.
I think a better approach would be not black and white orthogonality, but the degree of correlation. In humans there is definitely a variety of specialization at high intelligence levels (e.g. there are polymaths like Feynman who can excel in many disparate activities to the degree an average human would not, but also those who only excel in one area, say, music, and suck at life in general), but also hints that smarter people are on average smarter in multiple areas. There are probably studies out there that research correlation between intelligence and specialization, I wonder if you did a literature review?
I think what people mean by intelligence is how well someone or something does on tests, stuff you measure with precision and recall. Then you do some arithmetic and you get a number, whether it’s how many pieces of music you wrote or how many answers you got correct. Anything about intelligence outside of this context is actually a misnomer. They are rather talking about the process where the measure of intelligence can be deduced. A lot of it is dependent on the measurement of speed. That’s why they usually give you time limit for shit like this.
I think you have it backwards. Tests measure or purport to measure intelligence, but most people can tell a smart person from a not so smart one, though this can vary by domain.
Since intelligence is an arbitrary value on completely different processes in different context, I don’t know if you can call tests a measurement of such construct. Generally, it’s mostly a measure of 1) good memory and 2) the speed of the look up. If you have good memory but slow, you won’t be able to make practical use of the good memory, or at least maximizing its potential. If you have shit memory but fast look up, then you can specialize and do that for the rest of your life and be good at it, improving your look up time over the years. 3) The next layer is measuring the quality of the look up. 1 is dataset, 2 is running time, 3 is tuning the weights.
The term intelligence bears no actual meaning without some form of concrete measurement.