Hmm maybe “ability to absorb social information” was a bit of poorly chosen terminology. I didn’t mean to imply that people with it would be good at solving social problems. I wanted to contrast book reading and following a teacher with inferring information from experience or experiments. What pigeons sometimes beat humans at. The first two are social because they involve an author and a teacher, where as the latter are asocial, no other agent has to be involved.
Perhaps “linguistic information” would have been better.
Linguistic information isn’t much better, because that sounds like ‘crystallized’ intelligence as opposed to ‘fluid’ intelligence, where the most common tests—the matrix tests—make a determined effort to avoid anything even remotely like verbal or linguistic material.
You seem to be trying to equate intelligence as the ability to generalize and learn from experience (“inferring information from experience or experiments”) as opposed to the ability to follow received rules (“book reading and following a teacher”). Your use of “social” in this context is irrelevant.
ADDED: Also Frank Herbert said something similar in Chapterhouse:Dune
Education is no substitute for intelligence. That elusive quality is defined only in part by puzzle-solving ability. It is in the creation of new puzzles reflecting what your senses report that you round out the definition.
Hmm maybe “ability to absorb social information” was a bit of poorly chosen terminology. I didn’t mean to imply that people with it would be good at solving social problems. I wanted to contrast book reading and following a teacher with inferring information from experience or experiments. What pigeons sometimes beat humans at. The first two are social because they involve an author and a teacher, where as the latter are asocial, no other agent has to be involved.
Perhaps “linguistic information” would have been better.
Linguistic information isn’t much better, because that sounds like ‘crystallized’ intelligence as opposed to ‘fluid’ intelligence, where the most common tests—the matrix tests—make a determined effort to avoid anything even remotely like verbal or linguistic material.
You seem to be trying to equate intelligence as the ability to generalize and learn from experience (“inferring information from experience or experiments”) as opposed to the ability to follow received rules (“book reading and following a teacher”). Your use of “social” in this context is irrelevant.
ADDED: Also Frank Herbert said something similar in Chapterhouse:Dune