I see no value in prefixing "general" to "intelligence." What's the alternative? Specific intelligence? What does that even mean? I favor a multitude of scales, separating skills like mathematics, 3D visualization, language .... over a single metric.
It is worth noting though that the single metric has fairly robust predictive value. …
I see no value in prefixing "general" to "intelligence." What's the alternative? Specific intelligence? What does that even mean? I favor a multitude of scales, separating skills like mathematics, 3D visualization, language .... over a single metric.
It is worth noting though that the single metric has fairly robust predictive value. People who are good at one kind of problem-solving tend to be good at others.
Though it cuts fine. I'm a very good programmer but when it comes to parsing strings I am a complete idiot.
Culture example: where European cultures favor a logical approach to discourse, African ones favor a discursive (storytelling) approach. This is a disadvantage on intelligence tests, which tend to be logic-based.
Yeah, as you say, wouldn't this be in specific skills like mathematics or skill for languages perhaps? Again, I see no value in examining this across "racial" lines, but as a measure of aptitude it seemse pretty interesting, no?
The word "general" is absolutely crucial in modern discussions of cognitive science. The current established view rejects General intelligence for what is sometimes called "the Swiss army knife" theory. The idea is that we have lots of different abilities, each of which evolved to solve specific tasks. Later on, of course, those abilities were exapted to do tasks they were not originally designed for. But there is no single intelligence that is responsible for all of our abilities. In many cases, they occur in different parts of the brain specialized for language, face recognition, spatial orientation etc.
Chris (and anyone following this), the difference is that "general intelligence", often represented by an italicized lower case g, is a well researched term of art in psychometrics, not just a random justaposition of words.
Look up "g factor" in psychology. Wikipedia has a good short summary of the history, the supporting evidence accumulated over the past century, the critics, and the response to the critics. I'm serious - read it first and we can talk meaningfully. Until then it's like trying to discuss a "balanced binary tree" with somebody who is reasoning from just knowing what the individual words mean in common English usage, and knows zero about the terms of art in computer science.
Your talk of multiple skills is sensible and you are right that more can be captured with a multiple scale description - and that has been taken into account longer than I've been alive and I'm not young. Lumpers and splitters have had at it for a very long time, as with many other sciences. However, it was noticed a long time ago that there is a substantial positive correlation between tests of cognitive functioning - most are far from orthogonal measures. If you know how well somebody does on a few of them, you can substantially predict how they will do on others (as you say) - obviously not perfectly, but substantially as measured by statistics. The basic theory is that there is a more general component of cognitive ability underlying many of these tests, which can be measured (to useful degree, never perfectly). Modern IQ tests are therefore composed of several sub units.
Think of it like a suite of compiler or processor benchmarks. If you measure a few of them, you can get a pretty good idea of how fast a computer or compiler is in general, tho of course it may do better in one than in another. There is always a fuzziness, but it can be bracketed with error bars like other science.
NOBODY has ever said that g, or IQ tests, measure the only thing worthwhile. EVERY treatise I have read on intelligences makes this point, yet laymen tend to assume that professionals think IQ is the end all and be all - but zero professionals think like that. Nevertheless, what it does measure has been extraordinarily widely shown by science to correlate with many things which do matter. That is, it measures something in the psych with more validity than any other psychometric tests measures anything else, it's reasonably stable for most of life, and that something has substantial predictive value in terms of many other areas of life. People who score high in IQ tend to be people whom upon knowing them well, we consider quite smart - so g is a scientific abstraction, which corresponds to something real and salient in human behavior, which we intuitively recognize as relating to "being smart".
And no, it's not entirely logic based, or even language based - some IQ tests use no language at all (or any language). Properly administering a text involves adapting it such that it can be comprehended in the culture involved, so that not understanding the test is not inhibiting native intelligence from being measured. But that's about comprehension of the test itself; the test is not a test of knowledge, but of the ability to abstractly manipulate the knowledge that one has.
Basically, cross culturally, some people are observably better at figuring out real life scenarios, eg: involving hunting game. Others notice that. Pretty much every innovation in pottery or archery, everywhere in the world regardless of language, likely came from somebody with a high g factor. There will be rare anomalies which very high ability in a particular area and perhaps even sub-average cognitive ability in another - but they ARE anomalies, statistically. They are why there are error bars - IQ or g does not assert that it is all encompassing, there will always be fringe cases. But when tested scientifically and statistically, it's quite robust among all measures.
Again, your perspective might have been cutting edge a few generations ago, but the reasonable concerns you have, have indeed been thoroughly considered and debated over the decades.
Again, just read the Wikipedia summary of the g factor. If you distrust Wikipedia, follow some of the references, or pick up a modern psychometric textbook.
And just to head off misunderstandings (from anybody), I will say again that g (or it's best known approximate measurement, IQ) is just one characteristic in humans. It doesn't tell you who is a good storyteller or musician or friend. I very definitely do not choose mates or friends primarily much less exclusively on that basis; there are more important attributes. And it doesn't tell you everything even about cognition. But a massive amount of evidence shows that it does capture an important (not the only important) factor in human behavior.
And again - I realize that your message already noted some of the elements I am discussing, and elaborating upon.
And all that presupposes that "intelligence" is measurable.
If you limit your definition of "intelligence" to "ability to do IQ tests" then yes, that's measurable.
But as you say - there are lots of different kinds of intelligence, and aspects of intelligence - and every time you think you've counted them all, you find you've missed one. So it's infinite-dimensional.
And then you realise that your intelligence varies from day to day - how much sleep you got, how much you've had to drink, what else you're worried about... So "intelligence" maps to an "infinite dimensional fuzzy space".
And they're not measurable. Check out the maths.
You cannot define the distance between any two points in one.
So however you try to measure "intelligence", you're wasting your time... Anything measurable is not "intelligence".
That's why people talk about "general intelligence" and "IQ". They're different, and while there may be a correlation between "IQ" and "success" in some fields, you can't correlate something measurable to something not measurable.
And (a bit of a sidetrack here) that kind of pulls the rug from under eugenics - anyone stupid enough to believe in it is too stupid to be allowed to breed, if you're trying to implement eugenic breeding programs. I do like a good paradox!
You've said all this before including the smear about eugenics.
Measurement is not infinite-dimensional. Infinity has no meaning outside mathematics; in the sciences infinity always means there is something wrong with the theory.
"Too stupid to be allowed to breed" isn't the kind of discourse we use here.
Infinity is a fact of life; hard to experiment with in a lab, or even on a digital computer, I agree, but that doesn't mean it's not real.
Intelligence is, after all, also something that only exists in your mind. Like mathematics, it doesn't need to conform to common sense Newtonian physical rules, any more than quantum phenomena do.
Neuroscience shows that what you see as "reality" is actually a model constructed in your mind using sensory input extended by calculations of probability and a lot of estimation - very like mathematics. That's good enough to keep you fed & breathing, usually, which is what it was designed for. External reality looks very different to creatures with different senses - who's to say who's right?
The concept of infinity does often come into play when linear reductionist logic reaches its limits and that is indeed when an apparently satisfactory theory sometimes fails.
"Too stupid to breed" is the kind of thing eugenicists (and racists) say in private, using polite circumlocutions in public. We need to bring that thinking out into the light of day to deal with it.
I won't argue with you about infinity. I am as certain that you are dead wrong as I am about absolutely anything. Factors that can significantly affect the outcome of an intelligence test can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand (exhaustion, illness, head trauma, hypoglycemia ...) and all of them would likely lead to rescheduling the test. Factors that would affect the outcome by more than a point or two are probably in single digits. Your position on this is frankly absurd.
I asked you last time this came up what is your beef with intelligence testing and in a shocking turn of events, you didn't answer. Your position is so extreme as to deserve mockery but we don't do that here. Much, anyway.
But when you compare IQ testing to eugenics you cross a line. And no we don't need to bring that garbage out into the light of day; several of my great-grandparents died at Treblinka so I am not seeing the humor in your hyperbole.
Funny you should mention quantum mechanics, it was the infinity of what we call the Ultraviolet Catastrophe that led Planck to quantization and then to QM.
You don't know what you're talking about. Intelligence is reliably measurable.
I'm sorry, had I remembered who you were, I would not have replied to your comments.
Why would I need to explain separately why someone who thinks intelligence is not measurable "has a beef with intelligence tests" ? Isn't that obvious? I think they're fraudulent, damaging & unfair.
The reliability of repeated IQ tests has been the subject of much research, and is probably best described as "undecided", except among companies whose income relies on selling tests.
I am sorry to hear that your family suffered in the camps. I am astonished that someone with your background supports such a tainted methodology so enthusiastically.
If you check back through history and look at who was involved in the development of IQ testing, you will find that most of the early work was done specifically to facilitate the implementation of eugenics programs, both in terms of forced sterilisation of "unsuitable" parents in the US and the "elimination" of "inferior" people in Germany, starting with "subnormal" and disabled people and only moving on to the race-based selection of victims at a later stage. Even the terminology is appalling.
A great deal of the initial work was done purely with the intention of identifying people with learning disabilities, and most of the statistical validation for individuals was done with people with low scores. The validation work for people in the "normal" range was largely population based rather than done with individuals, and this (as has been discussed elsewhere in this discussion) is largely self-referential.
For supporting references I suggest you start with the recent book "Control" by Dr Adam Rutherford which offers a reasonably non-academic overview.
"most of the early work was done specifically to facilitate the implementation of eugenics programs, both in terms of forced sterilisation of "unsuitable" parents in the US and the "elimination" of "inferior ...." blah blah blah
When you are using a psychological test to determine which people will succeed and which fail, the fact that it was originally developed as part of a seriously unethical program and began from seriously unsafe assumptions should give you pause, surely? Particularly when the racial asymetry in the results mirrors so closely the intentions of its original designers?
When I was at uni, there were students from Masai and Yoruba backgrounds on my course. They found it astonishing that most European students found some topics (including subjects like the effects of infinity, and that there were some spaces that were not measurable) so difficult. Their cultural background (which you described elsewhere as more focused on "storytelling than logic") enabled them to understand, while we were floundering.
What you see as "logic" and "obviously the right answer" depends very much on your previous experience. Our disagreement over IQ tests is an example of this playing out. You may wish to pretend that I am being stupid, but I obtained very high scores on, for example, the IBM aptitude test, which I took at their request while working for a company that they supported. I chose not to work for them though, despite getting a very good offer: I had no wish to be surrounded by people who thought that that test was a good way to select a staff team. By your standards, probably a stupid decision - but equally, by your standards, I'm proved to be very intelligent...
No, I turned it down because of WHICH test they used, and what that said about who they wanted to employ & how their employees were expected to conform to approved patterns of thought.
The performance of IBM in the years between then & now speaks volumes about why that was a deeply flawed selection strategy.
As to intelligence, we'd better leave it there. We're going round in circles because we disagree about what we mean by intelligence - you think turning down a high paid job because it wouldn't offer the self-development you want is silly, and I think it's the intelligent thing to do... Which comes down to whether intelligence is the ability to avoid unnecessary problems, or only the ability to solve them when they arise...
I see no value in prefixing "general" to "intelligence." What's the alternative? Specific intelligence? What does that even mean? I favor a multitude of scales, separating skills like mathematics, 3D visualization, language .... over a single metric.
It is worth noting though that the single metric has fairly robust predictive value. People who are good at one kind of problem-solving tend to be good at others.
Though it cuts fine. I'm a very good programmer but when it comes to parsing strings I am a complete idiot.
Culture example: where European cultures favor a logical approach to discourse, African ones favor a discursive (storytelling) approach. This is a disadvantage on intelligence tests, which tend to be logic-based.
"What's the alternative? Specific intelligence?"
Yeah, as you say, wouldn't this be in specific skills like mathematics or skill for languages perhaps? Again, I see no value in examining this across "racial" lines, but as a measure of aptitude it seemse pretty interesting, no?
Don't get me started on language acquisition is my advice. A topic of endless fascination.
The word "general" is absolutely crucial in modern discussions of cognitive science. The current established view rejects General intelligence for what is sometimes called "the Swiss army knife" theory. The idea is that we have lots of different abilities, each of which evolved to solve specific tasks. Later on, of course, those abilities were exapted to do tasks they were not originally designed for. But there is no single intelligence that is responsible for all of our abilities. In many cases, they occur in different parts of the brain specialized for language, face recognition, spatial orientation etc.
University was a long time ago. Correction noted. Thanks.
Chris (and anyone following this), the difference is that "general intelligence", often represented by an italicized lower case g, is a well researched term of art in psychometrics, not just a random justaposition of words.
Look up "g factor" in psychology. Wikipedia has a good short summary of the history, the supporting evidence accumulated over the past century, the critics, and the response to the critics. I'm serious - read it first and we can talk meaningfully. Until then it's like trying to discuss a "balanced binary tree" with somebody who is reasoning from just knowing what the individual words mean in common English usage, and knows zero about the terms of art in computer science.
Your talk of multiple skills is sensible and you are right that more can be captured with a multiple scale description - and that has been taken into account longer than I've been alive and I'm not young. Lumpers and splitters have had at it for a very long time, as with many other sciences. However, it was noticed a long time ago that there is a substantial positive correlation between tests of cognitive functioning - most are far from orthogonal measures. If you know how well somebody does on a few of them, you can substantially predict how they will do on others (as you say) - obviously not perfectly, but substantially as measured by statistics. The basic theory is that there is a more general component of cognitive ability underlying many of these tests, which can be measured (to useful degree, never perfectly). Modern IQ tests are therefore composed of several sub units.
Think of it like a suite of compiler or processor benchmarks. If you measure a few of them, you can get a pretty good idea of how fast a computer or compiler is in general, tho of course it may do better in one than in another. There is always a fuzziness, but it can be bracketed with error bars like other science.
NOBODY has ever said that g, or IQ tests, measure the only thing worthwhile. EVERY treatise I have read on intelligences makes this point, yet laymen tend to assume that professionals think IQ is the end all and be all - but zero professionals think like that. Nevertheless, what it does measure has been extraordinarily widely shown by science to correlate with many things which do matter. That is, it measures something in the psych with more validity than any other psychometric tests measures anything else, it's reasonably stable for most of life, and that something has substantial predictive value in terms of many other areas of life. People who score high in IQ tend to be people whom upon knowing them well, we consider quite smart - so g is a scientific abstraction, which corresponds to something real and salient in human behavior, which we intuitively recognize as relating to "being smart".
And no, it's not entirely logic based, or even language based - some IQ tests use no language at all (or any language). Properly administering a text involves adapting it such that it can be comprehended in the culture involved, so that not understanding the test is not inhibiting native intelligence from being measured. But that's about comprehension of the test itself; the test is not a test of knowledge, but of the ability to abstractly manipulate the knowledge that one has.
Basically, cross culturally, some people are observably better at figuring out real life scenarios, eg: involving hunting game. Others notice that. Pretty much every innovation in pottery or archery, everywhere in the world regardless of language, likely came from somebody with a high g factor. There will be rare anomalies which very high ability in a particular area and perhaps even sub-average cognitive ability in another - but they ARE anomalies, statistically. They are why there are error bars - IQ or g does not assert that it is all encompassing, there will always be fringe cases. But when tested scientifically and statistically, it's quite robust among all measures.
Again, your perspective might have been cutting edge a few generations ago, but the reasonable concerns you have, have indeed been thoroughly considered and debated over the decades.
Again, just read the Wikipedia summary of the g factor. If you distrust Wikipedia, follow some of the references, or pick up a modern psychometric textbook.
And just to head off misunderstandings (from anybody), I will say again that g (or it's best known approximate measurement, IQ) is just one characteristic in humans. It doesn't tell you who is a good storyteller or musician or friend. I very definitely do not choose mates or friends primarily much less exclusively on that basis; there are more important attributes. And it doesn't tell you everything even about cognition. But a massive amount of evidence shows that it does capture an important (not the only important) factor in human behavior.
And again - I realize that your message already noted some of the elements I am discussing, and elaborating upon.
And all that presupposes that "intelligence" is measurable.
If you limit your definition of "intelligence" to "ability to do IQ tests" then yes, that's measurable.
But as you say - there are lots of different kinds of intelligence, and aspects of intelligence - and every time you think you've counted them all, you find you've missed one. So it's infinite-dimensional.
And then you realise that your intelligence varies from day to day - how much sleep you got, how much you've had to drink, what else you're worried about... So "intelligence" maps to an "infinite dimensional fuzzy space".
And they're not measurable. Check out the maths.
You cannot define the distance between any two points in one.
So however you try to measure "intelligence", you're wasting your time... Anything measurable is not "intelligence".
That's why people talk about "general intelligence" and "IQ". They're different, and while there may be a correlation between "IQ" and "success" in some fields, you can't correlate something measurable to something not measurable.
And (a bit of a sidetrack here) that kind of pulls the rug from under eugenics - anyone stupid enough to believe in it is too stupid to be allowed to breed, if you're trying to implement eugenic breeding programs. I do like a good paradox!
You've said all this before including the smear about eugenics.
Measurement is not infinite-dimensional. Infinity has no meaning outside mathematics; in the sciences infinity always means there is something wrong with the theory.
"Too stupid to be allowed to breed" isn't the kind of discourse we use here.
Infinity is a fact of life; hard to experiment with in a lab, or even on a digital computer, I agree, but that doesn't mean it's not real.
Intelligence is, after all, also something that only exists in your mind. Like mathematics, it doesn't need to conform to common sense Newtonian physical rules, any more than quantum phenomena do.
Neuroscience shows that what you see as "reality" is actually a model constructed in your mind using sensory input extended by calculations of probability and a lot of estimation - very like mathematics. That's good enough to keep you fed & breathing, usually, which is what it was designed for. External reality looks very different to creatures with different senses - who's to say who's right?
The concept of infinity does often come into play when linear reductionist logic reaches its limits and that is indeed when an apparently satisfactory theory sometimes fails.
"Too stupid to breed" is the kind of thing eugenicists (and racists) say in private, using polite circumlocutions in public. We need to bring that thinking out into the light of day to deal with it.
I won't argue with you about infinity. I am as certain that you are dead wrong as I am about absolutely anything. Factors that can significantly affect the outcome of an intelligence test can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand (exhaustion, illness, head trauma, hypoglycemia ...) and all of them would likely lead to rescheduling the test. Factors that would affect the outcome by more than a point or two are probably in single digits. Your position on this is frankly absurd.
I asked you last time this came up what is your beef with intelligence testing and in a shocking turn of events, you didn't answer. Your position is so extreme as to deserve mockery but we don't do that here. Much, anyway.
But when you compare IQ testing to eugenics you cross a line. And no we don't need to bring that garbage out into the light of day; several of my great-grandparents died at Treblinka so I am not seeing the humor in your hyperbole.
Funny you should mention quantum mechanics, it was the infinity of what we call the Ultraviolet Catastrophe that led Planck to quantization and then to QM.
You don't know what you're talking about. Intelligence is reliably measurable.
I'm sorry, had I remembered who you were, I would not have replied to your comments.
Why would I need to explain separately why someone who thinks intelligence is not measurable "has a beef with intelligence tests" ? Isn't that obvious? I think they're fraudulent, damaging & unfair.
The reliability of repeated IQ tests has been the subject of much research, and is probably best described as "undecided", except among companies whose income relies on selling tests.
I am sorry to hear that your family suffered in the camps. I am astonished that someone with your background supports such a tainted methodology so enthusiastically.
If you check back through history and look at who was involved in the development of IQ testing, you will find that most of the early work was done specifically to facilitate the implementation of eugenics programs, both in terms of forced sterilisation of "unsuitable" parents in the US and the "elimination" of "inferior" people in Germany, starting with "subnormal" and disabled people and only moving on to the race-based selection of victims at a later stage. Even the terminology is appalling.
A great deal of the initial work was done purely with the intention of identifying people with learning disabilities, and most of the statistical validation for individuals was done with people with low scores. The validation work for people in the "normal" range was largely population based rather than done with individuals, and this (as has been discussed elsewhere in this discussion) is largely self-referential.
For supporting references I suggest you start with the recent book "Control" by Dr Adam Rutherford which offers a reasonably non-academic overview.
"most of the early work was done specifically to facilitate the implementation of eugenics programs, both in terms of forced sterilisation of "unsuitable" parents in the US and the "elimination" of "inferior ...." blah blah blah
Is that what we use it for now?
When you are using a psychological test to determine which people will succeed and which fail, the fact that it was originally developed as part of a seriously unethical program and began from seriously unsafe assumptions should give you pause, surely? Particularly when the racial asymetry in the results mirrors so closely the intentions of its original designers?
When I was at uni, there were students from Masai and Yoruba backgrounds on my course. They found it astonishing that most European students found some topics (including subjects like the effects of infinity, and that there were some spaces that were not measurable) so difficult. Their cultural background (which you described elsewhere as more focused on "storytelling than logic") enabled them to understand, while we were floundering.
What you see as "logic" and "obviously the right answer" depends very much on your previous experience. Our disagreement over IQ tests is an example of this playing out. You may wish to pretend that I am being stupid, but I obtained very high scores on, for example, the IBM aptitude test, which I took at their request while working for a company that they supported. I chose not to work for them though, despite getting a very good offer: I had no wish to be surrounded by people who thought that that test was a good way to select a staff team. By your standards, probably a stupid decision - but equally, by your standards, I'm proved to be very intelligent...
So you turned down a high-paying job because they used a qualifying test. I rest my case.
I never said you were stupid but your tossing around infinity in this case is not the argument of a well-informed person.
Infinity is dangerous to mathematicians; many who studied it went mad. But it has nothing whatever to do with intelligence testing.
No, I turned it down because of WHICH test they used, and what that said about who they wanted to employ & how their employees were expected to conform to approved patterns of thought.
The performance of IBM in the years between then & now speaks volumes about why that was a deeply flawed selection strategy.
As to intelligence, we'd better leave it there. We're going round in circles because we disagree about what we mean by intelligence - you think turning down a high paid job because it wouldn't offer the self-development you want is silly, and I think it's the intelligent thing to do... Which comes down to whether intelligence is the ability to avoid unnecessary problems, or only the ability to solve them when they arise...