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Notes -
I like your examples of face-reading and 3D visualization. Doesn’t it sound a lot like these are distinct mental capabilities that certain people have distinct from their other capacities? And the idea of using your visualization skills to understand other mathematical realms suggests that your “general” intelligence in this case is informed by your ability to generally apply a more specific talent - and this works for students in proportion to their capacity with that specific talent. Presumably the students who don’t get it but who are still good at the subject are channeling a different underlying ability.
Flipping it around heavily, the memory example is also great. I’ve seen this as well: pretty much everyone I’ve met who was not heavily brain damaged has had some category of thing which they remember quite a lot about, corresponding tightly to their areas of interest. Presuming that “my results on a test” can be an area of interest, does that mean that the means of measuring abilities can identify divides in capacity when it’s really just a divide in focus?
My biggest sense for IQ and intelligence is that we just don’t really have a good idea of what’s going on. We’ve found certain capabilities which are confusingly harsh yes/no values, like the internal monologue and the ability to envision things, considering that there is no evidence that someone is one or the other without asking them: you would expect the difference to be night and day, like it is for children and adults! But we’ve also found certain capabilities that appear to be a single thing, like memory, but which express themselves in such radically different ways that you’d be forgiven for thinking they were entirely different capabilities, and which differences are immediately obvious upon meeting someone. That is, our intuition struggles to break intelligence down into real atoms, and naive external analysis carves at awkward joints.
To the extent I have a point, it’s that intelligence is way, way more complicated than the IQ test model makes it out to be, that we know effectively nothing about it, and that we should be really, incredibly humble about our proclamations about it. We’re all out here debating the four humors; that’s how bad it is. People back then would talk very confidently about the humors, and now they look ridiculous. They may have been smart, but the reality was that they were fools, and they could have been less foolish by being honest on what they didn’t know.
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