Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Multiple intelligence is absolutely real. Look at the rationalists, “geniuses” who make obvious logic errors and can’t communicate.
Maybe social and emotional intelligence are just instinct and upbringing, while logic is faster thinking or larger context i.e. “liquid intelligence”. But intelligence is only valuable and measurable by what it observably does: in a way anything is “intelligent” because it follows the laws of physics, the secrets of the universe, but we generally don’t label it as so because it won’t tell us.
Nah. Throwing in an adverb like “absolutely” doesn’t improve an argument by assertion. Nor does vaguely sneering toward rationalists, without even an attempt to claim that say, a marginal replacement person would do better with regard to logic or communication skills.
I was already being a bit charitable by including the “for the most part,” since I had quant/verbal tilts in mind. Yet, even with range restriction and foreign test-takers, SAT and GRE quant and verbal scores tend to be moderately to strongly correlated—not orthogonal—much less anticorrelated. Peskily inconsistent with multiple intelligences and peskily consistent with a general cognitive ability.
It Just So Happens that basically everytime researchers set out to test another form of alternative intelligence, it just ends up being at best a reinforcement of the general cognitive ability. Meanwhile, the incentives are such that discovering an alternative form of intelligence beyond general cognitive ability would supercharge an academic’s career, especially if the hypothesized form of alternative intelligence would be higher on average in non-Asian minorities.
It’s mostly cope in my view. The people who push the idea that there are other forms of intelligence tend to be either teachers who want to believe that the dumb kids aren’t actually dumb, and the dumb ones who don’t want to believe that they’re not just as smart as the science math and logic leaders. But it’s not true. You can’t be smart about feelings or art or nature or smarts without using the same pattern recognition and extrapolation skills that the STEM people use. You might, by temperament, aim it at different problems. Patrick Mahomes is aiming his logic and pattern recognition at football where Elon Musk is aiming it at rockets and drones and flying cars. It’s the same brain, the same processes, but one guy is throwing to Kelcie and the other is building flying cars.
But the point is, that is what we measure and ultimately what matters.
There are savants who are STEM experts but cannot socialize or understand art, even when it clearly limits their QOL. Maybe their brains are technically wired better, so if we just teach or condition them right they could be therapy or art experts too, whereas we could not turn a mediocre therapist or artist into a STEM expert. But until we do that, their intelligence is for all intents different than someone who’s good at STEM but also socialization, or someone who’s charismatic but otherwise stupid.
It’s the same intelligence. It’s not different intelligences. That’s my point. It takes logical reasoning to understand socializing or art or sports. You just have people spending their time using their g for different things. Some of it is temperament or family dynamics guiding kids on how they choose to develop their skills, but at the bottom it’s all g and a person who doesn’t have decent g isn’t going to excel in skills other than math either. I’ve yet to meet an IQ 80 person who could really and truly understand socialization or art or nature, and outside of maybe football defense where all they need to know is “tackle guy in front of me” most sports require at least average intelligence to understand the strategy.
What well meaning teachers talking about 7 intelligences tend to mean by that is that g, IQ, simply doesn’t exist and that you can be smart about different things because there are different forms of intelligence. So a person can be too stupid to understand very basic logic and supposedly have “sports smarts” which requires a form of cause and effect thinking to learn the game, let alone strategy. Or maybe they’re too stupid for logic but can figure out how to get a picture to look good (using cause and effect AKA logic). It makes no sense.
What about Mike Tyson? An incredible boxer (and boxing requires quick thinking) but doesn’t seem smart. Apparently his estimated IQ is 78.
I’m sure g does correlate: most dumb people don’t excel at anything that requires any form of intelligence, and most smart people (even autistic) do have social and emotional intelligence. But at the same time, an autistic genius who’s desperately lonely is not choosing to spend their g towards math. They may have the core smarts and just some small brain issue with them, but the small brain issue makes them socially unintelligent.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link