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Notes -
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.
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