It's weird how people are happy to say genetics plays a hand in the limits of human abilities, but when it comes to talk about intelligence, there are so many people in denial.
Perhaps it is just that you can't sell as many self help books if a lot of our brain's wiring is preordained.
What you call "denial", I call reasonable doubt. And by that, I mean we don't have any concrete way to measure intelligence potential/capacity in the same way we can measure 12 inches. We know what 12 inches mean, but can anyone tell me what it means to be smart? What subjects do I need to learn to qualify? And to what level of detail? Why do we conclude Stephen Hawkins is smart? Who is an example of someone that isn't smart and could never become smart no matter how hard that person tried?
Barring any serious mental illness, I am of the belief anyone can learn whatever they want. The speed may vary, but I don't believe there is more information in the human-society than the human brain can contain.
...I don't believe there is more information in the human-society than the human brain can contain.
The Library of Congress would disagree with you. The most bothersome realization I had in college was that, no matter how smart I was, how fast I learned, how rich I got, or how much I studied, I could never learn everything I wanted to learn. There's simply too much knowledge and too little time.
We do not. Are there answers to the questions I presented?
You can't observe any exact thing and say "Right there! This person is exactly 49 intelliunits smart". IQ tests may give you an idea of one point of view of a measurement of intelligent is, but it is certainly not concrete like 12 inches is. Not concrete like we know 2 hydrogens & one oxygen is water. I think our obsession that everything must be measurable & categorized fails when it comes to the human mind. We are more than the sum of our measurable parts... for now. You can look at a car engine specification and know exactly the maximum speed given optimum conditions and assuming no mechanical failures. There's no such measurement for the human brain. You cannot know what my top performance is. At the absolute best, you can have a ball-park guess. You could end up being right or being way off.
Human personality contains any number of traits that can be measured. To pretend that pyschometrics does not exist is the equivalent of refusing to look through Galileo's telescope.
> We do have concrete ways to measure intelligence, and have had them for over a hundred years.
Concrete, yes. Accurate, absolutely not. Any number of people have exploited the systematic errors in I.Q. testing for purely racist and political objectives.
> The literature on this subject is quite extensive.
No, but it tells us that it's not rigorous enough to resist such exploitation. There's nothing inherently evil or morally wrong about sloppy measurements. That comes from its uses, not the thing itself.
Interesting how you never bothered to ask that while reading the fraudulent book itself.
It's like skimming a poorly-researched paper on vaccines, taking it as gospel, proceeding to claim that they cause autism, and yet reflexively responding with "citation needed" to anyone that dare call into question your insane ideas.
> Interesting how you never bothered to ask that while reading the fraudulent book itself.
This is your evidence that Gould is a fraud? Nice dodge, but scientists and educated people will notice you avoided your responsibility to back up your words with evidence.
> And you dare to pontificate on this topic on HN while not even knowing the basics.
The basics of IQ testing and its many misuses? Gould didn't invent this topic, and he doesn't define it. You remarks about Gould and IQ testing remind me of the creationists who think evolution was Darwin's private fantasy. If you take away Gould entirely, you still have any number of terrible examples of misuse of IQ testing for racist and other deplorable objectives.
Obviously psychologists are defensive about IQ testing (they should be), and Gould made himself an easy target. But this substitutes substance with ad hominem, a mode of argument you appear to prefer.
That's pretty big talk from a dude who couldn't find the first link in Google, and tried to wave off any discussion of Gould's fraud as equivalent to all the crackpots talking about Einstein.
Yep. That works for "Einstein" and "fraud" also. In fact, it works for any well-known name in any field.
Gould missed things that happened after the writing of Mismeasure, and ignored some later developments that challenged aspects of his original work, but he made a number of important and legitimate points about IQ testing and its abuses, points that have stood the test of time.
This is a reasonable perspective. But people other than the parent sometimes read comments! I'll do my best at a level-zero explanation of "intelligence" in the literature:
Let's start by modestly noting that I routinely got the top score on Latin tests in high school (this was worth a small box of chocolates!). Someone applying the concept of "intelligence" might predict that I would also do well in math class. The traditional explanation for this given by Latin teachers is that learning Latin trains the mind to think logically, and getting high scores on Latin tests means that the training has taken. The intelligence-based explanation is that Latin and math are two of many tasks subject to the influence of g, the "general factor".
Moving to a more general level, the observation is that for many, many tests that appear to involve "mental abilities" to a greater or lesser degree, a person's score on any one of them is predictive of the same person's score on all the others. It's rare to find someone who is good at one and bad at another; instead, people tend to be uniformly good or uniformly bad (known in the literature as the phenomenon of the "positive manifold"). This suggests that there's one quality driving all the results, which we can call "intelligence", since that's the label commonly applied to people who tend to do well on those types of tests.
The question isn't, "Is there intelligence?" The question is "What is intelligence in terms of a definition?"
You're saying that if many people find you beautiful, there's a quality driving that, and it's "beauty". That's fine. Beauty exists. But aren't you almost admitting that it is a quality and therefore subject to what evaluates it? In other words, if 5 people call someone beautiful or ugly, are they beautiful? If someone is good at Latin and languages, does that mean they are intelligent? And if someone is not good at Latin, does that mean they are not?
Further, how many people do you have to find to say you are beautiful to be you are "defined" as beautiful? That's not a definition, that's just further confidence-building; the more you have the more confident you can be. But that still doesn't mean there's a point where you can say it is definitively so, and therefore you don't have a true definition.
> You're saying that if many people find you beautiful, there's a quality driving that, and it's "beauty".
That's not it.
1. Imagine that we have a system we're happy with for quantifying people's beauty.
2. Imagine that we discover that, in a sample population of 100,000 or so, higher beauty predicts lower willingness to wait in line, lower frisbee golf scores, and redder tablecloths in the home.
The idea here is that from (2) we conclude that (3) there is a single variable, "beauty", responsible for your rating in (1), but also responsible for your frisbee golf scores and the color of your home tablecloths. Now, in addition to using the system in (1), we could in theory rate people's beauty by visiting their home and checking the tablecloths, or by checking a frisbee golf score sheet (lest this sound ridiculous, I'll observe that a real test of intelligence in children consists of the instructions "draw a man", "draw a woman", and "draw yourself": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw-A-Person_Test).
In the literature, "intelligence" or g refers to this hidden variable that explains performance across all the various IQ-driven tasks. To discredit the idea, you'd want to find a test which correlated positively with one well-accepted IQ test, and negatively (or zero) with another. Another commenter pointed out that, since we don't have a specific physical metric for intelligence, we can't rate people as having a certain number of "intelliunits". That's correct, and it means that an intelligence-discrediting test could have pretty much any content at all; all that's required is that it be positively related to one existing IQ test and negatively related to another. This turns out to be extremely difficult.
This somewhat murky nature of intelligence as defined means that you're rated in terms of a comparison to the population (we can't say "you have 70 intelliunits", but we do know how to determine that you're smarter than Bob, Carol, and Tom, but dumber than Jennifer). An IQ of 115 means, approximately, that you're smarter than 5/6 of the reference population, which is conceptually all European whites.
Thanks for taking the time to write that! You presented your ideas extremely well. (And I love this kind of debate.)
So I'll accept both premises. And for premise 1, let's imagine the system we use to quantify beauty measures pronouncement of cheekbones and thickness of lips, etc. Premise 2 remains untouched. Here's the problem: Angelina Jolie would score well, but so would Jocelyn Wildenstein (Google image search that), and Emma Watson would score poorly. We would come to wrong individual conclusions based on correlations made from larger sample sizes. In fact, Jocelyn Wildenstein might come away with the title of "the most beautiful person ever." (And if you think I'm joking, listen to any interview with a man named Chris Langan.)
Since intelligence is qualitative, like beauty or flavors of ice cream, it's about the mix of ingredients. It's about "character". So that while you can make good correlations on large sample sizes, it's that individual mix that defines "beauty", "tasty", etc. Alan Kay was wrong: point of view isn't worth 80 IQ points -- 80 IQ points is worth a better point of view. That point of view is the end result, the character that determines your intelligence.
Again, the most beautiful woman, say, may not have the combined biggest lips and highest cheekbones, but an especially good mix. If you look at Einstein and every other great thinker, the people we consider the smartest, they won't have the highest IQ scores, but they had the best intellectual character.
You asked for the definition. That is the definition. Calling it a "debate" is the kind of thing that leads Kudzu_Bob to assume that questions are asked in bad faith. Whether you're happy with it is a separate question, which you can investigate yourself; there's an extensive literature on the various life consequences of high measured IQ.
It might be that intelligence is a plastic ability ("software"), while many other abilities are less plastic ("hardware"). We agree that the human brain is highly adaptable, people loose half their brains in early age and can still function. It doesn't seem that far fetched that such small differences as those between someone bright and someone not so bright is about adaptation. And perhaps the right type of curiosity.
Intelligence is a mixture of upbringing and genetics. If you're raised by a pack of wolves in the woods, you'll probably be rock dumb by all measures, regardless of your DNA.
I can't remember where I read it, but I know that hunting and tracking skills don't correlate very well with g. Though surprisingly, marksmanship does.
Perhaps it is just that you can't sell as many self help books if a lot of our brain's wiring is preordained.