Gee, Scoob, I wonder if screencap is relevant to pop music's effect on the brain? (link in comments)
(media.conspiracies.win)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (25)
sorted by:
It’s not real. The idea of multiple intelligences is an emotional tool used to make people feel that everyone can be special in their own way. In reality, all of those multiple intelligences almost perfectly correlate with the intelligence “g factor”; if you are intelligent in one area, you’re also intelligent in the others. That’s what IQ is.
You're not doing the counter argument justice. We can measure intelligence with standard IQ tests with reliability (it is just a proxy after all for actual intelligence), or with another kind of proxy measurement (SAT scores). When you do that, the law of large numbers kicks in and you get a "normal" probability distribution, also called a bell curve. Seems pretty solid, from a social science perspective anyway, mostly due to replication.
However, different kinds of tests geared toward measuring things like spatial reasoning over logic give results that show, like real world experience, people have different strengths and weaknesses. Do these average out in standard IQ test. Yes and no. We all know first hand someone book smart but otherwise stupid.
Take your example, a low IQ person, and have them study mathematics extremely heavily for a sustained period of time. They'll develop mathematical skills far exceeding their other abilities. That's not intelligence, it's rote memorization of patterns. If then a novel mathematics problem comes up, their low IQ will pose a barrier. This new problem will be extremely hard to solve because it requires making actual novel connections, not just regurgitating what they are familiar with.
Those are the "strengths and weaknesses" you mention. They're not intelligence, just skills developed over time. Yes we all know a "book smart" person who is stupid, but they are not actually smart. They just memorized specific patterns. It took them much longer to do that than it would take an otherwise intelligent person.
We all know a genuinely intelligent person who excels at many different things, from logical problems to creative tasks. They pick things up quickly, and while they need to develop skills over time, this is done really fast relative to other people. They're really just good at everything.
You're redefining intelligence as part of your reply. The ability to memorize facts and spit them out, in context, is intelligence, or a type of it at least.
A good memory, of course, plays a large role in the ability to score well on an IQ test. It's why billions of Chinamen score well on tests but aren't creative enough to make new things (at least not since the Middle Ages).
Likewise, the classic example of a "book smart" but stupid person is, generally speaking, very low in emotional intelligence. They can't "read" people, and have a distinct lack of natural charisma, and charisma (while some of it can be learned) is more mental than physical, and natural charisma is as unequally distributed as height or the ability to memorize things. In fact, as far as we can measure such things as charisma, it's on a normal probability distribution akin to IQ.
Bottom line on this, if people have physical strengths and weaknesses, say a natural athletic ability or lack of dexterity, they similarly have intellectual ones.
In sports, it was a compliment, years ago, to say to someone "they make the best of their ability." That is, he was no natural, but through hard work he succeeded. This is also implicitly acknowledging that there is a lack of ability in many people, and that some people have things come easier.
[break break]
Lastly, people take any discussion of IQ two ways. First camp wants to pretend that the races, or sexes, don't have IQ differences, so they do some real mental gymnastics to say it's environment. As if we could just give laptops to blacks in Africa and they will be Newtons. That, let me assure you, is not me.
The second camp is aware that there are IQ differences in the races/sexes, but take any criticism of IQ as some sort of science denialism (ironically). I think I would put you in this second camp.
That's not true at all. You can say that about the SAT, but modern IQ tests don't use questions that involve memory (minus holding the question in your head). They are made of very simple to comprehend, but highly abstract questions.
You're glossing over the entire point - the "book smart" person is only "smart" with topics they studied, i.e. they can only recite facts. They can't engage in new/novel information. They can memorize an entire math textbook but be unable to form new mathematical abstractions.
You can say that this rote memorization is a form of intelligence, but memorization will not help you do well on an IQ test. That's not how they work, and it's not what they measure. Memorizing things but being unable to form novel connections sounds pretty stupid to me.