Gee, Scoob, I wonder if screencap is relevant to pop music's effect on the brain? (link in comments)
(media.conspiracies.win)
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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.
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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.
Oh it is entirely true. The questions also follow a lot of the same tropes. Same as it's possible to prep for the LSAT, which is a logic test, memory plays a role because of pattern recognition. What you're saying, if taken just one step further than where you're at, is that if someone loses their memory (dementia) but they keep their abstract reasoning, they are still high intelligence, and that's just plain wrong. The cogitative power involves the use of memory and imagination.
You're also eliding on your terms again by using "smart" as a synonym for "memorization" and it's not. I also note, that you're not responding at all to the point that we know from experience, that charisma, while aspects of it can be learned, is also intuitive.
No, it’s not possible to prep for an IQ test. I’ve taken one with a professional evaluation. You obviously have no idea what an IQ test is like. If you want, you can take one to understand what it is. Chinamen studying for SATs won't give them a high IQ score. Only the proxy SAT score, which is not a real IQ test, so it can be manipulated.
Why are you conflating natural athletic ability and charisma with intelligence? The topic is that verbal intelligence, one of the classic multiple intelligences, is perfectly encapsulated by IQ. It's not a separate metric. The g-factor has been studied and it nearly perfectly correlates IQ to "verbal intelligence" every single time. There's no wiggle room here. There's no verbal IQ separate from IQ.
Memorize whatever you want, your pattern recognition for novel patterns will not improve. Pattern recognition has been extensively studied and has led to the most success-correlated psychometric test ever devised. If you have a high verbal intelligence, you have high spatial, musical, and logical intelligence. You'll need some effort to build those concrete skills, but your ceiling is much higher in every single one of those categories than somebody with a low IQ.