3 ms·
As another poster mentioned, don’t think that g is necessarily in opposition to bundles of domain-specific abilities. I see g as an attempt at dimensionalality
by whoisnnamdi 8y ago
As another poster mentioned, don’t think that g is necessarily in opposition to bundles of domain-specific abilities.
I see g as an attempt at dimensionalality reduction - can the essence of what is admittedly a complex phenomenon be boiled down to a single metric which, while clearly not complete, is at least directionally correct / helpful.
g in some sense could simply be a low dimensional projection of these more complex bundles.
Just theorizing here, not an expert
- iguy 8y agoIt is exactly that: think of it as the first principal component, of some group of tests. Obviously this always exists. The argument is really about how big the 2nd component is -- if it were comparable, then talking about the 1st alone would be very misleading. And for a typical bundle of school-like topics (like math/english/biology exams) it's quite a long way down: IIRC a factor of 3 or 4? If the bundle of subjects is different, then the size and meaning of the components will vary. In the tests the army does to slot recruits into all sorts of roles, I think manual dexterity is one of the things they care about which is almost uncorrelated with g. Eyesight is I think one of the only things negatively correlated with g (and it's thought to be nurture: bookish kids spend too little time outdoors).