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The article says "No good evidence for multiple intelligences (in the sense of statistically independent components of cognition)." But shouldn't the burden o
by kar5pt 5y ago
The article says
"No good evidence for multiple intelligences (in the sense of statistically independent components of cognition)."
But shouldn't the burden of proof be the other way around? Why is it more reasonable to believe that ability in different cognitive activities can be abstracted into a single component called "intelligence" than it is to believe that performance in unrelated cognitive tasks would be unrelated?
- exporectomy 5y agoWe already know that various cognitive abilities are correlated. It's been done. Even reaction times are correlated with IQ. Gardner's multiple intelligences are just made up. They didn't appear out of some analysis. He just imagined them and declared them to exist.
- perl4ever 5y agoAssigning disproportionate importance to IQ is inversely correlated with other types of abilities, even if IQ itself is positively correlated. If you interview someone for a job and ask what they like to do in their free time, and their only answer is they belong to Mensa, do you expect they will have musical, mechanical, linguistic, athletic, etc. talent?
- exporectomy 5y agoAmbiguous question. Everyone has those talents to some extent. Do you mean more than average? Exceptional (eg. top 1%)? More likely to have than if they had a lower IQ, or something else?
- perl4ever 5y agoI think that's a bit overly pedantic, but spelled out: ...in the same proportion as a person randomly selected from the general population with the same IQ. My point is that the overall correlation is obviously not going to hold, among people who derive self-worth from IQ in particular. But those are the people who want to talk about the correlation. It's self-defeating.
- exporectomy 5y agoIt's important because you might be asking for comparison to an average IQ person. But given this additional information obviously not, since we know they don't do any of those activities. But so? There's still a correlation. You say "disproportionate" but how do you determine that? What's the proportionate correlation that "normal" high IQ people will assign? Read the research and quote the numbers? OK but won't the Mensa member be doing the same? If it's just a hand-wavy idea like I gave, how can you compare?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jhgb 5y ago> Why is it more reasonable to believe that ability in different cognitive activities can be abstracted into a single component called "intelligence" than it is to believe that performance in unrelated cognitive tasks would be unrelated? Presumably because both hypotheses can be tested and one of them came out ahead?