5 ms·

Yes and cranial measurements determine intelligence too… Come on people. We’ve been down this road before. It’s not good.

xyzzyz 5y ago
Cranial capacity doesn’t determine intelligence, just as height doesn’t determine basketball ability. Nevertheless, good basketball players tend to be tall, and intelligent people tend to have large cranial capacity. These are well documented correlations, with multiple studies observing those.
inglor_cz 5y ago
So, does evolution and biology stop at the neck somehow? Or if it does not, are we better off staying ignorant than trying to discover some knowledge, however fractional and incomplete? I don't believe in either.
contingencies 5y ago
The Turing test is like saying planes don't fly unless they can fool birds into thinking they're birds. - Peter Norvig, via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup IMHO other intelligence tests are the same - they tend to measure familiarity with established systems of rationality and response within a given culture only. Here's a thought experiment. Imagine a student who can't read, or who can't read the language the test is written in, or are an elementary learner of that language. They would tend to score poorly. All communication is like this, not just written tests. But the logical basis upon which rationality is measured within said tests is also a language, and its drawbacks exactly parallel that of language itself. Perhaps what IQ and similar metrics are really measuring is cultural indoctrination and familiarity as a highly tangential proxy to the basic cognitive abilities which they actually purport to grade.
- imtringued 5y ago
  It's impossible for there to be an objective measure of intelligence as it is an adaptation to a specific environment. As others have said before me, an IQ test measures how adapted you are to IQ tests.
  - contingencies 5y ago
    Goodhart's Law (Popular formulation): When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

xyzzyz 5y ago

Cranial capacity doesn’t determine intelligence, just as height doesn’t determine basketball ability. Nevertheless, good basketball players tend to be tall, and intelligent people tend to have large cranial capacity. These are well documented correlations, with multiple studies observing those.

inglor_cz 5y ago

So, does evolution and biology stop at the neck somehow? Or if it does not, are we better off staying ignorant than trying to discover some knowledge, however fractional and incomplete? I don't believe in either.

contingencies 5y ago

The Turing test is like saying planes don't fly unless they can fool birds into thinking they're birds. - Peter Norvig, via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup IMHO other intelligence tests are the same - they tend to measure familiarity with established systems of rationality and response within a given culture only. Here's a thought experiment. Imagine a student who can't read, or who can't read the language the test is written in, or are an elementary learner of that language. They would tend to score poorly. All communication is like this, not just written tests. But the logical basis upon which rationality is measured within said tests is also a language, and its drawbacks exactly parallel that of language itself. Perhaps what IQ and similar metrics are really measuring is cultural indoctrination and familiarity as a highly tangential proxy to the basic cognitive abilities which they actually purport to grade.

imtringued 5y ago
It's impossible for there to be an objective measure of intelligence as it is an adaptation to a specific environment. As others have said before me, an IQ test measures how adapted you are to IQ tests.
- contingencies 5y ago
  Goodhart's Law (Popular formulation): When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup