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> We don't have any real evidence of "different types of intelligences". People with high IQ just tend to be better at all cognitive tasks than people with lowe
by goku12 11mo ago
> We don't have any real evidence of "different types of intelligences". People with high IQ just tend to be better at all cognitive tasks than people with lower IQ.
That would imply that a person with a high IQ score is uniformly better at every task compared to a person of lower IQ. But that's absolutely not what's observed. People show better skill levels at different tasks. A person who's bad at math may instead be a natural-born singing sensation. This is why I said that a single number is just incapable of representing intelligence. The mathematical dimensionality of the quantity called intelligence is just too high. You'll need a bunch of numbers - a vector, at the minimum. And even that can't be used for comparing people's intelligence. It can only be used for assessing someone's suitability for a particular task. Basically, IQ score is a scalar that is used to represent a vector, discarding very important information in the process.
> People with higher IQ also have better memory recall.
There are people who recite entire Shakespeare plays without understanding a sentence in it. I have also seen people who recall long derivation sequences using Maxwell's equations exactly and score well on exams, without having any clue as to what the del (∇) operator even means in practice. Needless to say, they have difficulty adapting that information to a novel situation. Memory recall is just one aspect of intelligence. There are other cognitive skills required to make that memory useful. This again goes back to my previous conclusion. A single number is quite meaningless at best and utterly misleading at worst.
> it's use for diagnosing people that may face challenges in a traditional learning environment well motivated. All of the examples you mention of people scoring poorly on IQ and facing challenges in school supports the use of IQ, it doesn't discount it.
On the contrary, it just misleads the educators to the student's real abilities. It ignores and hides the atypical talents that students possess. All it can do is to predict if the student will do well or not in generalized education and standardized testing, because they follow the equally illogical concept of using standardized pedagogy on everyone, neglecting their uniqueness. So, even if we accept your claim that the IQ score predicts their performance in schools, it means that the score has the very narrow scope of testing someone's capability to learn under a standardized curriculum. That's far too narrow to be identified as an indicator of intelligence. And even after identifying the students who are going to struggle, IQ gives no clue as to how to remedy that. All it does is put a dunce label on these students who might otherwise have done better. It does more harm than good.
- naasking 11mo ago> That would imply that a person with a high IQ score is uniformly better at every task compared to a person of lower IQ. No it doesn't, that's why I said "tend to". > On the contrary, it just misleads the educators to the student's real abilities. It ignores and hides the atypical talents that students possess. The test simply doesn't measure atypical talents, so there's no "hiding". That's why I said the test is used to identify people who will face challenges. What happens next has nothing to do with the IQ test and everything to do with other methods of assessment that should be used. Every test has limitations that those applying the test should understand. > That's far too narrow to be identified as an indicator of intelligence That's why it's a (strong) correlation and not a strict equality. Look, jumping height has been empirically demonstrated to be a good predictor of overall athletic performance, and you're coming here and saying that there exist some people without legs that can do more pull-ups than most people with legs. That's all well and good, but that doesn't somehow refute the idea that jumping height is a good predictor of overall athletic performance. It's just a complete red herring. If you happen to encounter someone without legs, then use a different test. People with legs who don't exhibit good jumping heights but are very good at some specific athletic challenge could exist, but they tend to be good only at that specific challenge (and ones that are very, very similar). This is a completely different thing than the general factor of fitness, which is correlated with all sorts of physical abilities, just like general factor g is correlated with all sorts of cognitive abilities.
- tptacek 11mo agoI think you are being a little bit conclusory here. There are in fact serious theories of intelligence that admit to multiple distinct intelligence factors. Mutualism is the obvious counterexample. You're arguing from what are arguably exploratory statistical correlations as if the correlation demonstrated the underlying cause. You might be right, but you're not presenting evidence for that position.