5 ms·

There are two problems though with this view. As a disclaimer, there are people who I consider much smarter than I am at certain things, and many people regard

There are two problems though with this view. As a disclaimer, there are people who I consider much smarter than I am at certain things, and many people regard me the same way. Some of that may be my attention deficit and the effort I have had to put in to being successful despite it. I think the problem though is different, however. I am going to say two things: 1. Intelligence is not definable to the point where it can be tested, and 2. Attitude > innate intelligence. I expect both these will not be so welcome in the HN community as such, so I am prepared for downvotes, but I also dont think these are wrong either. On the first, the fact is that people process information differently. Ramanujan processes a number a certain way. Someone else might associate it with a year and immediately make historical connections. Someone else may factor get fascinated and factor it. There are bunches of ways a piece of information can be processed and the weighing of one as better than another is ultimately a cultural judgement and ultimately what proves to be an interesting property depends on what we find fascinating (which brings me to my second point). On the second, I have found all my life that the smartest people I have known have always been the most humble, and to regard everyone else as being worthy of learning from. I have consequently come to regard intelligence as a two-fold habit. The first part is the habit of finding everything interesting in life, what I call an unwillingness to be bored (something that really comes through in Feynman's memoires). The second is regarding everyone as someone to learn from (Heisenberg btw comes across this way very much in "Physics and Philosophy"). If you go around learning from everyone, and refuse to be bored, you will quite quickly become smarter than everyone else if they refuse to do the same.

Nursie 13y ago
>> 2. Attitude > innate intelligence. What do you mean by greater than? Attitude like you describe is only really open to people above a certain level of intelligence. If you just don't get mathematics, language etc etc because of inbuilt limitations (yes, some people have these) then you're not going to get that far.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  What I mean is that most of intelligence intelligence is a habit cultivated by attitude rather than limited by an inborn capacity. This doesn't mean there isn't a basic shape given by innate aspects (at least for some people), but that most of what we'd call intelligence is developed rather than inborn.
  - Nursie 13y ago
    I would be interested to see any research you have seen that points in that direction. I think that people are more restricted by hardware capabilities than you like to imagine. That said, I asked what you meant by 'greater than' because I don't believe that raw intelligence always translates to success at life, whatever that may mean.
    - einhverfr 13y ago
      Well, at some point software affects hardware though regarding our brain. Could Sapir or Chomsky have been great linguists if they only had one native language and learned the other languages at, say, the age of 10?
      - Nursie 13y ago
        That's true, there is definitely environmental feedback involved. However people can grow up in the same environment, with the same access to learning, and have very different outcomes.
        einhverfr 13y ago
        You are assuming that most people fulfil their potential. As I mentioned on another post the way I look at it is that we are granted a "fated" potential that we must strive to reach. I don't think most people do this effectively.
        Nursie 13y ago
        >>You are assuming that most people fulfil their potential. No, I'm really not, I'm saying that people have different levels of intelligence and you can see this as they come out differently from the same environment. You seem to have a rosy view of everybody as smart and equally capable if they just jolly-well gave it a go. This is just not the case.
regal 13y ago
Wikipedia cites numerous studies on heritability, showing that IQ starts off largely environmental (0.2 heritability at birth) but ends up eventually moving to what its been genetically predetermined to be (0.8 heritability in adulthood).[1] IQ seems to accurately measure abstract reasoning abilities, pattern recognition abilities, and memory retention. That's what most people think of when they say intelligence (though there are always efforts to "redefine" intelligence to make it a more politically correct / egalitarian term - at which point, you're not really talking about "intelligence" but rather "semantics" and how you want to define a word in the English lexicon). The IQ "debate" reminds me very much of the race debate, that race "doesn't exist" and is purely a social construct with no genetic basis. I keep waiting for someone to take a black or Asian baby and place it with white parents for it to grow up and have white skin and a pointy nose and blond hair. So far I haven't seen it. We have no trouble understanding that the differences between, say, a sheep and a cow are due to genetics; why is it so hard for us to wrap our minds around the fact that most of the differences between one another come down to genes, too? Methinks it comes down to the old philosophical debate of free will vs. predetermination, and the innate fear many people have of the idea that you can do anything or be anything if you only work at it hard enough. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Heritability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Heritabi...
- einhverfr 13y ago
  > Methinks it comes down to the old philosophical debate of free will vs. predetermination, and the innate fear many people have of the idea that you can do anything or be anything if you only work at it hard enough. For the record, I don't think it works that way either. I am largely a fan of the idea that F. M. Cornford reconstructed from Greek myth ("From Religion to Philosophy"), that we have free will within a granted partition of fate, or lot of life, which is limited in various ways and repaid when we die. From this view, fate is a domain we must strive to achieve, and thus not inevitable. > The IQ "debate" reminds me very much of the race debate, that race "doesn't exist" and is purely a social construct with no genetic basis. I keep waiting for someone to take a black or Asian baby and place it with white parents for it to grow up and have white skin and a pointy nose and blond hair. So far I haven't seen it. Race is problematic in a number of levels. Yes it is a social construct with no real genetic basis, at least as we have constructed it. This doesn't mean however that you can't identify genetic commonalities among different groups. We could, for example, just as easily say that the racial test is drinking milk as an adult, and therefore Mongolians and Scandinavians are of the Milk-Drinking Race, while Italians and Chinese are of the Cheese-Only race. And before you say "but skin is more visible" it is worth noting that eating together and food taboos are historically much closer to ethnicity than skin color is. The problem though I think isn't a question of mere egalitarianism. There are people who are for all intents and purposes, greater visionaries, better at recognizing patterns that will change the world, and so forth than others. IQ tests, IMO will never be able to capture that for very fundamental epistemological reasons. This isn't to say that IQ isn't useful but as long as you are weighing different skills against eachother, assuming the only pattern that works (regarding pattern recognition) is the one the testers think is right, and so forth, what you have is a number which is fundamentally culturally constructed and fails to capture real genius.

Nursie 13y ago

>> 2. Attitude > innate intelligence. What do you mean by greater than? Attitude like you describe is only really open to people above a certain level of intelligence. If you just don't get mathematics, language etc etc because of inbuilt limitations (yes, some people have these) then you're not going to get that far.

einhverfr 13y ago
What I mean is that most of intelligence intelligence is a habit cultivated by attitude rather than limited by an inborn capacity. This doesn't mean there isn't a basic shape given by innate aspects (at least for some people), but that most of what we'd call intelligence is developed rather than inborn.
- Nursie 13y ago
  I would be interested to see any research you have seen that points in that direction. I think that people are more restricted by hardware capabilities than you like to imagine. That said, I asked what you meant by 'greater than' because I don't believe that raw intelligence always translates to success at life, whatever that may mean.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    Well, at some point software affects hardware though regarding our brain. Could Sapir or Chomsky have been great linguists if they only had one native language and learned the other languages at, say, the age of 10?
    - Nursie 13y ago
      That's true, there is definitely environmental feedback involved. However people can grow up in the same environment, with the same access to learning, and have very different outcomes.
      - einhverfr 13y ago
        You are assuming that most people fulfil their potential. As I mentioned on another post the way I look at it is that we are granted a "fated" potential that we must strive to reach. I don't think most people do this effectively.
        Nursie 13y ago
        >>You are assuming that most people fulfil their potential. No, I'm really not, I'm saying that people have different levels of intelligence and you can see this as they come out differently from the same environment. You seem to have a rosy view of everybody as smart and equally capable if they just jolly-well gave it a go. This is just not the case.

regal 13y ago

Wikipedia cites numerous studies on heritability, showing that IQ starts off largely environmental (0.2 heritability at birth) but ends up eventually moving to what its been genetically predetermined to be (0.8 heritability in adulthood).[1] IQ seems to accurately measure abstract reasoning abilities, pattern recognition abilities, and memory retention. That's what most people think of when they say intelligence (though there are always efforts to "redefine" intelligence to make it a more politically correct / egalitarian term - at which point, you're not really talking about "intelligence" but rather "semantics" and how you want to define a word in the English lexicon). The IQ "debate" reminds me very much of the race debate, that race "doesn't exist" and is purely a social construct with no genetic basis. I keep waiting for someone to take a black or Asian baby and place it with white parents for it to grow up and have white skin and a pointy nose and blond hair. So far I haven't seen it. We have no trouble understanding that the differences between, say, a sheep and a cow are due to genetics; why is it so hard for us to wrap our minds around the fact that most of the differences between one another come down to genes, too? Methinks it comes down to the old philosophical debate of free will vs. predetermination, and the innate fear many people have of the idea that you can do anything or be anything if you only work at it hard enough. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Heritability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Heritabi...

einhverfr 13y ago
> Methinks it comes down to the old philosophical debate of free will vs. predetermination, and the innate fear many people have of the idea that you can do anything or be anything if you only work at it hard enough. For the record, I don't think it works that way either. I am largely a fan of the idea that F. M. Cornford reconstructed from Greek myth ("From Religion to Philosophy"), that we have free will within a granted partition of fate, or lot of life, which is limited in various ways and repaid when we die. From this view, fate is a domain we must strive to achieve, and thus not inevitable. > The IQ "debate" reminds me very much of the race debate, that race "doesn't exist" and is purely a social construct with no genetic basis. I keep waiting for someone to take a black or Asian baby and place it with white parents for it to grow up and have white skin and a pointy nose and blond hair. So far I haven't seen it. Race is problematic in a number of levels. Yes it is a social construct with no real genetic basis, at least as we have constructed it. This doesn't mean however that you can't identify genetic commonalities among different groups. We could, for example, just as easily say that the racial test is drinking milk as an adult, and therefore Mongolians and Scandinavians are of the Milk-Drinking Race, while Italians and Chinese are of the Cheese-Only race. And before you say "but skin is more visible" it is worth noting that eating together and food taboos are historically much closer to ethnicity than skin color is. The problem though I think isn't a question of mere egalitarianism. There are people who are for all intents and purposes, greater visionaries, better at recognizing patterns that will change the world, and so forth than others. IQ tests, IMO will never be able to capture that for very fundamental epistemological reasons. This isn't to say that IQ isn't useful but as long as you are weighing different skills against eachother, assuming the only pattern that works (regarding pattern recognition) is the one the testers think is right, and so forth, what you have is a number which is fundamentally culturally constructed and fails to capture real genius.