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We do have concrete ways to measure intelligence, and have had them for over a hundred years. The literature on this subject is quite extensive.
by Kudzu_Bob 13y ago
We do have concrete ways to measure intelligence, and have had them for over a hundred years. The literature on this subject is quite extensive.
- smtddr 13y agoWe do not. Are there answers to the questions I presented? You can't observe any exact thing and say "Right there! This person is exactly 49 intelliunits smart". IQ tests may give you an idea of one point of view of a measurement of intelligent is, but it is certainly not concrete like 12 inches is. Not concrete like we know 2 hydrogens & one oxygen is water. I think our obsession that everything must be measurable & categorized fails when it comes to the human mind. We are more than the sum of our measurable parts... for now. You can look at a car engine specification and know exactly the maximum speed given optimum conditions and assuming no mechanical failures. There's no such measurement for the human brain. You cannot know what my top performance is. At the absolute best, you can have a ball-park guess. You could end up being right or being way off.
- Kudzu_Bob 13y agoHuman personality contains any number of traits that can be measured. To pretend that pyschometrics does not exist is the equivalent of refusing to look through Galileo's telescope.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- DanBC 13y ago> To pretend that pyschometrics does not exist is the equivalent of refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. But a lot of psychometrics is pure, unadulterated, grade A horse shit.
- lutusp 13y ago> We do have concrete ways to measure intelligence, and have had them for over a hundred years. Concrete, yes. Accurate, absolutely not. Any number of people have exploited the systematic errors in I.Q. testing for purely racist and political objectives. > The literature on this subject is quite extensive. Indeed it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
- Kudzu_Bob 13y agoGould has been exposed as a fraud.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lutusp 13y agoCitation needed.
- Kudzu_Bob 13y agoSimply Google "gould" and "fraud" and you will have hours of fascinating reading.
- lutusp 13y agoYep. That works for "Einstein" and "fraud" also. In fact, it works for any well-known name in any field. Gould missed things that happened after the writing of Mismeasure, and ignored some later developments that challenged aspects of his original work, but he made a number of important and legitimate points about IQ testing and its abuses, points that have stood the test of time.
- Kudzu_Bob 13y agoGould's ideas have not stood the test of time, and it is now understood that he committed the fraud and abuse of which he accused others. This is why he has been disowned by his own colleagues, something that never happened to Einstein.
- 011011100 13y agoWhat's "intelligence"?
- Kudzu_Bob 13y agoIt's the thing that blank slatists say can be improved by a better environment when they're not busy claiming that it can't be measured.
- 011011100 13y agoSo you don't actually want to address a legitimate question.
- Kudzu_Bob 13y agoNo, I don't want to address a question posed in bad faith.
- thaumasiotes 13y agoThis is a reasonable perspective. But people other than the parent sometimes read comments! I'll do my best at a level-zero explanation of "intelligence" in the literature: Let's start by modestly noting that I routinely got the top score on Latin tests in high school (this was worth a small box of chocolates!). Someone applying the concept of "intelligence" might predict that I would also do well in math class. The traditional explanation for this given by Latin teachers is that learning Latin trains the mind to think logically, and getting high scores on Latin tests means that the training has taken. The intelligence-based explanation is that Latin and math are two of many tasks subject to the influence of g, the "general factor". Moving to a more general level, the observation is that for many, many tests that appear to involve "mental abilities" to a greater or lesser degree, a person's score on any one of them is predictive of the same person's score on all the others. It's rare to find someone who is good at one and bad at another; instead, people tend to be uniformly good or uniformly bad (known in the literature as the phenomenon of the "positive manifold"). This suggests that there's one quality driving all the results, which we can call "intelligence", since that's the label commonly applied to people who tend to do well on those types of tests. Corrections are of course welcome.