On Intelligence
December 3rd, 2007This article in the New York Times talks about differences in intelligence and making mistakes. Intelligence is a funny thing. It’s a concept that there is no real way to measure. Perhaps because there is no real consensus on what intelligence means. Is intelligence being able to interpret geometrical shapes? Or perhaps being able to understand the concepts in a paragraph (Who’s concepts? What language and subject?)? Perhaps intelligence is being able to interpret body language to understand emotions? Maybe it’s making decisions that are least destructive to our health, in which case all smokers are less intelligent than non-smokers.
At risk of treading dangerously close to ‘everything is relative’ territory, I think it is very hard to judge intelligence. Is a drug user who robs a store not being intelligent? Does being a drug addict in the first place have anything to do with intelligence? In fact, does breaking any laws of any kind have anything to do with intelligence?
I think intelligence has little to do with your genetic gifts and more to do with how hard you work to understand things. If you tend to face unknown or confusing situations by saying ‘meh, nevermind I am not really interested’ or ‘this is too hard’ it almost certainly will be. But if you face those situations by asking what you can learn, pretty soon those situations aren’t as hard as they first seemed.
In other words, I think the human bell-curve of intelligence looks something like this:
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If measures of intelligence are dependent on cultural values, we can be assured that they discriminate against groups with different values. Someone who was raised with the idea of getting married and having a family over going to college is not by definition any less smart than the upper class kid who was raised to go to Harvard.
But we as a society seem to think that intelligence is an objective measure, like the length of a board or the size of a hard drive. Whether you rate someone else as intelligent probably has a lot more to do with how closely their values align with yours than it does with how much processing power they possesses. People don’t like the idea that you can’t assign a number to someones intelligence, or that that number will depend more on whether the person was raised in line with the dominant world view or not.
It’s a weird culture of fear that we have. Even those of us who are critical of what we might call ‘consumer values’ are afraid of the person who is homeless, or the person who is living in the projects. The reality is that people in substantially different walks of life probably have a lot of interesting things to say if we could just overcome our fear of crime and self-protective disdain.
Part of the problem with writing articles over multiple sessions is that you pick up in a very different place from where you left off. I hope this all makes some kind of sense.
-zot.
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December 3rd, 2007 at 10:13 pm
December 4th, 2007 at 9:37 am
@Joel: Ok, good point…it is possible that the behavior of working harder to learn has genetic origins. I’d be interested to see if there were studies that tracked families over generations to see if this is the case. Here is the problem, I’m almost certain that children of smart parents would be more likely to score well on intelligence tests just because they have been raised to value learning.
It would be very hard to separate the nature vs. nurture effects in such a study.
December 10th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
I work in a very corporate environment and can definitely attest to everyone’s aversion when it comes to ‘owning up’ to their mistakes. I’m still somewhat baffled by the lengths coworkers would go to avoid saying ‘I apologize, will fix this going forward.’ In my experience the ability to admit you were wrong is directly related to increased productivity and improved future work performance. And, I suppose in a round-about way this brings me to my point. Isn’t intelligence a measure of of conflict resolution and problem-solving skills. In the end, you would want to work with the person that can learn from their mistakes as quickly as possible and apply that experience to future decision-making.