Intelligence

[xiphias]

At a wedding I was at last night, I had a couple very interesting conversations which got me thinking. One of the people I was talking to works with gifted children, trying to make their lives in school less hellish. In the course of the conversation, I mentioned that I don't believe in g. "G", in this context, is, approximately, the idea that there is one specific thing which is "intelligence", which is scalable and, to at least a certain extent, measurable.

The couple I was talking to told me flatly that I was wrong, and that more recent research correlated g with visible biological processes such as neuron transmission speed, glucose metabolism speed, and so forth. Which sounds reasonable to me.

Nonetheless, there does remain something I don't believe in, and, on the drive home from the wedding, and for all of today, I've been thinking about that.

Because I can see, very clearly, that smarter people don't make better choices than less smart people. I can see that intelligence doesn't correlate with success. I know that, even if there are genuine biological differences in brain functioning, those differences don't lead to differences in the things that are thought of as intelligence to lay people. This month's Scientific American has a column on why smart people believe stupid things -- according to that columnist, smart people are harder to dissuade from stupidity than stupid people. And I was thinking of the one relative that I have who the family actually thinks of as stupid -- the Mensa member.

And I started thinking about Dungeons & Dragons, and how D&D splits out "Intelligence" and "Wisdom". I mean, I'm among the dumbest of my friends in terms of what "g" measures -- but I'm the one that people go to for advice.

In the conversation I was having last night, the folks to whom I was talking compared "g" to clock speed on a computer. Arguing by analogy usually gets one into trouble real quickly; nonetheless, I was extending that analogy in my mind, and thinking more and more about it.

No matter how fast your computer runs, if you're running crappy algorithms, you're going to get either wrong answers, or get the right answers real slow. Perhaps "wisdom" is analogous having the right algorithms to process the right data. Most of my friends are smarter and can get to answers much more quickly, but for many sorts of situations, the answers I'll come up with will be better. Just . . . slower.

And I keep coming up with definitions of "intelligence", or parts of intelligence, that would not be much affected by "clock speed". Perhaps one part of intelligence would be the ability to see a complex system, like a social situation, or even a society, and predicting what the effects of a large change on that system would be. And I've always been good at that. And "clock speed" is just not going to have that much of an effect on one's ability to do that.

Or maybe that's not intelligence. Maybe that's wisdom.

Lots of very smart people I know are libertarians. Carla Howel is getting an initiative on the ballot to remove the state income tax. She says that lots of wonderful good things will happen if this happens -- if the state, which is currently having such trouble trying to maintain decent health care, education, and roads loses ten billion dollars of revenue, our health care, education, and roads will become better.

Carla Howel may well believe this. She is, by all accounts, a very intelligent person. I just have doubts about her wisdom.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense....

I'm reminded of one person on a newsgroup I read, who's got what seems to be a habit of making flat proclaimations of fact in areas that she really doesn't know anything about, and not really being very graceful with people who disagree. Or, for that matter, with people she think's she's disagreeing due to a misreading on her part.

She's, by her own account (which I have no reason to dispute), very intelligent, as least as measured by IQ tests.

As best I can tell, what this has gained her is an ability to make conclusions from evidence very quickly. Specifically, at a rate where the conclusion becomes set in concrete well before enough evidence comes in to actually warrant a solid conclusion.

---

Another thing that you've left out of your analysis is experience. Which isn't just what you've been through, although that's part of it; it's what you've noticed about what you've been through. There's a skill of noticing things and figuring out how they fit together, and of remembering them in ways that allow you to recall them when you're figuring out how something else fits.

Someday, I suspect it would be useful for someone to do a study on how "intelligence" (as measured by this g you mention) affects people's behavior in everyday life.... I suspect the results might be surprising to some people who've been measuring this thing with rather abstract tests and stuff without really working on how it applies to "real life".

- Brooks

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that "experience" is a component of "wisdom". But it's not 1:1. People can gain wisdom through reading, or thinking, and people can gain experience without learning anything from it.

Perhaps "wisdom" is what happens when one gets raw material (whether that be direct experience, reading about other people's experiences, reading or otherwise learning about philosophy that others have hacked out, or even thoughts and dreams), and then finds a way to process it into a useful form that you can apply to your own life?

[gingicat]

As you know, I work as a secretary in a high school for gifted children. These children are chosen based on SSAT scores, grades, essays, and interviews. The best way I can describe these kids is that they have a wide range of interests and tend to be good at relating experiences in one subject area to another. The school where I work challenges them to do so as much as possible.

Many of these kids actually have learning disabilities: non-verbal learning disorder and dyslexia are the most common. We also have several who are diagnosed with what doctors call ADD and I call being creative and interested in so many things that it becomes difficult to concentrate.

Many of our kids have social skills issues: they need to learn to modulate their voices, to have discussions/arguments/debates without name-calling, to learn to choose their battles, to learn how to make sure they have time for the things which are most important to them, to learn to figure out what's important at any given time. In short, they're an awful lot like I was as a high school student; in fact, many of the lessons we try to teach, I didn't *really* learn till I was in my twenties, despite the best efforts of my parents.

So what we try to do in this school is to take kids who are already bright and high-performing, and help them learn to become well-rounded and capable. As many of us know, doing well in school doesn't always translate to doing well in life. And different people are able to learn what I consider "life skills" at different ages, too.

Sorry for the ramble.

[kiya]

So ages and ages ago (well, maybe a month or something) when I got on livejournal, I started poking around and typed a few random handles of people I knew into the slot for user. One of them was 'xiphias'. I thought it looked familiar, though there was no content. ;) But I went and friendsed it anyway on the off-chance something would come up.

And lo! I come back from having dinner with keshwyn and my friendspage is Xiphized. Hi! (I don't know if you know Anne-Keshwyn at all; she was my roommate before I fell out of Wellesley.)

Um. Anyway. Let's vaguely approach on-topic here. Graydon (I don't know if you know him from usenet) is wont to say quite vehemently that there's no such thing as intelligence, and I'm inclined to agree with him. There are a whole bunch of interrelated processes with ranges on 'em, and a high rating in one does not necessarily suggest a high rating in any other.

Clock speed. Memory. Arithmetic. Mathematics. Pattern-matching. Various forms of deductive logic. Adaptability. Intuition. Persuasiveness. Understanding-people. Abstraction. Spacial sense. Lots of other stuff I can't think of.

My father has a work-partnership with someone with over-the-top levels of intuition processing and a defective logical function: when she tries to explain how she got to her answer, she's often just plain wrong, but her answers are often functional. They work together well because Dad's entirely capable of taking a reading on that far-out point and slogging through the logic and the maths to determine if it's useful-and-correct, and if it is, why. Complementary intellectual functions.

I can look at a system and, once I grasp the fundamentals of it, point at the results with fair accuracy; I'm terrible at the numbers (in part because when I've seen the direction the motivation to do the number-crunching goes out). I can't remember formulas unless I understand how to derive them, and abstractions without applications don't process for me. I'm about as adaptable as a brain-damaged dodo. So it goes.