Intelligence discussion

Would you say that being unintelligent is a character flaw that is one's own fault? or an intrinsic trait that can't be helped and shouldn't be blamed for?

Same for intelligence. Is it a positive character aspect or just an advantage that people are born with?

edited 24th Jan '15 8:04:32 PM by BestOf

I've edited your post because the Forum software appeared to be rendering certain punctuation marks wrong. I didn't touch the content of the post.

With an OP as short as this there's a chance that this will be a fairly slow thread but of course it can also make it a very general thread about a wide variety of topics related to intelligence. I'll see where this thread goes before I decide how I'll moderate it - I could restrict it to just the questions included in the OP but maybe it'd be more interesting to allow it to flow more freely.

Let's see what happens.

I've come to think of intelligence more as a set of good habits than an innate trait. It's curiosity and thoughtfulness and the practice of deliberately seeking out, taking in, and processing new information, and these are all skills that can be developed. Perhaps some people are born with better memories than others, but the more you learn, the easier it becomes to learn new things, and what is intelligence but the power of learning—both the acquisition of new information, and the retention and application of the information you have acquired?

In the long run, nearly all ignorance is willful.

I think there is a difference between intelligence and wisdom.

Intelligence is partly innate, partly nurtured. I mean, someone born mentally-challenged is only going to get so far and in our day and age and as far as "blame" goes, we think bullying such people is evil - well, most of us, anyway. Then there are different kinds of intllegences to be considered. I do not know my own IQ, but I almost skipped a grade as a child due to my intelligence for reading-comprehension and language. However, I was never as good at mathematics. I could pull the Brilliant, but Lazy thing to a ridiculous degree with "doing homework on the bus on the way there" rather than actually studying through high school and college and still get As and Bs, save for a couple of mathematics classes, one of which I studied hard for to really EARN that D.

Therefore, a person who excels in mathematics might consider me "dumb," but if they had an interested in reading, might declare me a brilliant writer and bright in that.

As for wisdom, that's a more touchy quality. I've seen it described as "Knowing that a tomato is a fruit but not using it in a fruit salad." Having a creative mind, I could think of perhaps a different take on a fruit salad in which a tomato might actually be a welcome addition. Anyway, wisdom is subtle, comes from observation and experience, is something that goes beyond mere facts and statistics and is one of those things whereby as far as "intelligent" and "dumb" go, I've met people at once who were profoundly intelligent but also profoundly "stupid."

To further your point, it is necessary to distinguish educational aptitude from critical thinking. Memorizing facts and making good grades can go hand in hand with strong observational skills and an eye for reasoned, evidenced evaluations of reality, but sometimes the two are divorced from one another.

Some of my Chinese classmates have used the term 金鱼 - jin yu or "goldfish". It's not a well known term, but it basically refers to people who just strive to make high marks on their exams while lacking creativity and critical thinking. The result is a person who is professionally and academically dutiful, but obtuse and rather slow-witted.

edited 24th Jan '15 9:09:20 PM by Aprilla

Sometimes what we see as a lack of intelligence is an inability to observe that's ingrained from years of neglect. I've met people (including someone who used to be a friend) who don't appear to actually look at anything, instead just sort of assuming that everything is as they expect it, because paying attention isn't that highly praised outside of school. Giving the impression that you're paying attention is.

Oh, yeah, I've met people like that too. They're great at trivia stuff, but completely oblivious to things that land outside the area where rote memorization does anything.

One way I've heard it described is that you can have a wise idiot, who knows how to live, but basically nothing about the world he lives in, and the foolish genius, who knows everything, but doesn't have the slightest idea how to apply what he knows. Neither are that good, mind you.

edited 24th Jan '15 8:58:18 PM by Zendervai

I dunno, it's like whenever you call someone stupid as an insult, it's implying that their actions are foolish, right?

But it can also mean that they are instrically foolish, which if they were wouldn't really be their fault.

So therefore they can't be intrisnically foolish, i guess.

if that makes any sense

It makes sense, yes. Assuming
(A) You are not to blame for what you are
and
(B) Being stupid is intrinsic, ie a part of what you are
it follows that
(C) It is not your fault if you are stupid. However, if (A) is wrong, then yes, you can take the blame for being stupid.

I think you mean intrinsically ignorant, not foolish. A person is only intrinsically foolish if they have maturity issues that are not their fault. Children are intrinsically foolish, but adults are not unless they have some serious mental issues that they can't do anything about.

I don't think a main character would ever be called unintelligent. There is after all different kinds of intelligence. There's book smarts, street smarts, logical thinking, creative thinking... A person might have one and none of the others.

It goes to mention that IQ is going to be something that will come up a lot in this topic.

An Intelligence coefficient is something that is incredibly difficult to narrow down. To put an example, the intelligence tests came around during the times of the world war I, as we know them. Though there are precedents of intelligence tests since Ancient China.

Basically the U.S army wanted to hitch up the best soldiers into the armies and the tests that came from trying to do that later evolved into what we know in the vulgar term as "IQ tests". From its inception though, one has to remember that "intelligence tests" wanted to do something very, very specific. To measure if a person's mental attitudes were good enough to enter the army.

IQ nowadays tries to give a measure on how good people could be at anything. That is mother fucking impossible.

38957

Look at that number. Scroll down until you cannot see it any more. Wait 20 seconds. Ok. Wait 20 seconds I told you. Did you wait already? Good. Now recite the number, and then recite it again but backwards. Congratulations on whatever result you got, what you did was part of what is done in the Weschler intelligence test (The acutal test does that for a while)

Now tell me. Under what circumstance would being able, or unable, to memorize, and tell a number back and forth after a certain period means you would not be capable of writing a good story, telling a good, useful lie, writing an analytical dissertation, or operate heavy machinery? It isn't. These tests just generalize certain aspects of the brain (In the example of Weschler, Information, Arithmetic, Detecting similarities, Object Assembly, Matrix reasoning, to name a few), measure you on them, work out an average, add it up, take another average, and compare it to the rest of the massive amount of population that has been given that test.

Narrowing "intelligence" to that is, however, just plain old wrong. It can, at best, give us an idea of how that person's brain works. For example if all scores are super low, then yeah this person is definitely performing lower than a lot of people but this does not mean he/she is worthless. If they performed super high then sheesh, yeah, this person definitely performed better than a lot of people, but this does not mean he will be adequate for every situation. If the person scored super high on the verbal ones, but super low in the execution ones then we might suspect his brain has a statistically significant ease in one area over the other but that's it. We cannot judge a person by a number supposedly used to simply try to give some of the most basic approximations to how a singular human brain works.

So when defining intelligence, I would seriously be careful about throwing around the term "IQ" about.

I leave you with the experience of David McLelland and that interview that might be relevant. Slightly. Plus look at that suave mother fucker creeper stare that shit is just scary.

So basically he argued that Intelligence tests did not really seem to be measuring actual intelligence. he went on todesign other stuff himself, and presumably, stare creepily into the hearts and souls of men and women everywhere.

I believe that intelligence is malleable. Teens in India who prepare seriously for II Ts (Indian equivalent of MIT) notice a HUGE increase in their "intelligence". Many a times they go from "Dude is good at maths" to "Dude who can now score perfectly at Putnam".

Just to elaborate my own thoughts on what Shadsie and Zendervai said, I think what people refer to, and think of, as 'intelligence' is really more a matter of ways of thinking. Your level of awareness toward particular details, your method of paying attention to them, which details you pay attention to when, and why... These are all things that can be considered 'intelligence' as opposed to mere 'learning'. They're all also things that can be considered moreso a matter of what you've learned than of any inherent 'intelligence trait'.

So it shouldn't be surprising that they're also the kinda things that are often chalked up to sheer personality, priorities, etc.

People can change their attitude with effort, though it's hard. People probably can't change their -aptitude- for particular tasks, but aptitude is useless unless you go through the very same efforts to develop it as anyone else.

This is why people perceive 'intelligence' when what they're really seeing is more like 'mental talent' for a particular task. It's true that everyone's way of thinking is different. It's also true that some ways of thinking are strictly 'better' than others when it comes to approaching certain tasks.

So, to the extent that accomplishing much of anything in life requires doing so, you can 'improve your intellect' at a task just by learning the ways of thinking required to succeed at it. Learning how to learn is, after all, one of the most important life-skills you -can- learn. On the other hand, having a better aptitude -for- learning a particular task is probably not something a person can choose through any degree of effort. At the very least, it's not something you can blame a person for.

You can blame a person for not even trying to learn. But I personally don't think it's even remotely fair to blame someone for not being 'smart at something'.

And bearing in mind how many different tasks a person can aspire to, and how vastly different people's priorities can be, in terms of what they value, and in what they want (or feel like they -would- want) to do... I reckon it's not hard to see why it's so easy, in any given room full of people, for every last person to have a tragically legitimate reason to feel like the dumbest person there.

It's my personal belief that what people think of 'inherent intelligence' — regardless of what kind or kinds of intelligence they may be referring to — is primarily a product of personality formation during childhood. In particular, the vast majority of it is formed either during, or by the time of, the point in life a child 'would have' been able to learn to read by, if they had been read-to every day since birth. For most people, this is around age 5 or 6.

It's also my personal belief that what people refer to as 'wisdom', in the sense of 'wise vs smart', is nothing more than a product of their perception of other peoples' intelligence filtered through their own ethical judgements as to which kinds of thinking are 'good' or 'bad'.