Please tell me somebody still has that meme (of Big Mike?) saved on the crypts of their hard drive @no country for old wainds perhaps?
The "Education" Thread
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Please tell me somebody still has that meme (of Big Mike?) saved on the crypts of their hard drive @no country for old wainds perhaps?
no country for old wainds
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- Nov 23, 2002
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Master_Yoda77
Juggalo
Dak
mentat
Thanks duders
p.s. that last post is so Dak in 2016
I had the same response to it two years ago if you go back and look.
I talked to someone in the last year or so about the paper grading for the GRE and he/she said basically it was sort of keyword driven and a study guide would have helped with that. I don't know if that is true or not.
I wonder what sort of eugenics can of worms will open when we actually do figure out the intelligence question.
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I wouldn't be surprised if so. As was also mentioned a couple of years ago, essays are given like two minutes of reading time by your graders. They scan them and mark their little checklists (mental or otherwise), rather than read the essay's content word for word. Graders simply don't have the time to devote that much attention to a single essay because they have 29 other essays to read within the same hour. I believe @unknown mentioned that he was familiar with the standardized test essay grading process.
*if we do
Einherjar86
Active Member
The assumption built into this statement is that the intelligence question will be solved genetically. I'm increasingly convinced that it won't be.
Baroque
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Internally Deformed
Farseer of the Paranormal Abysm
What forms intelligence takes/if it can be quantified/what causes variations in intelligence between individuals.
Einherjar86
Active Member
All of these, but I would also preface this with the annoyingly vague question: What is intelligence?
I'm also curious as to whether intelligence can be formally structured, or whether it's a system-specific attribute. I've also been really interested lately as to whether, when we ask if an organism and/or system is intelligent, we can limit that question to the formal structure of the organism/system or whether intelligence somehow exceeds those limits (in a recursive fashion). I think that talking about intelligence genetically inevitably restricts intelligence to a quality of an organism, but I tend to think that intelligence involves an isomorphism between organisms (or systems) and their environments. This isn't to say that genes have no bearing on the matter, but that they supply more of a general species substrate rather than a motivation for specifically identifiable behaviors.
Baroque
Active Member
Internally Deformed
Farseer of the Paranormal Abysm
Dak
mentat
Of course intelligence is going to have some relative or "perspectivistic" properties. For a crude and extreme example, some extremely advanced species from another galaxy might find us too primitive to contact. Now, as far as a "motivation for specifically identifiable behaviors", I don't know exactly what you might be referring to.
Internally Deformed
Farseer of the Paranormal Abysm
If we define intelligence as the extent to which an organism's approach to interacting with its environment serves its interests, does that make man the dumbest ever animal?
That would be an interesting argument to make.
Einherjar86
Active Member
I was contrasting "specifically identifiable behaviors" among individuals - so, very detailed descriptions of different behaviors between, say, upper-class people and lower-class people - with intelligence as a more general substrate that has little bearing on individually distinct behaviors.
In other words, between intelligence as a specific and quantifiable variant among individual human beings and intelligence as a general substrate that has minimal impact on individual behaviors, respectively. In the latter formalization, intelligence is less something that bears immediately on how individuals behave and more of a species-wide isomorphic pattern. From this perspective, I'd also propose that IQ tests don't actually measure intelligence at all, but something more like the ability to maintain logical consistency within a given set of axioms. IQ texts don't necessarily provide you with these axioms, but they expect you to already be familiar with them. I'm not sure this qualifies as "intelligence."
According to Peter Watts, consciousness is an evolutionary mistake. But consciousness also isn't intelligence, and I think the two often get unconsciously and unintentionally conflated when we consider intelligence to manifest in rational action.
Also, I think you'd have to specify whether or not it serves an organism's best interests, and this is a difficult value to qualify.
I'm not inclined to say that humans are the dumbest animals since we've managed to consciously alter our own relationship to the external world via a mediating set of tools and instruments. I think intelligence lies not in how individual humans are able to manipulate tools or solve certain problems, but in the more complex pattern that occurs between human existence and its environment. This is a recursive relationship, and invites some contradiction since human bodies are part of the environment from which they attempt to distinguish themselves, and in which they must survive. Intelligence isn't a quality of human beings, in this model, but rather a complex pattern that forms between a human organism and its environment. To some extent, I think we misidentify intelligence when we restrict it to an individual organism.
To take this one more step, I think that what we perceive as intelligence in individual humans is not a pure attribute of the human brain but an emergent pattern between organic subsystems, most obviously cognition.
Dak
mentat
According to the most recent things I've read as it relates to genetics and intelligence, it currently does not appear that there are specific "intelligence genes". There are genes that do a variety of things, and providing a boost or a reduction in g scores may be one of those things. If this is accurate, this puts some immediate limitation on boosting intelligence via merely "switching genes on", because each one may be responsible for only a fractional boost, and may come with a host of other good or bad or conflicting pieces of information. Furthermore, as one diverges from the general population in terms of intelligence - past a certain point, at the extreme tail end - various socially related psychology problems emerge potentially related to although not limited to "loneliness". So even if one could provide a given human with an extreme intelligence boost with no obvious physical or mental complications, the boosted human will face some socially ill effects.
Internally Deformed
Farseer of the Paranormal Abysm
I suppose one way you might be able to define an organism's best interests would be its long term survival/propagation, and in that respect you could say humans are acting against our own. The drawback to that approach is that intelligent behaviors, even if they do fulfill that criteria, are seldom motivated directly by evolutionary imperatives - serving them just happens to be a secondary effect of satiating instinctual desires. Human intelligence is adept at fulfilling individual desires, so much so that doing so no longer serves the long term interests of the species. Whether that makes us smart or dumb comes down to which definition of best interest - individual or species wide - you accept.
I think a paradoxical effect of greater intelligence may also be that no matter how intelligent an organism is, the effects of its actions upon its environment will always elude it - assuming that greater intelligence implies more complex interactions between the two. Creating a tool or technology is a far easier proposition than predicting the effect that new innovation may have, which means that the effect an intelligent organism has upon its environment is actually arguably less intentional than is the case with simpler species.
I think a paradoxical effect of greater intelligence may also be that no matter how intelligent an organism is, the effects of its actions upon its environment will always elude it - assuming that greater intelligence implies more complex interactions between the two. Creating a tool or technology is a far easier proposition than predicting the effect that new innovation may have, which means that the effect an intelligent organism has upon its environment is actually arguably less intentional than is the case with simpler species.
Internally Deformed
Farseer of the Paranormal Abysm
I tend to find that people with high IQ's tend to have low emotional and practical intelligence, which are probably more useful forms of intellect, so I wouldn't worry about it. Not unless you're also an impractically minded social retard anyway .
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Dak
mentat
Well your anecdotes are at odds with the research on "emotional IQ". "Practical intelligence" is even more vague than "emotional IQ". What's practical in one arena isn't in another. Intelligence involves a capability to understand information, not happening to "know" something. An apparent misconception amongst those at or below the mean is that being smart means knowing how to navigate their own particular small world in a way that doesn't look different - regardless of how well one is doing by more objective measures.
Internally Deformed
Farseer of the Paranormal Abysm
I don't think I claimed that knowledge and intellect were the same thing, or even related, but thanks for the info.
Is it a misconception to suggest that being smart consists in acting in ways which are obviously smart? The concept of intellect predates attempts to measure it, so to revise the original concept to better match the means of testing it seems a little back to front to me. All you're really suggesting here is that you prefer one definition of smartness to another.
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