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Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?

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Re: Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand these meme of degrading IQ as having little real world value. That mentality seems to fly in the face of just about every observation one can make. It seems obvious that in general, smarter people tend to get ahead. Of course there are many counter examples, but overall the trend seems obvious. Why is it everyone must apologize, make excuses for, or somehow downplay their own intelligence? Maybe it…

I don't understand these meme of degrading IQ as having little real world value. Haven't you read Lewis Terman, author of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, on the subject? "There are, however, certain characteristics of age scores with which the reader should be familiar. For one thing, it is necessary to bear in mind that the true mental age as we have used it refers to the mental age on a particular intelligence test. A…

I appreciate the well-sourced comment, upvoted. Although I'm not sure exactly what you're arguing. All those points I agree with. Any discussion of IQ must be based on a realistic interpretation of its meaning. But this doesn't mean it has no real world value at all.

I would disagree with the focus on ability to do "academic" work as the only useful result from IQ. While academic challenges is the "tool" we generally use to measure IQ, it is likely to be measuring something that goes much deeper than just academic ability (g factor). This can be seen by the high correlation between different types of intelligence tests. The academic style questions are simply the tool used, since its assumed that most people have had (roughly) the same exposure to the concepts.

The most obvious real world result would be that people who have IQ, and thus have a mind that is able to perform academic work at a high level, would also be able to perform various "knowledge based" work at a similar high level. It seems pretty obvious to me that there is much crossover in the mental faculties needed to do academic work and "real world" work of business value. Since this is the direction the world is moving, it seems short sighted to want to dismiss IQ as having no real world value.

Re: Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand these meme of degrading IQ as having little real world value. That mentality seems to fly in the face of just about every observation one can make. It seems obvious that in general, smarter people tend to get ahead. Of course there are many counter examples, but overall the trend seems obvious. Why is it everyone must apologize, make excuses for, or somehow downplay their own intelligence? Maybe it…

Hmm, but how do you define getting ahead? People with a high IQ will get ahead on stuff that works like IQ tests do, like getting a degree or passing highly selective interviews. Especially interview questions in the finance sector are probably much easier with a better IQ. But that is only because it is easy to make things work like IQ tests. The people that seem to get ahead in society are those with excellent soci…

>Oh well, no political career for me.

I think this is one of the problems with how we analyze these things. We always want to focus on the very top and point out that those that lead us aren't the brightest of the bunch, but are oozing social skills. Yes at the very top, social skills, being alpha, being able to persuade and lead, etc, are much more critical than a high IQ. But for the rest of us in between, IQ likely does correlate at least somewhat to enhanced life outcomes.

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