Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
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Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
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Re: Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
#2an excellent lesson in humility.
Re: Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
#3This reminds me of a prevalent attitude I encountered in college where it was assumed that disciplines required more intelligence as they got more abstract. It's a persistent and seductive intuition that this is the case, but as Asimov points out it is only a matter of convention. Some geniuses can be very bad at dealing with mathematical abstractions and very good at performing in a specialized domain. Gifted athletes come to mind.
Wittgenstein puts it this way:
I can play with the chessmen according to certain rules. But I can also invent a game in which I play with the rules themselves. The pieces in my game are now the rules of chess, and the rules of the game are, say, the laws of logic. In that case I have yet another game and not a metagame.
Re: Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
#4It's a nice story. I agree with his point about testing. But it seems to me he's just apologizing for his intelligence and education. I'd bet Dr. Asimov would make one hell of a auto repair mechanic if he dedicated his life to it. I'd let him work on my cars!
Re: Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
#5I would ask Mr. Asimov: Do you think that, given a reasonable amount of training, your "intelligence" could be applied toward automobile repair? Or do you truly believe that your mechanic friend had a different sort of "intelligence" that made him better at car repair, while your brand of "intelligence" lent itself toward academia?
Re: Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
#6An example does not prove the point but Click and Clack of "Car Talk" both graduated from MIT.
Their 1999 Commencement address to the graduates of MIT:
Re: Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
#7A friend of mine used to be a welder. I always found his political views simplistic to say the least. He couldn't control his liqueur and one day he felt down from high up and his arm got trashed.
I always thought that he was going to end up as a looser, although I love him as a good friend.
Years went by and he never really got anywhere, of course supporting my theory and increasing my concern.
Then a friend suggested (for whatever reason I don't know) that he should take up system administration. So he took a couple of courses and lo and behold got an apprentice position at Maersk.
He blazed through the various Sisco certifications without any issues as such exceeding what was normally considered possible. Basically flooring those who hired him and our common developer friends.
I was puzzled and asked him how he was able to advance so fast and he basically said to me.
"You know it's not really that different from installing and welding pipes. I see things needing to be connected and I connect them"
The moral of the story.
Sometimes things that seem very complex and require a tech centric mindset is really very simple. The welder, electrician and the plumber also deals with complex systems, they just have different names for them.
My friend is still the simple minded person that I know (and love) but he sure know how to lay pipes.
Re: Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
#8I totally agree, so far as merit is concerned, but the value society places on intelligence is entirely economic (at least at the moment). And academic intelligence has great economic value because it scales: it's abstract, so can be applied broadly; and is information, so can be replicated and transmitted widely.
Asimov's books, textbooks and articles need be written once, but have been replicated many times. Likewise his insights and perspectives (including this article). And the nature of insight and knowledge is there's no danger of mining them out, because you can always make finer distinctions - so there's room for arbitrarily many suppliers, each in a minuscule specialization.
Re: Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
#9This is the most important lesson my mother ever taught me. I (like her) have that same type of intelligence, the type that makes IQ tests and school exams far easier than they should be, and yet often isn't really that useful in life. I still find myself placing far too much importance in it when judging people, can only imagine how big headed I would be about it if she hadn't constantly reminded me how little IQ really means.
Stephen Fry made a similar, though briefer, point (I think in one of his auto-biographies, though I could be wrong)... Actually instead of quoting from memory I googled, it is indeed from his first auto-biography, and here it is:
"I actually went so tragically far as to send off for and complete a Mensa application test...It was only then I realised the kind of intelligence that wants to get into Mensa and succeeds in getting into Mensa and then runs Mensa and the kind of intelligence that I thought worth possessing were so astronomically distant from each other that the icing fell off the cake with a great squelch.It is occasions like this I thank God for my criminal tendencies, my homosexuality, my jewishness and loathing of the bourgeois, the conventional and respectable that these seem to have inculcated me. I could so easily given the smallest twist to the least gene on the outermost strand of my DNA have turned into... [one of those awful Midas types on politics forums boasting about my Mensa membership and 'high' IQ.]"
Re: Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
#10Don't let that article fool you kids — I met Issac back in the day and while he may have been modest about his IQ it didn't make him shy about using powers of the mind to charm the ladies. He was also an advocate of using your smarts to get ahead...