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Comment by zarathustraa | Hacker News Reader

Success is a social construct. Intelligence is a social construct.

Those are staggeringly enormous claims. Got any scientific evidence?

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15426432.2016.1...

This paper already assumes that success is a social construct, and so it is not evidence of the kind you’d need to substantiate your initial enormous claims.

From the very first part of the abstract: “[...] the literature has not fully explored distinctions between the ways leaders of these organizations socially construct success, [...]”

Just for argument’s sake, my opinion is that intelligence is a kind of social construct. What we view as “intelligence” is the manifestation of traits that are important for our current society to function. i.e, we value bridges, so the traits of bridge builders are viewed as positive traits, which we call “intelligence”. In other environments these traits might not be seen as intelligent. For example, from what I’ve gleaned from reading books written a hundred or so years ago, “intelligence” could only be possessed by members of the upper classes, so even if you could build bridges, if you weren’t born into a certain class you were seen as mentally inferior. So our definition of intelligence shifts over time based on whatever society deems as important.

Our definition of intelligence continues to refine itself to be a highly generalizable aptitude for certain abstract skills. Your example of equating intelligence with wealth or bridge building is not even close to how intelligence is measured. It will be measured in dimensions like long term memory, working memory, pattern recognition, rotation of visual space, strategy/problem solving. And these abilities invariably dictate how people will be able to learn or perform at things like bridge building or software engineering. You will never be an exceptional software engineer if you cannot keep a suitably sized problem space in working memory.

It's so frustrating to me that we keep regressing our political conversations with assertions of this nature, that intelligence is a social construction, when in doing so we are literally turning a blind eye to what is arguably one of the greatest injustices our society faces. Intelligence is not a social construction, and it's not distributed equitably, and that isn't fair. It's the single greatest psychological signifier for material success. I'd much rather accept reality as it is, and spend resources attempting to ameliorate objective injustices, rather than making assertions that intelligence is a social construction because it gives some opening for a utopian alternative that can simply dispense with our "oppressive conceptions of competence."

I agree with you, believe it or not, what I was referring to was “our definition of intelligence” (edit: ie, the collection of traits we see as “ingelligent”), not the underlying traits.

>Our definition of intelligence continues to refine itself to be a highly generalizable aptitude for certain abstract skills.

This is exactly what social construction is: reifying a set of observations into an abstract notion. Intelligence is a social construction.

Our definition of intelligence comes from a set of measures which were calibrated to correlate with measures of success. Success is by definition a measure of societal “fit” and so the whole program is by definition socially constructed.

Doesn’t mean it’s not “real”. But I also would not say it’s “abstract” in any meaningful sense. It’s certainly not derived from first principles, nor do we have any kind of theoretical model of intelligence that’s good enough to construct measures around.

The fact that intelligent people were seen as mentally inferior doesn't negate the existence of their intelligence. The upper classes relied on the expertise of engineers, scribes, musicians, mathematicians, and artists and supported them materially even as they debased them in other ways. Otherwise that intelligence wouldn't have been selected for and inherited by later generations.

Claiming success is a social construct seems to me to be trivially true, not a staggering claim. Intelligence is less obvious since there is a vast literature around it, but, again, it is clearly a social construct; we must struggle to agree on a useful definition of intelligence, therefore it is a social construct.

I'm also not sure what "scientific evidence" would look like here. You seem to have had some sort of allergic reaction to the assertion of social construction and retreated instinctively to familiar but hollow epistemic grounds.

>we must struggle to agree on a useful definition of intelligence, therefore it is a social construct.

This makes everything a social construct, which negates any usefulness of the distinction. Having to agree to definitions cannot be a realistic definition of social construct, because it's a basic part of using language.

Yes? And? This is one of the most profound and basic observations of twentieth century philosophy. That is what social construction is, it underlies our basic notions of perception and reality.

Read this book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_R...

What you've said is not profound. When you go around saying "the sky is blue" people aren't wrong to assume you meant something relevant, rather than just tossing out vague and trivial statements.

I'm not sure what to do with this remark. You said my definition of social construction was untenable because the implications were too broad and you seemed to find that frightening. I responded by saying that social construction IS a theory with broad implications and gave you a reference to read, since you seem to be unfamiliar with these concepts. Your response seems a non sequitur.

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