Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
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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.
A skilled craftsman who understands what he is doing, understands a bit of the market and the chances available to him can run circles around any struggling internet startup, if only because the equipment and training needed are typically not as easy to come by as a Rails or AJAX or web handbook.
It was more some of the other experiences I had with him.
After my experience, I've tried to apply the lessons I learned from welding to my full-time job, and I've become a better developer as a result. "Measure twice, cut once" is a mantra that should apply to every field. At the same time, it's easier now to recognize when something isn't done right and it's time to refactor or rewrite. Good welders, like good developers, do it right the first time :)
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.]"
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 subject's mental age in this sense may not coincide with the age score he would make in tests of musical ability, mechanical ability, social adjustment, etc. A subject has, strictly speaking, a number of mental ages; we are here concerned only with that which depends on the abilities tested by the new Stanford-Binet scales." (Terman & Merrill 1937, p. 25)
Or perhaps you would prefer the point of view of David Feldman, a psychologist specializing in the scholarly study of precocious and highest-IQ individuals?
"Put into the context of the psychometric movement as a whole, it is clear that positive extreme of the IQ distribution is not as different from other IQ levels as might have been expected. . . . While 180 IQ suggests the ability to do academic work with relative ease, it does not signify a qualitatively different organization of mind. It also does not suggest the presence of ‘genius’ in its common-sense meaning, i.e. transcendent achievement in some field. For these kinds of phenomena, IQ seems at best a crude predictor. For anything more, we will have to look to traditions other than the psychometric and to variables other than IQ." (Feldman 1984)
The one independent science writer who has had access to Terman's longitudinal study files at Stanford points out that IQ tests are a great way to miss future Nobel Prize winners. Amazingly, Terman’s study catchment area in California included two future Nobel Prize winners, but both were rejected from inclusion in the study because their childhood IQ scores were too low (Shurkin 1992, pp. 35, 395).
REFERENCES
Feldman, David (1984). A Follow-up of Subjects Scoring above 180 IQ in Terman's Genetic Studies of Genius. Exceptional Children, 50, 6, 518-523.
Shurkin, Joel N. (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston: Little, Brown.
Terman, Lewis & Merrill, Maude (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
After edit: I see several replies elsewhere in this thread are citing Wikipedia articles as the last word on their subjects. It's important to point out that most Wikipedia articles don't reflect the best research literature known even to Wikipedia editors,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...
largely because the Wikipedia articles on human intelligence as a broad subject have been the subject of much edit-warring for years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...
and some editors continue to push their point of view, relying on unreliable sources, into multiple Wikipedia articles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...
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.
The thing with IQ tests is that it measures a very specific type of skill, and to use that to define intelligence is insulting to an awful lot of people.
The two people who own my company, who I work for, don't have degrees, they're not particularly mathematically skilled, and I don't think they'd do particularly well on an IQ test - not saying they'd get a terrible score, but they wouldn't come of as mensa candidates. And yet they're too of the brightest people I know, they've done amazing things in their careers and I have a huge amount of respect for them.
My dad is another person with a not-great IQ, and yet in my (admitedly biased) view he's the cleverest person I know Whether it's when he's buying/selling stocks, or betting on horses, or working out taxes, he can do it all in his head at a crazy speed - not with any education, just because maths is easy for him. But that's not why I think he's clever. He's clever because of the way he's lived his life and the decisions he's made, many of which have made me insanely proud.
I on the other hand have a high IQ, I did well in school with no work (well, I dropped out at 16 because I was bored, by "did well" I mean stuff like the fact that I got an A* GCSE in French at 15 even though I can't, and couldn't then either, speak French). Sure, it can be useful to be able to float through in areas where that kind of intelligence is useful, but it sure ain't everything.
My point is that there's more to life than one very specific set of skills, and to think otherwise is narrowminded and big-headed. Not big-headed about having an IQ, but about thinking that your high IQ makes you better than someone with a lower IQ.
PS: IQ tests are only really meaningful for the young. At 40 I can look at what you have accomplished at 10 that's far less meaningful.
Though personally I don't see that much difference in the intelligence level of a village idiot and Von Neumann, they're both humans and both way beyond an ant. I'm looking forward to a species that makes modern humans as a whole, from dumbest to smartest, appear as an ant to them.
The people that seem to get ahead in society are those with excellent social skills instead. I'd gladly trade a dozen mathy IQ points for eloquence alone. Oh well, no political career for me.
And on the "honest work" side of things, people with persistence, a healthy lifestyle and passion for what they do seem to be the most productive. (Some people are also productive because they are obsessive, let's leave those out.) How do IQ tests with their super-clean mini puzzles measure any of those?
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.
Avoid confusing warnings against a certain kind of vanity with anti-intellectualism, which regrettably is popular enough already.
The way I understand it: many people equal IQ test scores directly to real-world success and I would say such a direct causality does not exist. Case in point: Mensa members are CEOs all the way down to broke janitors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International#Demographic...
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.
Much of what the vast majority of people do with their brains is a biproduct of training, and little of it can be attributed to intelligence.
In most fields there is some combination of motivation and intelligence necessary for success. It is my view that an IQ of 110-120 is more than sufficient for abundant success in nearly any field. 40% of the population falls in this range.
So Azimov's "discovery" that his mechanic possesses intelligence even though he lacks education just illustrates Azimov's own biases. I'd argue that the mechanic, if properly cultivated, would likely have been able to excel in a wide variety of careers thought to require far more intelligence than being a mechanic appears to Azimov to require.
Also, Azimov's description of the mechanic's work style suggests that he found it oddly crude but appreciated it in a mystical sense, as if it was so far removed from his own abilities as to be unfathomable, which is absurd.
My classmates admired my ability of remembering things. I enjoyed that feeling quite a bit. Yet, I couldn't take any intelligence test.I was afraid that the result of my test might look bad.
I often hear about Gene scientist saying that they have discovered certain gene that defines certain "ability" of people, for example, "good-looking gene", "criminal gene". It seems that everything is deterministic (to some extend) by genes.
It sounds like at certain time in the future, they can discover a "loser gene" such that a child can be tagged in his young age.
Gene technology is making Determinism more true than ever before. And that is a very horrible fact. If I knew that I would be a loser, I would have given up my life.
I was afraid of IQ tests, I still am. I want to try different things in my life, no matter if I am inherently good, or bad at it. IQ tests are evil. They are the ruthless lifetime sentence against endeavor.
Of course, some people do wind up with, say, a genetic predisposition to alcoholism or depression. But if you have something like that, wouldn't you like to know about it? If you know that you're predisposed to alcoholism (or whatever) then you can do something about it, instead of just letting it happen to you.
If anyone bothered to try to answer the question "do genetics matter much?" by examining real-world prodigies, they would be forced to conclude "Yes, genetics are equally important to upbringing/environment".
Read through this, then claim genetics don't matter:
"This was Richard Feynman nearing the crest of his powers. At twenty-three ... there was no physicist on earth who could match his exuberant command over the native materials of theoretical science. It was not just a facility at mathematics (though it had become clear ... that the mathematical machinery emerging from the Wheeler–Feynman collaboration was beyond Wheeler's own ability). Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations, like Albert Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau—but few others."
— James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
Fun fact: Feynman mastered Calculus by age 15. He didn't just learn it; he derived it himself.
Their 1999 Commencement address to the graduates of MIT:
If you think about it, it's very similar when you try something new that breaks the conventional boundaries. If you have a huge education, you tend to avoid it because you usually learned this before. Sometimes, you need to ditch your education, to try something not conventionally accepted. In other words, education is key to find the things you should experiment.
It's like in art you have to know the rules to break them into an useful way.
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.
Deliberative thought is penalized in IQ-like tests and that is, in my opinion, a huge mistake.
I'm not sure what his point is. Intelligence, by even the crudest methods of measurement, is the core human trait, and will help determine every important thing every human does. He assumed a mechanic was stupid because he seemed low-rent. Headline: The mechanic probably wasn't stupid in the first place.
"J. C. Raven first published his Progressive Matrices in the United Kingdom in 1938."
"all entrants to the British armed forces from 1942 onwards took a 20 minute version of the SPM"
edit Just found a copy of and tried the standard test. Very easy once you see what they're testing in each group. Basic pattern matching and boolean shape operations for the most part. Last question was visual arithmetic. According to Wikipedia this only measures the "reasoning" component of Spearman's g. I can honestly admit that my reasoning is pretty questionable, having found myself in numerous questionable situations in my life ;)
And as for his point that there's an educational bias to IQ tests -- that's just silly. The intellectual requirements of being a nuclear scientist are more stringent than those of being a car mechanic. The qualities we ascribe to intelligence map more to the former than to the latter. Next, IQ tests don't measure intelligence. Intelligence is qualitative, like beauty, not quantitative, like height. We use it to look for attributes of intelligence. Knowing a woman has high cheekbones doesn't tell you if she's beautiful, but it gives an indication that she might be, for what that's worth.
Besides that I don't think intelligence can be measured. I know neuronal networks are simulated in a very similar way, but it still can be used to explain the concept of IQ is nonsense.
It's the same nonsense with people claiming brain size related or genomes relate with what people mean when they talk about intelligence. There are people who had half or their brain removed (for example because of epilepsy) which disproved pretty much every claims made. Some of these people were able to live a pretty much normal live, studied, etc.
Many view genius as having a high IQ. I view it as extreme form of insight rather than a measure of IQ, although a high IQ helps. I like to think of genius in terms of perspective and thus measure it by how rare and valuable a perspective is.
Your level of insight/understanding will vary from one domain to another. A financial genius like Warren Buffet sees how the financial world connects in a way that few others do, but that insight/understanding doesn't necessarily mean he'll see the connections that an artist sees and yet you might say that both are genius.
He certainly doesn't; he's dead. And everyone knows who we're referring to, so there's no ambiguity. Everything seems to indicate "it doesn't matter", and yet apparently it does to some. So why?
A nice example of how people are inherently illogical...
But it seems beyond dispute that for any given task requiring it, different people will perform measurably better or worse.
And some people will become highly proficient at a wide variety of such tasks quicker than others.