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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

You're absolutely right, IQ is fundamentally flawed as a measure for Intelligence, but it's a convenient one to use as a proxy because it seems to generally correlate for many other measures of specific aptitudes and intelligence.

> This also means that anyone with lower IQ can achieve same things, it just takes a little more time.

One thing that is interesting is that a person with a low-IQ and one with a high-IQ seem to actually have different capabilities, not just speeds. A person with an 80 IQ, for example, would likely not be able to understand advanced philosophy or mathematics or some such at all -- even given infinite time. There's some ability to hold complex models, and weave, wind and connect through them that requires a certain level of intelligence that simply doesn't exist at lower levels.

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> A person with an 80 IQ, for example, would likely not be able to understand advanced philosophy or mathematics or some such at all -- even given infinite time.

Yes, I wanted to write similar thing too, but felt that post was too big already. Besides, I am not completely convinced by the idea itself - having enough memory, you can actually slowly link the most complicated concepts even when you can link only relatively "similar ideas" (brain of higher IQ has a tendency of creating longer physical neuron links, which some relate to the ability to understand seemingly unrelated concepts). The impossible part probably comes from the fact that the time and effort required would be inadequate.

Additionally IQ to understand different fields varies as well. One who is able to understand math quickly will not be able to understand language or emotions quickly. Even saying that one has higher IQ in math is not correct, one able in set theory or may not be good in calculus or statistics since those fields may involve different mathematical skills.

Very true. Except that you can be both understand math quickly and understand language or emotions well, it's just that they are not directly linked and need to be worked on separately.

Now if we could just test and deduce what intelligence actually is, those facts would be useful!

At least for me intelligence is brain fitness for anything in particular. For example running, or writing.

This is a very common conception. The problem is that this requires me to set you a task before we can deem you intelligent. In nature, whatever it is we're deeming innate intelligence comes before any task, and then builds upon itself based on tasks.

You mean brain plasticity? Because it is one of the only things that the brain starts with. Among very few others are vital reflexes and, examples from a little higher level, fears like fear of snakes and fear of spiders. Skills like logic, pattern matching, analogy building and others are acquired while observing world for many years before they can be used for tasks.

>You mean brain plasticity?

Kind of? I mean at the cognitive level rather than the neurological one.

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