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What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
By Isaac Asimov
What is intelligence, anyway?
When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me.
(It didn’t mean anything. The next day I was still a buck private with KP - kitchen police - as my highest duty.)
All my life I’ve been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I’m highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think so too.
Actually, though, don’t such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests - people with intellectual bents similar to mine?
For instance, I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was.
Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.
Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test.
Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I’d prove myself a moron, and I’d be a moron, too.
In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly.
My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.
Consider my auto-repair man, again.
He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me.
One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: "Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand.
“The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?”
Indulgently, I lifted by right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers.
Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, “Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them.”
Then he said smugly, “I’ve been trying that on all my customers today.” “Did you catch many?” I asked. “Quite a few,” he said, “but I knew for sure I’d catch you.”
“Why is that?” I asked. “Because you’re so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn’t be very smart.”
And I have an uneasy feeling he had something there.
~ ~ ~
Autobiography by Dr. Isaac Asimov (1920–1992): It’s Been a Good Life
Excellent, “because you’re so goddamn educated.”
What’s great is that after reading this I used this exact gag on my (very educated) wife, and she fell for it too!
Funny, but that’s not how it works. A (good) intelligence test doesn’t ask you about stuff you learn in school. They are designed specifically to not have this problem.
(Some of them have categories where education helps you. This is on purpose and should have little influence on the final score. This is for the more detailed results.)
Everyone knows a good intelligence test asks you Raven’s progressive matrices – the one true sign of intelligence – and nothing else
Edit: I was of course joking, but from my own link:
The high IQ societies Intertel and the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry (ISPE) accept the RAPM as a qualification for admission,[14][15] and so does the International High IQ Society.[16] The Triple Nine Society used to accept the Advanced Progressive Matrices as one of their admission tests. They still accept a raw score of at least 35 out of 36 on Set II of the RAPM if scored before April 2014.[17]
Sounds like some pretty depressing societies. Give me a secret cool kids club that’s all about mazes any day of the week. I like mazes.
my brain is generating a Rationalist version of That’s So Raven where instead of psychic powers she scored really high on an online IQ test and constantly updates her Bayesian priors, and I feel like I need to drink this idea out of existence before Yud turns it into an extensive fan fiction
Delete this now. This is an info hazard.
“wait, is it ALL infohazard?”
“oh come on, that TOO?”
get writing you know you have to
look, the alternative is rewriting your air conditioner’s OS again
don’t threaten me with a good time
now, between writing Rationalist Raven and braving the attic in a respirator (I’m terribly allergic to the dust around here) to finally replace my AC’s filters… it could go either way
You could also ask ChatGPT to make it for you. The idea’s complete garbage unworthy of an actual writer’s time, so I’d let it slide in this case
Intelligence to me has always meant the ability to quickly absorb and apply new information. Best test I ever took for this (imo) was a kids mensa test I took forever ago on the assumption it’d look good on a college application. They tell you a short story at the beginning of the test, let you read along if you like, and then give you an hour and a half of the standard math, spelling, reading comp, and logic questions. Then the last 20 minutes they spend grilling you about the story from the beginning, with intentionally misleading questions and open ended prompts that leave plenty of room for you to hang yourself. The whole point was to see how well you absorbed the information after a long and mentally taxing distraction.
Jokes on them. I ended up going to community and falling in love with welding.
Take the MENSA IQ Challenge! https://www.mensa.org/mensa-iq-challenge/ Three guesses of what kinds of questions this uses and the first two don’t count. That’s right! Raven’s Progressive Matrices! :D
Half of the Finnish Defence Forces aptitude test is just RPM. The other half is a bizarre and inscrutable questionnaire, which includes questions like “is your father a good man” and infamously “would you like to be a florist”.
RPM? Like how fast you can spin?
Fuck yeah I’m a finnish DF genius
If it were about that, maybe they hadn’t decided I’m NCO material and forced me into a full year of service instead of half.
I’ve had to do a number of “aptitude tests” in conjunction with applying for jobs[1] and RPMs have been a staple.
- Swedish Defense Force aptitude test (you kind of stand out as middle aged among all the yoofs taking it)
- one for a job at a state-owned enterprise
- one for a job at an outfit selling this stuff for other companies[2]
I never really got a good score on them either!
[1] I don’t really like this but beggars can’t be choosers
[2] like I said, beggars can’t be choosers, lucklily I didn’t have to take the job
deleted by creator
you mean something like posting this comment to sneerclub? or are all your posts like this?
Please read the mismeasure of man I beg ef you. Intelligence tests are fucking bullshit and all the testmakers have known it from the very beginning. Unless you are of the opinion that the noble art of skull-measuring holds any water, that is.
an hackernews:
a high correlation between intelligence and IQ
motherfuckers out here acting like “intelligence” is sufficiently well-defined that a correlation between it and anything else can be computed
intelligence can be reasonably defined as “knowledge and skills to be successful in life, i.e. have higher-than-average income”
eat a bag of dicks
Intelligence is when money.
ooh can I play? A species’ or race’s intelligence can be reasonably defined by how rapidly it extracts resources from the surrounding area.
That would be the Lexus-and-the-Olive-Tree definition, like the one by which McDonald’s burgers are the best cuisine
These must be the same people who say your rich because you are worthy in God’s eyes.
🙄🙄🙄
“A high correlation between intelligence and the thing we define intelligence as”
Second, is the more common “IQ isn’t intelligence” trick. Sure, the measure doesn’t encompass everything that is making intelligence, but it is still a somewhat interesting proxy as there is a high correlation between intelligence and IQ.
Any time you see something like this, what it’s really saying is:
IQ is intelligence to me and nothing you say can dissuade me. I just have a high enough IQ to write a disclaimer for plausible deniability.
Also:
I took an online IQ test in 2004 and scored 160 i am very smart --hakernews, probably
Imagine being a skilled San Francisco-style tech worker, at the apex of your industry, and the heights of intellect and rigor you can scale outside of that very specific context turn out to be “race science” apologia. Probably a lesson in there somewhere.
It’s pretty on-brand for a techbro to search for answers in what they see as “the code” (genome) while ignoring the entire rest of the fucking world.
They’re too stupid to understand anything beyond “the code”, its unsurprising they’re treating it as a technological hammer in a world of nails
at the logical end of this reasoning they do sound like a bunch of tools
I knew this was good stuff when the majority of HN commenters where huffily complaining about the tone.
In particular, two semantic tricks are used. First, the fact that current genetic markers aren’t a good prediction for IQ heritability is used as an argument against it. The other likely explanation that our understanding of those markers is widely incomplete is not explored.
Unlike our understanding of IQ, the game of matching shapes where the loser gets a teen pregnancy. That’s been fully explored.
Science: “our current understanding of genetics leads us to believe IQ is not heritable”.
This fucking guy: “IQ is heritable and you just haven’t proved it yet. Citation: I belong to a race with good genetics, unlike you”
Honestly, I’m really surprised to hear that IQ is not even a little bit heritable, given that IQ test performance correlates with level of education, which correlates with wealth, which is heritable.
True, wealth is not genetic, but heritability has an interesting definition which leads to some unintuitive cases of heritability abd non-heritability. For instance, wearing earrings is heritable while having ears is not.
IQ is a little bit heritable. But there are plenty of things which are very heritable and also not genetic to use as comparisons, like accents or posture or little societal rituals of communication, compared to which IQ is barely heritable at all. And that’s without cracking into memes/tropes/narremes, skills, maths, or other more-abstract inheritance.
@bitofhope @swlabr One of those quiet little scientific revolutions; cheap genetic testing let biologists realise that insects they had classified as different species were not, they were different morphs using the same genes. This let in the idea of developmental plasticity and the current consensus is that a whole lot of stuff is developmental, not genetic.
In humans, almost everything brain-based (sexuality, identity, language, symbol manipulation…) is likely significantly developmental.
@bitofhope @swlabr This completely messes with the idea that you can use “good genes” as a guarantee of a desirable outcome.
It also hauls in the idea of environment as the arbiter in more-difficult-to-ignore ways. Even if you’re using Origin and nothing since, you should be aware that “fitness” means “in some specific environment and moment in time”, only there’s this drive to ditch that. Recognising how much developmental plasticity matters breaks any concept of inherent quality of organisms.
That’s because the HN poster I quoted, like many many MANY people, has conflated predicting iq based off of genes with heritabilty. I’d recommend reading the linked substack, the author’s much more succient and knowledgeable than I am, and I wouldn’t want to misrepresent his point
IQ test performance correlates with level of education
I read somewhere that this claim owes a little too much to the inclusion of pathological cases at the lower end of the spectrum, meaning that since below a certain score like 85 you are basically intellectually disabled (or even literally brain dead, or just dead) and academic achievement becomes nonexistent, the correlation is far more pronounced than if we were comparing educational attainment at the more functional ranges.
Will post source if I find it.
@Architeuthis @bitofhope Taleb calls that a “dead man bias,” though I don’t know if he originated the critique. https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39
If you click enough links, you get to this substack article which I think all the discussion is about. https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/no-intelligence-is-not-like-height
Which indicates that IQ is a little bit heritable, just much less than other traits and with way more confounds.
Which, when you think about the extreme examples, makes sense - if your parents were humans, and mine were golden retrievers, you will be a human and I will be a golden retriever, and you will almost certainly have a higher IQ than me.
… but, apparently, if your parents were particularly bright humans and mine were relatively dim humans, but we then got adopted by the same family and given the same educational opportunities etc., the chance that you will end up brighter than me is only very slightly better than 50/50.
IQ is heritable and it can’t be fully explained by wealth. Twins raised in different families have a high IQ correlation between them whereas non-twin siblings raised in the same household have far less IQ correlation. This suggests that IQ is likely affected by some combination of genetics and the maternal womb environment much more so than the household environment (where wealth would play a big factor).
Now, the maternal womb environment is not wholly uncorrelated with wealth. Maternal health including lifestyle, activity, and nutrition may play a big role here. Since all of those are positively correlated with wealth, this suggests a potential cause (which still needs to be investigated) of maternal health on fetal brain development and therefore IQ.
look pal, we have it right there in the sidebar
I too believe in race science, but only a teeny weeny bit
I want to make a HN account and reply to the ‘depression and schizophrenia is or isn’t a hardware/software issue’ posters and tell them there is actually is a working IQ test, and they all just failed it.
@Soyweiser @sneerclub It is not possible to understand neuroscience using a “hardware/software” paradigm. That is a model created by humans to make building working computers possible. Brains develop without any such abstraction constraining the process.
Or at least what people are thinking of as “software” is wrong; neuroscience is 100% “hardware”. Can’t expect techbros to understand memetics or iatrogenic illnesses, though, not when they’re fixated on the idea that people with depression/schizophrenia/etc. are having “issues” rather than experiencing society.
non-linear analogue electrochemo-computer with distributed processing centers, multiple unmapped signalling sidechannels, multiple overlapping interdependent sets of subsystems, liquid temperature management, and no jtag
and that’s just on the intro leaflet
