On Sunday, June 15, 2014 5:03:28 PM UTC+1, John Clark wrote: > > On Sun, Jun 15, 2014 at 10:39 AM, <ghi...@gmail.com <javascript:>> wrote: > > > John. You have just mentioned I.Q. which is a specific kind of measure. >> Would you be willing to clarify where you stand on the science behind I.Q.? >> > > I was using the term "IQ", perhaps sloppily, as a sort of shorthand, I > certainly didn't mean to suggest it was the be all and end all. Indeed it > would be remarkable if the most complex thing in the known universe, > intelligence, could be measured with just one number; you need 2 numbers (a > Vector) just to measure something as simple as the wind, one for speed and > one for direction. I imagine that for a good measure of intelligence you'd > need a Tensor, and a big one. >
I agree with both points, the first one being substantial: that the distinct field of cognitive science is clearly inadequate and/or likely to be a partial answer to the question of intelligence. My response to that would be: nevertheless it does feature the hallmarks of robust knowledge. The second point is true, but only in the trivial case of someone takes a measurement, resulting in a number. In cognitive science arrives at the 'g-factor' from a large base of convergent statistically robust - and mutually independent - lines of evidence. It's also worth mentioning that a large amount of knowledge does in fact converge to individual values. Like constants of nature. > > Besides consisting of only one number another problem is that IQ tests are > written by psychologists, I don't happen to believe that the very brightest > members of our species tend to go into that profession and tests have > difficulty measuring the intelligence of somebody smarter than the one who > wrote the test. > Definitely agree with what you might be inferring about the current status in psychology study...in fact I'd probably say the field is pre-science and even on a worsening trajectory. However, just as a good university can have bad departments, and vice verca, psychology as a field will contain sub-domains that are better or worse. I'll leave that one open as to the veracity of psychometric testing and so on. I leave it open because I don't think it's a legitimate criticism of cognitice science because: - typically robust fields of knowledge exhibit convergent lines of evidence/science, that perform the plausible critical function of preserving only the hardest most reliable datum within each line (has to happen because the result is a single field, and we've already eliminated failed fields by saying 'robust fields'. - this is certainly the case in cognitive science. > When the great physicist Richard Feynman was in high school he had an IQ > test and all he got was a mediocre 125. The best definition of intelligence > that I can think of is "the sort of thing that Richard Feynman did", > therefore it is not Feynman but the authors of the test who should feel > embarrassed by this. Meanwhile one of the highest ranked Mensa members > alive today, with an IQ north of 200, works as a bouncer in a bar. > Yeah that'll be Chris Langan. It isn't really fair to dismiss someone because they choose a certain profession. Langan was young punk from a hard background, who learned to brawl and rather liked it, teenage tearaway, who oneday took a test, and was found to have at or near the highest IQ in history. The guy's head is visibly larger than one normally expects (and his bone is harder as people he nuts find out) Well look, I hang out with some v.high IQ fellows and your point has been my point there. Those places are full of good guys, but there's an awful stench of un-earned self-proclaimed status. Backed up, with dreadful sketches of everything humanity has done by I.Q. band. It's not uncommon for a guy with an I.Q. at the 4th standard deviation and above to be going around saying things like "I'm already functioning at the level of Einstein". Fuck off! Yeah, so there's intuition for example. Which isn't explained, but at the end of day, just like I.Q. it's going to come down to regains of brain, and their connectors and so on. Personal testimony: some of stupidest attitudes - as well as some of the most brilliant - I have heard from guys with verified IQ scores 170+ So it's not a settled matter. But then again, there's that historic fact of robust knowledge featuring distributed layers of related but independent knowledge. None of what you or I have said, has actually undermined what is a layer of independently robust knowledge in intelligence., > > The man with the highest IQ ever may have been a fellow by the name of > William James Sidis (1898-1944). Sidis's IQ can only be approximately known > even though he took many many IQ tests, the tests were just not up to the > task, he was off the charts. Abraham Sterling, director of New York City's > Aptitude Testing Institute said: > > "He easily had an IQ between 250 and 300, I have never heard of anybody > with such an IQ. I would say that he was the most prodigious intellect of > our entire generation". > Well first of all, it's rubbish to even speak of IQs that high, because it's increasingly hard to standardize over 150. Once you get up to 180, all the hard science drops away. However there has been a lot of work done the last 30 years in producing IQ tests that are not timed, and not monitored, that feature immensely difficult problems, and they have normalised to some extent simply by testing the people known to have the highest IQ's via approaches that are robust. These tests for example, might feature 40 question. Getting ONE right and the rest wrong, is usually normalized to an IQ of something like 130. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
