On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 2:03 PM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 6:51 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > >> > As soon as you refer to IQ you lose me. Can you restate your argument >> > without such mythology. >> >> Raghu's argument is that intelligence is like beauty: there's >> no scalar metric like IQ -- that's a myth, as he agrees -- but >> we can all tell a stupid person from an intelligent person, just as >> we can all tell an attractive person from a troll. >> >> It's an original argument -- or at least, I haven't heard it before -- >> but it gives away a lot to the anti-intelligence crowd, like Carrol >> and me. >> >> After all, everybody knows that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; >> what was beautiful to Rubens is pretty repulsive to a lot of people >> nowadays. >> > > > Perceptions of beauty are subjective - and culturally determined, but not > entirely. This is a "glass half-full" story, but what I find remarkable is > the surprising amount of cross-cultural *agreement* on perceptions of > beauty. > > A better analogy than "beauty" would perhaps be musical tastes. It is > obviously silly to assign numerical scores or ranks to pieces of music, but > surely we would not go so far as to assert that there is no such thing as > good music or bad music and that it is all just a matter of opinion? >
This is the sort of thing I am referring to here (which is also relevant to the fallacies of the Evol Psych crowd that was the original topic of this thread): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2566458/ --------------------------------snip Human infants, just a few days of age, are known to prefer attractive human faces. We examined whether this preference is human-specific. Three- to 4-month-olds preferred attractive over unattractive domestic and wild cat (tiger) faces (Experiments 1<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2566458/#S2>and 3 <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2566458/#S14>). The preference was not observed when the faces were inverted, suggesting that it did not arise from low-level image differences (Experiments 2<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2566458/#S9>and 3 <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2566458/#S14>). In addition, the spontaneous preference for attractive tiger faces influenced performance in a recognition memory task involving attractive versus unattractive tiger face pairings (Experiment 4<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2566458/#S20>). The findings suggest that infant preference for attractive faces reflects the activity of general processing mechanisms rather than a specific adaptation to mate choice.
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