I am not sure there’s a single thing called “intelligence.”
Obviously, people have different mental aptitudes and capabilities! I want to put that right up front because people tend to get confused and assume that if one says “I’m not sure intelligence is a singular thing” one actually means “…because no one has different cognitive abilities at all!” However, I think that there are a lot of different kinds of cognitive abilities under the thing normally called “intelligence,” some of which are correlated and some of which are not, and that classifying them all as “intelligence” risks conflating them.
So here are some things I’ve thought of that people mean when they say “intelligence”:
Sounding smart. Your ability to say things like “when I read the Aeneid in the original Latin” and “reifying the social construction of homonormative sexuality” and “its transcendence degree over Q, the prime field of C, is the cardinality of the continuum.” If you want to sound smart, I recommend studying mathematics, philosophy, physics, or classics, using lots of jargon and complex sentence structure, and adopting an aura of arrogance and contempt for the plebes. (Do not, however, brag about your IQ or your Mensa membership. People will laugh at you.)
Unfortunately, while sounding smart does correlate to some degree to Actually Meaningful Cognitive Abilities, a lot of times the person talking about how Feynman is a classy-ass motherfucker has way more knowledge of physics than the person wittering about quantum vibration.
Credentialing. Having a high school degree, a college degree, a master’s, or a PhD. Of course, a lot of people with a college degree are smart. On the other hand, a lot of them got drunk and went to football games and played video games for four years and passed their classes because they cheated or took nothing but easy courses. And a lot of people who don’t have a college degree are very intelligent but were too poor to attend college, flunked out because of depression, or didn’t even realize college was an option for them. Even attendance at a top college is not necessarily an indicator of Actually Meaningful Cognitive Abilities, given the rate of legacy admissions to Ivy League schools. Class and ability are incredibly important here: poor people and disabled people are, all things considered, less likely to have access to credentials.
Knowledge. Knowing Lots of Things. Knowing lots of things about lots of topics, particularly topics that are generally considered academic, is often considered to be a sign of intelligence. Note that there are lots of autodidacts who know lots of things, and people with impressive credentials who forgot it all or never even learned. Also that knowing things does not necessarily mean that you know what you should do with that knowledge, or that you can come up with brilliant new ideas on your own.
Memory. Or, well, semantic memory, anyway. The ability to remember all the world capitals, not the ability to remember where you put your car keys. This is linked to knowledge, but different– after all, if you have a good semantic memory but little library/Internet/school access or no desire to learn things, you’re probably not going to know a whole hell of a lot.
Reasoning ability. Your ability to do things like solve math problems and do well on tests. This gets called “intelligence” a lot, and I don’t have a problem with people calling this “intelligence” as long as they’re careful with their usage. Because, once again, you can have a lot of reasoning ability and be irrational or have really massively incorrect opinions or drop out of high school or speak solely in Tumblr speak.
Creativity: The ability to think of new ideas! I… really can’t think of much to say about this, okay. But it’s a thing.
Executive functioning. Executive functioning is one’s brain’s ability to do things like “remember what you’re doing” and “do what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it” and “get to class on time.” People don’t necessarily assume that people with a low level of executive functioning are stupid– as everyone with poor executive functioning who gets told “you’re so smart, why can’t you just–?” knows– but a person with a high level of executive functioning often is likely to come off as more intelligent.
Rationality. Susceptibility to cognitive biases! Like “I already know this, so I’m going to avoid any information that might disprove it.” Or “look, the coin came up heads a dozen times, we’re due for a tail.” Or “that person cut me off because he’s a jerk, but I cut this person off because the sun was in my eyes.” (It occurs to me that not all cognitive biases have the same origin, so you might be able to divide up this category further, but I don’t know enough to say what the divisions are.)
Desire to know. Do you like thinking? Do you want to learn? Is knowing things fun to you? Do you like debate and solving problems? This is the one I tend to value most highly in people, and what I’m most likely to mean when I say “smart.” (Which is weird, because everyone else seems to mean “reasoning ability.” Harrumph. Perhaps I should start saying I only want to be friends with people with a high need for cognition instead.)
All those those things are pretty heavily correlated with each other. For instance, wanting to know things, reasoning ability, and memory are all probably correlated to how much you know. Reasoning ability, creativity, and memory are also correlated fairly well, at least if you believe our current methods of measuring those three things work fairly well. Credentialing and sounding smart are correlated to all the Actually Meaningful Cognitive Abilities.
But they are not all the same thing. Do not assume that because someone is good at reasoning that they’re necessarily rational, or that because someone has a college degree that they necessarily know lots of stuff. In particular, credentialing, sounding smart, and knowledge are influenced by things like social class and access to an actually decent educational system and not being mentally ill and having parents that take an interest in your upbringing and who your friends were as a kid and so on.
“a lot of times the person talking about how Feynman is a classy-ass motherfucker has way more knowledge of physics than the person wittering about quantum vibration.”
And the person who can tell you how long it’ll take a ball to roll down a slope has more physics knowledge than either of them.
Nothing wrong with science fandom–I do lots of it myself and I think it beats the hell out of any of the vampire-based fandoms–but *liking* a subject and *knowing* it are also two very different things. I’d put both the quantum whatever person and the Feynman person at different levels of physics fandom; the person with physics knowledge is the one actually doing out the unglamorous math.
Sorry to nitpick, btw, because on the whole I really think this is an important point. One talent does not imply others. As any number of bands formed by famously talented actors will quickly convince you…
One of the things I find most interesting about the different aspects of “intelligence” is the different ways in which they are valued. I find that a lot of people only value the kind of intelligence they happen to have, and look down on people who struggle in the areas they excel, which makes me sad. I have met so many people whose brains work in distinctly different ways than mine, who bring so much new perspective, and colour, and… possibility to my world.
So, for instance, my brain happens to work in a way that has made math come really easily to me all of my life. I can think in systematic ways required to write in the language of mathematical proofs or computer code, (and I’ve been told that I do so creatively), but to many people this seems like magic.
But then, I feel the same way about people who can precisely and artfully describe emotions and the paradoxes of the human experience in poetic and just plain perfect ways. It is magical! I do not understand how they do it. But reading the things they write make it easier for me to parse my own experiences in a way that is invaluable to me.
I think that every kind of aptitude has necessary and important and even practical applications, and I hate it when artsy-creative types (as opposed to rational/systematic but somehow still creative in that realm types like me) get condescended to, which I see a lot
I’ve had a pet theory for awhile that the “intelligence” measured on IQ tests (not even going to touch whether IQ tests are biased or not- let’s just agree that they measure *something* with some decent measure of accuracy for some percentage 51%<x<100% of the homogenized US population who is classically literate) can best be defined as "ability to think about a lot of different things at once", or some sort of strategic (defined as "overall campaign plan") thinking. I have this theory for two reasons:
1) People who score very highly on IQ tests tend to be a medium-to-high amount "good" in a lot of different "subjects", while not necessarily standing out in any particular one, and
2) Interviews with Marilyn Vos Savant, the record-holder for the highest tested IQ (which is a category they don't give records for anymore) say things like (paraphrased) "watching her solve a problem is like watching a general direct troops".
so lately that's what I've been meaning when I say "intelligence", and if I want to say something more specific I'll use a different word instead.
(to clarify, that doesn’t necessarily mean I think “intelligence” as tested by IQ tests is any more or less important than any other cognitive characteristic, it just answers the question “if there’s no such thing as global intelligence, then what are those darn tests actually testing?”)
I’ve been meaning to write a similar post about “effort” for a while now, and this has inspired me to actually do so.
I’d divide Rationality into ‘Motivation Resistance’ (the ability to avoid ideologically or otherwise motivated thinking and belief-in-belief), ‘Bias Resistance’ (avoiding inbuilt biases) and ‘Epistemology’ (Ability to gain information about the world with a minimum of data).
Finally, I’d add ‘motivation’ or broaden ‘desire to know’ into motivation.
Cliff: I wish that there was a +1 or favorite button here because yes, what you said. That distinction is really important.
If I can nitpick your nitpick: I’d say that the math isn’t so much important as the person who can tell you the principles behind a slope: will the ball rolling down be faster or slower than a dropped ball, and why? Obviously this does eventually boil down to math, but even people who are bad at math can get real, legitimate, holistic science knowledge without very much math. I got my start in physics with non-math based physics courses that taught accurate, exacting principles. (Of course if you want to _do science_ you will need to know a fair amount of math).
I am pretty much in the “the only thing IQ tests measure is ability to take IQ tests, which is strongly correlated with ethnicity and social class” camp. I generally think intelligence isn’t a thing, period (or, rather, it is a term used to describe a cluster of largely unrelated skills, talents, backgrounds, and capabilities). And yet… I’m attracted to intelligent people. So there’s definitely some hypocrisy / confusion there.
I’ve had a friend, who is very good with math, tell me on several occasions over the course of watching me build costumes out of cut paper that I have an innate understanding of 3-dimentional shapes on par with some very advanced geometry. This is despite me barely being able to get through 9th grade algebra.
So clearly I’m good at something, I just have no idea what that something is.
Oh, right– and don’t get me started on the chronic devaluation of artistic and poetic intelligence we suffer from in this culture.
Yeah, like I was saying about the tarot on another thread here… I know the card meanings, but what I really do is talk about what the cards mean and then closely observe people’s reactions to what I say. “closely observe” is the only word I have for it. But basically, I can read people’s minds by watching their faces/bodies (even easier if they start talking too)… but my mind-reading doesn’t work unless I can direct their thoughts to a certain place (i.e. if we are thinking about the same things), which is what the tarot does.
I don’t know what that’s called, but good poker players, salesclerks, criminal-profilers and certain other people can do it too. I don’t know if it can be taught, since I don’t know what I am seeing, exactly (like, if I had to describe it), I just know what it means. (The same expressions, gestures, etc can mean different things in different people, depending upon cultural background and so on.) I often listen to the body-language experts on TV; they can analyze it and quantify the gestures. These concepts seem easy to learn, but I seemed to know instinctively, the way some people can do math instinctively or play musical instruments instinctively.
I think of this as a type of intelligence, but I don’t know what you’d call it… I tend to think of it as “neighborhood psychic” intelligence: “I don’t know how she knew all those things about me!”… she knew because you told her, as clearly as if you spoke it aloud.
You’d think the entire field of A.I. utterly failing to create, or even define, what they call “general intelligence” would make it obvious that there isn’t any such thing. Last I checked A.I. is now about solving a billion tiny problems and trying to knit them together and then maybe you’ll get something called a person at the end of it.
I’m gonna throw in a random fact about IQ here because it’s always hilarious to me when I think about it: 60% of Mensa members believe in horoscopes and that aliens have visited Earth. The relationship between rationality and IQ is, I figure, the same as the relationship between a computer’s horsepower and how buggy/inefficient the software running on it is.
I hope that at least some people here are aware that the question “what is intelligence” has been a hot topic in the scientific (and bad science) community for something like a century now. Cf. “The Mismeasure of Man”. (For an example of bad science on “intelligence”, see “The Bell Curve.” But don’t buy it — there’s no reason to support those guys.)
Kasey: I totally love you for your comment. As an artsy-creative type myself, I’ve always struggled to feel “smart” because, to me, smart meant being good at STEM things. I am (disgustingly stereotypically) not good at STEM things. Although I feel like a lot of that boils down to “Nobody ever took the time to explain it to me in a way that was engaging and interesting.” Had I been in a science class where we did experiments instead of read textbooks, I probably would have loved the fuck out of science, and learned the requisite math that goes with it to boot.
Instead, I am a writer. Because of this I will probably never make millions doing the thing I love. (And before anyone argues this point, I want them to list the top three most wealthy and famous female poets they can think of. Singers don’t count, and neither does anyone you didn’t know about before she came up on Google.) =/
I think working memory level may underly some of that (e.g. problem solving and possibly creativity). There also seems to be a difference in “how fast people think,” but that may be more a matter of trained heuristics than the actual processing speed (e.g. someone who has trained a process as system 1 will seem to do it faster than system 2, but might actually think the same speed when dealing with something unfamiliar).
This is yet another time I really wish I knew a lot more about neuroscience/cognitive psychology.
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