Re:Is there a general factor of intelligence?
by kkfx on Friday March 25, 2022 @01:23PM
(#30804880)
IMVHO that's a classic fallacy of a managerial-driven thinking: numbers are not the essence of anything, they can be used in many things to summarize to the extreme something but not everywhere for everything.
It's like to say "how many degree of temperature and humidity there are in this room"? Most just look at nearest thermo-hygrometer and say out load a number, let's say 19℃ considering that number "the truth" at maximum with the relative precision error of the meter. Actually that's a "somewhat realistic approximation", a room is not a well insulated calorimeter, so I can say that's 32℃ just because behind the windows with direct sunlight that's the temperature locally measured with 30% humidity, but also on the other extreme of the room, one of an old masonry house placed direct on ground soil, where I measure 14℃ and 60% humidity.
For intelligence it's not much different, only even harder to measure. We can say someone is very skilled in math so "he/she is intelligent" and craft some kind of test (like uni admissions tests common in various faculties around the world) but can also be absolutely not much skilled in math but very smart in talking and comprehend peoples so we can craft a "social ability skill" intelligence scale etc and finally combine all those test in a giant one and establish a scale, but again that scale is a kind of generic approximation of something we try to "standardize" after a long process of observation on many peoples abilities. It's not a real measure out of something tangible and really meaningless, for instance if you need a developer how it's intelligence score matter? Someone might have a high score but still being far less able to sole certain kind of programming tasks than someone else.
Long story short: there is no real and meaningful measure for intelligence, we just try to pretend there is something to craft studies on that produced like an industrial product because in a managerial-driven society anything must be like that, it's not possible to think about immeasurable, not programmable Gantt diagrams style things.
It's like to say "how many degree of temperature and humidity there are in this room"? Most just look at nearest thermo-hygrometer and say out load a number, let's say 19℃ considering that number "the truth" at maximum with the relative precision error of the meter. Actually that's a "somewhat realistic approximation", a room is not a well insulated calorimeter, so I can say that's 32℃ just because behind the windows with direct sunlight that's the temperature locally measured with 30% humidity, but also on the other extreme of the room, one of an old masonry house placed direct on ground soil, where I measure 14℃ and 60% humidity.
For intelligence it's not much different, only even harder to measure. We can say someone is very skilled in math so "he/she is intelligent" and craft some kind of test (like uni admissions tests common in various faculties around the world) but can also be absolutely not much skilled in math but very smart in talking and comprehend peoples so we can craft a "social ability skill" intelligence scale etc and finally combine all those test in a giant one and establish a scale, but again that scale is a kind of generic approximation of something we try to "standardize" after a long process of observation on many peoples abilities. It's not a real measure out of something tangible and really meaningless, for instance if you need a developer how it's intelligence score matter? Someone might have a high score but still being far less able to sole certain kind of programming tasks than someone else.
Long story short: there is no real and meaningful measure for intelligence, we just try to pretend there is something to craft studies on that produced like an industrial product because in a managerial-driven society anything must be like that, it's not possible to think about immeasurable, not programmable Gantt diagrams style things.