Interesting email on Intelligence...
 

What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
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.

I thought it was pretty well put!

The confusion is the difference between intelligence and common sense.

It's not confusion between intelligence and various mental or physical skills.

The mechanic may or may not have a high degee of intelligence. Most tests will be reasonably accurate in determining whether he does or not. The questions are not complicated. In fact, the question that he posed to the doctor might be typical of such a test.

"Intelligence" is a measure of the capability to process a given set of facts........quickly.........and determining the correct answer from the facts provided.

In the little anecdote, the doctor could be presumed to have lost a point on the question posed. The mechanic may, or may not have figured out this question. However, it would have been independent of his "book smarts" or lack thereof.

I've always,with my lack of formal training..considered intelligence as the capability to absorb knowledge quickly and also utilise whatever native abilities you posess to rapidly diagnose and repair whatever is broken and/or malfunctioning,chiefly from a mechanical standpoint,but also from a human angle as well,the more you know people,the sharper your instincts and the less you expect of them,ergo,the easier to manipulate them and sooth their wounded egos.

On the flip side,the easier to make a profit from your fellow beings.:D

Sure, it is nice to have the cognitive talent for such great potential. But it is up to that individual to not overindulge themselves in their fantasies. They need to shut-up, sit down, and brush up on all things common to many but perhaps not to themselves. If they shun others with a false notion of their superiority in a given subject, they will learn nothing.

A person with a closed-minded, egotistical perspective is most certainly an ignoramus in many fields. And he will remain as such.

The true wise man is the one who remains the most humble and accepting.

I'll have you know I still wear briefs with HOLES in them,wash my own cars and buy my clothing in thrift shops,volunteer to help homeless veterans AND pick up bottles,cans and discarded batteries at the yacht clubs for which I get $1.20 each! so THERE!!!!put that in your smoke and pipe it!!!!!

Why does he get the pipe and stuff to smoke? When I lived on St Thomas and did scuba tours I'd go onboard to get the people for our tour. I used to ask people on the cruise ship to say "silk". "Silk" they'd say. Spell silk. "S I L K" they'd say. Now say silk silk silk. And they say "silk silk silk" Now what do cows drink? 90% would say milk. The rest of the people on the tour were waiting for them to say milk. If they got mad I 'd do the same thing with roast, then ask them what goes into a toaster. If they anwered correctly then I'd sy sorry go back to your cabin- you are thinking to much to come on this tour or even this cruise. You are on vacation- let yourself go and have fun. In the end we had more fun and I made better tips....:stupid:

Well Sport,I don't need tips but being economical is an ingrained habit,even make my own guns.

BUT when I want something I have the jack to buy it,I do it rarely,I'll admit. But we all have our desires which must be fulfilled.

To me, it's related to reasonable (to differentiate from intuitive) predictions accurately (anybody can guess), with parsimonious knowledge in a timely manner.

For example, Asimov's mechanic qualifies as intelligent because of all of the above. Also, this definition doesn't require encyclopedic knowledge, which people often confuse with intelligence. Nor does this definition confuse itself with wisdom, the just application of knowledge. Finally, it is open to any number of fields of human endeavor, not just arts and sciences.

Bot

And those facts are relative to the environment in which a person functions, and from whence his frame of reference is drawn.

"Civilized" intelligence is useless in, say, the Khalihari desert. The Bushmen would consider us hopelessly retarded because we cannot do simple things like interpret the natural signs around us, or determine, from a set of footprints in the sand, the direction a person is traveling, and the physical condition he is in.

There is simply no universal standard of intellgence, and "intelligence tests" will always be from the environmental frame of reference of their creators -- who are apparently too dumb to recognize that limiting fact.

Not many bushes in the desert...:book:

Why,they shave down there:D

You must be an intelligent guy to have seen the forest for the trees there (those bushmen must be some real woodsmen) and here me thinking this was the start of another contentious Iraq thread.

i hear those bushmen are democrats.

tom w

When I worked in Palau as a dive guide, I had to pay attention to the water, the weather, the divers, the boat, and quite a few other variables. My boat driver (Jimmy) and I viewed many things with the same glasses, so to speak. We rarely spoke to each other, because by looking at the set of circumstances in front of us we came to the same conclusions: where to dive, how to get there, which divers would be problematic.... When we went fishing it was the same way. When others came with us- Jimmy or most of the other boat drivers- the off island guests talked alot and missed most of the wonders to see. The certainly appeared less intelligent to myself and the Palauans. But it was due to the bushman in the desert effect.:silly: BTW Palauans are matriarcal, and they have traditional chiefs. democrats and democracy shouldn't be there at all.