There’s a lot of worship of intelligence in our society. Some of it is justified but much isn’t.
I’m reasonably intelligent: I’m at the level where I’m startled if someone is much smarter than I am; it doesn’t happen often.
But it does happen. There are people who make me feel stupid.
Intelligence is essentially two things: ability to perform mental operations, and speed of operation. A smart enough person can perform operations a less smart person can’t; can more swiftly learn how to do operations available to both, and processes faster.
Intelligence at its highest levels leads to polymaths: people who have mastered multiple subjects. All that speed matters.
Generally speaking, though, a smarter person will just get to the same conclusion a stupider person who knew the same things would get to faster. Think the kid at the front of class putting his hand up first.
Intelligence is not judgment or creativity.
Creativity is the ability to come up with new ideas or new combinations of ideas. Intelligence is a multiplier for creativity: the faster you perform mental operations the more ideas you can come up with, but if you don’t have creativity to multiply by, intelligence matters little.
Plenty of creative people are not at the highest levels of intelligence, especially if the type of creativity is largely artistic. But even many extremely intelligent scientists are just grinds who rarely come up with anything new: they work thru the implications of other people’s ideas and the current scientific paradigm in their field.
Judgement is the ability to know what ideas and mental operations are useful and appropriate. People without judgment apply the processes and paradigms they have learned and come up with “correct” answers which are wrong in the real world, or which are harmful.
For the paradigm of this think Larry Summers. Brilliant, but no judgment. He’s a reliable indicator of what you shouldn’t do because he applies the economic paradigm without any judgment, and since economics is a crap discipline to start with, being based on faulty axioms, he produces very intelligent garbage results. He’s a GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) machine.
Judgment tells you what old and new ideas are fruitful and what they’re fruitful for. Ideas are tools, you have to use the right ones for the job. World system analysis is worthless for day trading. Marxist class systems don’t explain societies well where the major cleavages are not along class lines, and so on. (Although they often claim to.) Keynesian economics doesn’t deal well with supply issues: it’s demand related, since that was the problem Keynes was dealing with at the time.
Intelligence is a multiplier for judgment, but if you have bad judgment, intelligence makes you more likely to get the wrong answer. Intelligence is jet fuel for foolishness.
Intelligence without judgment leads to ideas which fail to achieve their goals.
Intelligence without creativity leads to fast orthodox solutions.
Intelligence without creativity or judgment leads to new foolish ideas.
Willy
It’s cool when intelligence, judgment, and creativity work together towards some noble end. Even more so if it’s different individuals combining their different strengths towards that noble end. But it sure is a bitch when you find all three in a single individual who isn’t working towards anything noble.
bruce wilder
I find I disagree about Larry Summers and, indirectly, about economics.
Human beings are mimics. And herd animals in a way. Intelligence, and the great variation in human intelligence, manifests in a social context. (Maybe eusocial, but let us not get distracted.)
As social animals, humans talk and play games. Our cooperation is mediated by narratives and institutions, institutions that serve up rules to live by. Our intelligence is recognized, employed and rewarded (or not) in playing games.
Larry Summers is very good at certain games, including neoclassical economics and neoliberal politics. His public views on economics are importantly shaped by his determination to win recognition and power for himself.
His personality is in the mix somewhere and that may be where poor judgment as to the choice of ends comes into play. Arrogant and narcissistic are words that come to mind. But, we might keep in mind that he is playing to an audience that highly values neoclassical economics and neoliberal politics. It is hard to talk to idiots and not play the fool.
When I consider Summers work with Akerlof, I do not see a slave of neoclassical economics. When I consider the devastation of Harvard’s endowment, I see arrogance not intelligence. When I consider his role in promoting financial deregulation and corruption, I think I see bad character at work.
Contrast with Stiglitz, the Past Grand Master of neoclassical economics and a much nicer human being than Larry Summers. His elaboration of high academic neoclassical theory required high intelligence and a kind of creativity. I do not think Stiglitz’s body of work, academic or popular, served the society well, in the sense that it reinforced a fundamentally flawed and limiting way of thinking about economics that has vast numbers of lesser minds in its grip.
Exactly why a Einstein can spark a revolution in physics that the vast majority of humans can not understand and that even smart people cannot “explain” adequately for a popular audience is a fascinating mystery to me. It certainly illustrates the extremes and dangers posed by the vast differences in intelligence in our species. (Lots of Asperger’s among academic economists — contemplate that.)
What would it take to overthrow neoclassical economics? Pretty sure it isn’t dictum about axioms. Just sayin’.
elissa3
Agree with most of what Bruce Wilder has to say. Summers has always impressed me as a stupid person. But this takes issue with your definition of intelligence, which I find analogous to what computers do. High quality software and super fast chips enable “ability” and speed. There are so many kinds of intelligence, so many shadings. And, no, good judgement IS a part of intelligence. I guess mine is just a different way of looking at it.
Ian Welsh
Plenty of very intelligent people who can, say, do advanced math easily, who have no judgment or creativity. Lumping everything in with intelligence makes distinctions difficult.
StewartM
I think Ian is onto something about identifying intelligence vs. judgement vs. creativity, but there I think there is something of a co-dependence between the three.
Most of my academic career I label as “data acquisition mode”—I was so busy adding to my knowledge base, I struggled to connect the dots in any other way than the one offered by my professor/teacher. Likewise, coming from a non-college educated family, my analysis skills were probably lacking—I recall not doing so well on a paper comparing and contrasting the French and German military relationships to their civilian governments because I had never been asked to do such a task, so I reverted to what I knew–narrative history. So while I may have been very intelligence (i.e., I made very good grades) I didn’t have a lot of creativity and my judgement may have been lacking.
But the more I learned, and the longer I could digest past data, I began to see different ways to connect the dots than the ways I had been taught. With this developed judgement, in connecting the dots in a different way you decide some data is ‘more important’ and some is ‘less important’. In fact, you start to question the reliability of some of the data itself; you see all data is not equal. This happened in both my social science interests and my professional scientific interest (my job). But it’s all interrelated–without learning and developing mastery over the data, you don’t digest it and make new arrangements, and then you don’t see that some of those arrangements look ‘better’ to you than others.
On LinkedIn I got into a debate on scientific education and research (though it applies broadly to all the other disciplines as well). As you probably remember, I criticize the current doctorate degree because it emphasizes obtaining ‘new knowledge’ much more so than mastering ‘old knowledge’ (the old knowledge being almost always much more useful in one’s work). I also wrote that the way we do R&D in the US now is nonsensical, as we have the least experienced and least knowledge people (i.e., graduate students) do the work, and they make plenty of avoidable mistakes that experienced people would not make. I added that the ONLY reason we have gone in this direction is that graduate student labor is free labor—corporations now often pay universities to do development work for them, instead of them doing it themselves, and likewise funding for government research laboratories has been cut. We do R&D penny-wise and pound-foolish.
I gave as an analogy an orchestra filled with amateur musicians, some having to record different parts on different instruments, versus an orchestra where each and every player in the orchestra was a master of his/her instrument. The answer to the question “Which orchestra could play more difficult pieces?” is pretty obvious to me. And to those who talk about the conductor’s skill (by analogy, the university professors’) I say “they can only correct for so much”. There’s the “10,000 hour” rule that says one only achieves excellence in something by putting in at least 10,000 hours of focused practice (which equates to 10-20 years in a job) and only one of these orchestras could have met that criteria. This is a big reason why US science, both academic and corporate, is faltering; we ignore the 10,000 hour rule of excellence and think we can create instant genius.
I also think what you said about some scientists having no judgement is spot-on. Judgement is, as I said, is the selection of which connection of the dots is the most likely explanation. It’s why when you get a weird result, you repeat the experiment (there’s a ‘rule of two’ in chromatography that says ‘unless it happens twice, it really didn’t happen’, given the near-impossibility of replicating the cause of a ‘hiccup’ in the data). Or the realization of the spectrum of a paint may only be appearing different from the normal spectrum because it’s being distorted by the sampling methodology rather than by any actual chemical compositional changes (an actual example from my work, where in a phone meeting we met with someone who appeared to be relatively new to the art, and made that false determination). But all these too are related to the ‘10,000 hour rule’; the more you’ve seen and learned, the better you get.
Purple Library Guy
I think it worth while to note that all these distinctions are ultimately, not arbitrary exactly, but they are inevitably maps rather than the territory. You can label human mental faculties in an infinite number of ways, and quite a lot of those ways will not be “false”.
That said, I do like this intelligence/judgment/creativity formulation. It seems useful, a good way to get at some distinctions we find important. One thing I would like to say about it is that while I do believe there is quite a bit of innate individual variation in all three (on judgment, some people seem to have just TERRIBLE instincts), all three can also be cultivated–you can learn how to think better or faster, you can learn better judgment, you can learn to be more creative. Maybe not AS creative as a natural genius at it, but a lot MORE creative than you would be if you hadn’t done things to expand that side of you. When you do certain kinds of stuff, your brain will forge new pathways and make pathways stronger, more efficient so that it does that stuff better. I like to remember that the guy who originally invented what came later to be misused as the “IQ test”, made his tests to figure out where people were AT THE MOMENT, so as to teach them to get better at things. And he was the one who was right, not the people who decided those tests should be used to measure some eternal unchanging faculty that they would then call “intelligence”.
Oakchair
Another trait along these lines is scientific curiosity which is discussed in the book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”.
Those with scientific curiosity want to understand topics in depth. They actively seek out all information particularly information that opposes preconceived notions. The rareity and punishment of scientific curiosity in society is why the populace supports so much of our dystopia
.
Cultivating scientific curiosity is one of the primary points of philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, though he does not use that term.
“The description is not the described; if you are caught in the description then you will never see.”
“If I want to understand something, I must observe, I must not criticize, I must not condemn, I must not pursue it as pleasure or avoid it as non-pleasure. There must merely be silent observation”
“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence. When you have an ideal, you cease to observe, you are then merely approximating the present to the idea.”
Hairhair
One of Einstein’s best quotations: “Imagination is more important than knowledge”.
Oakchair
Most of my academic career I label as “data acquisition mode”
—–
This is a major problem with school system. Instead of teaching people how to think, and how to learn our system just has them memorizer a shit ton of data. It makes everyone easy prey to Garbage in garbage out.
———
you start to question the reliability of some of the data itself
—–
The powers at be hate this questioning. They don’t want people to consider the fact that what they know depends on data told to them by people who are just as gullible, sadistic, and faulty as people are.
It is astonishing how many medical “facts” rely on little to no quality data. How the conclusion of many medical papers is not supported by their own data. The pharma industry doesn’t want the masses to think or question because that would collapse their trillion dollar narratives.
—–
you can learn better judgment,
—-
Likewise, worse judgment can be conditioned into a population. That has been going on for several generations.
mago
The standard Western definition of intelligence refers to the academic and scholarly with a capacity for information retention.
Then there’s intuitive Intelligence or the intelligence of a Sage with direct perception, or seeing what is as it is. (Ian might call this the creative aspect of intelligence.)
Ok, either way, we live in a time and place where Bill Gates and his ilk are considered intelligent, maybe even genius.
This tribe of trans humanists think AI and human intelligence can be married to create a transcendental hybrid.
They believe a lot of things, like the natural world can be transformed so that food can be laboratory created, that GMO will create superior crops and growers can be replaced with AI driven machines.
Such thinking is divorced from the natural order of the universe. Those promoting this view lack basic intelligence.
However, since they have money and power and platforms to promote their
perverted views, they’re Masters of the Universe.
Somewhere the gods are laughing. Or crying. Maybe both.
Cunning, deceit and manipulation,—are those aspects of intelligence?
Whatever promotes one’s agendas I guess.
I have no idea what my intelligence quotient might be—the IQ test itself is bs.
However, as a food person I practice intuitive cooking, which incorporates seasonality, the nature of ingredients and their synergy, along with technique and heart.
I’m often asked for recipes, which is the paint by number formula for cooking.
Ok. Combine tamarindo syrup with tamari, mirin, yuzu juice, lemon juice, coco amino siriacha along with minced garlic , ginger and shallots. Whisk olive oil into the mix. Use as a quick marinade for salmon or tofu. Add a bit of tomato paste for the tofu.
Apologies. That’s too much to wade through.
What I wish to say in the above example is to make those ingredients meld into a whole, one needs to understand the nature of each component and how they combine.
Recipes are worthless in that regard,
although they provide a roadmap.
I was an honor roll student who received a scholarship here and there, but until I attain enlightenment, I’m just a dumb shit backwoods chef humming along with the birds.
DrNRG
“Intelligence is jet fuel for foolishness.” Cue Elon Musk, who is not unintelligent but has horrible judgment.
StewartM
PLG
I like to remember that the guy who originally invented what came later to be misused as the “IQ test”, made his tests to figure out where people were AT THE MOMENT, so as to teach them to get better at things
Alfred Binet. As per Wikipedia
They created the first intelligence test to objectively measure the intellectual functioning of primary school children. Binet and Simon believed thatintelligence is malleable and that intelligence tests would help target children in need of extra attention to advance their intelligence .[2]
IOW, “Let’s find the kids who aren’t doing well in school, so could use extra attention and extra help, so that they WILL DO BETTER. Quite the different message from the later mis-use of its descendants, which was to label kids as ‘unreachable’.
StewartM
Oakchair
This is a major problem with school system. Instead of teaching people how to think, and how to learn our system just has them memorizer a shit ton of data.
The only problem with that, is I do think you have to master the data.
Now, what does “master the data” mean? Looking at my history degree, I now see that the memorization stuff was largely (but not entirely) pointless, and the ‘churn out an essay in the course of an hour’-type test WAS pointless (even though I mastered how to do that). Why? Because while you need to know the facts, broadly, knowing all the little details (when was the Battle of New York fought? Who was Stalin’s second chief prosecutor? Which clan of Shawnee was Tecumseh born into?) in actual work in history or history-related subjects you can look up. Professional historians don’t know all these either (and trust me, having watched CSPAN history lectures, and even worse, TeeVee history shows, they get basic facts wrong too).
OTH, you do really need to know that say, Lenin and Lincoln weren’t contemporaries, that the Battle of Britain occurred before the atom bombs on Japan were dropped, and that Washington’s continental army didn’t ‘seize the airports’ as has been famously claimed. The farther back in history you study, the more this error creeps in; I had a history professor joke that a millennium hence students would ask each other “Nixon or Lincoln? Now which one came first?” like they do about medieval or ancient historical figures separated by time spans as large if not larger.
But loading your mind up with essay answers to write out as fast as possible in a class test? No need for that at all, even though I learned to do it pretty well.
I’ve decided that the best way to prepare students was to have them write essays, footnoted or not (could be both) on a historical topic and give them at least a week or more to write from home. I say that as it’s the best model closest to the type of work they would do. They don’t have to know every little fact (but they better look them up!) and they have time to compose a better, more thoughtful, essay. In my student days, we didn’t have computers let alone AI (word processors would have been wonderful for writing footnoted papers instead of typewriters!) so I wonder how much AI is distorting this process.
The only limitation on ‘data acquisition’ I had with was volume. I had a professor who routinely assigned up 500-600 pages a week of reading. I know he meant well, but that’s too much volume for people to digest and think about, particularly as his students were taking other classes.
I’ve also encountered different ideas on the material that students. Some have stridently proclaimed that students should ditch all secondary sources, and only read primary sources. For many topics, taken literally, this would mean the student would also have to have a working knowledge of several foreign languages. Moreover, there is a great danger that these sources would be read with no context, even in English, as the meanings of words/phrases may have changed. Finally, the student should be aware of that there are multiple interpretations of historical events. One of the more useful meetings I had in a professor’s class was an evening meeting where we discussed several historians’ interpretation of a historical event or person.
I’ve even heard about this ‘original source’ notion applied to the sciences. There was this young man, many years ago, who I got to talk to who was interested in philosophy (particularly Nietzsche at the time). He later became a doctor of philosophy and has taught at several schools. At a mutual friend’s wedding he told me he was teaching at John Hopkins, using the ‘great books’ method, and he was applying it to the sciences as well—his students read Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and more. The problem is with this approach is while it might be well and good for a ‘history of science’ course, it’s ill-suited to teaching actual contemporary science. You will not, say, get a good overview of current theory on evolutionary biology from reading Darwin.
bruce wilder
Moral judgment and aesthetic judgment and their manifestations in charismatic leadership can certainly be factors distinct from “intelligence”. My own inclination is to identify “intelligence” with the ability to learn and more specifically the ability to learn to plan / design / discover the mechanisms that control the outcome of systematic processes.
The distinction between “narrative” story-telling on the one hand and the analysis of systems and mechanisms on the other would seem to me to have some implications for the identification of intelligence as a distinct personal capacity.
I tend to be a sucker for people who are very articulate. I like English better than math for argument. When Ian observes that there are “very intelligent people” who do “advanced math easily, who have no judgment or creativity” I certainly feel I have encountered such. But, I am not sure I should trust my own judgment. Would I recognize a creative proof of the Pythagorean theorem? Would I care? How about the Riemann hypothesis? Could I even explain what that hypothesis is? On the other hand, if a mathematician won the Fields Medal, would that incline me to listen to him lecture on eugenics?
bruce wilder
Taken from Psypost clickbait, offered for what it may be worth.
bruce wilder
I would love to be able to cook without a recipe. Alas and alack. But I remain grateful for recipes.
mago
Recipes serve their purpose.
Eric Anderson
Plagiarist.
I’m pretty sure I’ve read those last three sentences in the Tao Te Ching.
That dude had pretty good judgment.
The Tao is an example of an old idea whose application to any job *worth doing* is generally the correct one.
Eric Anderson
Bruce:
I’m going to quibble on Ian’s behalf.
As he defines it: “ Judgment tells you what old and new ideas are fruitful and what they’re fruitful for. Ideas are tools, you have to use the right ones for the job.”
Summers *job* is to predict the future. Not promote his own. We don’t often equate sociopathy with intelligence. We associate it with danger.
Purple Library Guy
I do think we can go too far in jettisoning the memorization side of things. And I’m saying this as someone who always used to do that when I was younger, since I was very proud of my brains and thought I could quickly figure out anything from scratch. But I was overplaying the idea, largely because I’m lazy and hate spending time learning facts. It’s not so simple. Yes, you can look stuff up, but if you’re thinking about some problem it can really hurt if you don’t KNOW jack shit about it. If you have absorbed a lot of the important stuff there is to know about a topic, your mind has that stuff to work with when it’s figuring stuff out. You can integrate it, it is your base to step up from. Standing on the shoulders of giants is all about knowing what those giants thought. If you don’t know much to start with, you have nothing to process to even tell you what is the stuff you need to look up, or why.
Mind you, times have changed since the Renaissance. There was a time when, if you had enough moxie, you could pretty much know all there was to know about most of the subjects of scholarship there were, and half the practical stuff at the same time. You could literally read everything that had been written that anyone thought was remotely important. Nowadays, there is too much stuff–there is no way to know it all. Even in a subtopic, you have to sort of survey, get a feel, and then use that judgment we’ve been talking about to guide you in picking the most relevant stuff for getting deeper in.
Carborundum
I’m not so sure. Broadly, I would conceptualize the aspects of judgement and creativity that are germane to the type of generalized intelligence implicitly referenced as *dimensions* of intelligence rather than separate “things”.
Although we use the same term “creativity” to describe particular types of intellectual activities (frequently conflated with level of performance) in diverse fields such as musical composition and financial engineering, the various fields seem to me to involve different types of intelligence (as well as different knowledge bases). Creativity is being able to perform a particular type of activity at a reasonably high level – being able to recombine, to generalize, to create something new that is perceived as valuable. In my view, the folks who look like they are bringing enormous intellectual horsepower to bear without being creative actually have deficient, unbalanced intelligences – highly proficient at lower order functions, but much less so at higher.
Similarly, it seems to me that judgement is really about being able to understand likely higher order consequences and contingencies of more immediate intellectual conceptions. Again, a particular type of intellectual activity applied in a particular field, involving a particular type of intelligence.
I don’t know that the difference in conceptual schema makes a lot of practical difference, but it seems to me to fit the observed phenomena better. The key issue here is that if one isn’t creative and doesn’t have good judgement, one isn’t as smart as they (and we) have been told they are by societal institutions that only ever focus on what is easy to assess: lower order activities with more immediate evaluation potential.
Revelo
It’s always garbage in, garbage out. There is no such thing as objective judgement. You (Ian) simply don’t like some judgments: subjectively bad judgments from the point of view of the subject (yourself).
The human mind is just a more powerful version of the chimpanzee brain which is just more powerful version of cow brain and so on down to whatever is the lowest animal with a separate brain organ. They are all just neural networks, partly pre-configured by genes, partly modified by learning process. There is a set of precoded goals related to the body: avoid bodily pain , seek bodily pleasure. However, the human brain is so big that it can learns behaviors that ultimately act in opposition to underlying goals. This feature/bug of large neural networks (whether human or computer) might impose a limit on the size of neural networks. That is, any very intelligent creature might be doomed to eventually cogitate up something like “I’ll protect myself from bodily pain and increase my bodily pleasure by taking an overdose of heroin!” without realizing it has gone off the tracks.
In humans, brains always exist in a context of a society of other human brains and much of the human brain is adapted to interoperating with other human brains (figuring out what other people are thinking, manipulating the thoughts of other people, preventing other people from knowing what we are thinking, etc) versus interoperating with the material world.
“If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” is the ultimate put down for those believe in objective intelligence independent of human society. A brain that can’t succeed in human society is as defective as a brain that can’t distinguish edible from inedible plants: the latter type of useless brain was driven to extinction long ago, the former type is driven to extinction whenever a society goes through a period of starvation or hardship and needs to cull the herd of misfits. Whereas someone who is very popular among fellow humans, and that popularity allows him to get rich and leave behind a huge number of grandchildren, is an evolutionary success, regardless of how absurd his thinking.
Ian Welsh
The idea that “if you’re so smart why aren’t you rich” is a putdown is ridiculous. Most intelligent people spend their time on other things than making money. And the idea that there’s no such thing as good judgment is ludicrous, though it’s always a question of “for what.”
Simplistic Darwinistic reductionism should have gone out years ago, but there’s always another.
Jan Wiklund
As the Danish mathematician and daily deliverer of a poem for the daily paper Politiken, Piet Hein, wrote: http://tosommerfugle.blogspot.com/2015/02/piet-hein-den-intelligente-idiot.html (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grook).
bruce wilder
@Eric Anderson
Summers *job* is to predict the future. Not promote his own.
Apparently, he doesn’t see it that way.
I would stipulate that he is corrupt and promoted corruption. That could be classed as poor moral judgment, but it doesn’t make him stupid, just someone I dislike.
If I have quibbles with Ian’s proposed distinction, one of those quibbles is certainly that they may seem to license mindless insults hurled at people whose politics we dislike or simply disagree with.
Being intelligent or intellectually smart unfortunately does not correlate highly with being wise, let alone morally or even factually right in general and across domains and circumstances. Nor does it make anyone volunteer as a selfless champion of humanity.
Overall, I would say the general run of humanity has a very mixed record collectively in picking out visionaries, leaders, heroes and villains. That has proven to be problematic for human politics, which as a result cycles chaotically. We need to get better, more discerning about smart, wise and good.
As a sometime economist in past lives, I tend to be interested in promoting a better economics than the “crap” currently used to indoctrinate the governing classes. I am a master of the apparatus of neoclassical economics, but do not respect it, having also absorbed various critiques. In fifty years, I have seen some, but not much, evidence that very many people are ready to do better with regard to thinking seriously about the way the economy is structured and works. In a way, that is counterpart to not thinking seriously enough about, say, the policy choices of politicians and the economists like Summers who advise them.
Willy
I have an Aspergers father who was proclaimed by his own parents to have been otherwise “brilliant”. We kids figured out the Aspergers part much later in life, after many WTF’s?
In hindsight, we can see how had he just done the right thing, family matters would have much been better for all. He instead always erred on the side of the selfish thing (rationalized as the right thing) remaining oblivious to all the many possible other outcomes for the family. This suggests to me that another part of intelligence important for the success of social animals, might be empathy.
I consider the ability to explain things. I had highly intelligent profs who sucked at getting their academic points through to their students. Maybe some students were forced to adapt, which expanded their learning skills. But for most it created an unnecessary hardship which may have turned them off from wanting to further explore the subject. The missing ingredient in those profs seems to have been empathy. I mean, if you’re a true expert in your own field, able to view it from every possible angle, then why not chose an angle of explanation which most inspires further curiosity and thought?
Between Einstein and Summers, I think we would’ve preferred having Einstein as our prof. Or having him over for Thanksgiving dinner. That one’s easy. But if Trump was a third option, it seems a lot of folks out there would’ve preferred him instead. And so the mystery continues.
Jan Wiklund
Without doubt there is such a thing as intelligence = calculation speed. But it is terribly difficult to judge if that speed is due to familiarity with the type of question concerned, or if it is due to speed whatever question it is.
I became aware of this when i was IQ tested at 19 and told i belonged to the 4 best percent of those who had passed high school. I didn’t feel particularly intelligent, but I was at the time amused by the kind of questions they presented to me, so I was familiar with the athmosphere so to say.
I suppose Summers and his ilk has spent all his time with the kind of questions he excels in so that he can do it when sleeping. That makes him seem very intelligent. But let him try gardening, or weaving, or earning a buck from washing peoples’ cars.
StewartM
Revelo
“If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” is the ultimate put down for those believe in objective intelligence independent of human society.
So, Mike Lindell, Elon Musk, and Timothy Dexter are all smarter than:
Mozart
Franz Schubert
Thomas Jefferson
William Blake
Oscar Wilde
Matthew Brady
Karl Marx
Nikola Tesla
Edgar Allan Poe
O. Henry
Herman Melville
Vincent Van Gogh
These were either penniless, or in debt, when they died. And I’m sure one could add to this list.
Then you consider that Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Turing, Curie, Godel, and most accomplished people weren’t penniless or poor but were far from rich either, maybe ‘comfortable’ but not much more.
The graph of smarts versus money is a scatter plot. As Stephen Jay Gould said in his critique of The Bell Curve , wrote that even the authors of that loathsome book buried in its appendix that the strength of the correlation of IQ vs success in life, the latter being measured by various metrics, ranged from 0.04 to 0.16, or that only 4 % to 16 % of one’s success in life could be explained by intelligence.
By contrast, I recall that the wealth one is born into predicts one’s success in life with about 90 % accuracy.
StewartM
Revelo
It’s always garbage in, garbage out. There is no such thing as objective judgement. You (Ian) simply don’t like some judgments: subjectively bad judgments from the point of view of the subject (yourself).
In the workplace, there certainly are objective judgments. One either interprets the data ‘correctly’ and applies the correct solution for a problem or situation, or one mis-interprets the data and goes running off on a ‘wild goose chase’ at least wasting time and money, or even worse (safety issues).
Now and part of this judgment is a finally honed intuition, as at first you never have a enough data to know for sure. But the data you have drives various hypotheses which you will pursue, devising more tests/experiments to pare down those to the most likely one. You’d be surprised at the people who are technically trained but who do not do this well, who see all causes as equally likely, even the very implausible ones.
(On the other hand, you have to be self-aware of tunnel vision, and I’ve sat on plenty of teams where the leader was fixated on a certain hypothesis and wouldn’t let it go. Engineers seem to be more likely to get tunnel vision and to lock into a hypothesis than any other profession).
mago
Reveló by my reading sees mental activity as a chemical process and mind as a function of brain, a mechanistic view divorced from the nature of mind and phenomena, but I’m not unpacking my assertion.
On another note, Larry Summers is toxic as a human being and economist. And as we know economics is voodoo practiced by witch doctors.
I’ll just keep cooking turnips and greens along with whatever else comes my way, while praying that genius never goes astray.
And god bless little Tim. (The sixties freako dude with his ukelele.) Tip toe through the tulips.
Never mind.
Jorge
Economics is better understood as a priesthood who delivers propaganda from rich people to the rest of us. They must truly believe the propaganda to remain in the priesthood; those who falter are sniffed out quickly and booted from the temple.
This explains, for example, why the history of economics is not a common subject in econ schools- why would you need to worry your pretty little head about the propaganda from 100 years ago? It would merely confuse you!
Purple Library Guy
On the Darwinian thing, no “objective judgment” and “if you’re so smart why aren’t you rich?”
So, these are three different ideas that don’t go together at all (and two of them are bullshit). The result of trying to combine them is incoherent. Darwin’s theory of evolution is a product of “objective judgment”; it is a thing that is true, and Darwin himself would never have agreed with any kind of relativism applied to what is and is not true. It’s also silly to claim there is no “objective judgment” and then start making objective claims.
Meanwhile, evolution and wealth have nothing to do with each other (indeed, evolution, wealth and personal well being are all nearly unrelated). So like, Darwin’s theory of evolution says that things which can survive and breed, thus passing down their traits, will . . . pass down their traits. He defines the ability to do this as “fitness”. So let’s see–do rich people breed more than poor people? Well, some of them, but on average no, if anything it’s the reverse. So one might argue that from an evolutionary perspective, humanity is selecting for poverty . . . One of the things that motivates all the eugenics bullshit and “Bell Curve” crap is precisely that all these well off people who think they’re superior are frightened and pissed off by the feeling that at the basic level of passing on traits, people they look down on are in fact out-competing them.
And the rich can’t change that because to be rich they depend on this huge pyramid of poor people to exploit–the more poor they have, the more rich they get. So much for wealth as Darwinian evolutionary competition. It’s a stupid idea. The only reason it became an idea at all is that the rich can’t stand the concept of not being the best in some way, so if science is going to have a concept of “fitness”, they need to be pretending they have the most of it.
Dan Kelly
Unfortunately, this hasn’t moved beyond a rather shallow intellectual exercise. That sounds mean, but I say it with purpose, in the hope it will lead to a broader ‘understanding’ of something that I’ve come to see, feel and understand about the ‘modern’ lives we all lead to one degree or another.
The larger issue underlying all this is akin to what Tolstoy struggled with and that ultimately led him suicidal ideations. It’s what I ‘struggle’ with (Tolstoy n’ me!). And I imagine many, many others as well.
Tolstoy eventually found ‘inner peace’ to some degree in both ‘God’ through his own intellectual/reasoned interpretation of religion, along with actually living more like a peasant. Zen-like Tolstoy.
I believe this is a root cause of many/most modern ailments including ‘mental health’ and ‘addiction’ issues, and beyond. It has to do with ‘civilization and its discontents’ for lack of a better phrase.
Per usual, I’m filled with an enormous amount of currently unstructured thought and feeling about this rooted in both my ‘real-world’ experience to date combined with my reading and ‘personal study’ to date. And all of life’s other stuff.
I think this somewhat long passage from William James’ ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’ best encapsulates the initial part of a larger whole my nomadic mind is attempting to elucidate. Tolstoy’s ideas about ‘faith’ (‘belief’ in the specific religious sense of that given time and place is a better word for what he describes here) and ‘God’ are somewhat narrow and not nearly historically accurate, but this combined with his embracing of ‘the commoners’ as well as James’ own intrepretations provide a nice springboard for a larger conversation, understanding, and feeling.
——-
“…It must be confessed at the outset that it is hard to follow these windings of the hearts of the others, and one feels that their words do not reveal their total secret.
Howe’er this may be, Tolstoy, pursuing his unending questioning, seemed to come to one insight after another. First he perceieved that his conviction that life was meaningless took only this finite life into account. He was looking for the value of one finite term in that of another, and the whole result could only be one of those indeterminate equations in mathematics which end with 0=0. Yet this is as far as the reasoning intellect can go, unless irrational sentiment or faith brings in the infinite. Believe in the infinite as common people do, and life grows possible again.
‘Since mankind has existed, wherever life has been, there also has been the faith that gave the possibility of living. Faith is the sense of life, that sense the virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live. If Man did not believe that he must live for something, he would not live at all. The idea of an infinite God, of the Divinity of the soul, of the union of men’s actions with God – these are the ideas elaborated in the infinite secret depths of human thought. They are ideas without which there would be no life, without which I myself would not exist. I began to see that I had no right to rely on my individual reasoning and neglect these answers given by faith, for they are the only answers to the question. Yet how believe how the common people believe, steeped as they are in grossest superstition? It is impossible – but yet their life! Their life! It is normal. It is happy. It is an answer to the question.’
Little by little Tolstoy came to the settled conviction – he says it took him two years to arrive there – that his problem had not been with life in general, not with the common life of common men, but with the life of the upper, intellectual, artistic classes, the life which he had personally always led, the cerebral life, the life of conventionality, artificiality and personal ambition. He had been wrongly and must change. To work for animal needs, to abjure lies and vanities, to relieve common wants, to be simple, to believe in God…therein lay happiness again.
‘I remember one day in early spring I was alone in the forest, lending my ear to its mysterious noises. I listened, and my thought went back to what for these three years it always was busy with – the quest of God. But the idea of him, I said, how did I ever come by the idea?
And again there arose in me, with this thought, glad aspirations towards life. Everything in me awoke and received a meaning…Why do I look farther? a voice within me asked. He is there: he, without whom one cannot live. To acknowledge God and to live are one and the same thing. God is what life is. Well, then! Live, seek God, and there will be no life without him…
After this, strange things cleared up within me and about me better than ever, and the light has never wholly died away. I was saved from suicide. Just how or when the change took place I cannot tell. But as insensibly and gradually as the force of life had been annulled from within me, and I had reached my moral death-bed, just as gradually and imperceptibly did the energy of life come back. And what was strange was that this energy that came back was nothing new. It was my ancient juvenile force of faith, the belief that the sole purpose of my life was to be better. I gave up the life of the conventional world, recognizing it to be no life, but a parody on life, which its superfluities simply keep us from comprehending.’
And Tolstoy thereupon embraced the life of the peasants, and has felt right and happy, or at least relatively so, ever since. As I interpret his melancholy, then, it was not merely an accidental vitiation of his humors, though it was doubtless also that. It was logically called for by the clash between his inner character and his outer activities and aims. Although a literary artist, Tolstoy was one of the primitive oaks of men to whome the superfluities and insincerities, the cupidities complications and cruelties of our polite civilization are profoundly unsatisfying, and for whom the eternal veracities lie with natural and animal things. His crisis was the getting of his soul in order, the discovery of its genuine habitat and vocation, the escape from falsehoods into what for him were ways of truth. It was a case of heterogenuous personality tardily and slowly finding its unity and level.
And though not many of us can imitate Tolstoy, not having enough, perhaps, of the aboriginal human marrow in our bones, most of us may at least feel as if it might be better for us if we could.”
—————–
That ‘aboriginal human marrow’ is important to understand in all its many manifestations. I don’t believe either Tolstoy or James were ‘privy to’ this knowledge to any significant degree, but there is volimunous information now available.
https://annas-archive.org/md5/c22d05bd1cd87b88252112f3a587c058
https://annas-archive.org/md5/1016de16e73ebef29afad9b55152a073
https://annas-archive.org/md5/16e2c19db6278f315213210254104b3b
Ian Welsh
Faith, purpose and spirituality are a fair ways from what I was discussing in this post. (They’re worthwhile topics, and I’m glad you raised them, but they aren’t all that related.)
There are a variety of spiritual understandings (views, Buddhists and many Hindus would call them.)
The essential rejection of God(s) can be one of them, as can the rejection of purpose: you see this in various veins of Buddhism and Hinduism. There’s a great deal of feeling of freedom and relations: a removal of stress, in these views.
Some of the greatest mystical adepts could switch between views. Ramakrishna is one: he had the realization of “no real Gods” but found having a personal God more enjoyable and spent most of his time in that view. He also could switch to the monotheistic views of Christianity and Islam, but, again, didn’t enjoy them as much.
Speaking mystically, the view which dominates you is said to have a lot to do with what afterlife you wind up in, so if you believe in such things, take that into account.
(Maybe I’ll write a post on spiritual views at some point, though there’s a chunk of the audience who wouldn’t be interested, or would outright reject such things.)
Dan Kelly
Thanks Ian.
Faith, purpose and spirituality are a fair ways from what I was discussing in this post.
No they’re not. They are all of one. That’s why I chose to post this here.
They’re worthwhile topics, and I’m glad you raised them, but they aren’t all that related.
I’m glad you’re glad I raised them. I think. Again, they are related. Not ‘seeing’ the relation is the problem. Intellectual vivisectioning is easy.
Maybe I’ll write a post on spiritual views at some point, though there’s a chunk of the audience who wouldn’t be interested, or would outright reject such things.
Again, this is the problem right here.
It’s not about this versus this versus this. It’s not about spiritual ‘views’; ‘spiritual views’ confuse the map for the territory itself.
But you can’t lose your audience, so I understand.
I’m reasonably intelligent: I’m at the level where I’m startled if someone is much smarter than I am; it doesn’t happen often.
Sure, but I often sense a lack of ‘intellectually curiosity’ around things that you ‘know’ you already know.
Frankly, that’s an extraordinarily pompous statement. But I guess I appreciate your honesty.
I’ll leave you with this: Is ‘intelligence’ really the ability to ‘perform mental ops’ at blazingly fast speeds?
It’s like move fast and smash things. You miss a lot.
Ian Welsh
Wow. That was sure something Dan. We could have had an interesting conversation, but you managed to foreclose that possibility brilliantly and damaged any future prospects as well.
aside: the map often determines where you wind up.