The Dangers of Intelligence without Creativity or Judgment

“Perspective is worth 80 IQ point” – Alan Kay

If you can’t change perspective, the angle you’re looking at a problem from, some problems become unsolvable.

Which is why I visit this blog, to learn another perspective or ten.

Ian,

I’m a little curious as to your support for IQ. I thought it was widely accepted that IQ has too many confounds to be more than an extremely coarse measure.

excellent post, minus quibbles about IQ. it’s a general test, yes, but there are several indicators which do not fall under it. it’s not meaningless, but only having enough IQ gives you the perspective.

( having just taken a series of IQ tests to measure what I have lost in that department. sometimes I can see the forest though I have lost some trees.0

Most (not all) of the creative people I’ve known have been very intelligent but often narrowly so – almost like Aspergers. Polymaths are rare (which is one reason I treasure Sterling).

Intelligence recognizes & understands facts, usually narrowly. Creativity conceives possible scenarios based on those facts, ideally widely-scoped. You could say that judgment selects from those possibilities, but such selection is based on values, from whatever source those values are derived. In fact, my view is that judgment is not so much a trait as it is a result of expressing one’s values via the possibilities.

I don’t really see how creativity and judgement are parts of intelligence, per se. Intelligence may not be put to good use without creativity, and may be put to bad use without good judgement. There may be commonalities and connections between/among them, but I think that statement needs a lot more development before you can just say those two qualities are parts of intelligence.
I would argue that awareness, especially self awareness, and awareness of the limitations of one’s own knowledge and that of others’ is what differentiates those with narrow fields of intelligence from those with broader ones. Coupled with “intuitions” which is just awareness also, awareness of less obvious data and nonverbal cues as well as maybe nonphysical or subconscious processes. Empathy is also a kind of awareness.
Lack of such awareness(es) is what lets the ambitious and aggressive go-getters rise to the top, despite only having IQs in the top 10 or 20 or 50 percent of the population. The same lack of awareness that leads them to think they deservedly won the meritocracy game later on, even while they help drive the world over a cliff with their “gifts”.
I’m one of those people who scored in the top 1000th or 10,000th on a lot of those tests in school. And I was probably the B+/A- student that teachers and the lower scoring, crybaby honor students were referring to when they would disparage the results of those standardized tests (you know those kids who thought they were the smartest in the school who only got SATs around 1200, which was proof to them and their favorite teachers that the fault lay in the test, not in the tested).
Actually, they mostly thought I was kind of stupid, although I never studied for math or science and got A’s, and I was just too lazy too kiss enough ass to get A’s in the more subjective classes, like English or history.
Anyway, those tests mostly measured things that supposedly those honor roll students had mastered better than anyone else in the school just a year or two earlier. There is nothing on the SATs and similar tests (except a few vocabulary words) that every kid shouldn’t be able to answer by the end of 10th grade. Just some algebra, some geometry, and the verbal part is just testing your logic and reading comprehension of short articles you have just read, and that you could still reread if you didn’t catch the answer on the first go-round. As such, my scores were never something I was especially proud of, but I always have a laugh the people who think they are so smart but can’t understand why they couldn’t do better on those tests (It’s because you aren’t nearly as smart as you think you are, chiefs. It’s not because you have some special intelligence that is just unmeasurable with a standardized test).
It was never my experience that those of us with the best scores were the most successful by society’s standards (which the sour grapes lower score crowd always takes as proof of the uselessness of the tests). Some like me just were just smart and perceptive, but not exactly born with a burning vocation to do or achieve anything in particular, and we weren’t that motivated to do what had to be done to be an Obama or Clinton or Dimon, or just a run of the mill shitbag lawyer or stockbroker. Others who were brilliant (and maybe creative) did brilliant things, but maybe they didn’t have the abilities or appetite to do the things necessary to make themselves the ones who profited most from their brilliance.
There seems to be a very common belief in society that if we just had the smartest people in charge, everything would take care of itself. But in my lifetime, I, and many others smarter than me, have recognized lots of bad things coming, as well as lots of opportunities. But if you are too stupid to recognize those things for yourself, you are most likely too stupid to recognize those who are smarter than you, or to listen when they point those dangers or opportunities out to you. And so the stupid people put the “successful” charlatans and selfish, short sighted psychos in charge because they can’t or won’t try to distinguish good ideas from bad ones on their merits, so they want to see your ideological or financial credentials before they will listen to what you say or show them.
Anyway, talking about intelligence is kind of wankerific. I can’t tell you how many people I knew growing up who would take me aside and tell me I was just about the smartest guy they ever met (i.e. the 2nd smartest guy in the world, a somewhat distant 2nd to the persons who would tell me that). Whatever it is, it is not the be-all or end-all of human traits. Not even in the top 5 qualities.

In Minima Moralia, Adorno IIRC states “Intelligence is a moral category”.

#2 – creativity – is associated with perception. It needs to be wide open.

#3 – judgment – is discernment, the ability to sort through the perceptual field or the results of processing a situation, the ability to assign a hierarchy

I’m in a situation not unlike Stirling’s, where my raw IQ isn’t what it used to be. No longer the fastest or sharpest mind in the room. But what I do have, that I lacked when I was younger, is clarity.

Youth is a time of great potential along with confusion. It can take decades to sort through all the social and personal conditioning to get to the point where you can clearly separate the nonsense from the truth. I suppose this is wisdom, and it definitely comes with age, if you’re willing to do the work.

@Alyosha ” if you’re willing to do the work.”
I always refer back to Jung. He theorized that when we are young, say up to our Thirties, we should work on our strengths, our preferences. Confident in ourselves, we then should try to work on things we don’t prefer by getting into other people’s shoes. Yin and Yang. He called this process “individuation” and I called it “maturity”. As you say, if you do this work you gain wisdom. If you don’t do the work and remain forever a teenager, like say a John McCain or most politicians, you are not wise but just a wise cracker.

Re Summers et al:

They come across a g-whiz kids propounding their own view while preventing or shouting down any broader dialogue. That has been part of the problem with the economic and policy direction over the past few decades, where ideas are over-HYPed to the detriment of 300MM+ Americans.
How does the average citizen get #3 acknowledged and discussed?

Pattern recognition, judgment and creativity are all part of intelligence in the current common use of the term. It’s the ability to understand a problem and find a solution. Although etymologically the word intelligence only refers to the understanding part, it has now evolved to include the problem solving part too (for instance Mc Gyver).

The 3 components overlap but roughly speaking I would say that pattern recognition and judgment drive the understanding part while creativity is responsible for problem solving.

Faced with a problem, pattern recognition in overdrive can come up with dozens of different causes. Judgment will select the most likely causes. Judgment can be based on experience (therefore memory).

Judgement should also help select the solution. Here judgment can be based on ethics. But ethics can be seen as the sum of experience and wisdom accumulated by our ancestors.

There may be some overlap between pattern recognition and creativity.

In science the ability to see the same pattern in 2 sets of very different phenomena seems very important. Physics in particular advances by unification, generalization, abstraction. Before Newton, an apple falling and the movement of celestial bodies were seen as in separate classes of phenomena. Newton said it was the same thing. Maxwell unified disparate phenomena of electricity, magnetism and light in just 4 equations. For some time, physicists have been working (without much success) on some unified field theory of everything.

But the importance of the ability to see the same pattern in different domains goes beyond science. Let’s take verbal ability for instance. When someone makes a striking comparison, we take it as a sign of creativity. For instance, when Ian welsh compares the processes of the intellect to the driving of a motorcycle.

Proust put the “metaphor”, the connection of 2 different realities at the center of his work. One famous example (in either “A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur” or “Du cote de Guermantes” I cant remember) is his description of a theater. He makes a striking elaborate comparison between the dukes and duchesses in their balconies and mythological monsters in their grottoes.

But I doubt the IQ tests can catch this ability of making connections between very different domains. The tests seem more focused on sequential patterns in a narrow view.

Is it time to get creatively judgmental ?