Sun, re: "Most types of intelligence just can't be made in portable booklets or even software simulations, let alone be judged by a mechanical scoring method...so in theory, you could be right about intelligence being measurable, but in practice we are far from it."
That raises the question of how much harm we do by branding individuals with bogus IQ labels. I read one study where they inverted the actual IQ scores on an elementary classroom without letting the teacher in on it. Sure enough, the half of the class with the true lowest IQ scores had a higher average grade than the half of the class with the highest scores. In the middle of the school year they told the teacher they'd made a mistake and gave out the real scores. The grades of the two groups then inverted.
Kids don't understand what it is that IQ tests purport to measure and how poorly they actually measure it and neither do most of their educators. I'd like to see them not only tinker with the tests but also rename them something that doesn't convince us that they're some magic measure of true intelligence. The grades they receive in school also tend to result in students lowered self-expectations and perceptions of themselves as not being one of the "smart kids."
As far as the true measure of intelligence, it's the ability to DO things. Some people DO things primarily in a left brained way and can write books explaining how they did them, others DO things primarily using their right brains and couldn't explain it very well even if they tried. Those people just FEEL like they should go one direction or the other.
Regardless of how people get things done, however, the only test of true intelligence is whether they could, or could not, successfully complete the job. And yes, the "job" defines the intelligence. Is it engineering, persuading, music, counseling, teaching, physics, athletics, chess, etc. intelligence?
There are overlaps so that if you are intelligent in a chess sense you might also be intelligent in an auto mechanics sense, or a computer programming sense and we could use that to predict aptitudes, but the only true test of intelligence is the ability to perform. We see that best when we're trapped in the bottom of 30 foot well with a 10 foot piece of rope and the clothes on our backs. Who can find some way of maybe getting out and who will sit and die of thirst. Or when we go to court with a case that no one thinks can be won and after a few weeks of trial the jury finds in our favor. Or when we're stuck in a jail with 10 Taliban radicals and we have to find a way to fit between the cracks that will save our life. Or when we're stuck in the lines of Nazi concentration camps and we have to decide which line it is, whether we should risk death by switching lines and how we can get from one line to the other. Those are some of the true tests of intelligence; all the rest is conjecture. Ed |
