BS, that's old thinking: <EDIT: BTW assuming all tests given in English or American ? would venture that language affects the way you think.. and test results > They don't give english tests to a chinese language person person these days to test intelligence.
It is still fashionable to think people are fungible at birth, but that's scientifically illiterate and logically absurd with even a faint passing knowledge of genetics and evolutionary processes.
And yes, there are many cognitive functions and therefore ways of defining and measuring intelligence, but there are g measurements which are near enough to accurate for government work. The fact that emotional intelligence and weight lifting capacity are not necessarily correlated, doesn't mean g is wrong [which is another argument often used to cloud the issue of intelligence to pretend that it can't be defined and measured].
Memory is not the same as thinking for example, but memory is an essential ingredient of thinking. Google does memory but is weak on thinking, though already better than many people.
Correlation is a good way of finding facts worthy of investigation as possible causal agents. Because there's more to wealth than intelligence, the fact that one group of people has much higher intelligence than another group isn't proof that they have greater GDP. A gang of Mao marauders can easily keep a huge number of intelligent people in a state of poverty, or worse in the case of Adolf who took Ashkenazi Jews and imprisoned and murdered them.
Intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for wealth [Forrest Gump notwithstanding].
China's impoverishment for decades was due to political ideology and violence against wealth for individuals. India's was for anti-British ideological reasons, plus choosing to keep the Marxism and kleptocracy, voting themselves poor, plus low smart fraction intelligence.
He wasn't saying that humanities, social science and law create wealth, he was saying that that was evidence of the effect of reduced verbal intelligence. Chinese would have problems following that reasoning. Racists would think that that means all Chinese would have problems. But it's impossible to reason with racists, so it's not worth trying.
Mqurice |
