Today's graph

[andrewducker]

Can anyone tell me if these kinds of results are cross-cultural and cross-temporal?

Comments

[matgb]

I have seen other evidence and datasets that can lead to similar conclusions; high acheivers in some academic fields (especially sciences), low acheivers and the prison population, etc.

It's something that needs to be looked at, but very important it's looked at carefully, just because there might possibly be far fewer females with IQ above 140 doesn't mean they can't/don't exist (given I live with one, for example).

But it also might show a bias in what IQ actually measures, it's a particularly narrow form of intelligence that I've neve given much credence to.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure it's that narrow. There's a 0.8 correlation between IQ and both GCSE and SAT scores. Plus fairly strong correlations with work effectiveness (in jobs requiring intelligence). It's not _everything_, obviously, but I get a little fed up with the "It's meaningless!" crowd.

[matgb]

Yes, but both GCSEs and SATs judge academic intelligence, and define "jobs requiring intelligence" without making a value judgement about what intelligence is.

Seriously, I score incredibly highly on most intelligence scores, including IQ papers, but I'm useless at a lot of things others are very good at.

As an example, I'm "smarter" than my car mechanic, but he can open up the bonnet, fix the car quickly, and put it back together again.

I've helped rebuild an entire engine and it still makes no sense to me whatsoever.

Same applies to other non "intelligence" based skills; why is a very good farmer less intelligent because (s)he understands when to plant, when to fertilise, when to harvest, how to judge the weather, etc?

[andrewducker]

They aren't less intelligent for knowing things - they may well be less intelligent if they don't understand those things, and simply learned them off by rote.

When it comes to not understanding certain things (like car engines) in my experience that pretty much always comes down to bad teaching. I've yet to find anything I can't understand given a decent teacher/reference. Car mechanics simply spend a lot of time delving into this stuff, and are fascinated by it, so of course they understand it better.

[random-redhead.livejournal.com]

Anyone can learn anything with the right teaching. You have the confidence and self assurance to seek out the right teaching, not be put off by not gaining from the teaching style you are first offered.

Is solving mathematical equations learned by rote? A complex system of knowing what to apply where, which of ~16 thingies to use. Because it is on a blackboard or computer screen it is awarded more value than something in a field.

Computers are just a matter of delving into that stuff, being facscinated by it (from an early age) so of course you understand them better.

[andrewducker]

I'm not convinced that anyone can learn anything. There are some bits of maths that require thinking in ways that I can't see me being able to master. I'm not going to be an organic chemist because there are far too many individual things to memorise, rather than abstract concepts to understand (which I'm much better at). I do agree that most people can learn the majority of things that we encounter - if it weren't for the awful teaching a lot of us get.

Solving mathematical equations isn't rote if they're more than the simple puzzles you get in school. You have a problem, and a bunch of different tools to attack it with - the skill is in knowing which ones to use to attack which bits of it with, and in understanding how it all goes together. I know that I do better at work than many of my colleagues because I can hold bigger abstract structures in my head and see how their interlock and interact with each other.

IQ seems to be based on a mixture of how much stuff you can hold in your head, how well you can spot patterns, how much you can manipulate at once, and how fast you can do all of the above. Intelligence, to me, is all about the pattern matching and extrapolation - recognising that you've seen something before, coming up with ideas about why you're seeing the same thing again, and finding methods of dealing/manipulating it.