meritokratias
Resisting the Design – Measures of Intelligence
It is often easy to think that people who are professionals in prestigous jobs are always smarter, that the experts, scientists, doctors, lawyers and other such professionals are all wise and intelligence people. However we also may run into different flocks in our life’s journey to discover several street smarts in people who simply haven’t been fortunate enough for advanced education. But who are really smart?
The first suggestion of such a question would be the IQ. What does IQ measure though? IQ measures specifically what the IQ tests are trying to find out. It is a codification of various decontextualised generic skills that are commonly seen in abstract logic. The particulars of the IQ tests, and how the scores are codified and quantified are all human designs. And usually there also exists a verbal comprehension section that requires certain linguistic skills that can be difficult for certain individuals. And then the difficulties and scores are calibrated somewhat by a certain coded mechanism. Eventually, the IQ finds out the very specific qualities that IQ is designed to find out, not a natural measure of intelligence. Even if it is a useful tool for discovering young talents for prestigous upbringing, we hardly can truly make use of it in our daily life. Imagine seeing someone street smart and you have to ask him to go take an IQ test and share his score to you.
The second suggestion would be to try to test someone with 10 questions of various trivia. Indeed possessing esoteric knowledge of historical and scientific facts may make someone sound smart. But how smart will that person actually be? We can totally go wider into this logic and suppose we have an individual who has great memories of many aspects of knowledge across many different fields. Then if we view the acquisition of knowledge to be structured in a tree diagram where deeper knowledge has the prerequisite of some other knowledge that is easier, and the easier knowledge in turn has the prerequisite of some other even easier knowledge. In theory, hence, a man with an abundance of accumulated knowledge will indeed has an advantage to obtain new knowledge. However, it does not measure other personal temporaments like how one approaches a problem, or basically how useful is that knowledge accumulator as a person during times of strife. Because let’s be honest, why do we even measure someone’s intelligence anyway if we are not actually trying to find some use, for example to put him in a place of making decisions?
The third suggestion would be to measure how quickly someone learns something totally new. And this is basically what is referred as the cognitive capacity in terms of learning. If someone is trained to learn new things as quickly as possible, he would basically have no issues to initiate new researches to find out unknowns or an engineering solution. These are the generic workers who are trained with generic problem solving skills and can tackle problems with self initiative. But their weakness is we simply lack a reliable system to find out these people, or to even train these people up to standards. They can come from very different backgrounds with various different vocations. They may be very quick to learn something new from a total stranger of the new knowledge, but it doesn’t mean they possess enough existing knowledge to make use of to come up with a good solution.
Here we have listed 3 different ways of measuring someone’s intelligence. They are very observable behaviours. Does anyone style of intelligence more leaning to critical thinking? Whom do we wish to enlist to solve our problems? Here we shall leave it as an open question for your contemplation.
