A few more comments on intelligence, prompted by various responses
to my last post:
1. The more intelligent one is, the higher the probability on
average of doing well. But the correlation is by no means perfect. There
are lots of other attributes that matter – personality, persistence,
willingness to work hard, willingness to take risks, etc, etc. Mensa is an
organization that only accepts people who score in the top 2% of intelligence
tests – yet not every Mensa member is highly successful. For some the only
distinction in their lives is that they managed to qualify for Mensa. On the other hand there are plenty of people
who wouldn’t score especially high on an IQ test, but who are brilliant at what
they do.
2. Intelligence is different than wisdom. There are plenty
of people who are brilliant in some field, but not very wise. And there are
people who are of average intelligence, but who are unusually wise. The
intelligent know lots of things. The wise know what matters and what doesn’t. Of the the two wisdom is probably the more valuable, and also probably harder to find.
3. IQ tests are designed to make distinctions in the middle
range, where most of the people fall. They are by design not very good at
making distinctions out in the tails, where there are not many people and so
not many samples. The difference, say, between an IQ score of 135 and 145 might
just be one or two questions which the subject happened to get right or wrong,
or a few seconds difference in completing a task. So people who compare their
scores out in that range are on thin ice. It may be that all one can really say
with confidence is that they are a lot brighter than average.
4. As I mentioned before, IQ tests are only a rough measure
of intellectual ability. Human intelligence is multi-factor, meaning it has
lots of parts. Everyone has met people who are brilliant in some field, say
math, yet hopeless in other fields. Indeed, we are all that way – good at some
things and hopeless at others. IQ tests take a sample across a few of these
various factors and compute a rough measure of intelligence. It’s enough to sort out army recruits
effectively, which was its original purpose, but it is by no means a
comprehensive assay of an individual’s mental abilities. We don’t know enough
about human intelligence to build such a comprehensive test.
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