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In light of the threads on psychological studies...the TRUTH about such studies!!!!!!

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  • #16
    I would say that intelligence manifests itself in different ways. I have known people who were very bright, but could not do well in tests.
    Micah 6:8 He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

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    • #17
      Originally posted by Chrawnus View Post
      While I do agree with the larger point in your post, I don't think there's different "forms" of intelligences. I believe there is one type of intelligence, which you can measure in IQ, and then what people call "different kinds of intelligence" are, for example, what people used to call having talent for something, or aptitude for something.
      I think IQ tests (which I score fairly high in regardless) don't test intelligence that well. They have a very dubious utility in tracking something about puzzle solving, that correlates somewhat with possible earning brackets and level of education. I think we'd need hundreds of "IQ" scales to adequately measure intelligence, which is by its nature highly varied. Associative thinking, lateral thinking, spatial thinking, emotional thinking. These are different from each other. Each an intelligence of its own kind, and someone who is good at solving the coloured boxes puzzles in the Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices test, isn't necessarily good at making anagrams, but might be good at certain brick puzzles.

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      • #18
        A few comments about the OP.

        Firstly, one of the key ideas in science is replication of the result. That's what makes science be science as opposed to people just writing down ideas that sound good to them (like often happens in philosophy or religion). A published study is not a definitive proof or a scientific fact. It's an "I tried X, and measured it and saw Y in my measurement". If other people in the world try the same thing and measure the thing, they might not get the same result. Because all sorts of factors can affect results.

        There's a big, big, big difference between a study that has been done once and found a certain result, as compared to dozens of different studies done around the world on many and various aspects of the same topic which all found similar results. As a scientist myself, if you show me one study that found a result, I might say "meh" or "that's mildly interesting" in the same sort of way I might react if you showed me a letter to the editor in a newspaper - as far as I am concerned it is a long long way from proven fact. But show me a review article that documents the works in the field and shows how dozens of different studies done by many groups of researchers have all found the same results and mutually support each others findings, then I will say "ok, that's fact".

        Secondly, people outside of academic research probably have little appreciation for the sheer volume of articles being published. Even keeping abreast of research in your own specialty sub-field can be hard at times even in the less-busy fields. A few years back, high-temperature superconductivity, one of the hot topics of research, was getting about 10,000 articles per year published on it.

        Sometimes something goes wrong, and journals end up retracting 1 article, or 10 articles or even 100 articles, due to finding some sort of fraud, or mistake, or something. And to people outside of science fields this can seem like some sort of big scandal, and they ask irrelevant questions like "how can we trust science?" But in reality those articles represent a small fraction of 1% of articles being published. So it's like saying "I've heard that articles are only 99.9% likely to be right! Now I know that, I'll never trust science again!" In response to which I just have to roll my eyes.

        And in response to the specific article that reported apparently finding ESP? Someone else should obviously do a study on the topic using the same general method, and see if they get the same result. If they do, then more people should do studies varying the method slightly, and then more, to try and determined why the result is being obtained. That's how science works.

        Perhaps the lesson to take out of the OP is that psychology is less of a hard-science than those who work in the field tend to think of it as being, and as such you should treat not-yet-replicated published studies in the field with extreme skepticism.
        "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
        "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
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        • #19
          Originally posted by Leonhard View Post
          I think IQ tests (which I score fairly high in regardless) don't test intelligence that well. They have a very dubious utility in tracking something about puzzle solving, that correlates somewhat with possible earning brackets and level of education.
          Sure. They're still the most reliable tests we have currently though.

          Originally posted by Leonhard View Post
          I think we'd need hundreds of "IQ" scales to adequately measure intelligence, which is by its nature highly varied. Associative thinking, lateral thinking, spatial thinking, emotional thinking. These are different from each other. Each an intelligence of its own kind, and someone who is good at solving the coloured boxes puzzles in the Ravens Advanced Progressive Matrices test, isn't necessarily good at making anagrams, but might be good at certain brick puzzles.
          Associative, lateral and spatial thinking is just different ways for intelligence to express itself. Emotional thinking shouldn't be classified as an "intelligence" in the first place, but rather as co-operativeness/agreeableness and possibly empathy. You didn't bring it up, but there's also no such thing as "social intelligence", that's simply personality.

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          • #20
            Originally posted by Chrawnus View Post
            Sure. They're still the most reliable tests we have currently though.
            I don't think 'its the thing we can measure most precisely, therefore we have no choice but to consider it this' is a good argument. He's right that there's a somewhat strong correlation between what a person tests in an IQ test, and how "well" they'll do in society (as measured by level of education, and earning bracket). He does admit tacidly in that video that he defines intelligence purely in terms of earning bracket.

            His argument then proceeds in reverse by finding people in high earning brackets, and seeing if they also have any of the other intelligences that he disputes. The correlation however becomes a lot weaker, and therefore he argues that these intelligences are either not very defined, or they're simple "IQ" manifested in different ways. However its precisely if intelligence is not a linear scale, but a diversity of abilities that we'd expect to a pattern like this. And he doesn't really deal with that objection, I don't know if he has in his works, but it wasn't mentioned in the talk.

            Associative, lateral and spatial thinking is just different ways for intelligence to express itself.
            The expectation would be that if we design tests meant for those things, then people who score high IQ would all perform reasonable close to each other. I don't find any evidence for this at all.

            Emotional thinking shouldn't be classified as an "intelligence" in the first place, but rather as co-operativeness/agreeableness and possibly empathy. You didn't bring it up, but there's also no such thing as "social intelligence", that's simply personality.
            That's his claim, but his entire reason seems to be that you can't easily create psychometrics on this and then correlate it with expected earning, or level of education. It comes back to how you define intelligence. He defines it as 'your ability to perform well on tests that correlate with expected income'. I define intelligence as your ability to overcome problems of a particular type. Which is how a lot of behaviorists see intelligence, and how its defined in animal studies for instance in regards to problem solving.

            Animals don't earn any money, nor do they go through education. But it would be absurd to say that we can't discuss the intelligence of a raven, compared to that of a turtle.

            And in that case its not impossible to talk about various types of social intelligences, as your ability to figure out other people, their expectations, their internal state, etc... in fact we have good enough tests on this to at least recognise that some people have significant problems. Like me for instance. I'm an autist, and its very difficult for to figure out another person, and how they're thinking. Even though I can solve a rubiks cube quickly, and I breezed through college level math without much trouble. The last time I had an IQ-test (last year during a psychological evaluation), I was the only one who had gotten through all them flawlessly and I solved the brick puzzles laid before me dang near instantly.

            Curiously though I faltered on a test designed to figure out working memory, I was told a row of numbers and I was to repeat them, reverse them, sort them, etc... I failed at six numbers, which surprised the tester. At which point he concluded one of two things: That I have a minor learning disability due to a smaller working memory, which explained why I got so exhausted in college during cramming sessions. Or, I simple wasn't interested in the test, and that I have a hard time learning things I'm not interested in.

            So High IQ, but a learning disability. I can solve colorful puzzles featuring boxes shifting shape, size, color, in various sequences and guess the next one, solve spatial problems etc.. but I have a very hard time figuring out what another person expects of me, unless its clearly specified.

            My difficulty with people don't stem from a personality problem. Its not that I didn't like people. I just didn't get people. Developing a theory of mind took a very long time for me, and its still lacking behind other people.

            His idea that we can just lump together all sorts of other 'problem solving abilities' (aka intelligences) together under new lables because we can't measure them that well, strikes me as sweeping things that are hard to explain or measure under the rug and pretend they're gone.
            Last edited by Leonhard; 05-21-2017, 03:13 AM.

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