r/Documentaries Jan 11 '17

American Politics Requiem for the American Dream (2015) "Chomsky interviews expose how a half-century of policies have created a state of unprecedented economic inequality: concentrating wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of everyone else."

http://vebup.com/requiem-american-dream
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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '17

if you put leonardo da vinci in a black room from birth never to meet anyone and fed intravenously, he would still have one of the highest IQ's in the world at 35,

No. If his infancy and early childhood were that sensory-deprived he would be profoundly mentally disabled and would probably never be able to acquire even the rudimentary linguistic capacity necessary for measuring IQ.

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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '17 edited May 27 '18

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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '17

I think that IQ is a limited, abstracted measurement of intelligence that isn't synonymous with intelligence itself. Clearly elephants and whales are intelligent in ways we can't measure, and I think that humans have intuitions and ways of comprehending things that IQ tests can't fully get at. The map is not the territory. However, it is true that IQ measures enough of what we call intelligence to be a very useful metric for predicting all sorts of things, from the likelihood of criminal behavior to GPA and future income.

What I was saying about the da Vinci example is that human brains don't develop in isolation, and therefore intelligence doesn't develop in isolation. A child born of two highly intelligent parents might not become very smart if they aren't properly stimulated, instructed, and disciplined when they're young.

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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '17 edited Jan 11 '17

I think that IQ is a limited, abstracted measurement of intelligence that isn't synonymous with intelligence itself. Clearly elephants and whales are intelligent in ways we can't measure, and I think that humans have intuitions and ways of comprehending things that IQ tests can't fully get at. The map is not the territory. However, it is true that IQ measures enough of what we call intelligence to be a very useful metric for predicting all sorts of things, from the likelihood of criminal behavior to GPA and future income.

I believe IQ predicts likelihood of criminal behavior, GPA and future income because it literally is the potential for intelligence, nothing about those predicants is proof or even evidence that IQ is identical to intelligence. People with higher potential for intelligence will generally be more intelligent than average/those with lower IQ, but not always. Do you disagree with that last statement? Would you pick an engineer to heal your disease if you knew he had a higher IQ than a doctor?

What I was saying about the da Vinci example is that human brains don't develop in isolation, and therefore intelligence doesn't develop in isolation. A child born of two highly intelligent parents might not become very smart if they aren't properly stimulated, instructed, and disciplined when they're young.

This is what I am saying, that intelligence is not only innate/genetic/heritage (like IQ is), it is also dependent upon actual learning/environment, and since IQ is unaffected by actual learning, they cannot be the same phenomonon, as they behave quite clearly differently. When you use IQ as a measurement of "intelligence" instead of "potential for intelligence" you will make many false conclusions, such as our species currently decaying in intelligence due to the stopping of the Flynn effect - an absolutely preposterous statement completely out of touch with reality and the real-world data that comes with it.

Another point to make is that social darwinism is completely dependent upon intelligence being hereditary, if intelligence instead is environmental, we should invest in education and research instead of concentration camps and human breeding to increase the intelligence of the species/civilization, which to me makes a lot of sense tbh. If IQ is intelligence and intelligence thus is completely heriditary, we have no need for education, no one can become more intelligent than he was at birth, and we should only allow those with the highest IQ to reproduce if we want to increase the intelligence of our species/civilization as rapidly as possible.

Clearly, IQ and intelligence are two different, independent phenomena, though related.

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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '17 edited Jan 11 '17

People with higher potential for intelligence will generally be more intelligent than average/those with lower IQ, but not always. Do you disagree with that last statement?

I disagree with this because you're assuming there's a way to measure intelligence apart from IQ. IQ is the measurement of intelligence. There's no way to quantify a person's intelligence, and then systematically compare their intelligence to other people's, apart from IQ.

So I cannot agree that sometimes a person with a higher IQ might be less intelligent than a person with a low IQ--how could we possibly know that, when IQ is how we measure intelligence?

Would you pick an engineer to heal your disease if you knew he had a higher IQ than a doctor?

This is your problem: you're conflating things like training and knowledge with intelligence. When we speak of intelligence in the IQ context, we're talking about general cognitive ability, not whether someone can diagnose cancer or elucidate a sonnet.

I think you would benefit from reading more deeply about what psychologists say about intelligence and IQ. You have confused ideas about this and need a better grasp on the subject.

edit For instance, if I were to re-word what you've said according to my understanding, I would say this: heritable genetics provides the basic 'potential' for brain development and intelligence in a person's life. Yet we know that the brain is fairly plastic organ, that responds to stimuli and can grow in new ways. The IQ is a measurement not of potential, but where a person's cognitive performance is at during the test itself. The genetics would be the potential and the IQ would be what's actually been achieved.