[maskedmelon]

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Fun fact: IQ was never designed to measure the intelligence of normal people. I did my high school senior thesis as a nerdy kid with a high IQ believing in the concept of IQ. By the end of it I realized that the word "intelligence", as it's often used, depended heavily on the person using the term. Most people use it to refer to "g" or "general" (all around) intelligence ... which doesn't exist.

The whole point of IQ tests originally were just to determine which people were mentally handicapped . Even the guy who invented the IQ test (Lewis Terman who, incidentally, was the father of the guy who started Silicon Valley) said that we shouldn't use it for anything else. But people did, even though it would later be determined that we have at least 7 (or more, there's disagreement) types of intelligence. There's mathematical intelligence, spacial intelligence, verbal intelligence, musical intelligence, etc. and there is no strong correlation connecting them all together.

As a result the idea of a single "g" intelligence has more or less been debunked, which in turn debunks the idea that you can measure such a "g" intelligence. In other words, there are no "smart" people, just people who are smart about different things, and any given person might have any combination of "smarts" because the different kinds mostly don't correlate. Now that's not to say that intelligence tests don't measure something, because they clearly do, but whatever they measure it's a certain subset of the many different intelligences, and which ones are included and to what degree depend largely on the person writing test.

The "Theory" of Multiple Intellengences is pseudoscience rooted in egalitarian ethos. They were designed as participation trophies in the game of intellectual competency. The theory enjoys little support within the scientific community because it not only is without any empirical evidence, it is also at odds with neuroscience. Many of the intelligences are highly correlated with one another in addition to.... "g." Also, when you account for other cognitive processes and personality, there isn't anything else left to explain.


I liek the way you wrote this though ^^