Sat in a philosophy class today.

[Ektar]

I can play that game too... you're wrong hbb.

it's a fucking verb and there are no boundaries on it. I can say things that are not true. just because person 1 thought it doesn't mean person 2 can't say it. it CAN happen.

[Barkingturtle]

Hey, I would like a frosty beer and a blowjob.

[Alawen]

I just found an interesting study about this that was published last December in Neuron. It was an online test with tens of thousands of respondents, and they concluded that intelligence has three distinct elements: memory, reasoning, and verbal competence. The authors are challenging conventional IQ testing, which isn't new, but here's what I found noteworthy: "Intriguingly, people who regularly played computer games did perform significantly better in terms of both reasoning and short-term memory."

[Alawen]

I should mention that four standards of deviation is the limit of the Stanford-Binet test. It is very difficult to measure IQs over 160.

[Hasbinbad]

Hey alawen, what happens if you eat a large meal of fish 12 hours before you take an IQ test?

[Samoht]

i don't know if i could sit through 2 hours of those, but these are fucking easy in comparison

[Barkingturtle]

All easy u dum.

[Samoht]

MAT is clearly a combination of reasoning and working knowledge of the world. would do.

[Splorf22]

What I am trying to say is that I feel the human brain is extremely specialized. Not just something like multiple intelligences but literally case by case, problem by problem.

Making this claim requires some explanation for the correlations we see (some people seem to be able to solve more problems on average than others). I am saying that some of these correlations are probably genetic (person x has more neurons or faster or more connections or whatever) but a lot of it probably has to do with motivation.

Also all of those theories of intelligence are basically BS. For a great (if longwinded and somewhat difficult to read) explanation, see http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~...eblog/523.html. The basic idea is that just because you run PCA on your data and get some dominant eigenvalues doesn't mean that your new basis vectors actually have physical meaning. Sometimes they do, sometimes they dont.

[Alawen]

I don't think you read that paper. I just did and it has several problems. He is operating under the assumption that IQ tests from different sources are designed to correlate. That assertion has no basis. More importantly, the entire article is devoted to debunking Spearman's unitary g factor model. If you've been paying attention, you will note that I, following Cattell, never mentioned that earlier model, and that I discussed the two-factor model, Gf and Gc. The more recent study I linked today identifies three distinct factors.

What really gets my nuts twisted, though, is that after spending almost two hours reading his horrible prose and looking up everything I wasn't positive that I understood, he writes off the whole exercise as too distracting from his real work to finish and delivers a weak conclusion: he doubts that there is a general factor of intelligence, but he's been wrong before. Along the way, he pretty much trashes all social science. I bet he's popular with other departments at CMU.

Well, that straw man is fucking dead and burned to the ground. You sure did a number on him.