How Do You Define Intelligence?

Ben Sears

Ben Sears is a writer and restaurant guy in Birmingham, Alabama. He lives quite happily across from a creek with his wife, two sons, and an obligatory dog. You can follow him on Twitter and read his blog, The Columbo Game.

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11 Responses

  1. Jaybird says:

    I think, like, there are a *LOT* more types than just 3.

    I mean, if we were talking “fitness”, there’s the ability to lift heavy weights. There’s the ability to lift smaller weights multiple, multiple times. There’s the ability to run really fast. There’s the ability to run really far. There’s the ability to do a cartwheel. Charles McIlvaine famouslywas able to eat mushrooms that others considered poisonous.

    And, like, I’m sure I missed a couple dozen more.

    If I were to add categories for intelligence, I’d have to include stuff like:

    There are two kinds of spatial intelligence. “Rotate a cube in your head” sort of stuff. You are looking at a regular die from Las Vegas. The faces of the 3 and the 5 are showing (the 3 is on the left) and the pips of the 3 are in the upper leftmost and lower rightmost corners. How many pips are on the face of the die that is on top?

    Or be able to imagine a map in your head and navigate in your head on this map.

    The whole “math” thing in your head. The ability to write clean code. The ability to create a low-res version of another person and have a conversation with him or her or them or whatever.

    The ability to notice when something isn’t right with the outcome of a test! Oh my gosh, we had testers who just ran through the numbers and just handed in the form with 0s on every line and we had testers who were able to say “I think the file system permissions were messed up after the update.” Of course, the latter were the ones who got promoted…

    And, like, I’m sure I missed a couple dozen more.Report

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Jaybird says:

      When we had Bug tested back in September, they tested for 6 or 8 kinds of intelligence and admitted that there was more they could test for, but that would take a lot longer.

      The results were interesting and enlightening.Report

  2. Chip Daniels says:

    What I would add to the essay is to note how much physical ability influences intelligence. For example, there is the famous statue called The Thinker, where a man is seated, intensely focused and concentrating.

    This is how many people think of intelligence, that the body and mind are separate and the problem is solved simply by the application of cognitive ability.
    The thinker conceptualizes a real life problem into an abstract set of symbols and statements, and furiously grinds the gears of logic to produce some sort of conclusion.

    But consider how utterly inadequate this is, what it is missing.

    Think of the person who first tied a knot in string, which is the basis of nets and clothing.

    Did the invention come about by sitting motionless, intensely thinking? Of course not.
    It isn’t possible to conceptualize the tying of a knot unless you have a deeply intimate knowledge of string. How string feels, how it behaves, the way it slips through the fingers, that it is strong in tension and weak in compression.

    Our bodies are part of our intelligence. Muscle control and memory, and hand-eye coordination are essential tools that complement and are prerequisites of what we call intelligence.Report

  3. The best definition of intelligence vs. stupidity I’ve ever seen was from filmmaker Errol Morris (though he’d probably say he didn’t come up with it personally, it’s where I first heard it). He said something along the lines of “a stupid person hears/reads someone who knows more than they do about a subject, and assumes they are stupid because of that”. I believe it’s somewhere in Errol’s blogs on NYT, which are worth a read if you haven’t seen them before.

    (this link goes to a blog post that has all five of the blog posts linked in one spot) http://www.caitlinburke.com/blog/2013/01/07/errol-morris-on-dunning-kruger-and-other-blind-spots/Report

  4. Greginak says:

    There is no doubt intelligence has many factors and what they are is a good debate. Seems like the only people who think intell is simple and one factor are the IQ weirdos who think you can define the whole shebang with one number. There verbal intelligence which is only lightly connected to actually knowing or understanding any damn thing. The best example of this are lawyers who can argue any point well even when everybody knows they don’t have any facts or case. This is partially a stereotype of lawyers but there is something to. The same intell is shown in politics where talking heads can construct an argument without using any facts or with knowingly false facts but fly forward anyway.

    Before anything else any halfway smart person will recognize the Dunning Kruger effect coming for them. We are all ignorant of many things. Some of this is just facts/knowledge gaps and some is the inability to think through things in certain subject areas. Intelligence is at least a little bit knowing when you don’t know enough to have an idea so you listen and learn. Shutting up is evidence of intelligence.

    A well known theory of multiple intells was by a psych named Gardner. He had seven multiple intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal, and he has since added naturalist intelligence.

    There are other ideas like this but i think he covered it well. I also agree very much with Chip. Can’t really separate mind from body. Or even our feelings from our intelligence. We are one mushed together whole thing and are attempts to separate often misrepresent our actual natures.Report

  5. Pinky says:

    Learning languages is a passion of mine, although definitely not a skill. There are a lot of different intellectual feats involved.

    memorizing the word “libro”
    reading the word “libro” and thinking “book”
    hearing the word “libro” and thinking “book”
    seeing a book and thinking “libro”
    reading the sentence “Yo quiero 3 libros” and hearing “qu” as a “k” sound
    reading the sentence “Yo quiero 3 libros” and seeing the “3” as “tres”
    seeing the word “libreria” for the first time, intuiting the connection to “libro” and knowing it means “library”
    seeing the word “libreria” for the first time, intuiting the connection to “libro’, remembering that stores have “ia” on the end, and knowing it actually means “bookstore”Report

  6. DrSloperWazRobbed says:

    I applaud the effort to limit it to 3 categories, with I guess humor being one that spans all 3? I wonder, going on your 3 (as limiting the number is always good, and everybody loves a good ‘3’ and for good reason) if creativity could be seen in the same way as your take on humor: overarching, sort of spans all three, and is nebulous. Bravo! (as the smart set say, apparently).Report

    • I’m looking those three categories, at least for the moment as primary colors you can mix and match to get other aspects of intelligence. Yellow and Blue make green, knowledge and understanding make math adepts, etc. The attempt was to be as elemental as possible but as I said, this is me tossing around ideas and is in no way definitive.Report

  7. One advantage of online is that you can post a funny response much later, and no one can tell whether it took you a long time, or you’d only just read the thing you were responding to.Report