Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?

http://talentdevelop.com/articles/WIIA.html

by rblion • 15 years ago

232 58 15 years ago

peterquest• 15 years ago

an excellent lesson in humility.

siglesias• 15 years ago

This reminds me of a prevalent attitude I encountered in college where it was assumed that disciplines required more intelligence as they got more abstract. It's a persistent and seductive intuition that this is the case, but as Asimov points out it is only a matter of convention. Some geniuses can be very bad at dealing with mathematical abstractions and very good at performing in a specialized domain. Gifted athletes come to mind.

Wittgenstein puts it this way:

I can play with the chessmen according to certain rules. But I can also invent a game in which I play with the rules themselves. The pieces in my game are now the rules of chess, and the rules of the game are, say, the laws of logic. In that case I have yet another game and not a metagame.

xm1994• 15 years ago

It's a nice story. I agree with his point about testing. But it seems to me he's just apologizing for his intelligence and education. I'd bet Dr. Asimov would make one hell of a auto repair mechanic if he dedicated his life to it. I'd let him work on my cars!

javert• 15 years ago

Hell, I'd probably let him work on my car even if he were terrible at it. (Then again, maybe not - what a waste of talent that would be!)

baddox• 15 years ago

I would ask Mr. Asimov: Do you think that, given a reasonable amount of training, your "intelligence" could be applied toward automobile repair? Or do you truly believe that your mechanic friend had a different sort of "intelligence" that made him better at car repair, while your brand of "intelligence" lent itself toward academia?

atgm• 15 years ago

The Good Doctor has been dead for decades, unfortunately. If you want to learn more about him, you can read his (amazing) two-volume autobiography, In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt.

bahman2000• 15 years ago

I second this one. Mr. Asimov could easily become a mechanic if he were to apply himself. His mechanic, most probably, would never become an academician.

wallflower• 15 years ago

An example does not prove the point but Click and Clack of "Car Talk" both graduated from MIT.

Their 1999 Commencement address to the graduates of MIT:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1999/clickclackspeech.html

ThomPete2• 15 years ago

A friend of mine used to be a welder. I always found his political views simplistic to say the least. He couldn't control his liqueur and one day he felt down from high up and his arm got trashed.

I always thought that he was going to end up as a looser, although I love him as a good friend.

Years went by and he never really got anywhere, of course supporting my theory and increasing my concern.

Then a friend suggested (for whatever reason I don't know) that he should take up system administration. So he took a couple of courses and lo and behold got an apprentice position at Maersk.

He blazed through the various Sisco certifications without any issues as such exceeding what was normally considered possible. Basically flooring those who hired him and our common developer friends.

I was puzzled and asked him how he was able to advance so fast and he basically said to me.

"You know it's not really that different from installing and welding pipes. I see things needing to be connected and I connect them"

The moral of the story.

Sometimes things that seem very complex and require a tech centric mindset is really very simple. The welder, electrician and the plumber also deals with complex systems, they just have different names for them.

My friend is still the simple minded person that I know (and love) but he sure know how to lay pipes.

seri• 15 years ago

I wasn't impressed with the original article. It didn't attempt to define intelligence at all. If it tried to make the point that the social perception of intelligence is only for economic convenience, I found this short comment more insightful: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2884857. If it is about how academics overrate their intelligence and are therefore reluctant to get out of their comfort zone, the point wasn't very well made (http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-el... is a detailed treatment). And if it is about telling a story, I find yours much more inspiring.

kahawe2• 15 years ago

Another moral here is: you were seeing him as less clever and less successful because he was "just" a welder.

A skilled craftsman who understands what he is doing, understands a bit of the market and the chances available to him can run circles around any struggling internet startup, if only because the equipment and training needed are typically not as easy to come by as a Rails or AJAX or web handbook.

ThomPete2• 15 years ago

Well my father is a plumber my mother a cleaning lady. So I don't really have those kind of prejudice just because of peoples trades.

It was more some of the other experiences I had with him.

tadfisher• 15 years ago

As a full-time software developer who recently took a three-month intro course to welding, I can certainly take this moral to heart. Good welders (and other craftsmen) are able to successfully channel years of knowledge and experience through their eyes, wrists and fingertips, balancing an incredible amount of variables to end up with a good product in a short amount of time. They can also make pretty good money.

After my experience, I've tried to apply the lessons I learned from welding to my full-time job, and I've become a better developer as a result. "Measure twice, cut once" is a mantra that should apply to every field. At the same time, it's easier now to recognize when something isn't done right and it's time to refactor or rewrite. Good welders, like good developers, do it right the first time :)

6ren• 15 years ago

I totally agree, so far as merit is concerned, but the value society places on intelligence is entirely economic (at least at the moment). And academic intelligence has great economic value because it scales: it's abstract, so can be applied broadly; and is information, so can be replicated and transmitted widely.

Asimov's books, textbooks and articles need be written once, but have been replicated many times. Likewise his insights and perspectives (including this article). And the nature of insight and knowledge is there's no danger of mining them out, because you can always make finer distinctions - so there's room for arbitrarily many suppliers, each in a minuscule specialization.

corin_2• 15 years ago

This is the most important lesson my mother ever taught me. I (like her) have that same type of intelligence, the type that makes IQ tests and school exams far easier than they should be, and yet often isn't really that useful in life. I still find myself placing far too much importance in it when judging people, can only imagine how big headed I would be about it if she hadn't constantly reminded me how little IQ really means.

Stephen Fry made a similar, though briefer, point (I think in one of his auto-biographies, though I could be wrong)... Actually instead of quoting from memory I googled, it is indeed from his first auto-biography, and here it is:

"I actually went so tragically far as to send off for and complete a Mensa application test...It was only then I realised the kind of intelligence that wants to get into Mensa and succeeds in getting into Mensa and then runs Mensa and the kind of intelligence that I thought worth possessing were so astronomically distant from each other that the icing fell off the cake with a great squelch.It is occasions like this I thank God for my criminal tendencies, my homosexuality, my jewishness and loathing of the bourgeois, the conventional and respectable that these seem to have inculcated me. I could so easily given the smallest twist to the least gene on the outermost strand of my DNA have turned into... [one of those awful Midas types on politics forums boasting about my Mensa membership and 'high' IQ.]"

hackinthebochs3• 15 years ago

I don't understand these meme of degrading IQ as having little real world value. That mentality seems to fly in the face of just about every observation one can make. It seems obvious that in general, smarter people tend to get ahead. Of course there are many counter examples, but overall the trend seems obvious. Why is it everyone must apologize, make excuses for, or somehow downplay their own intelligence? Maybe it's just a ploy to be able to say "IQ tests and school exams far easier than they should be" without coming off as boasting?

corin_2• 15 years ago

It's definitely not a case of avoiding boasting in my case - and not because I'm a modest person, but because I'm the exact opposite, and I would have absolutely no problem shouting from the rooftops about how awesome I am based on IQ tests if I felt that to be something worth boasting about.

The thing with IQ tests is that it measures a very specific type of skill, and to use that to define intelligence is insulting to an awful lot of people.

The two people who own my company, who I work for, don't have degrees, they're not particularly mathematically skilled, and I don't think they'd do particularly well on an IQ test - not saying they'd get a terrible score, but they wouldn't come of as mensa candidates. And yet they're too of the brightest people I know, they've done amazing things in their careers and I have a huge amount of respect for them.

My dad is another person with a not-great IQ, and yet in my (admitedly biased) view he's the cleverest person I know Whether it's when he's buying/selling stocks, or betting on horses, or working out taxes, he can do it all in his head at a crazy speed - not with any education, just because maths is easy for him. But that's not why I think he's clever. He's clever because of the way he's lived his life and the decisions he's made, many of which have made me insanely proud.

I on the other hand have a high IQ, I did well in school with no work (well, I dropped out at 16 because I was bored, by "did well" I mean stuff like the fact that I got an A* GCSE in French at 15 even though I can't, and couldn't then either, speak French). Sure, it can be useful to be able to float through in areas where that kind of intelligence is useful, but it sure ain't everything.

My point is that there's more to life than one very specific set of skills, and to think otherwise is narrowminded and big-headed. Not big-headed about having an IQ, but about thinking that your high IQ makes you better than someone with a lower IQ.

gurkendoktor• 15 years ago

Hmm, but how do you define getting ahead? People with a high IQ will get ahead on stuff that works like IQ tests do, like getting a degree or passing highly selective interviews. Especially interview questions in the finance sector are probably much easier with a better IQ. But that is only because it is easy to make things work like IQ tests.

The people that seem to get ahead in society are those with excellent social skills instead. I'd gladly trade a dozen mathy IQ points for eloquence alone. Oh well, no political career for me.

And on the "honest work" side of things, people with persistence, a healthy lifestyle and passion for what they do seem to be the most productive. (Some people are also productive because they are obsessive, let's leave those out.) How do IQ tests with their super-clean mini puzzles measure any of those?

Jach• 15 years ago

It is interesting. On the one hand, very few people argue that a person with measured IQ of 80 won't have a hard time in life. On the other hand people dismiss 120 people and pretend IQ doesn't matter. (And it seems a lot of this group is made of 120+ people.) I figure it's just a form of social signaling, a signal of false modesty so the 100s still like you.

Though personally I don't see that much difference in the intelligence level of a village idiot and Von Neumann, they're both humans and both way beyond an ant. I'm looking forward to a species that makes modern humans as a whole, from dumbest to smartest, appear as an ant to them.

al-king• 15 years ago

Fry's point in particular is not that IQ is bad or useless; it clearly indicates some kind of talent. It's that treasuring IQ to the point that you join a society for people with high IQ, to Fry, also indicates a vapid intellectual narcissism wholly lacking in other kinds of "intelligence". At the very least, he feels that that's what it would have meant for him.

Avoid confusing warnings against a certain kind of vanity with anti-intellectualism, which regrettably is popular enough already.

codeslush2• 15 years ago

"tend to get ahead", "trend seems obvious", "fly in the face..." -- I've witnessed a lot of "intelligent" people in my life, and a lot of people on the other end of the spectrum. Intelligent or not, I would suggest that people who "tend to get ahead" are those that ENJOY and are HAPPY with life. I would go so far as to say that IQ doesn't play a part in this outcome - and may make it more difficult to achieve. It's all about the unit of measurement, which I believe is consistent with the article's intent.

kahawe2• 15 years ago

> I don't understand these meme of degrading IQ as having little real world value

The way I understand it: many people equal IQ test scores directly to real-world success and I would say such a direct causality does not exist. Case in point: Mensa members are CEOs all the way down to broke janitors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International#Demographic...

tokenadult• 15 years ago

I don't understand these meme of degrading IQ as having little real world value.

Haven't you read Lewis Terman, author of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, on the subject?

"There are, however, certain characteristics of age scores with which the reader should be familiar. For one thing, it is necessary to bear in mind that the true mental age as we have used it refers to the mental age on a particular intelligence test. A subject's mental age in this sense may not coincide with the age score he would make in tests of musical ability, mechanical ability, social adjustment, etc. A subject has, strictly speaking, a number of mental ages; we are here concerned only with that which depends on the abilities tested by the new Stanford-Binet scales." (Terman & Merrill 1937, p. 25)

Or perhaps you would prefer the point of view of David Feldman, a psychologist specializing in the scholarly study of precocious and highest-IQ individuals?

"Put into the context of the psychometric movement as a whole, it is clear that positive extreme of the IQ distribution is not as different from other IQ levels as might have been expected. . . . While 180 IQ suggests the ability to do academic work with relative ease, it does not signify a qualitatively different organization of mind. It also does not suggest the presence of ‘genius’ in its common-sense meaning, i.e. transcendent achievement in some field. For these kinds of phenomena, IQ seems at best a crude predictor. For anything more, we will have to look to traditions other than the psychometric and to variables other than IQ." (Feldman 1984)

The one independent science writer who has had access to Terman's longitudinal study files at Stanford points out that IQ tests are a great way to miss future Nobel Prize winners. Amazingly, Terman’s study catchment area in California included two future Nobel Prize winners, but both were rejected from inclusion in the study because their childhood IQ scores were too low (Shurkin 1992, pp. 35, 395).

REFERENCES

Feldman, David (1984). A Follow-up of Subjects Scoring above 180 IQ in Terman's Genetic Studies of Genius. Exceptional Children, 50, 6, 518-523.

Shurkin, Joel N. (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston: Little, Brown.

Terman, Lewis & Merrill, Maude (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

After edit: I see several replies elsewhere in this thread are citing Wikipedia articles as the last word on their subjects. It's important to point out that most Wikipedia articles don't reflect the best research literature known even to Wikipedia editors,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...

largely because the Wikipedia articles on human intelligence as a broad subject have been the subject of much edit-warring for years

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...

and some editors continue to push their point of view, relying on unreliable sources, into multiple Wikipedia articles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...

zb• 15 years ago

There's a very good interview here: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/200808... with Jim Flynn (discoverer of the Flynn Effect - essentially IQ inflation) where he talks about how we value different kinds of intelligence and what IQ tests are actually measuring. It's worth listening to if you are at all interested in the subject. (Bonus: RMS!)

michaelpinto• 15 years ago

Don't let that article fool you kids — I met Issac back in the day and while he may have been modest about his IQ it didn't make him shy about using powers of the mind to charm the ladies. He was also an advocate of using your smarts to get ahead...

_gd3l• 15 years ago

Asimov is fucking brilliant. So are his sideburns. +9,000

monkeypizza• 15 years ago

The problem with this is that we now have totally abstract IQ tests, the invention of which did not break the concept of intelligence as a measurable thing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravens_Progressive_Matrices

lusr• 15 years ago

Interesting definition of "now" ;)

"J. C. Raven first published his Progressive Matrices in the United Kingdom in 1938."

"all entrants to the British armed forces from 1942 onwards took a 20 minute version of the SPM"

edit Just found a copy of and tried the standard test. Very easy once you see what they're testing in each group. Basic pattern matching and boolean shape operations for the most part. Last question was visual arithmetic. According to Wikipedia this only measures the "reasoning" component of Spearman's g. I can honestly admit that my reasoning is pretty questionable, having found myself in numerous questionable situations in my life ;)

neurophos• 15 years ago

I read somewhere that I ought to comment on these links, which is a shame because most of them speak so well for themselves. Does truth need comments, opinions? I'm sure I'll warm up to all this, but sometimes an unfiltered observation is a good way to start.

espeed• 15 years ago

What is intelligence, anyway?

Many view genius as having a high IQ. I view it as extreme form of insight rather than a measure of IQ, although a high IQ helps. I like to think of genius in terms of perspective and thus measure it by how rare and valuable a perspective is.

Your level of insight/understanding will vary from one domain to another. A financial genius like Warren Buffet sees how the financial world connects in a way that few others do, but that insight/understanding doesn't necessarily mean he'll see the connections that an artist sees and yet you might say that both are genius.

grandalf3• 15 years ago

I think this essay makes a good point but largely misses the mark.

Much of what the vast majority of people do with their brains is a biproduct of training, and little of it can be attributed to intelligence.

In most fields there is some combination of motivation and intelligence necessary for success. It is my view that an IQ of 110-120 is more than sufficient for abundant success in nearly any field. 40% of the population falls in this range.

So Azimov's "discovery" that his mechanic possesses intelligence even though he lacks education just illustrates Azimov's own biases. I'd argue that the mechanic, if properly cultivated, would likely have been able to excel in a wide variety of careers thought to require far more intelligence than being a mechanic appears to Azimov to require.

Also, Azimov's description of the mechanic's work style suggests that he found it oddly crude but appreciated it in a mystical sense, as if it was so far removed from his own abilities as to be unfathomable, which is absurd.

ominous_prime• 15 years ago

An error that may change your outlook a bit-- only about 16% of the population fall into the 110-120 range (roughly 74th to 90th percentiles)

grandalf3• 15 years ago

It doesn't really change it. One in 6 is close to saying one person in every household, and so intuitively it negates the notion that intellect sufficient to achieve at the highest levels is scarce.

mynameishere• 15 years ago

Headline: Man with extraordinary high IQ becomes extraordinary author.

I'm not sure what his point is. Intelligence, by even the crudest methods of measurement, is the core human trait, and will help determine every important thing every human does. He assumed a mechanic was stupid because he seemed low-rent. Headline: The mechanic probably wasn't stupid in the first place.

chegra84• 15 years ago

I think the problem with IQ is the labelling. They give somebody Genius status without ever having to produce genius status work. In a place like america, there are suppose to be like 3 million genius(cut off 1%). I really haven't felt the impact of the many, just only a few.

billconan• 15 years ago

When I was in high school, I topped my class. Some of my classmates started to call me about questions in their quizzes. I could remember the exact descriptions of the quiz questions back in few months. So when they asked me about certain question, I didn't need my exam papers. They told me the number of a question, I could give both the question and the answer. I didn't remember the question on purpose, I simply did because I took the quizzes. I lived in an Asian country, where daily quizzes were more than 1 hour long,

My classmates admired my ability of remembering things. I enjoyed that feeling quite a bit. Yet, I couldn't take any intelligence test.I was afraid that the result of my test might look bad.

I often hear about Gene scientist saying that they have discovered certain gene that defines certain "ability" of people, for example, "good-looking gene", "criminal gene". It seems that everything is deterministic (to some extend) by genes.

It sounds like at certain time in the future, they can discover a "loser gene" such that a child can be tagged in his young age.

Gene technology is making Determinism more true than ever before. And that is a very horrible fact. If I knew that I would be a loser, I would have given up my life.

I was afraid of IQ tests, I still am. I want to try different things in my life, no matter if I am inherently good, or bad at it. IQ tests are evil. They are the ruthless lifetime sentence against endeavor.

pjscott4• 15 years ago

Genes are a lot more complicated than that. Unless you get some really blatant genetic problem, like Down Syndrome, there's a very heavy environmental component to how you turn out. And that's exactly what you want, isn't it? You want your life not to be predetermined, or even predictable -- and that seems to be the way things really are!

Of course, some people do wind up with, say, a genetic predisposition to alcoholism or depression. But if you have something like that, wouldn't you like to know about it? If you know that you're predisposed to alcoholism (or whatever) then you can do something about it, instead of just letting it happen to you.

palish3• 15 years ago

Apologies, but this attitude is quite annoying: "As long as you're healthy and a hard worker, you too can be a genius! It just takes time!"

If anyone bothered to try to answer the question "do genetics matter much?" by examining real-world prodigies, they would be forced to conclude "Yes, genetics are equally important to upbringing/environment".

Read through this, then claim genetics don't matter:

"This was Richard Feynman nearing the crest of his powers. At twenty-three ... there was no physicist on earth who could match his exuberant command over the native materials of theoretical science. It was not just a facility at mathematics (though it had become clear ... that the mathematical machinery emerging from the Wheeler–Feynman collaboration was beyond Wheeler's own ability). Feynman seemed to possess a frightening ease with the substance behind the equations, like Albert Einstein at the same age, like the Soviet physicist Lev Landau—but few others."

— James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

Fun fact: Feynman mastered Calculus by age 15. He didn't just learn it; he derived it himself.

Game_Ender• 15 years ago

Gattaca explores this concept nicely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca I think we will get there someday. Then after that, those who can it afford will flip on all the intelligence genes for their children. That world will be a much more "interesting" place then one where you know you were "born stupid". You will be less intelligent because you were too porn, or your parents didn't believe in genetic modification.

RockyMcNuts• 15 years ago

It's hard to definitively describe or measure intelligence.

But it seems beyond dispute that for any given task requiring it, different people will perform measurably better or worse.

And some people will become highly proficient at a wide variety of such tasks quicker than others.

adulau• 15 years ago

I especially enjoyed the final part "Because you're so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn't be very smart."

If you think about it, it's very similar when you try something new that breaks the conventional boundaries. If you have a huge education, you tend to avoid it because you usually learned this before. Sometimes, you need to ditch your education, to try something not conventionally accepted. In other words, education is key to find the things you should experiment.

It's like in art you have to know the rules to break them into an useful way.

bpd1069• 15 years ago

IQ-like tests reward speed, and as such all alternative/possible answers are not explored. In his story, he failed because he quickly devised the pattern from the deaf-mute and extrapolated gestures as the method of communication.

Deliberative thought is penalized in IQ-like tests and that is, in my opinion, a huge mistake.

unwind• 15 years ago

Someone, please fix the spelling in the title, incredibly grating. It's "Isaac".

palish3• 15 years ago

Who cares, and why? (Honest question.)

He certainly doesn't; he's dead. And everyone knows who we're referring to, so there's no ambiguity. Everything seems to indicate "it doesn't matter", and yet apparently it does to some. So why?

A nice example of how people are inherently illogical...

rootbear• 15 years ago

Dr. Asimov never liked it when his name was misspelled. My name is common and rarely misspelled, but I think I would feel the same. It's just a matter of respect.

collateral• 15 years ago

On a bit of a tangent, but since encountering many such people in college, i've wondered why the intelligent ones tend to be more cynical, shy, closed up.

tete• 15 years ago

I also reach ridiculously high IQ score on tests (no, not online one ;p), but I know I am not smart. In fact I am very dumb. This proves that IQ test have a lot of flaws.

Besides that I don't think intelligence can be measured. I know neuronal networks are simulated in a very similar way, but it still can be used to explain the concept of IQ is nonsense.

It's the same nonsense with people claiming brain size related or genomes relate with what people mean when they talk about intelligence. There are people who had half or their brain removed (for example because of epilepsy) which disproved pretty much every claims made. Some of these people were able to live a pretty much normal live, studied, etc.

david927• 15 years ago

But Asimov's answer was an indication of intelligence -- not the opposite. Intelligence often means dealing at a conceptual level as opposed to a more detailed level. There's a reason that there's the stereotype of the absent-minded professor. He or she will publish an important paper and then leave their sweater at work. They've sacrificed one level for the other. Asimov's mistake answering the question was the same as forgetting a sweater -- he just didn't spend any effort thinking about it.

And as for his point that there's an educational bias to IQ tests -- that's just silly. The intellectual requirements of being a nuclear scientist are more stringent than those of being a car mechanic. The qualities we ascribe to intelligence map more to the former than to the latter. Next, IQ tests don't measure intelligence. Intelligence is qualitative, like beauty, not quantitative, like height. We use it to look for attributes of intelligence. Knowing a woman has high cheekbones doesn't tell you if she's beautiful, but it gives an indication that she might be, for what that's worth.

Issac Asimov: What Is Intelligence, Anyway?

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