My experience of Mensa was that there’s always at least one conversation going at any time along the lines of “if we’re all so smart, why aren’t we all rich?”
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Meanwhile, rich people be like: “I’m rich, so obviously I’m smart!”
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It’s the obvious corollary, and it’s equally wrong for the obvious reason that intelligence is neither necessary nor sufficient for success and/or wealth.
But the idea that if you’re smart enough you can make the rules work for you and get ahead is just so entrenched, that it’s really hard to get your head around the idea that as a factor it’s heavily outweighed by inheritance, luck, and sociopathy.
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Huh. I’m surprised they’d have to discuss that. You’d think they would realize that wealth does not equal happiness or fulfillment. And I’m assuming that if they’re in MENSA, their basic physical needs are being met, so they aren’t living in poverty or anything. Smarts is measured in questionable ways!
It’s like a bunch of rich people asking, “if we’re so rich, why aren’t we happy?”
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I think they do ask that, at least subconsciously. And the answer is always, “Because we aren’t rich enough!”
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It’s almost like human intelligence is hard to quantify and a bit like nailing jell-o to tree.
But you know stupid when you see it.
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The world would have far fewer problems if that was true for most people. This is why we hear about those who have been struggling to undo the damage caused to family and friends by con artists, conspiracy theorists, and cults.
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My retirement plan is better.
Because all that matters in life is money, money, money… /s
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True and I mostly mean this in very general terms.
It’s easy to point to something and say it’s smart or dumb but as far as human intelligence is concerned it’s kinda hard to quantify and put on a definitive chart. Same goes for pointing at somebody that does smart things and thinking they are smart in every other way.
I guess I’m cynical and thing boiling intelligence down to a 3 digit number might be folly… then again I’m a dog on the internet so what do I know?
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I do think general intelligence is a real thing. That said, when I think of intelligence I am reminded of the time Anne Coulter used an ableist slur against Obama and John Franklin Stephens (Global Messenger of Special Olympics Virginia) wrote an open letter in reponse.
Turns out having more general intelligence than someone else doesn’t make you better than them (like, at all).
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In our department we HAD two aerospace engineers who routinely wangled others to do their work for them… then claim credit for it. (I avoided them like the plague after being one of their victims.) When discussing work, they did not display any brightness or contribute meaningfully. One even boasted as to his cleverness in cheating on a computer science exam. And a PhD (turbomachinery design/development) we once worked with came up with a result (and I am not exaggerating here) that any typical 4-year-old would have gotten right in one second simply by looking at the process being studied.
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g or General Intelligence “exists”, in that it can be measured in most people most of the time. Mostly.
For those up the back who haven’t done the reading: there is no test for g (g being the thing which is measured in IQ. That is, g is the thing, IQ is how you measure it, like temperature is a thing, °C is how you measure it). What there are are tests for aspects of memory, problem solving, spatial manipulation, general knowledge, that sort of thing. Those tests are calibrated so that for most people, the tests all come out (after some finagling) to roughly the same answer, where most people cluster around 100.
For most people. There are some people for whom that doesn’t work. Like, where the working memory is dismal, but the verbal or spacial tests are in the 90-somethingth percentile. Like me.
g is a thing insofar it’s a meaningful summary of a large number of characteristics, distilling it all down to a place on a one dimensional scale, which only works because most people are boring more or less the same in quantifiable ways.
It’s when g isn’t a meaningful number because a person isn’t so easily summarisable that it gets interesting.
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