From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@ricochet.net)
Date: Wed May 09 2001 - 06:40:07 MDT
J. Gourd wrote
> From the little exposure I've had to cognitive psychology, the few "types
> of intelligence" papers I've seen strike me as pseudoscience in the service
> of egalitarian wishful-thinking. Correct me if I'm wrong. But at any
> rate, the version of it which has trickled down to the masses, seems to
> hold that whatever an individual lacks in one area, he makes up in another.
> "Well, your little Timmy can't read, paint, or throw a ball, so he must
> have a lot of paste-eating intelligence."
and Damien wrote
>I think just for the moment I'll go along with Howard Gardner and Jerome
>Bruner and those guys who've been working in this area for the last few
>decades, and take Eliezer's guess as an interesting `sidewalk supervisor'
>opinion.
Well, I'll go along with J. Goard here. The advocates of Spearman's "g",
(for general intelligence), have been gathering data for the belief in
a mostly-single intelligence far longer than just the last few decades.
The overwhelming single fact about all the intelligence tests is that
high scores on one **always** predict a high score on the others. But
this also jibes with one's personal experience: you mostly know, after
just a few minutes conversation, how intelligent someone is (be honest).
Of course there are exceptions, and of course there are variations, but
on the whole this fits very well with the "traditional" view of IQ.
Lee Corbin
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