Very interesting. What do you think of talking about intelligences rather than monolithic intelligence. Intelligence in one area, as you say, doesn't assure intelligence in another though some may be correlated.

There is also a distinction to be made between ones "talent" and the access one has to it. The brain is so complex and does so many things at the same time. This guy on the piano, I believe, is an example of someone who doesn't get bogged down worrying about how he does what he does. He simply allows the capacity to play through him without much conscious control. Or so it appears to me. The conscious mind is a fairly narrow wave length.

Went ahead and read through the rest of the thread. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. I don't tend to be very medically minded but I'm sure my wife will be coming up with some questions which I may like to pass on from her.

Yeah, I think in general the idea of IQ is at least parly busted. It is meant to represent a general intelligence, which means if you study one or two intellectual tasks, you should be able to assume that ALL intellectual tasts will correlate reasonably well-- which they do, but not enough to establish a useful measure of the mental greatness of an individual.

I think a double statistical measure, while unpopular and dickish, could at least say a little more: a combination of mean scores but also of variance among very many tasks, with low variance meaning a person is generally of that level, and a high variance pointing to savantism. Also important could be the top scores one gets or the lowest ones. If there was a skill involving catching or throwing objects, for example, I'd do poorly. If there was one involving quickly navigating mazes, I would destroy it, because I'm Rainman crazy genius at mazes.

(December 6, 2015 at 8:45 am)Aractus Wrote: Define "general intelligence". IQ has another weakness - it compares you to other contemporary people. If you compared the IQ's of people the same age 30 or 40 years ago, on average they'd be significantly lower (from memory something like 10-20 points lower!): does that mean people 30-40 years ago had lower intelligence? Or that they learned less? How do you account for such a discrepancy?

There's no discrepancy. IQ is a stastical measure across a population, with 100 being the average and scores being measured based on standard deviations, IIRC. And I don't find it harder that given the same test, they'd score lower-- because we have an almost infinitely greater exposure to all kinds of information and challenges, via technologyh, that they didn't have. I can easily play dozens of games of chess in one day, for example, and would probably destroy the average hobby player of 50 years ago quite easily.

"General Intelligence" is the idea that there's a single function which determines the overall intelligence of a person. This is partly true: certainly, we've all met people who are clearly dumb in almost every way, and those who almost always "get the point" even with new tasks or ideas.

Now, this isn't a measure of WORTH. It's only a measure of certain types of skills which we've arbitrarily defined as intelligence. But the same goes for everything else: what, exactly is beauty and how could you score it? How about athletic ability?

(December 5, 2015 at 9:42 am)Aractus Wrote: Iron is an interesting mineral. The body breaks down RBCs and recycles much of the iron so that 90% of a person's daily iron needs are met by the recycling of existing iron. The body really doesn't want to excrete it, thus some people end up absorbing too much iron even with a healthy diet, and the only way to thin it out is to have blood removed from the vein.

Bold mine.

You're kidding right? You need to look at the treatment for hemochromatosis and transfusion overload.

Back to nutrition: Is it better to deep-fry my Mars Bars in lard or in beef tallow?

Boru

(December 6, 2015 at 2:21 pm)Thena323 Wrote:

(December 6, 2015 at 1:14 pm)mh.brewer Wrote: Bold mine.

You're kidding right? You need to look at the treatment for hemochromatosis and transfusion overload.

What's wrong? I thought that therapeutic phlebotomy is the most common treatment for iron overload.

Nope. Mainly in hereditary hemochromatosis and then there are complications/co-morbidity to consider. Why would you bleed someone out that you gave a blood transfusion to? Standard is chelation therapy.