(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?
