Who would have thunk it?
Posted on 11/20/2011 9:02:21 AM PST by Pharmboy
HOW do people acquire high levels of skill in science, business, music, the arts and sports? This has long been a topic of intense debate in psychology.
...what seems to separate the great from the merely good is hard work, not intellectual ability...Malcolm Gladwell observes that...snip “Once someone has reached an I.Q. of somewhere around 120,” he writes, “having additional I.Q. points doesn’t seem to translate into any measureable real-world advantage.”snip..
But this isn’t quite the story that science tells. Research has shown that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields — and not just up to a point.
...David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow...tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who...scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate highly with I.Q). ... The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, [etc.] A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.
...we have discovered that “working memory capacity,” a core component of intellectual ability, predicts success ... snip..
It would be nice if intellectual ability and the capacities that underlie it were important for success only up to a point.... But wishing doesn’t make it so.
None of this is to deny the power of practice. Nor is it to say that it’s impossible for a person with an average I.Q. to, say, earn a Ph.D. in physics. It’s just unlikely, relatively speaking. Sometimes the story that science tells us isn’t the story we want to hear.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the ClassroomHe concludes that it's hard work, persistence and practice that makes people stand out in all fields, including intellectual ones like mathematics and science, not just sports and music. I like this quote from the book: The best geologist is the one who's seen the most rocks.
I had a friend who was a natural musician. He received a full-ride music scholarship. He couldn’t get up in the morning to pass his mandatory english classes. Lost his scholarship. He’s a baker now. Another friend, very little talent, but willing to practice all the time......he’s a carpenter. My experience in music is that some people are naturally gifted musicians. The rest of us can practice our behinds off, but we’ll never be as good.
I’ve got my youngest daughter started on this, http://www.khanacademy.org/ . I wish I had gotten my very smart son on it ten years ago.
Ping
Who would have thunk it?
I agree that hard work, practice, and persistence will suffice for 99.9% of normal professions.
But to be a truly great mathematician, scientist, or artist you need talent that is off the charts. The genes that made Leo Slizard, Johnny von Neumann or Vincent van Gogh just don’t come along very often.
Howard Gardner has long flogged the idea of “multiple intelligences”. Unfortunately, it is really just a way to treat talents that are not significantly cognitive as if they were the equivalent of “g” so that those who aren’t intellectually gifted and their patrons can pretend that excellent dancers, for example, are the intellectual equals of those with high IQs.
There are many ways in which people can be talented, but not all of those talents are “intelligence” in the sense being discussed.
The absurdity of the situation is easily made manifest. Suppose we consider a culture in which kinesthetic activities such as sport and dancing were valued in the same way that we value high IQ. Now suppose that to avoid having those who lack superior kinesthic abilities(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/kinesthetic) “feel” inferior the cultural elites decide to proclaim that there are many “kinesthetic abilities” that are just as important as sports and dance - playing chess and doing mathematics, for example.
By the way, there is a literature on what IQ tests measure.
There are two things.
1. Memory
2. Common sense
Or as my daddy said.
1. Book smarts
2. Street smarts
1. Who you know.
2. Who you [censored].
Or
1. Money
2. Family
3. Connections / networking skills
Ecclesiastes says it best:
"The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor riches to the intelligent, but time and chance happen to them all."
(But as Murphy's Law reminds us, the race is not always to the swift, but that's the way to bet.)
Cheers!
Needless to say the OWSers were the bottom of the barrel in positive genetic intelligence factors. They do however continue to practice their idiocy over and over again.
-Albert Einstein
This is one area not well studied. Yet this finding points to an area where different abilities intersect.
The brain is the origin of ALL behavior etc. Thus there is very much a linkage between intellectual areas of the brain and the other ability areas.
Additionally it is found that repeated physical exercise can increase one's short term memory.
I see your argument as an important (street smart/common sense smart) point to not fall away from. Yet. There is so much that is being discovered as all these areas and 'abilities' intersect and reinforce one another.
To memory and common sense I would add pattern recognition.
Not sure where you know a lot of PhDs from, but that's not my experience of them. The ones I know are usually normal, likable people in their private lives, and if you met them you would think they were nice. They tend to know how to do things, too. One guy who is a professor at a major European university restored his sixteenth-century house with his own hands, is a good artist, speaks several languages well, is uproariously but self-deprecatingly funny, and is magical with children. He can rebuild a transmission when his van breaks down in the middle of the desert Southwest. He does significant research in mathematics and physics, and kindly nurtures younger graduate students.
Not every PhD I know is so wonderful, but the "piled higher and deeper" accusation is not necessarily fair, and my observation has not been that others make fun of them, or that they can't do anything outside of their profession. Even if a person with a PhD doesn't know how to do a lot of other things, why would that make him worthy of laughter? Someone has to make advances in medical research, in physics, in geology, chemistry, electronics. So unless you think that we don't benefit from breakthroughs in immunology and electrical engineering, you have to admit that the researchers do make an important contribution to the quality of our lives and our society.
None of this good stuff applies to PhDs in Education or Transgender Studies or other such nonsense, of course! ;-)
If you put it that way, then "intelligence" refers to one specific way of using one's brain. Because no matter what skill is under consideration, all skills arise from cultivating a part of the brain. Whether it is the athletic part, the academic part, the artistic part, or whatever. Perhaps there should be words equivalent to "intelligence" that refer to cerebral gifts other than academic intelligence.
As far as intelligence and politicians go--well, that is a difficult one. Anyone with an IQ above 90 could have foreseen that forcing banks to make loans to people would cause great trouble down the road. Congress started pressuring the bad loans in the 90s; every attempt to stop that policy was met with demagoguery. So, clearly, politicians do NOT often act in the most intelligent way possible, and often, act in the least intelligent manner.
When I was a child, I spent my time finding samples to examine under a microscope, observing interesting specimens, or reading anything scientific that I could get my hands on. I played around with math--by the age of 11, I had figured out aspects of calculus that I didn't learn formally until I took calculus in college.
It's all a matter of having one part of the brain more developed than another part, I'm sure. Whether that manifests as academic intelligence or as artistic talent is a matter of which part of the brain happens to be more developed.
I think that all these things are properly called “Talent”, as in Rush’s line “Talent on loan from God”. High intelligence is just another talent. Beauty, I guess could also be considered a talent, but lucky for those people it requires little work to develop.
There are many ways in which people can be talented, but not all of those talents are “intelligence” in the sense being discussed.
I don't quite agree. Academically, I'm quite intelligent, and have always intuitively understood things that other people sometimes cannot understand at all, no matter how well they are explained. But there is no way I am ever going to be good at a sport, no matter how much I practice, even if I had the best coach in the world training me. I would say that people who are exceptionally talented at a particular sport have a brain that is just as focused and agile in the manner of sports as mine is in the manner of academics.
The absurdity of the situation is easily made manifest. Suppose we consider a culture in which kinesthetic activities such as sport and dancing were valued in the same way that we value high IQ. Now suppose that to avoid having those who lack superior kinesthic abilities(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/kinesthetic) “feel” inferior the cultural elites decide to proclaim that there are many “kinesthetic abilities” that are just as important as sports and dance - playing chess and doing mathematics, for example.
Um, isn't that the culture we live in now? No kid ever wins popularity contests by being the smartest in their class--in fact, that often makes them a social pariah. And I can't think of any scientists who pull in 7 figure salaries, but I hear of athletes who do, all the time.
True, but I'm an artist, film maker, and broadcast personality, with an intense lifelong interest in natural science. I too used to peer through a microscope and collect specimens as a boy. So who knows?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.