No, intelligence is not like height

What Is Intelligence, Anyway?

By Isaac Asimov

What is intelligence, anyway?

When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me.

(It didn't mean anything. The next day I was still a buck private with KP - kitchen police - as my highest duty.)

All my life I've been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I'm highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think so too.

Actually, though, don't such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests - people with intellectual bents similar to mine?

For instance, I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was.

Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.

Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test.

Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I'd prove myself a moron, and I'd be a moron, too.

In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly.

My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.

Consider my auto-repair man, again.

He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me.

One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: "Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand.

"The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?"

Indulgently, I lifted by right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers.

Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, "Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them."

Then he said smugly, "I've been trying that on all my customers today." "Did you catch many?" I asked. "Quite a few," he said, "but I knew for sure I'd catch you."

"Why is that?" I asked. "Because you're so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn't be very smart."

And I have an uneasy feeling he had something there.

~ ~ ~

Autobiography by Dr. Isaac Asimov (1920–1992): It's Been a Good Life

Excellent, “because you’re so goddamn educated.”
- What's great is that after reading this I used this exact gag on my (very educated) wife, and she fell for it too!
Funny, but that's not how it works. A (good) intelligence test doesn't ask you about stuff you learn in school. They are designed specifically to not have this problem.

(Some of them have categories where education helps you. This is on purpose and should have little influence on the final score. This is for the more detailed results.)
- Everyone knows a good intelligence test asks you Raven's progressive matrices -- the one true sign of intelligence -- and nothing else
  
  Edit: I was of course joking, but from my own link:
  
  The high IQ societies Intertel and the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry (ISPE) accept the RAPM as a qualification for admission,[14][15] and so does the International High IQ Society.[16] The Triple Nine Society used to accept the Advanced Progressive Matrices as one of their admission tests. They still accept a raw score of at least 35 out of 36 on Set II of the RAPM if scored before April 2014.[17]
  
  Sounds like some pretty depressing societies. Give me a secret cool kids club that's all about mazes any day of the week. I like mazes.
- Please read the mismeasure of man I beg ef you. Intelligence tests are fucking bullshit and all the testmakers have known it from the very beginning. Unless you are of the opinion that the noble art of skull-measuring holds any water, that is.
- you mean something like posting this comment to sneerclub? or are all your posts like this?

an hackernews:

a high correlation between intelligence and IQ

motherfuckers out here acting like "intelligence" is sufficiently well-defined that a correlation between it and anything else can be computed

intelligence can be reasonably defined as "knowledge and skills to be successful in life, i.e. have higher-than-average income"

eat a bag of dicks

Intelligence is when money.
ooh can I play? A species' or race's intelligence can be reasonably defined by how rapidly it extracts resources from the surrounding area.
That would be the Lexus-and-the-Olive-Tree definition, like the one by which McDonald’s burgers are the best cuisine
These must be the same people who say your rich because you are worthy in God's eyes.

🙄🙄🙄
"A high correlation between intelligence and the thing we define intelligence as"

Second, is the more common "IQ isn't intelligence" trick. Sure, the measure doesn't encompass everything that is making intelligence, but it is still a somewhat interesting proxy as there is a high correlation between intelligence and IQ.

Any time you see something like this, what it’s really saying is:

IQ is intelligence to me and nothing you say can dissuade me. I just have a high enough IQ to write a disclaimer for plausible deniability.

Also:

I took an online IQ test in 2004 and scored 160 i am very smart --hakernews, probably

Imagine being a skilled San Francisco-style tech worker, at the apex of your industry, and the heights of intellect and rigor you can scale outside of that very specific context turn out to be "race science" apologia. Probably a lesson in there somewhere.

It's pretty on-brand for a techbro to search for answers in what they see as "the code" (genome) while ignoring the entire rest of the fucking world.
- They're too stupid to understand anything beyond "the code", its unsurprising they're treating it as a technological hammer in a world of nails

I knew this was good stuff when the majority of HN commenters where huffily complaining about the tone.

In particular, two semantic tricks are used. First, the fact that current genetic markers aren't a good prediction for IQ heritability is used as an argument against it. The other likely explanation that our understanding of those markers is widely incomplete is not explored.

Unlike our understanding of IQ, the game of matching shapes where the loser gets a teen pregnancy. That's been fully explored.

Science: “our current understanding of genetics leads us to believe IQ is not heritable”.

This fucking guy: “IQ is heritable and you just haven’t proved it yet. Citation: I belong to a race with good genetics, unlike you”
- Honestly, I'm really surprised to hear that IQ is not even a little bit heritable, given that IQ test performance correlates with level of education, which correlates with wealth, which is heritable.
  
  True, wealth is not genetic, but heritability has an interesting definition which leads to some unintuitive cases of heritability abd non-heritability. For instance, wearing earrings is heritable while having ears is not.

I want to make a HN account and reply to the 'depression and schizophrenia is or isn't a hardware/software issue' posters and tell them there is actually is a working IQ test, and they all just failed it.

@Soyweiser @sneerclub It is not possible to understand neuroscience using a “hardware/software” paradigm. That is a model created by humans to make building working computers possible. Brains develop without any such abstraction constraining the process.
- Or at least what people are thinking of as "software" is wrong; neuroscience is 100% "hardware". Can't expect techbros to understand memetics or iatrogenic illnesses, though, not when they're fixated on the idea that people with depression/schizophrenia/etc. are having "issues" rather than experiencing society.

We see height highly correlated to genetics, but only in places without widespread childhood food instability...

All kids getting proper nutrition and calories means they reach the max height they have DNA for.

So it's hard to compare to IQ in places where public education is shitty.

If kids aren't living up to their potential due to poor schooling, then it's going to look like there isn't a genetic component.

Like, identical twins where one grew up in luxury while another grew up in abject poverty will not be the same height.

Here's an actual academic study that goes in depth on it:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270739/

Tldr for the article (but it's worth the read):

There's lots of genes that effect intelligence, so rather than try to look at them individually like the article does, you need to look at a genome wide polygenic score

But a lot of the misunderstanding in OPs article is treat "IQ" as a single score. It's like SATs, people say the average of a bunch of small tests rather than list all of them. Two people with 120 IQs could be good at very different things.

So while it may be hard to correlate certain genes with an IQ score, it isn't to correlate a gene with a specific part of the IQ test like processing speed, associative memory, or fluid intelligence.

Comparing it to height just shows a complete misunderstanding of what IQ even is...

Ooh I was there for this one! Fun convo.