Sigh. If you had thoroughly read my post, I think you wouldn’t have glanced over an important point I made. I’ll repeat.</p>
<p>Intelligence is something we don’t know about completely. That’s simply because we haven’t discovered it obviously. When you’re talking about social matters such as success, it’s important to keep your perspective. It’s easy to measure success when you don’t lose sight of what you mean by success. I’ll repeat the example I used. A guy with a 115 IQ could be an engineer based on his socioeconomics status, maybe his race (which may affect other things, not just genes as far as we know), whether his parents were divorced or not, etc. All of that information and where it came from is irrelevant. The point is, he got the score he got, so we can predict how easy it will be for him to succeed in engineering. When we say succeed, it clearly means that this person has the balance of prior “innate” sort of knowledge required to make the engineering material manageable for him. For someone with a higher IQ, engineering would be easier, clearly, though we can’t say for certain how and which parts will be. It’s important to keep the scope of the IQ test in mind, because when you start trying to define intelligence and what the IQ test really means, it’s irrelevant. It’s just a prediction, it can’t tell you all these things you want to know, we just haven’t gotten there yet.</p>
<p>There’s no need to dive into deep philosophy and try to define all these things we don’t need to. As long as we keep in our sights what’s relevant, we can achieve what we’ve wanted to. I think that’s the main problem with these IQ tests: people expect too much of them.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Intelligence has a genetic component but the genetic component alone does not determine one’s final intelligence. If we get to the point where we can have a Gattaca-like society then I would not have a problem becoming part of one but those more “naturally” oriented may.</p></li>
<li><p>The dog example is weak because there are many ways a dog may die; there’s only one way to obtain an I.Q. score (testing). Still, congratulations on proving statements are invertible! :D</p></li>
<li><p>Life is not fair. This is why certain people of certain privileged backgrounds try to “brainwash” others into believing only the former is capable of success while the latter is not. If a rich family adopts a poor kid and said kid ends up with a respectable I.Q. we may say I.Q. is more closely related to education and socioeconomic background than some fuzzy genetic background. Still, does not explain why many poor people become wealthy.</p></li>
<li><p>Individual differences exist within the human race; genetically, physically, chemically, etc. the issue here is that within engineering and science, the skills needed are generally quantitative skills, critical thinking skills, creativity, and abstract reasoning. Two of those can be reliably trained (quantitative and critical) but these two are generally considered to be the “litmus test” that determines who becomes an engineer and who does not.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>To answer your question, English is my 3rd language. I was born somewhere between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.</p>
<p>(<int(a)> > <int(b)>) && (a in A, b in B) => P( int(a) > int(b) ) > P( int(b) > int(a) )</int(b)></int(a)></p>
<p>Where int(x) is the IQ of person x, A is the set of engineers, B is the set of all non-engineers, <int(x)> is the average intelligence across all members of group X.</int(x)></p>
<p>Is it always true? No, but without proof I hypothesize that it is usually true.</p>
<p>Important question: if you have never taken an I.Q. test, how did you know you were capable of completing a CS program? Would you have changed your mind if you had known what your I.Q. level was?</p>
<p>"Intelligence has a genetic component but the genetic component alone does not determine one’s final intelligence. "
If you read what I wrote you’ll see I said this already.</p>
<p>"Intelligence has a genetic component but the genetic component alone does not determine one’s final intelligence. "
No, Enginox, it isn’t weak, I have apparently just failed to make myself clear. You claim that “If education tells I.Q. then I.Q. tells education.” Implicitly what you’re saying is that “(A => B) => (B => A)”. This is easy to disprove by letting A = T, B = F. Notice that I just proved your syllogism false.</p>
<p>“Life is not fair. This is why certain people of certain privileged backgrounds try to “brainwash” others into believing only the former is capable of success while the latter is not.”
Prove any of that.</p>
<p>“If a rich family adopts a poor kid and said kid ends up with a respectable I.Q. we may say I.Q. is more closely related to education and socioeconomic background than some fuzzy genetic background. Still, does not explain why many poor people become wealthy.”
I already said this, except without committing the fallacy of concluding that heritable IQ must have no bearing at all.</p>
<p>“Individual differences exist within the human race; genetically, physically, chemically, etc. the issue here is that within engineering and science, the skills needed are generally quantitative skills, critical thinking skills, creativity, and abstract reasoning. Two of those can be reliably trained (quantitative and critical) but these two are generally considered to be the “litmus test” that determines who becomes an engineer and who does not.”
If that is all true, explain the correlations in job performance and attainment with measured IQ. You’re saying that it’s coincidence and that, by extension, statistics is all smoke and mirrors.</p>
<p>“That’s like most of the world.
AMT you can put your math tools back in your toolbox, that’s just overkill man.”
Just trying to inject some clarity in an otherwise woefully abstract discussion. That is what I mean, and if you are familiar with the formalisms employed, it should be very easy to understand what I am saying, at the least, and then determine whether it is reasonable or not; indeed, you could probably judge its truth or falsity in that form, or in a form derived nearly from it.</p>
<p>“Important question: if you have never taken an I.Q. test, how did you know you were capable of completing a CS program? Would you have changed your mind if you had known what your I.Q. level was?”
Like I said, I have taken online IQ tests, but only after I got to college. My friends and I would usually try them after a few drinks to see who was the farthest along. That being said, I just went for it and it turned out that I was able to do quite well in my CS program. Had I not been able to hack it, however, I would have found out as I went along. However, if I hadn’t been able to hack it, I would have accepted it and done something else instead. I never said you shouldn’t try to do what you want, only that some people probably lack the innate ability to hack it. There’s nothing wrong with them; the only wrong thing would be denial, or angry feelings that you should be doing better, or whatever. Just accept the hand you were dealt and play it the best you got. Nobody cries on Jeopardy (except that one kid, lol).</p>
<p>I haven’t felt like going through this thread completely, but I do want to make a comment.</p>
<p>So far, I’m doing rather well in Engineering GPA-wise at a highly ranked school. As best as I can tell (which I honestly believe to be quite accurate), my intelligence is about .6 to .9 standard deviations above the median, which corresponds to an underwhelming IQ range of about 109 to 114. So far, I’m doing it, so it shows that you really don’t have to be all that smart.</p>
<p>I guess I can respect that, AMT. My philosophy is different. My parents taught me from an early age that anything I wanted to accomplish required hard work and dedication. To this day, anything I wanted to accomplish I’ve been able to accomplish it just by figuring out which pieces to play and how long should I play them. I’ve never felt smart or dumb but I’ve felt that anytime I did not accomplish something was due to not putting enough time or effort into the matter.</p>
<p>This is especially true now that I began my undergrad. I’m more concerned about what to study than anything else since I feel I can complete any program I desire. If I can do it, anyone can.</p>
<p>(blog-like style post ahead)
I prefer watching popular culture shows than the Discovery Channel science programs. Can I still be an engineer? I’m not like the MIT geniuses born with a protractor in their pocket.</p>
<p>Maybe I should do a marketing degree and aim to be VP of Discovery Channel instead. I appreciate the sciences, maybe not that much. Maybe I need professional career counselling.</p>
<p>On my Tivo, between Glee and a “Greatest Inventions” show I taped for ‘educational purposes’, I chose Glee. Eep!</p>
<p>I dunno man, I have all four channels on favorites: Discovery, Travel, History, Science. All in HD too! But I don’t think that everyone needs to be brilliant or even at the same level as successful people in the sciences. Everyone can appreciate science because it really is a beautiful thing to learn about. It’s nature, who wouldn’t want to understand the world they live in?</p>
<p>I can’t stand documentaries (or even the news for that matter). Usually for me it seems too pretentious or too watered-down. I only watch movies and adult swim -esque shows on a regular basis. My girlfriend loves documentaries though, esp. animal planet. Different strokes.</p>
<p>I do read a lot, though, so I get my non-fiction fix by other means.</p>
<p>Normally I find that documentaries are good for a sort of priming of a difficult topic. When I first started learning about quantum mechanics for instance, it’s a bit difficult to simply dive in to a book and learn it so easily, so documentaries helped. But I agree they’re usually watered down, but it’s inspiring especially with all the shiny cool graphics.</p>