View Single Post
  #25  
Old 11-23-2007, 07:05 AM
Alex-db Alex-db is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: London
Posts: 447
Default Re: relationship between SAT scores and intelligence?

Everyone intuitively knows what "intelligence" means.

If classes of students of any age are asked to rank each other according to their natural view of "intelligence" it will correlate incredibly well with IQ tests.

Some people like to be nice to everyone, they want to be able to tell people who score badly on IQ tests that they can still be "intelligent" in their own special way.

So they attempt to change the meaning of "intelligence" and kick up a fuss about its definition whenever it is used in a way that is not all-encompassing.

If they have a good point, then all words are meaningless unless defined, and since you will attempt to define them using other words, everything is meaningless and everybody and every thing can be correctly described using every adjective that ever existed.

There is no non-meritocratic definition of intelligence that is of any use to us, and our standard natural definition (which matches IQ test) proves to have amazing predictive validity again and again and again.

We can tollerate telling some kid that couldn't be bothered passing a maths class that his "creative" doodles means he is intelligent in a different way, but lets not pretend that has a real meaning.
Reply With Quote