Girl Can't Name All the Continents?!

[tuq]

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I think you're wrong...not knowing the names of all the continents is like not knowing the earth revolves around the sun. It shows a complete lack of basic knowledge of the world in general.

Spelling mistakes are much less severe.

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I have no clue how you could say that. In terms of severity spelling errors are going to negatively impact someone's success way more than random trivial facts.

This whole topic also goes to the value of a college degree. In my line of work I am regularly involved in the hiring process. I don't give a crap about someone's education (in fact I tell them to put it at the bottom of their resume), I've met a billion degreed people who are idiots and just as many non-degreed people who are smart as hell. It gets REALLY annoying when we have a client who requires a degree. Rare, but it happens.

Cliff's Notes: suigin needs to start writing "you" instead of "u".

[Evan]

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Evan,

In your opinion, what IS important to know? Rattle some things off.

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I said this earlier in the thread, concepts are important. Examples: how US government is structured, basic physics, algebra...stuff like that. Specifics aren't really important and are dependent on what you like and what you want to do.

Facts, that aren't directly relevant to classes or jobs, are not important. Memorization is NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT a metric of intelligence.

[Evan]

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I think you're wrong...not knowing the names of all the continents is like not knowing the earth revolves around the sun. It shows a complete lack of basic knowledge of the world in general.

Spelling mistakes are much less severe.

[/ QUOTE ]
Dom, I bet you'd be hard pressed to find anyone that has ever had their lives adversely affected by not knowing the names of all the continents. Hell, you could probably even get by without actually knowing that the earth revolves around the sun because that pretty much isn't going to come up.

However, spelling mistakes affect people every single day, often in very important ways (like the resume example I gave). For every person you could find that actually failed the continents test in a meaningful setting, I bet I could find hundreds that did the same with spelling.

[Anacardo]

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Memorization is NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT a metric of intelligence.

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It is, though. Like - the capacity to remember information, organize it, and retrieve it on demand all relates to how fast you can learn, how well you can function without references, reading / conversation retention, etc. etc. etc. This totally relates to intelligence.

"The thing about abstract knowledge is, you end up using pretty much all of it."

[Austiger]

When Drew Barrymore was doing 5 questions on Kilborn, one question was "Name 2 continents that end in the letter A." She said Canada and China.

[Sephus]

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Memorization is NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT a metric of intelligence.

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It is, though. Like - the capacity to remember information, organize it, and retrieve it on demand all relates to how fast you can learn, how well you can function without references, reading / conversation retention, etc. etc. etc. This totally relates to intelligence.

"The thing about abstract knowledge is, you end up using pretty much all of it."

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agree strongly.

[Evan]

Cardo, let's say you're starting a company and you have two pools of applicants.

Pool A has excellent memorization skills. They will all instantly remember everything they read or that they're told. They will remember every line of every income statement they've seen in the last 5 years, they will never forget a scheduled appointment and they will remember all personal details they're told (name, birthday, education, whatever). Think of these people as a more socially functional version of rainman, hell, they can even count the toothpicks if you want.

Pool B has average to below average memories for trivia. None of them can name more than 10 presidents, none know the name of the Secretary of State, none know the difference between Iran and Iraq. However, these people all have excellent communication skills and they are able to quickly understand concepts; for example, how to value a stock, what makes businesses efficient/inefficient, or what demographics will be least price sensitive to your products.

Which ones do you want?

[Sephus]

i think people in both pools are virtually nonexistent.

edit: what i wanted to say is that if i knew someone had the bad qualities of type B i would be very surprised if they had the good ones.

[Anacardo]

Evan,

This never happens.

[Dids]

Intelligence isn't a catch all metric. There's different types of intelligence.

IMO- the most important part of intelligence is the ability to reason.

That intelligence that allows you to cram a lot of [censored] in your brain is [censored] pointless if you can't use it.