I have a pet theory that what we casually refer to as 'intelligence' or smarts is actually a three-pronged function of fundamental aspects of the way we think.
would be actual brainpower in terms of processing speed, the ability to be faced with completely new information and to process it into different information or meaningful conclusions quickly - like the high IQs or indeed autistic savants who can look at a number pattern or visual puzzle in an IQ test and waste minimal time on it.
would be knowledge base - your wealth of 'book smarts' or 'life experience' you can draw on, independent of the time or prompting you require to do it. This also depends on the strength of your memory and would account for why long and short term memory loss can affect intellect in different ways.
'wisdom' on the D&D char sheet, which I'd define as your ability to usefully pattern-match your knowledge base (2) to the world around you, independent of speed. You might be faced with new info and be able to perform transformations on it quickly in your head as in (1), but the new info might also correspond to old info in your knowledge store(2) which would affect the nature of this info and the way you should process it, so unless you're good at the application of knowledge to reality(3), every wider conclusion you're reaching could be trash.
so it's basically 'int'(in GHz)/Knowledge/Wis. I want to find a different term than 'Intelligence' for the first one, because that's the word everyone is already so attached to even though I think the concept is broader, but I can't think of one.
You can theory craft these to come up with archetypes that cover every kind of person across the board, such as a sheltered person with no life experience (low in #2), who is nevertheless academically gifted (high in #1) and able to apply their limited knowledge to a broad range of situations, like childish fables or Karl Pilkington outsmarting Ricky Gervais using comparisons he would never think of (high #3). Karl for his part would be low Int/low knowledge(I know he's experienced a lot but he always seems to go back to comparisons from his childhood and home life)/high Wis.
All the academics and researchers during the pandemic who continue to parrot covid lies are - the good faith ones at least - High Int (they deal with complex models and maybe they out-argue the uneducated in the heat of the moment), High Knowledge (lot of stuff to remember, lot of years behind the microscope), and zero fucking Wis ('lol idiot how could ALL my inputs be wrong, I guess EVERYONE in politics and science is lying huh?? conspiracy theorist! oh and you must be one of those nazis they told me about too!')
I've worked with peers who could engineer a solution to just about any technical problem handed to them...and they still believe communism will work and vote blue no matter who.
Sowell suggests that these kinds of people are attracted to systems with centralized control, like communism, because they imagine it would give them more power. If they can engineer a solution to any problem, arrogance would tell them that they could also "solve" societal issues in a childish "if I were king" way.
I think the other thing missing is how narrow the knowledge is. Everything is niche and field-specific and narrow nowadays. The world was a much better place when scientists were doing astronomy at night, chemistry on a monday morning and then reading the latest in geology and anthropology on a tuesday afternoon.
Knowledge being narrow makes mid-to-low wis people think they are far smarter than they actually are, and its preventing some important innovation I think. This is one of my soapbox issues.
Generalists are definitely under-appreciated. One of the refuges of the scientismo is to knock people back by saying akshully black is white because you don't have enough detailed knowledge in X field.
It has ramifications for human progress for sure. I was recently watching the Tucker podcast with Casey Means, the former surgeon and health researcher. She described medical education in the USA as multiple disciplines where no specialist is ever taught to look at the whole system of the body, hardly any being taught about nutrition for example. And as it turns out, of course, one of the best ways to never reach a solution to a profitable problem (chronic health issues in the wider public) is to break it down into various sub-specialties, all of which need their own paid specialist, gatekeeping their field using opaque language, and discouraging them from talking to eachother or from forming a generalised overview of how human health works. So you end up just finding multiple expensive non-solutions and that's more important than being actually correct, because you respected all the various specialists sufficiently and you followed the accepted process.
I have a pet theory that what we casually refer to as 'intelligence' or smarts is actually a three-pronged function of fundamental aspects of the way we think.
would be actual brainpower in terms of processing speed, the ability to be faced with completely new information and to process it into different information or meaningful conclusions quickly - like the high IQs or indeed autistic savants who can look at a number pattern or visual puzzle in an IQ test and waste minimal time on it.
would be knowledge base - your wealth of 'book smarts' or 'life experience' you can draw on, independent of the time or prompting you require to do it. This also depends on the strength of your memory and would account for why long and short term memory loss can affect intellect in different ways.
'wisdom' on the D&D char sheet, which I'd define as your ability to usefully pattern-match your knowledge base (2) to the world around you, independent of speed. You might be faced with new info and be able to perform transformations on it quickly in your head as in (1), but the new info might also correspond to old info in your knowledge store(2) which would affect the nature of this info and the way you should process it, so unless you're good at the application of knowledge to reality(3), every wider conclusion you're reaching could be trash.
so it's basically 'int'(in GHz)/Knowledge/Wis. I want to find a different term than 'Intelligence' for the first one, because that's the word everyone is already so attached to even though I think the concept is broader, but I can't think of one.
You can theory craft these to come up with archetypes that cover every kind of person across the board, such as a sheltered person with no life experience (low in #2), who is nevertheless academically gifted (high in #1) and able to apply their limited knowledge to a broad range of situations, like childish fables or Karl Pilkington outsmarting Ricky Gervais using comparisons he would never think of (high #3). Karl for his part would be low Int/low knowledge(I know he's experienced a lot but he always seems to go back to comparisons from his childhood and home life)/high Wis.
All the academics and researchers during the pandemic who continue to parrot covid lies are - the good faith ones at least - High Int (they deal with complex models and maybe they out-argue the uneducated in the heat of the moment), High Knowledge (lot of stuff to remember, lot of years behind the microscope), and zero fucking Wis ('lol idiot how could ALL my inputs be wrong, I guess EVERYONE in politics and science is lying huh?? conspiracy theorist! oh and you must be one of those nazis they told me about too!')
I've worked with peers who could engineer a solution to just about any technical problem handed to them...and they still believe communism will work and vote blue no matter who.
Sowell suggests that these kinds of people are attracted to systems with centralized control, like communism, because they imagine it would give them more power. If they can engineer a solution to any problem, arrogance would tell them that they could also "solve" societal issues in a childish "if I were king" way.
I think the other thing missing is how narrow the knowledge is. Everything is niche and field-specific and narrow nowadays. The world was a much better place when scientists were doing astronomy at night, chemistry on a monday morning and then reading the latest in geology and anthropology on a tuesday afternoon.
Knowledge being narrow makes mid-to-low wis people think they are far smarter than they actually are, and its preventing some important innovation I think. This is one of my soapbox issues.
Generalists are definitely under-appreciated. One of the refuges of the scientismo is to knock people back by saying akshully black is white because you don't have enough detailed knowledge in X field.
It has ramifications for human progress for sure. I was recently watching the Tucker podcast with Casey Means, the former surgeon and health researcher. She described medical education in the USA as multiple disciplines where no specialist is ever taught to look at the whole system of the body, hardly any being taught about nutrition for example. And as it turns out, of course, one of the best ways to never reach a solution to a profitable problem (chronic health issues in the wider public) is to break it down into various sub-specialties, all of which need their own paid specialist, gatekeeping their field using opaque language, and discouraging them from talking to eachother or from forming a generalised overview of how human health works. So you end up just finding multiple expensive non-solutions and that's more important than being actually correct, because you respected all the various specialists sufficiently and you followed the accepted process.