Quote Originally Posted by Lemur View Post
Point of order: I know exactly what my bedroom scale is measuring (mass*gravity). Can't say that with confidence about an IQ test; indeed, that's a big part of why I'm raising so many questions and objections.
Yeah, the scale measures mass*gravity*error rate for that scale. And IQ test measures questions right/time it takes or something. The quantitative aspects are pretty cut and dry. But you step on the scale ultimately to measure your health don't you? It's hard to say with confidence what "good health" is too.

But I'm not sure that's important to what sprung this line of thought. Many tests and scales don't measure outliers properly. But that's ok because they work for 99% of the population.

There must be some truth to that; a person who I know who get a full-ride scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago told me that almost half of her class was dyslexic. Clearly there's some relationship between re-wired perceptions and visual creativity.
Yup, which is partly why I don't see the need to posit a "creative intelligence" as Gardner does. One of his quotes is:

"I balk at the unwarranted assumption that certain human abilities can be arbitrarily singled out as intelligence while others cannot"

Which is I guess the source of his argument for multiple intelligences.

While the examples you give a good and valid, they aren't what I was driving at. To draw a broad (bordering on meaningless) generalization: Some folks are a bit thick, and they don't see anything complicated as such; brighter people are able to see just how complex a problem can be; and the scary smart people are able to see how simple the root of that complexity is. With some thinkers there is a definite quality of incisiveness which I admire.
I think this is a learning thing though. Like if I watched a chess game, I would see a move as simple. If I learned more about it, I might see a ton of complexity and how it was a countermove to a countermove. If I became a chess master, I might see at simple again, because now I see that all the moves and countermoves are part of an overall strategy, and the move was an obvious defensive move.

And I would be smarter if I'd learned that much. But intelligence is generally thought of as separate from that. What I think is tricky though, is that we say intelligence is separate, but clearly certain skills are required in order to be intelligent at all. Language skills for example. And I believe IQ scores have risen over time with education.

I guess I think of intelligence as: given two people with equal motivation, knowledge and resources (i.e. everything else being equal) who solves a problem faster, learns something faster, can understand something that the other person can't grasp? Like the equivalent of a 2 Ghz processor compared to a 1.9 Ghz processor, given the same task from the same program.