Quote Originally Posted by KukriKhan View Post
There's lots of dumb smart people, and lots of smart dumb people. Measuring those degrees is possible I'm told, but it has always flummoxed me. The only truly stupid people I've met are those in a rioting crowd. Individually, they were probably perfectly OK guys, but when 'group think' kicks in....
Eh, I've never met any smart dumb people or any dumb smart people. Definitions are tricky I guess.

Many tasks require knowledge and practice to be able to do competently. Intelligence doesn't really deal with that, it's generally seen as a more general thing like "athleticism". You can be generally athletic, but terrible at a sport. Because to be good at a sport you have to know how to play it, and to have practiced playing it. The redefinition of intelligence that so that it can be divided into physical, verbal, mathematical, social, etc doesn't seem very intuitive to me. Although I don't know if they've ever proved the existence of some underlying general intelligence that would be comparable to athleticism (which has maybe never been shown anyway).

But it seems like in the same way that I could become a faster sprinter than all of you by training at it for years, I could become a master plumber by training at it for a few years, even if I'm not particularly athletic or not particularly intelligent.

I think the IQ test measures it well enough to be used as a predictor doesn't it? That seems fairly obvious. I don't get the backlash