Me too. In one of his first threads, I started a reply with “Whoa. Too many words.” and he hasn’t demonstrated to me that his obfuscation is worth reading yet.
I love words. I even love big words, like “obfuscation” (meaning to make the meaning of something unclear by hiding it with impressive and incomprehensible vocabulary). But on a message board, clarity trumps poetry. Unless it’s EddyTeddyFreddy, of course!
At least he’s putting his stream of consciousness posts in IMHO now instead of Great Debates.
I understand the point Poly is making. He’s defining Intelligence as “capacity for understanding” vs. Knowledge as “information and experience”. Your IQ changes very little from the age of 10 or 12 through adulthood. It’s your knowledge and experience that makes you “smarter” over time.
Whoa ho!!!
twickster’s getting FEISTY in the pit today. Must have come across a tricky clue!!!
Man, I was thinking the same thing after seeing about the 20th piece of coberst diarrhea go trickling down the screen, but even I thought, “ah. . .I’ll cut the kid a break.”
Kid?
from here.
Oh, he’s slowly going nuts then. He sounds like an 18 year who just finished Intro to Philosophy at the local Community College.
I remember that one. At the time, all I could think was “Do you think “self-actualizing” is like “handsome”, “modest” or “genius” in that anyone who uses the term to describe themselves probably isn’t?” 
I should short-circuit him with my granddad, so they coul bullshit eachother to death.
I believe my “kicking the dead horse while it’s down” quota for today has been filled.
Frankly, what you wrote here doesn’t even reflect an understanding of the question. Your “IQ” is the artifact of a test, and that test is normed against those around you. Your IQ won’t change in the slightest as you age as long as your score on the test relative to others the same age doesn’t change. That’s because IQ tests are scored with that precise goal in mind; whatever the average score is, that average is then defined as IQ 100. Whatever the standard deviation is in that score, it’s set so that someone who does one standard deviation over the average has an IQ of 115. The scoring on an IQ test is designed for a very specific purpose, and it doesn’t indicate anything at all about the topic under discussion.
If you really think a 9-year-old is as intelligent as an adult but has less experience and knowledge, prove it. Or even devise a way to prove it. If people become uniformly smarter, or stupider or stay the same as they age, it won’t be reflected in IQ tests because IQ tests ultimately only measure your intelligence as compared to that of your peers. No one has even come close to devising any sort of objective, straightforward measurement of intelligence that would enable meaningful comparisons to be drawn between the intelligence of a 9-year-old and that of an adult. An IQ test certainly wouldn’t work. And, frankly, the very question presupposes things that are not proven to exist, like “general intelligence”. Since the only tool we have to measure this thing (usually nicknamed g) only works by comparing someone’s intelligence to that of their fellows, it doesn’t provide any way whatsoever to compare the intelligence of a child to that of an adult. An IQ test tells you, basically, something like “Little Jimmy is smarter than 63% of other 9-year-olds.” Twenty years later, if he’s smarter than 63% of his fellows - which ought to be true, accepting the theory underlying IQ tests and omitting brain injuries from the discussion - it doesn’t prove anything about how his intelligence at 9 could be compared to his intelligence at 29. It doesn’t even suggest a definition of “intelligence” that could possibly work.
I’m only talking about this because I’m mightily puzzled by the people who are making statements about the comparison between a child’s intelligence and an adults. If there’s at least some smidgen of actual, objective, empirical evidence that can shed some light on the subject one way or another, I’d love to see it. But I’d rather not have more bits of inadequate common wisdom parroted at me.
Or like someone that just woke up from a 50 year nap on a deserted island during which time an entire world burst from the clutches of the deep, dark sea.
ELEANOR –
Heh. 
TRUNK –
This was my take as well.
Still, I’m not sure we should nail him to the cross just yet. He seems to mean well, he’s just . . . dense. In which sense of the word, it has yet to be determined.
Oh, great, so I’m the SDMB’s poet lunatic? :dubious:
Well, yes – yes you are.
Brain cell death over time.
Ugh. That reads like an MCAT Verbal Reasoning Passage. In fact, I’m almost positive I’ve had an MCAT Passage that was essentially the same content.
At least he doesn’t end his posts with ten multiple choice questions.
I kind of got the impression he was working up to that.
Uh-huh. And how does that make adults less intelligent?
No, don’t answer right away. Because the fact is that we have very little idea of how the brain’s hardware actually works and where intelligence comes from. In fact, infants have many, many extra synapses, peaking at 6 to 8 months, and it’s understood now that the process of pruning them - eliminating extra synapses - is an important part of developing a functioning brain. Simply having extra equipment up there is not necessarily an advantage. And it can literally be said that we don’t know how the functionings of neurons actually create thought. And, as I’ve already explained, “intelligence” is a concept that can hardly even be defined, let alone measured; at very least, it is something highly abstract and it stretches the imagination to claim that we can predict any sort of connection between it and brain anatomy beyond at the highest levels like “putting a brick through someone’s head doesn’t help them think.”
I’d like to see a cite that states that IQ doesn’t change “one iota” over time. My information says otherwise.
I’d also like to see the definition of “intelligence” that you’re using. The one I’m using states “capacity” for knowledge.
God… you are sooo hot when you’re annoyed!
Excuse me? I already explained to you how IQ testing works. I’m not going to offer a cite on something like that, which is frankly pretty common knowledge for anyone who’s taken basic statistics. You can find references in a million places to explain exactly how IQ scores are normed; I’m sure Wikipedia would be a start. I gave a logical explanation of why that makes them completely useless for attempting to draw the conclusions you’re drawing. If you have a problem with my logic, please share it. I’d love to know if I’m wrong about this. I doubt you’ll be able to, though, until at very least you stop equating “IQ” with “intelligence” - as I’ve explained, one is a number that ranks you against your peers; the other thing is what the former attempts to quantify, and it hasn’t been uncontroversially demonstrated to exist as a measureable quantity.
Uh-huh. Go learn some about introductory psychology. You can found out pretty easily that the very concept of “general intelligence” as an independent, measureable thing is not exactly uncontroversial.