If the statement: “People may cry when chopping onions” is true, then the statement " People may not cry when chopping onions" is equally true.
Do you understand that?
If the statement “People may not cry when chopping onions” is in fact also true, then explain how this statement supports a conclusion that chopping onions causes people to cry.
You are either playing games or are unable to grasp simple logic. In either event, it’s clearly not something I can help you with.
Exactly. Now I think you might get it! Congrats! It isn’t the onion per se, that causes people to cry, but the individual’s personal level of sensitivity to irritants, of which the sulphuric acid in onions is one example. Of course it would be stupid of us to say that cutting up onions is the only way that people’s eyes would be irritated - we know that lots of different types of activities cause irritation of the eyes.
If we spent all of our time going on about onions as the cause of tearfulness without understanding individual differences in responsiveness to irritants in any context, people would rightly point and laugh at us, and we wouldn’t want that.
Yep, and as per Assertion 3 we agreed that the level of “sensitivity” is the same among people with high and people with average IQs. This was part of the argument, remember?
In any case nice dodge of the fact that your logic didn’t hold up.
Actually, what am I doing? I’m as tired of this as no doubt everyone else is.
Hentor, you win.
My original post way back at #90 was obviously based on faulty premises, and contained logical errors which you have brilliantly exposed.
There’s a documentary about IQ named “Baltle of Brains”, they speak about an IQ test that was done to school children many years ago and then repeated to th same persons when they were old and their IQ was the same.
On one hand it shows what seems like common sense: In general, people with high IQs have more of tendency to be professionals that require thinking, such as scientists, physicians, engineers, accountants, etc. People with low IQs tend to be janitors, truck drivers, etc.
But if you look at the distributions, each occupation has a very wide range of IQs. Some electrical engineers have IQ below 100. Many janitors have IQ above 100. So you couldn’t tell, just from someone’s IQ, what kind of job he’d end up with. I think it’s in that sense that IQ tests don’t give much information about one’s future prospects.
Interesting, or maybe more disturbing, that the fellow fixing your vehicle could have an IQ in the Forest Gump range. Hopefully he’s committed and/or creative.
Or just experienced.
I wouldn’t have thought that vehicle repair was a role that frequently required thinking outside the box.
Of course some faults are hard to diagnose, but I’d be willing to wager that the best approach for such faults is to be systematic and methodical, rather than relying on a flash of insight.
Honestly I can’t swear I’ve ever heard that claim made in precisely exactly that many words. But an attitude basically along those lines is one I’ve encountered enough to have started this thread. Certainly I’m not saying “hey, you and you and you, Mr. SDMB posters bob and joe, you were guilty of this hyperbolic claim, now my clever thread has bested you”.
Of course, I didn’t ask about a one-to-one correspondence, I asked about a correlation. It’s easy to construct singular examples of people who either are or are not viewed as clever by their society for some very specific reasons which wouldn’t apply outside that society, but isolated examples (which are, of course, purely hypothetical) do not a correlation disprove.
Are there correlations between a student’s SAT math and verbal score? (Obviously that doesn’t prove anything, because students who go to better schools will better educations in all areas, yada yada yada. But it ought to be possible to correct for all of that…)
And more generally, even if we were to assume that there were 5 or 10 totally independent types of intelligence (and I tend to fall somewhere in the middle… I think there are various types of intelligence, but I don’t think they’re completely distinct, and I also think there are correlations between how strongly people have at least some of them… certainly there are people (even excluding idiot savants) who are math geniuses but can’t write poetry at all and vice versa, but I don’t think they’re independent variables), I think that many of them would be helpful in a wide variety of situations in a wide variety of cultures. But we’ve kind of wandered off into the land of pure supposition here.
Well, that’s a bit of an contrived example, primarily because it involves kids. However much we might like to make fun of rednecks or whatnot, do you think that adult members of that culture are unable to recognize that quiet old Bob who lives down by the river and doesn’t watch sports, might be smart? In general, I think a kid who would, if he went through the modern educational system, have a talent for Math and Science, is likely to have some kind of talent for SOMETHING comparable, depending on what culture we’re talking about. Fixing cars? I mean, I’m not saying your example is impossible, but you’re kind of stacking every last variable possible and you still might well end up with someone who grows up to be the town schoolteacher or something. And again, say Bob there does fall through the cracks and his peers never realize he’s smart. That still doesn’t mean that the popular kids still can’t have an idea among themselves of which of them is smarter, even if they exclude poor Bob, and that could still easily lead to the correlation I’m hypothesizing.
Sure, you rip them out of their lives and drop them, unexpectedly, into an aboriginal setting, and they’ll do terribly. As will 99% of modern people. That’s not saying much. The real question is either, if they had been born into that society in the first place (assuming IQ is at least partly hereditary), or if they become acclimatized into that society over a long period so that they learn the general way of life etc (note that I specified that for my initial posing of this thought experiment), would they eventually seem more clever, on average, to people in that tribe than other similarly acclimatized moderners? (Let’s also give the tribesmen credit for being sophisticated enough to distinguish between knowledge and intelligence. Someone with working practical knowledge of weaving, or blacksmithing, or mineralogy, or something like that, might be SUPER-valuable to the tribe… doesn’t mean they’d automatically assume that person was a genius.
OK, I understand your point now, and it’s certainly not prima facie ridiculous. Although for Bob’s company to do better than Jane’s company, a few things have to all be true at once:
(1) Creativity is WAY more important than intelligence in a company’s success, so much so that a few key Bob individuals being creative more than compensates for every single Jane individual being far more intelligent than their Bob counterparts
(2) The correlation between IQ and creativity has to be weak enough, and the standard distribution of creativity has to be high enough, that the most creative members of Bob’s group are significantly more creative than the most creative members of Jane’s group, despite Jane’s group having a higher average creativity. (And of course at least one article someone linked to here claims that the IQ-creativity correlation goes up to the mid 160’s in IQ…)
In any case, though, I assume that if I modified my thought experiment as follows:
We take a starting population of one million. We find all the people with IQ 135-145. Jane can hire from that group. We then count Jane’s group and randomly choose an exactly equally sized group of people with IQ 95-105. Bob can hire from that group. Which company does better?
Then you would guess that Jane’s company would do better?
More tasks in the world is equivalent to more tasks in the businesses. If we have two widget manufacturers, they’re both going to need X number of janitors, Y number of factory drones, Z number of data entry people, W number of customer support representatives, etc. If you have a room full of Einstein clones, and you’re forcing Einstein to mop floors and take out trash, instead of being in the R&D department, it’s fairly likely that he’s going to be bored by the task. His tolerance for tedium isn’t less than someone of a lower IQ, but there are more tasks in a real-world company that are too simple to provide sufficient interest.
Point in fact, it’s a decently good bet that we’ve evolved to be that way. A tribe of monkeys doesn’t need 30 leaders. It needs 1 leader, 1 wise man, and 28 grunts. Making the grunts smarter is probably good, but only up to the point where they and everyone is fully aware that they’re wasted on the task.
Of course, in the real world, it seems likely that the group would change its dynamic. The widget manufacturer populated by Einstein clones would give up factory work and become a total R&D company, with people taking turns doing the boring jobs. There’s no need to maintain the evolutionarily accepted pyramid hierarchy of work if you have a non-representative selection of humanity.
Only for those positions where creativity really is going to matter. But yes, I think it matters more, and no, I think Bob’s going to net more than a few. And that’s just creativity. There’s also stuff like EQ etc.
Why would they have a higher average creativity (unless Jane is selecting for it)? Her people are all over in the “no correlation” section - we can’t say anything about their creativity as a group. It could be all over the map.
I already addressed the flawed 1953 study that number’s based on. I prefer Torrance’s number of around 120, considering he made this his life’s work from the 60s till he died recently.
I’d say it’s more likely (but not certain - I still think the high IQ *tend *to lack social skills and be more prone to mental disorders like Asperger’s) to do better, because you’d have eliminated the one advantage the average IQ people have (a larger pool of varied other abilities) - essentially handicapping Bob’s choices.
I thought the implication was that there was a positive correlation between IQ and creativity up to 120, but the correlation stopped at that point, ie, people with an IQ of 140 have the same creativity, on average, as people with an IQ of 120. Or is that not the case? The only link I followed and read was the one about the “twisted pear” diagram and it certainly didn’t seem to be saying that creativity then decreased after 120.
A super-quick check on Wikipedia seems to indicate that it’s all controversial:
It doesn’t *necessarily *decrease. But that doesn’t mean you can say it’ll be the same on average, either. No correlation is just that, “*no *correlation”.
