What is intelligence?

[Baruch]

Galton was a Victorian prodigy ... but his work on eugenics has been superseded ... but he did a lot of other good stuff ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton

Basically genius isn't inherited .. but one has to claim that in a monarchy like Victorian England.  Genius seems to be associated with compensation for genetic or congenital damage.  Today the fad is about high-function autistic males.

[jonb]

I have worked with and met some very inventive people both in the creative field, and some inventors.

Although many of them were very intelligent it does not seem to me that was always the case, or some of them must have had super abilities at hiding their intelligence. I would say that the defining feature of the creative inventive mind is the same as that of the great entrepreneur a sort of bloody mindedness, that they were willing to look at, or work at, or pursue an idea when everyone else around them just thought they were daft and wasting their time.

Think of how many great scientists and thinkers artists showed no sign of it through their schooling. I would say for every Mozart there could be ten Einstein patent clerks, or bottom of the class science pupils called Stephen Hawkin.

Genus I think is a title given to people that have been successful at this inventive process and little other meaning, while those that have wasted years pursuing something that has given no discernible result are called mad men.

One of my heros is Eric Laithwaite an English electrical engineer, known as the "Father of Maglev"



Do we call him a genius or a madman that depends on whether we look at his work with linear motors or gyroscopes at the moment.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Laithwaite

[josephpalazzo]

@ Mike Cl, stromboli

I don't know if we are raising his/her intelligence, though there is definitely  something going on when an individual becomes more knowledgeable and experienced as he/she will behave in such a way to  find better solutions to a problem. It seems that in these cases the individual has become - through knowledge and life experience - more aware of different possibilities, and so acts more intelligently. But with extreme intelligent people, they can easily find these multitude of possibilities without the knowledge or in spite of lack of experience. This is what divides them from the norm.

[Baruch]

jonb - good point regrading stubbornness.  Edison and his English competitor, Swan ... Edison tried countless samples to come up with the light bulb.  Also it takes courage, a lecture by Glenn Seaborg I heard about ... he said that some researcher actually gave up on a topic, for fear of the opposition of other academics, that he was subsequently successful at.

[jonb]

Oh and I can remember when the mighty corporation IBM ruled computing, who was going to back some layabout students in a garage?

There is a thing about management structures that they depend on stability and new ideas often cause instability. Often academic and economic structures in practice can suppress new ideas because they can undermine the status of those in control. Which I think why often the groundbreaking ideas and inventions come from some nutter working away in a shed not from the experts in the know.

[Mike Cl]

@ Mike Cl, stromboli

I don't know if we are raising his/her intelligence, though there is definitely  something going on when an individual becomes more knowledgeable and experienced as he/she will behave in such a way to  find better solutions to a problem. It seems that in these cases the individual has become - through knowledge and life experience - more aware of different possibilities, and so acts more intelligently. But with extreme intelligent people, they can easily find these multitude of possibilities without the knowledge or in spite of lack of experience. This is what divides them from the norm.

I quite agree.  It seems for most of my life intelligence was presented as a single number, single trait thing.  And that the intelligence test could measure it.  'What is you IQ?', was a popular question in my schooling days.  I don't think it is like that.  A person's total intelligence is an uneven thing.  I think it quite normal for a person to have a high IQ in some areas of life and low in others.  And I think  that the IQ can be raised with training and dedication.  Genius is different.  Yes, it is IQ, but I think it is narrow.  Same with a so called savant (I think of Rain Man), their IQ is off the charts in a narrow area, but very low in all the others.  Same for a genius, except the other IQ areas are higher and some may even be high all across the board.