this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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Don't forget about different types of intelligence. There's sharpness, memory, puzzle solving, and so much more - someone could be extremely high in one category and abysmal in another.
But what seems to trump them all is emotional intelligence, which has almost next to nothing to do with normal intelligence? Or rather, has more to do with being raised by parents and oneself, I think bc wisdom (e.g. a willingness to learn from others' mistakes) has little to do with intelligence (the ability to spot mistakes on one's own, not necessarily coupled with a willingness to do so though).
Bc of all this, it's not so easy to simply judge someone as being "smarter" or "dumber". Though if they are making an extremely obvious mistake, or say something that took you a decade to puzzle out, then there's that evidence to go on - sometimes the other person makes it very easy to see who they are, at least in that moment, in that specific sense of intelligence.
Agreed, there are many types of intelligence. It is not often that you have people who are high in many types.
I don't really agree that EI trumps the others. EI is great and important; especially where managing others. It really depends on the problem you are trying to solve.
I would say having high self awareness (which maybe a type of EI); is super important, knowing what you are and are not good at; will stand you in good stead no matter what you are doing.
Knowing the correct thing to do that will fix things (high IQ, e.g. making a vaccine), yet not doing it (low EI, like refusing to take said vaccine), leads to bad outcomes. Conversely, I've never seen anyone fired for being unintelligent (low IQ) who was willing to work with their employer (high EI).
Like making a nuke is great, but knowing when to use it - and more importantly when not to - is even better? And today's version: IQ resulted in climate change, yet will it now save us, or will we need to develop some EI as a culture or species to survive the massive issues facing our entire planet?
EI seems more mandatory to exist, while IQ... is great and fun and all, but not anywhere close to being on the same level. At least, that's what shows such as Star Trek taught me:-).
Maybe we can say that EI is necessary for longevity, while IQ provides more the spikes in processing power to get through a particular task in front of you. But even there, most tasks that people associate with "intelligence" have rather more to do with sheer dedication than anything else - e.g. math ability relates to patience to learn from constant mistakes especially those made early on prior to building up confidence, studies show. That patience helps you learn math, which literally makes you smarter (legitimately, bc it increases your capabilities).
Ergo even though intelligence is measured as IQ, it appears not to be a foundational but rather at least in large measure a derived characteristic for people. Which is why I was saying that EI trumps it: e.g. a genius who committs suicide helps nobody. But yes, locally there are times when IQ is more important, ofc.
You could easily argue that high EI has caused more human suffering than anything else.
Being highly charismatic (high EI), means you can get others to follow you. You can manipulate and mislead.
Not every high EI person is morally good.
Specifically on the global warming comment, scientists at the oil companies knew about and wrote reports about the global warming potential in the 1970's, they knew it was bad. Their bosses (theoretically higher EI leaders) kept it quiet...
I haven't read deeply enough into EI yet to get into the psychopath issue, but e.g. this and others seem to suggest that not only do psychopaths have wobbly EI scores depending on whether they want to participate or not, but that those tests are not good to begin with, reflecting more whether someone is willing to give the socially acceptable answer, or dare to (admit to being) different. In either case, I was thinking before more along the lines of an "emotional health" than actual processing ability, so I guess I was wrong about the definition of EI, though it's nonetheless interesting (to me:-) to see how central that issue apparently is.
Even so, "Power" is defined as the ability to do work. IQ has given us nuclear technology, which unlike EI grants us a power that we never had before - the ability to end human habitation on this (or any specific) planet. Thus IQ can be misused as well. EI grants people power too, but either way it's up to the (ab)user to decide how they want to use their power, regardless of its source. And if EI really has caused more harm & suffering than IQ, then that is all the more evidence that it is more powerful.
But perhaps this is all a false dichotomy - if IQ and EI are components of a vector, then is IQ the amplitude and EI is the orientation? So like, IQ makes a gun but EI is the one who decides who the weapon gets pointed at - maybe even back at ourselves? Importantly, IQ is societally cumulative, so before we made the gun, we still had access to a knife, and before that a rock, and before that our fists. But maybe EI is societally cumulative as well? That part I'm not certain about, except so many people lack it (but then again so many lack IQ as well:-), that it seems more difficult to preserve and pass on between generations.
Which might not be true except locally in our history - i.e. with the recent (in historical timescales) advent of the internet, knowledge (IQ) became much more readily available, but now that we are in the mis-information era, that may no longer be true moving forward. "Secret knowledge", like that vaccines actually work and help you live for nearly a hundred years, rather than being witchcraft among peoples who if they live to be thirty may be considered "elderly" (bc who wants an aging worker class slave, possibly actually learning things and as a result getting "uppity"). Perhaps EI has always been more along those lines - some things work well, others don't, and the truth being buried amidst the misinformation, hence (safe-)guarded and preserved by fewer people within each population? I dunno, that's getting too theoretical, but I found the thought interesting at least:-).
In any case, whether my analogy with a vector is way off base or not - perhaps it is too specific and it is rather more like IQ and EI are simply different routes to Power, the ability to change things via different methods - anyway, it does seem that any discussion of IQ lacks something crucial if it does not also include EI as well.
If I was going to map something like ability in vector space; I would put IQ and EI on orthogonal axis. Each a component of the overall ability vector.
But to this you would have to add (just for mental parts), components of memory (storage and recall), curiosity, how do you measure creativity? The overall vector becomes the unique position in n-space, where n is the number of components you choose to measure.
Just a note knowledge and IQ are not the same. From psychology today:
From my reading over the years, IQ tests have been modified many times to try to remove any specific references to knowledge. One example is the removal of the question of "what colour are rubies?" this was because it unfairly penalized poor people who may never have seen a ruby.
I think your musing around different routes to power, is probably not far off base. If you are really high in either IQ or EI you probably have high potential to gain power (just different types).
This discussion has gone off on a wonderful tangent :)
Before we go any further into the vector idea, I have to return to the thought of "health". I mentioned that a supremely intelligent person, lets say a genius of 250 IQ (yeah I know, we'll get to that term in a moment but ignoring it for now...:-), commits suicide, after first lets say his partner leaving him b/c he ignored them and focused too much on work - i.e., low EI. But importantly that's only one small component: what if he had not only perfect IQ, but also perfect EI as well, yet still committed suicide... and yet that only b/c he had a terminal illness that would have killed him painfully within weeks? Or perhaps he has perfect health, in that moment, yet his oxygen supply is running out, and will be dead in mere minutes, where his IQ, EI, or physical health cannot save him? Now we begin to start recapitulating Maslov's hierarchy of needs, where some things - like intellectual curiosity - only become important after our other, more basal needs are met, air being one of the prime ones, but also food, water, shelter, security, and the like.
And then sex is an oddity, arguably more primal than most others, since someone will give up access to most of those - if not air then food, water, shelter, security etc., in order to have even a chance at a sexual encounter. Which we know is important, nay crucial, to the survival of the species, even if fairly low on the scale of importance to an individual's survival - i.e. someone can die at 100+ years of age as a complete virgin, so it is not necessary at all, at least for the individual. But that does show the interconnectedness of concepts that we claim to be "more foundational" (like food), yet that sometimes shift positions and at least temporarily become dispensable in exchange for something that is, as I just mentioned, not important at all.
So if IQ is less foundational than EI, and both are less foundational than health, then that means... what? I don't even know, but perhaps they don't need to be on the same dimensional plane at all, maybe it means that we really can talk about "intelligence" separately from other matters, such as emotional acuity? But while that may sound nice in theory, I really don't think that works out in practice, b/c sometimes the absolute smartest people can do just the absolute DUMBEST things!:-P And it's b/c they really, truly are less "intelligent", in that particular area, e.g. perhaps they can solve mathematical equations that nobody has figured out for hundreds of years, but for the life of them they cannot remember their wife's anniversary date and after missing it the 5th time in a row, is now reading divorce papers handed to them.
So whether it's a vector, or two vectors, or no vectors, any particular theory about this aspect of humanity could be challenged in terms of its specifics, and be either partially or even wholly wrong, but the main TLDR is this: intelligence is COMPLEX, and therefore as you brought up, not so readily judged.
Knowledge I would argue is not even in the same category as Intelligence at all - knowledge can be written in a book, or carved into stone, so mere "knowledge" is a collection of messages, which requires zero intelligence at all, especially if a computer that is dumb as a rock can handle it.
But I know what you meant: "Intelligence is not the same as IQ" - the latter is a specific attempt to measure the former, and is hella wrong, in all manner of ways. I recall a similar discussion about the SAT involving essays written up describing yacht trips - a poor person, or perhaps even a wealthy(-ish) one living in the midwestern states, VERY far away from any kind of ocean, may have never been yachting in their entire life, or even know of someone else doing so either. It is an "unfair" (as in: unequally biased) type of question that favors elitism at the expense of others who may be just as smart, yet not know those particular cultural matters quite as well (and therefore btw those kinds of questions were removed, though I am happy to see the trend continuing - although I would hope that everyone would know "ruby", e.g. in one of the earliest and most revered films of all time Wizard of Oz they talk about "ruby red slippers"... although then again, how many people know of e.g. Charlie Chaplan, so I can kinda see from several POVs there; but I did want to point out that you don't need to have SEEN a ruby, as in irl, b/c movies, TV, and the internet do exist!).
So... Intelligence is all things to all people, yet not equally so, and in particular there is a stigma among people who lack it who feel poorly about that, perhaps having been chided in the past for something related. But high-IQ (or EI) people are no "better" than those of low status... (imho at least) and yet they are more "powerful", in that they can accomplish more things. As too can someone with greater musculature, and yet that is less rare, plus less valuable for other reasons too in this era of machines.
Though imagine this: 1000 years from now, when people have literal computer chips placed into their heads (probably biotech at that point rather than plastic+metal, or even spiritual-tech if we find a way to tap into something outside of our physical realm, like if this is The Matrix and we can even temporarily tap into sudo commands from "above" the normal rules:-), at that point will "intelligence" be of any value whatsoever? And yet even in that distant future, "character" still seems like it will be of great value b/c it is far more foundational than anything else (in my hypothetical imaginings, plus many sci-fi books, e.g. Greg Bear's "Moving Mars" explores this).
We start to see glimmerings of this even now: e.g. what use is "memory" when we have pocket internet + calendar + insta-communication? In ye olden days, winning arguments could be done by deploying a fact that the other side did not know yet. Not so today, as the recent debate with Trump v. Kamala Harris showed... or as the debate with Nixon v. JFK identically showed >60 years ago. One of them says something that rattles the other, who then "wins", based almost totally on EI considerations and almost none at all of IQ ones. IQ has no "power" to solve things in that arena... though with computer assistance, high-EI people can do things that even the highest-IQ ones of the past would never have been able to (or perhaps requiring months, decades, or would have required millennia under some theoretical condition that they could survive and remain focused on the issue all that time).
So anyway... yeah, it's complicated. :-)
The needs thing is interesting. But you can't really have a conversation about the higher needs without the lower needs being satisfied first.
Right... so is that "all" that EI is, another level below IQ, like physical safety is below either of those, or is it perhaps another half of the same rung on the ladder?
I don't know, maybe nobody does, maybe someone does and I just haven't heard it from them:-).
They are so extremely similar though - both involve a type of processing, both involve puzzle solving, and memory, and other shared components. It's just that one pertains to matters of the heart, and the other the brain.
And to my knowledge there isn't anything else like it to be a third, but neither can we seem to isolate a discussion about just one, without the other getting pulled in as well. Like to learn math (IQ), patience (EI) is required, while to avoid mistakes (EI), we have to first understand (IQ) what might happen. The dichotomy is everywhere we look, at least among matters pertaining to humanity.
This I feel deserves its own separate reply. THIS is what Reddit (supposedly, though before I joined it) was supposed to be about - connecting people so that they could have enjoyable conversations about topics of interest. Ofc, as with any wide open playground area, it quickly became overrun by both cyberbullies and literal children, who now derail every attempt at conversation over there, with smarty-sounding (to them) replies like "show your references", "no You show Your references", "NO, ~why~ ~am~ ~I~ ~shouting~?, YOU SHOW YOUR REFERENCES", and now there basically is no reason to ever go to Reddit, as it is merely an energy-draining profound waste of time. (I am speaking from one POV ofc, which is obviously biased, as I did not traverse the entirety of Reddit so can only say what I saw, and inferred from others talking, and anyway speaking of a general trend, which does not imply that there were not some small corners acting as pocket hold-outs against the general trends.)
This is the hope that the Fediverse offers: after Huffman did... what he did, those of us with a conscience and/or who could see the writing on the wall left (+ those of us who were going to leave anyway b/c there simply was no longer any point to remaining).
These types of conversations - with respect, with intellectual curiosity, based on facts - are sadly rare even here. But they do happen, unlike Reddit, which is really notable, imho.
Yes, I was involved in a bunch of Reddit communities that were really good.
But it go to the point where it shit the bed; it was time to leave. I was happy to find Lemmy. I haven't been back to Reddit in around 6 months.
I don't do algorithmic social media. So Lemmy is really up my alley.
https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb is a really good read about that. e.g. Lemmy can be bad as well, even if to a significantly lesser degree.
Also while on Reddit I found myself becoming angrier, more combative in my argumentation, less empathetic and kind, etc. Trolls cause that effect - it's definitely no bueno. And sometimes literal teenagers can act like trolls, without even really meaning to or trying at it, just not thinking about it.
That was when I gave up my pride of being willing to listen to literally everyone - it's just flat not worth it, it is harmful to me, not helpful even for them, and perpetuates a cycle of negativity.
And Lemmy definitely requires a heavy hand on the block button, I have found!:-) But then after all that effort, in the midst of the noise, occasionally some worthwhile people and conversations can come through.
So don't be too afraid to block people here. I wouldn't do that for someone who is unintelligent, but I would most definitely do it for someone who consistently engages in trolling behavior, intelligent or no.