While not opposed to IQ tests, I do firmly believe in the concept of multiple intelligences. If that makes me a flaming lib/prog, that's ok.
It doesn't make you a flaming anything. It just means you are unwittingly a victim of a hoax that may or may not be intended to be a hoax.
In other realms, we all tend to agree that words mean things, and what follows from that is that we should do our best to use the same words to mean the same thing.
As a general principle, the concept of multiple intelligences is very reasonable; the problem occurs, though, when one begins to describe capabilities in one realm of intelligence using the language of an entirely different realm of intelligence.
For example, one of the newer alternative realms of intelligence is referred to as EQ, rather than IQ or EIQ. It stands for Emotional Quotient, and it is variously intended to, depending on who is doing the promotion, (a) accurately assess an individual's ability to negotiate the emotional states of hirself or others, or (b) prove that having a high score on an EQ is the equivalent of having a similarly high score on a standardized IQ test, and in the case of this latter end of the spectrum if one believes that then one is decidedly a flaming prog, because what's right behind such propaganda is the effort to prove that women and men are equivalent beings and/or that it just doesn't matter how one scores on tests, because they're all biased toward skills that don't really matter. All versions of critical theory espouse this philosophy. But this is unreal and dispositive on its face, because if they really believed that deep down, these people wouldn't have gone to the trouble of taking Duke Power to the Supreme Court in the first place. The reason why so many employers used traditional IQ tests as employment/hiring filters was that they
worked to determine whether individuals were suited for the positions they were seeking. If the tests were meaningless, they would have resulted in poor employment
outcomes, and employers would have abandoned them. Quickly. They also wouldn't have purposefully used them to discriminate against people with equal abilities from certain races who supposedly collectively just aren't good test takers but would be just as productive of employees, because to do that would put a company at a disadvantage in comparison to the companies who didn't restrict themselves from hiring productive and brilliant bad-test-takers.
I like the EQ moniker, because it doesn't on its face water down the legitimacy of the traditional IQ tests (which, by the way, are continuously being studied and tweaked).
This is the bottom line on this subject: In psychometric testing -- and this matters because this is the field that first formally defined the word 'intelligence' -- intelligence is very specifically defined as the ability to rapidly process information to create successful outcomes in matters both verbal and quantitative. If one wants a highly-expanded version of this, one should take the ASVABs; no battery of tests is more highly honed than them. But, for the most part, all the most respected standardized IQ tests (from the Stanford-Binet on down) are strictly timed tests (forcing test takers into a situation of rapid processing) divided into two distinct sections: verbal and quantitative (sometimes thought of as language and math). Until misguided political correctness started its stranglehold on the culture, the SAT was almost entirely an IQ test, and the results people get on the SAT track those they would get on an intelligence test. The ACT, on the other hand, is an achievement test, designed to assess how much one has
learned over the course of one's primary and secondary education. The difference explains why some individuals get a really high score on one and a really low score on the other. The now-abandoned traditional SAT test was so well vetted that, no matter how much one studied, about the maximum one could improve one's score from a day when one was hung over to a fresh day after tutoring was 100 points out of 1600 (weighted to make 1000 the average score). Now one can be tutored to literally pretend to be an entirely different human being and boost one's score by as much as 300 points, which illustrates why it has become a nearly useless predictor of undergraduate success.
Anyway, intelligence is the measure of how successfully one can process new information in rapid fashion.
These other 'intelligences' assess other human capabilities, and those other capabilities are indeed valuable, important, worthy, etc., but they don't really need to be called intelligences to have legitimacy. Generally, the whole movement to create equivalences is a movement to indirectly downplay the value of merit.
I have absolutely no sourcing other that memory of a citation somewhere that states that more years of formal education results in increases of IQ over time.
Many assertions are made about many different things, but most such assertions should have more accurately been presented as an opinion. Research has never corroborated such a claim, despite the fact that those who promote Big Ed want to consider themselves the repositories of all wisdom -- and want the rest of us to keep shuffling up to the trough to pay for the supposed boosts (including IQ) that paying for their services will grant us. Real research has demonstrated that the inverse is more likely to occur over time, with or without education: a decrease in IQ. Generally speaking, though, if one's IQ is properly measured at age 8, one's IQ score at 58 will be nearly identical. It's your operating system, and you can't change it. You can download new games and apps into it, but those games and apps are still going to operate according to the speed and memory capabilities of your God-given operating system.
Be careful when reading random statements about something as critical as intelligence to make sure that the person making it either provides sources that involve real research (as opposed to
Psychology Today or Dr. Phil) or encourages you to seek out that research yourself (the latter of which I'm doing here). We have all been bone smuggled by Dr. Fauci over the past year and a half due to willingness to accept so-called expert advice without considering the possibility that he is an Emperor with No Clothes or has agendas that propel him to make so-called "follow the Science" pronouncements that make him look good, put money in his pocket and advance the power agendas of his political cronies. The same can be said of the majority of mainstream anti-intelligence or alternative-intelligence 'experts.'
What they're speaking into is the listening people have of wishing that intelligence didn't really matter.
I think it is entirely reasonable to assume that intelligence can be grown, not just inherited. Your brain is part of your body, you can improve your muscle fitness, and surely improve your brain's fitness also.
And that sounds good, but the evidence is that what you
can do is preserve your abilities longer. There is this canard about how human beings only use 10% of their brain. CaCa! Every bit of the brain is used by every human being other than those with significant brain damage. Our central nervous system is organized so that we are only conscious of 2 or 3 things at any given moment out of the 30,000 pieces of information being sent to us from our receptors at those same moments, on top of whatever our soul inspires us to actively think about, which cuts out one of the 2 or 3 things.
Methods are available to increase that 2 or 3 to higher numbers of simultaneous awareness, but the 2 or 3 is God-designed for our survival (to keep us from being distracted in life-threatening situations, for one reason), and only a small percentage of people would ever be capable of learning how to simultaneously consciously access any more than about 4 or 5 things at once, anyway.
People will point to such things as, hey, when I was young I could barely drive a car, but now I can drive across the country almost on auto-pilot and listen to music while talking with my wife and thinking about doing it with my secretary's mother -- or learn a language I couldn't manage back in high school -- so I must be more intelligent, right? No; you always had the same general capability, but you might have needed certain life experience before moving on in some realm, or you might have needed to become less distracted by whatever was more important to you in high school before you could apply yourself to certain things that would have been boring to a teenager.
But you're not going to become more intelligent. If that were so, you would have ended up having professors with Down Syndrome, for example.
I have absolutely no sourcing other that memory of a citation somewhere that states that more years of formal education results in increases of IQ over time. Is it possible that it's because of IQ tests being devised by those with more advanced formal education?
Just something I think about.
Indeed, and, in a way, I wish it were so, but, in the realm of productivity, actual empirical research has indicated that the farther one advances on the formal-education academic path, the
less productive one is on average. If you want to be horrified, randomly download about 10 recent doctoral dissertations, and you'll discover what I'm talking about. I used to do documentation production for people in school, all the way from undergraduate to post-doctoral. Most of the dissertational work I edited was little more than evidence that the person had just stayed in school so long out of paralysis or an inability to go out and do anything else.
