On 12/18/2011 5:31 PM, Joseph Gwinn wrote:
In ,
wrote:

On 12/18/2011 3:06 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:

Hmmm, but many of those require some knowledge of the physics
involved. I don't believe it's a very good test of reasoning power in
isolation.

As a mechanical type of guy, with a lot of electronics background on
top of it, I answered all of those almost in knee-jerk fashion. There
wasn't a lot of reasoning. I've seen them all before, and I've been
tripped up by the pulley questions beforeg, so I knew how to
consider them.

It really is tough to construct any conventional test that isolates
intelligence from knowledge.

Culture effects are also a confounding influence. The best tests of
pure intelligence involve tests of reasoning without words, like those
asking one to find the object that best "fits in" a set of other similar
but different objects presented as examples. There is a large
literature on such things.

The most interesting tests are those made to assess animal intelligence.
There is also a literature on this.


IS there any real difference between intelligence and knowledge?

Can one have knowledge without the requisite intelligence?

Can one have intelligence without knowledge?

They are not the same. I have seen lots of analyses by PhD engineers
that were rendered nonsense because the engineer didn't know this or
that practical detail or effect, usually one outside their area of
specialty. The math was perfect, though.


Knowledge without intelligence: Sure. It's called Common Sense, and
Cunning if it's knowledge (or instinct, it doesn't matter) about human
behaviour.

Intelligence without knowledge: In the absolute, no. One must know
something, although many kinds of knowledge are innate. But, as in my
example of the PhD engineer above, one may be highly intelligent and yet
not know enough.

But, more generally, we are confusing intelligence with effectiveness.
We have all met people who were highly intelligence, and yet are totally
ineffectual; and people who sound like idiots, and yet always seem to
manage to achieve whatever they were attempting.

How does this work? My theory is that effective people somehow
understand how the world really works, covering both human behaviour and
technology/science, and so spend little time tilting at windmills.

Joe Gwinn


I dunno, Joe.

It might have something to do with somehow picking the right wind mills?