discodown Posted June 4, 2006 Share Posted June 4, 2006 yes they are in their own way. intelligence is a subjective thing though Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Titian Posted June 4, 2006 Share Posted June 4, 2006 Exactly... "...start with the term intelligence itself. It is clear from the way the word is used that we think of it partly, at least, as quantitative. People are described as being ‘more’ or ‘less’ intelligent. Dictionaries are the arbiters of what words are supposed to mean. In this case the Shorter Oxford Dictionary gives a wealth of material which focuses on the notion of ‘understanding’. Thus it speaks of intelligence as: ‘the faculty of understanding’ and, more helpfully, as ‘quickness of mental apprehension’. The quantifiability of intelligence, in common usage, is attested in ‘understanding as a quality admitting of degree’. So far so good but none of this helps us very much in constructing a scale of measurement. Some would argue that, in spite of the way we use the word, intelligence cannot be measured at all. According to them the project falls at the first fence because it is futile to try to measure the immeasurable." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tony Posted June 4, 2006 Share Posted June 4, 2006 Can I throw in an education hand grenade? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cyclone Posted June 4, 2006 Share Posted June 4, 2006 Do you actually have an opinion on this eagle eyes, or are you just fishing for other peoples? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Titian Posted June 4, 2006 Share Posted June 4, 2006 Can I throw in an education hand grenade? please do! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eagle_eyes Posted June 4, 2006 Author Share Posted June 4, 2006 Do you actually have an opinion on this eagle eyes, or are you just fishing for other peoples? fishing for other peopls if you dont mind please cheers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crayfish Posted June 4, 2006 Share Posted June 4, 2006 No one's ever managed to agree on a measurement for intelligence and they may well never do. Need to break it down into e.g. academic success, emotional intelligence, suppose you could use IQ as quantitative proxy, though there's too much variation between different IQ tests to really make that reliable even as a comparative measure of success in performing IQ tests. Education improves many of the traits people would normally bundle in with intelligence, as does practising any particular skill e.g. spatial awareness, mental calculation, semantic ability - none of these things are fixed in my opinion, humans are made to adapt to become better at what they do a lot, so what you may really be asking is do members of one culture tend to learn more and become better educated than those of another? It's also linked to the effort put into self-development, I suppose. That given, there may well be cultures which don't, culturally, have as much focus on developing intelligence-traits as others but value other characteristics. Other cultures will be unable to afford or ever get to know about certain aspects of education. Alternatively, are you asking whether different races tend to have different innate abilities? That's a touchy subject, though the answer is essentially yes, in trend at least. But individual intelligence comes from a combination of self-motivation (which is set genetically and environmentally) and complex interactions between genes and environment for each other aspect of intelligence. Intelligence generally isn't developed as a whole, for instance a top class footballer may have very good visualisation and spatial skills but be poor with words and numbers. So, it's not a discrete concept at any rate and shouldn't really be viewed as such. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
buck Posted June 4, 2006 Share Posted June 4, 2006 Intelligence, as defined by the IQ factor is individual. The ability to reason at a certain level doesn't depend on race or environment. How that intelligence is applied is what's important. Consider a highly cultural and technical people like the Germans being brainwashed by a WW1 corporal into passive submission. What happened to intelligence there? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Swan_Vesta Posted June 4, 2006 Share Posted June 4, 2006 In my opinion, No. Certain cultures are geared to predetermined limitations of which they will never exceed - they are happy to stagnate in a perpetual mire of adequacy never going forward and occassionaly slipping back:Zimbabwean, Maori and Indonesian culture . Other cultures are predisposed to excell, Chinese, American, British, Korean and Japanese cultures have a kind of 'no limit' attitude where the only constraint on what can be accomplished is the extent of the individuals imagination. IMO people are the intelligent ones and the truly great thrive whatever their social circumstance, culture is merely a system of belief where the individuals desire to suceed is either nurtured or repressed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crayfish Posted June 4, 2006 Share Posted June 4, 2006 Intelligence, as defined by the IQ factor is individual. The ability to reason at a certain level doesn't depend on race or environment. How that intelligence is applied is what's important. Consider a highly cultural and technical people like the Germans being brainwashed by a WW1 corporal into passive submission. What happened to intelligence there? Nah, it isn't. You can learn to do IQ tests. I was bored the other day and did a few, and I got better scores the more I did - first one was 135 and third one was 142. Started to realise what sort of format the questions came in and what they were looking for after a bit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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