IQ is just a number that tells you how good you’re at doing specific kinds of tests. It’s associated with intelligence, but it’s still a proxy metric. It doesn’t actually measure the thing we’re really interested in. We don’t even know what intelligence really is, or how to measure it properly.

Yeah. Psychology is still largely qualitative at the moment, just like chemistry was in 1700s.

Here’s the first one.

Memorizing facts, dates, and formulas aren’t what necessarily makes someone intelligent. It’s the ability to second guess yourself and have an appropriate amount of confidence relative to your knowledge that is a sign of intelligence.

This passage implies that you can increase your intelligence by getting educated, learning facts, gaining more knowledge, receiving feedback and getting a more realistic understanding on what you know and don’t know. Based on some of your clarifications, that doesn’t seem to be what you intended to say.

To me, they certainly are.

However, many people seem to think that you can get smarter. There’s even a YT channel with a name like that, so I guess smart means something different.

Fair enough, we can split that nebulous concept into innate intelligence which refers to your mental capacity, and being booksmart, i.e. having read many books and knowing stuff. In that sense, you can get smarter by learning more information or mastering new tools.

Getting more intelligent happens naturally as children age, but eventually it’s all downhill. You can choose to drink alcohol and and reduce your intelligence that way, but I’m not aware of any method of increasing your intelligence. Many people seem to use this term in a very different way, so I might be in the minority here.

Either way, I would still argue that, intelligence isn’t something you can simply increase.

That’s interesting, because the original post certainly didn’t sound like that. Thanks for the clarification anyway. I’m glad we’re on the same page here.

Totally agree with you about the importance of feedback. With no feedback, you won’t know how wrong or right you are. You’ve also connected feedback with confidence, and that was a pretty good point. Formal education provides the feedback, which then adjusts your confidence to a more realistic level. Great observations, good post. 👍

However, many people get sidetracked by the way you mix up terminology. Maybe you should stop and think what exactly goes into the list you label “intelligence” or “being smart”. Are they the same thing, or are those lists different? Maybe they are separate lists, but there’s overlap? Either way, I suggest you sit down and reflect on the meaning of those terms. Maybe even write that list. Once you’ve done that, see how wikipedia describes intelligence.

As you can see from the number of comments, most people don’t agree with the way you use these terms. That’s the feedback you’re getting from this post, and it’s a great learning experience. Think of it like an exam, where the 100 teachers in this post are taking out their red markers and crossing out half your post.

I’m saying education increases intelligence through reevaluating your own thoughts.

Education gives you tools and information. Intelligent people are able to put those to good use. Stupid people are unable to, no matter how hard they try.

Intelligence is such an elusive concept, but here goes anyway…

Knowing stuff makes you knowledgeable. You’re either born intelligent, stupid or somewhere in between. No amount of studying will ever change that, unless studying also involves copious amounts of alcohol. In that case, you’ll only get dumber.

Anyway, studying gives you information and tools, and what you’re talking about is a bit of both. If you go through a training system like that, you’ll be equipped to process and evaluate information, but none of that changes how intelligent you are. Sure, you can sound really smart to other people by using fancy terms and explaining complicated things. Those words alone don’t make you intelligent. Having the innate ability to understand that level of information does.

I’m sure there are really smart people living in rural parts of India where they don’t learn to read or even count very far, but they can do really clever stuff when hunting birds or weaving baskets. Even though they didn’t receive much education beyond what they learned from the local villagers they can still be intelligent. If they were born in a wealthy family in UK, these people would probably go to Oxford and graduate with a PhD in no time.

Some people have managed to diversify their income, but a hefty chunk still comes from ad money. That income is also wildly unpredictable, so it really makes economic sense to diversify. Being entirely dependent on a single source puts your business in a very precarious position. If your company fails as a result, it’s just bad strategy. On the other hand, you could also blame YT for being unpredictable, wild and turbulent.

The way I see it, the core of the problem is economic. Making videos takes money. Storage and bandwidth cost something too, so doing this on a small scale won’t make much sense.

There are a few medium scale platforms like Nebula, and they seem to be doing just fine. IMO those platforms are the way to go.

At least on Lemmy, you don’t really search for people except in very rare cases. On Mastodon, users are more important than the topics they talk about, so over there it’s a whole different ballgame.

Yeah but the older generations probably never even thought of watching a series in reverse order. You start with the last episode spoilers, but you don’t know why any of that is important.

That’s a common theme in psychology. We’ve built this house of cards on opinions, subjective observations and beliefs. Neurobiology and statistics are gradually beginning to pull the rug under the mess we call psychology.

It took us a few hundred years to go from medieval alchemy to modern biochemistry, and the same should apply to psychology as well. Check back in a hundred years or so to see if it’s any better. My guess is, it’s going to take 200 years to figure out what autism even is, how to classify it, how to test for it and so on.

We have a very long way to go, so the current terms are only marginally useful. Don’t take them too seriously just yet.

What about squares with rounded corners then? Some could be very sharp, and some could be extremely rounded. See where I’m going with this?

Can confirm. These are the three cancers of the internet. Amazon is the fourth.

Microbes eat filth, so they are filth. Bugs eat the microbes, so bugs are also filth by extension. Rats eat those bugs, foxes eat the rats, humans eat the foxes etc. It’s just filth all the way.

True, but this kind of psychopath level behavior is very telling. You’ll know exactly how much they respect you.

When those companies roll out new features, are they opt-in, opt-out or sneaky stealth assassin features that just stab you in the back one day without any warning?

Boiling it in nitrogen is so much more fun.

Gastronomy and botany can’t agree on anything…

That’s the bizarre thing about English. Maybe native English speakers don’t really think about it, but as someone looking at this mess from the outside, I can tell you that it’s really nice when verbs and nouns are distinct.