What Is Intelligence?
Why we pretend it can’t be meaningfully talked about
Imagine we lived in a world in which we were supposed to believe (i) everyone is the same height, and (ii) it’s impossible to measure height anyway, and (iii) there are many different kinds of height and each is just as good as all the others.
In this curious world, a racehorse jockey would be assumed to have the same height as a professional basketball player and we would be told it’s impossible to say anything about height anyway because there’s no way to measure it. Furthermore, as there are different sorts of height (jockey height, basketball player height, Empire State Building height) everyone has their own special height that is just as good and therefore just the same as everyone else’s height.
In this imaginary world it might be rather problematic to design car, train, and airplane seats. It might be awkward to determine the appropriate dimensions for beds and duvets.
Just imagine the scandal if we attempted to measure a range of people in order to be able to accommodate more adequately their different height-related needs. Imagine the vitriol directed toward anyone evincing the temerity to suggest that some people are shorter than others.
Clearly a wholesale denial of the evident fact that people come in a range of heights would lead to significant unnecessary difficulties across a wide range of situations.
Yet this is precisely the stance we take with intelligence.
We’re told that it is Very Wrong to observe that people’s cognitive faculties aren’t equivalent. We’re told we can’t measure intelligence. And we’re told, these days, that there are many different sorts of intelligence and they are all just as good as one another and everyone has their own special intelligence.
Yet just as with the imaginary example of height, a persistent refusal to acknowledge disparities in intellectual capacity leads to many unnecessary difficulties across a wide range of situations.
So why do we pretend that intelligence should, uniquely, not be amenable to the same sorts of quantification we employ in every other aspect of our lives?
As best as I can tell, there are two fundamental causes for this rather…
