I’ve been thinking about younger brothers and older brothers. I have a younger brother, I know at least one pair in Finland, I have a good friend with a younger brother, and I have a new student whose older brother I know/knew well as a programmer. I’m wondering how the student will fare, and I recall reading that older siblings tend to have higher IQs.
I am not a big fan of IQ – that is, IQ testing, not intelligence in general. If someone tells me that I have an IQ of 150 (not that they have!) or 50 (no-one has said it out loud), I don’t think it will change anything in my life. So, why are some people so obsessed by it? I cannot move my cursor without it landing on an ad for online IQ tests. Why should I care what Bill Gates’s IQ is? I doubt if outperforming BG will have any impact on my success. Well, perhaps it will make me feel a little better about my failures. And that is probably half the story. It’s the fox and grapes. So, while for some it’s just harmless fun, those who take it seriously are probably buying a little cheap superiority.
I’m sure that the other half of the story is that IQ correlates with all sorts of wonderful measurements (are you vegetarian? male?), but in my experience it plays a very small role in real life. I’m not convinced that IQ is a good predictor of performance, and especially not when the performance is measured at school. Moreover, the older-sibling-theory indicates that IQ is mutable, so perhaps it’s more of a summary indicator. But perhaps it’s useful to tell children they have high IQs to persuade them to “raise their game” – the Lake Wobegon strategy.
Of course, I have not investigated IQ much: I have an extremely high LQ = laziness quotient, something that is much more impactful in life. Well, in my head I’m always complaining about it, but I do tend to stay busy. So perhaps in my case it’s not high LQ, but low FQ = focus quotient. Alas, I was born before ADD was invented, and anyways, my parents would not have been able to afford it. But I do wish I could acquire a little self-discipline. It’s seems the stores are out of stock at the moment.
I have met people I consider highly intelligent (using some nebulously instinctive definition of that word). They think faster than others: they can see that arguments through to their conclusions to the third and fourth generation. Or is this just good preparation? I have been in the situation where a student proposes an idea, and I foresee the consequences, simply because I’ve been there. Do intelligent people think more and not faster? Thought experiment: let’s say we can measure thought in some way, and we calculate the amount of productive thought and wasted thought accumulated (in one person) over the course of a day. Well, not much of a thought experiment… (In the future this kind of experiments will be possible.)
Getting around to the last new term in the title, I have found that the people I like most are those with high HQ = humour quotient. It’s hard to resist a funny guy. Most of the time they are friendlier than the rest. (Sometimes you do come across the bitter, sarcastic, this-country-is-going-to-hell humourists.)
So, getting back to the starting point: I believe sincerely that my brother is probably more intelligent than I am. This is based on small observations (he thinks fast, and he grasps new concepts quickly and deeply). But I’m perfectly OK with this. My life won’t change if the matter is settled one way or the other by attaching some number to our heads. Much more important to me is that we share a sense of humour. Whether we have low or high HQ, at least we have roughly the same HQ. I offended someone over the weekend by making a joke when they were trying to be serious (or at least they thought I was making a joke). [In fact I had a brilliant idea over the weekend which I'll explain later.] I’ll have to see what my student can do, but – despite the older-sibling-theory – I’m very optimistic.
Look, I know I’m not the weather bureau, but I must mention that today has been relatively cool. Only 35 Celcius. And this evening it clouded over and no wind!, so it is decliciously cool. A well-deserved break from the heat, I think.
I foresee the consequences, simply because I’ve been there. Do intelligent people think more and not faster?
Why does it have to be either-or? Think about it. Let’s say you are solving a computational problem that requires a lot of memory and a lot of time. It is such that you can exchange one for the other; if memory runs out, you recompute.
If there ever will be a way of measuring this, I would guess that intelligence is very much related to an efficient trade-off between the two. So that “smart” people remember the right things, i.e., things that are expensive to come up with and are needed often.
Allow me to rephrase: “Perhaps the secret to intelligence is thinking more, not thinking faster.” I don’t like your analogy, but I like your *use* of it. When I was a maths tutor in 1990/1 I used to tell the students that maths is easy: “Learn a couple of rules and then apply them to a few problems. About 1000 should be enough.” I think that experience with analogous situations is worth more than fast computation. Or at least, it is what makes the computation faster. This is probably not a new idea. But I agree that this involves a kind of sorting of “good” and “bad” analogies, and that the smart people remember the good ones.