Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
On the other hand, I just don't think that scoring high on real-world IQ tests has much to do with that kind of hypothetical intellligence, as the real-world tests, in order to be culturally neutral and avoid the need for subjective judgment as much as possible, have actually excluded the vast majority of the myriad things that make up real-world 'intelligence'.
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What psychometricians mean when they talk about general intelligence is the common factor that is responsible for a large part of the variance in all mental performance. The discovery of this common factor was what gave rise to this field. It's by no means obvious that there should be such a factor, no a priori reason to assume that mental abilities all correlate with one another positively, with one factor common to them all. But that is in fact the case. When you say that the vast majority of all the components of intelligence have been excluded from intelligence testing, you're missing this vital fact.
It's amazing that if you test a person's mental abilities on a very limited set of instruments, say face memory, picture puzzles, repeating long strings of numbers, and reaction speed, you can give a fairly accurate estimate of their performance on tasks that seem completely unrelated, like their vocabulary, or their knowledge of history, or their ability to distinguish musical tones. It's amazing, but it's true. Intelligence isn't just a vast variety of different abilities combined. Most of all, it's one hidden trait that is at the core of all mental abilities.