Note that this comment at AC’s place was not aimed at me, but I chose to take up the gauntlet out of interest in the subject.
For all your internet “brilliance”, you appear to conflate two things: intelligence and IQ.
Intelligence is not IQ; IQ is not intelligence. They are only occasionally and coincidentally correlated.
IQ is a ridiculously flawed measure of intelligence. It’s a measure that persuades low-brow, one-dimensional Mensas to think themselves smarter than they really are.
Disagree? Please persuade me to abandon my “maddening denial of reality” with respect to IQ by demonstrating that you “know enough to engage about it” and proving succinctly that IQ is sufficiently correlated to intelligence to “matter”.
A good first step: define intelligence.
Since you are as brilliant as you claim, you should have no difficulty making your case without:
– question begging (assuming the conclusion)
– post hoc ergo propter hoc
– appealing to authorityAfter the proof that I am certain is forthcoming, I shall have no problem accepting my inferior station with respect to my betters. Thanks!
Intelligence is the capacity to reach a correct conclusion on the basis of the information provided. The less information required to reach a correct conclusion, the higher the level of intelligence. This is why we describe minds like Newton or Galileo as high intelligences, because they proved their ability to reach correct conclusions on the basis of the same limited information provided to their intellectual inferiors. Whereas low intelligences are observably unable to reach correct conclusions even when all of the information required to do so is comprehensively provided to them.
While IQ is an imperfect quantified proxy of that capacity, it nevertheless corresponds strongly enough with it to serve as a useful measure to compare the intelligence of individuals. However, intelligence is not the only component of intellectual achievement, as wisdom and experience/information/education also play a role.
The artillery metaphor I coined to illustrate the concept is that intelligence is the diameter of the gun barrel bore, information is the ammunition, and wisdom is the targeting accuracy.
I await the various critiques with interest.