Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!markh From: markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Intelligence Message-ID: <3552@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> Date: 26 Jul 89 17:21:14 GMT References: <5453@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <2061@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> <5480@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <3506@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> <1696@uceng.UC.EDU> <3549@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> Sender: news@csd4.milw.wisc.edu Reply-To: markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins) Organization: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Lines: 84 * From: Mike Slade * Date: Wed, 26 Jul 89 11:37:04 BST * Subject: Re: Intelligence (was: IQ), Categorization (was: Racism) * Organization: Computer Science, Warwick University, UK * In article <3506@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> you write: * > * > (... even predisposition is not static ...) * * So tell me, do you ever feel frustrated at your _in_abilities? Until recently, but not anymore. Things have changed. * I rank well above average by most criteria for measuring intelligence, but * I often wish I could, say, remember something with more ease or follow a * line of thought faster. Aha! Finally, something concrete I can bury my fangs into. FOLLOWING A NEW LINE OF THOUGHT (say in reading a publication): (Copyright 1989, All rights reserved :-)) Problem: The difficulty lies mainly in the high density of unresolved references to terms and concepts in the literature due to the relative lack of background knowledge. Method: Treat all unresolved references as forward references, and store them in your associative memory. Most people use their stack memory, which is very limited and which is needed for other, more important, tasks such as language comprehension. Forward references can be incrementally resolved as you read on in the literature. Thus, you not only come to understand the line of thought but accquire the background knowledge in the process. Some references are external to the source text, which requires a lateral search in other, related literature. But this can be determined with no major difficulty at "run-time", and can thus guide your search through other literature. And that is an example of one technique on learning how to learn, that I have used (somewhat unconsciously at first) with considerable success. Nothing can easily elude me anymore because of it, though there can be considerable overhead (taxing my patience) in the initial moments as unresolved refereces are accumulated. Warning: the technique is consciously learned, but must be assimilated into your unconscious mind by extensive use. There will be an initial learning curve. * This (current limitations on my abilities) seems to me to indicate that I am * predisposed towards some upper limit to my abilities. How so? * - I have friends that are incapable (i.e. not just lack of confidence, * background knowledge, or whatever) of profound thoughts, problem * solving by abstraction, visualisation, etc. If you can walk or drive, you have visualization, if you can pack items in a box, you have abstraction. If you can make career decisions for yourself, you have the ability to have prfound thoughts. Too many people take too much of their hidden cognitive powers for granted. Even speaking and understanding human language requires all of these skills in considerable magnitude. * Therefore _you_ are predisposed towards being intelligent, because your limit * is probably higher than most people's limit, so it is easier for you to * attain a higher level of "explicit" intelligence. Expertise in any area of knowledge increases as a power of time. Apparent differences lie in who's got a head start, not how far you can go, because even the smallest difference in time are magnified. * In other words someone with a lower intelligence limit would need to put in * more effort to reach your level, if indeed they could at all. * * Comments ? * * Mike Slade * Even the ability to learn is subject to the same power law. Differences exist for much the same reason. But my point throughout all this is that the ability to learn and even to think is, itself, learnable. And that I take all the credit for both what I know and how well I can learn. And that it is a crime for people to trivialize this in anyone -- most of all, in theirselves.