Comment by DINKDINK | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DINKDINK | Hacker News Reader

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>It is very well known that intelligence or talent exhibit a Gaussian distribution among the population

Why should we assume that intelligence in the total population is Gaussian distributed, even if you assume that you can measure 'intelligence'? A Gaussian distribution of a metric emerges solely for the reason that there is nothing else influencing the out come of the variables (no one way boundary transition conditions) and as a result, there is just a random, scattered cloud of noise around where the values are. Pareto distributions emerge when there's an influencing factor which forces a change (businesses collocating next to each other to reduce costs, people buying things from people/businesses they know) Given that there are are events/phenomenon that will clearly break independence of an intelligence result (child suffers head trauma, exposure to chemicals while in the womb, Malnutrition) I remain skeptical that 'intelligence' is Gaussian distributed.

Intelligence cannot exhibit a Gaussian distribution, not unless you make certain assumptions about what intelligence is.

Is the OP's definition of intelligence limited to academic or intellectual intelligence? If so, that's the problem.

There just isn't a single kind of intelligence. Nor is intellectual intelligence superior. It's just unique, like other forms of intelligence.

Also, different people excel naturally in certain fields, or even when it comes to learning in certain fields, or learning through certain methods, such as through watching something happening, doing it practically, listening to an explanation, or even just reading about it, and so on.

Because of this, I'm skeptical that there's even an element of randomness. There isn't, not when you take into account all of the life circumstances that shape individuals and their ability to cultivate and make proper use of their innate skills and abilities.

Many people are hampered by society from ever discovering their true calling in life, so to speak, in various ways, whether it be bias towards intellectual intelligence, bias towards what suits the needs of our corporation-dominated society consumed by the need to work for money almost all the time just to survive, etc.

In a work-orientated society that takes up the majority of people's time, stress them out, etc, most people never get the chance to discover their talents, to cultivate them, etc.

Just a bit of unstructured rant, because it's early in the morning and I haven't yet had my coffee, but had to type this while it was still fresh. :/

There are some who claim that it does not. In particular they claim that there is a longer tail on both ends of the curve than a normal distribution would predict.

http://www.abelard.org/burt/burt-ie.asp

But there are others who refute that claim. Their analysis shows there are actually fewer supernormal outliers than you would expect for a normal distribution.

http://www.ncurproceedings.org/ojs/index.php/NCUR2012/articl...

Either way it's a pretty close fit and the argument is just about whether there is a small variance several standard deviations from the mean.

And, yes, there has always been disagreement about what IQ really is, what do IQ tests measure, what forms of intelligence aren't measured in IQ tests, etc. I've always settled for the tautological definition. IQ is what an IQ test measures.

Personally I think intelligence is trainable and a part of the reason we do not see more intelligent people is because the RoI of scoring well on tests and IQ tests drops off pretty quickly

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