Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7180846" data-attributes="member: 4937">I absolutely agree.  The six attribute system has held up very well over time, and attempts to tweak it into larger or smaller sets seldom work out well.  I might consider a larger set of attributes for a complex video game that could handle the book keeping, but probably would never get much more than six for any game I designed.Well, I personally have concluded that there are thousands, millions, or even and infinite number of types intelligences.  The '9 types of intelligence' listed in the link you link to looks to me for the most part incredibly naive, and looks like it was compiled by someone who isn't remotely an expert in intelligence.  "Naturalist" and "Existential" in particular strike me in particular as being not like the others, and should have hinted the creator that he was off on a wrong tangent.  Still, at least he correctly realized that there was no such thing as "hard intelligence" as people in the 60's and 70's understood "intelligence" to mean by default.  But for example, he seems to fail to realize that the even distinctions as small as ability to manipulate sounds as symbols (recognize words as standing for something else, for example) and the ability to manipulate pictures as symbols (recognize that a stick figure is representing a person) are separate forms of intelligence, and part of the general suite of (usually) innate intelligence that work together to give humans the illusion of hard intelligence.   But even more so, he'd probably treat 'statistical inference' as a subcategory of 'math/logic' intelligence, but a being could have ability to enumerate objects (a form of intelligence) and plenty of ability to do term logic reasoning (another form of intelligence), but no intelligence regarding statistics.  Indeed, I'd suggest that this is true of humanity, and that in order to do statistical reasoning we have to kludge together a variety of other things that we can to, in order to approximate statistical intelligence that we don't actually have as a species.   So each of his categories breaks down into many subcategories, many of which we probably aren't aware even exists (think how long it took humanity to even discover statistics).  His categories of 'Naturalist' and 'Existential' probably aren't even top level categories themselves, but skills that we recognize based on lots of sorts of intelligence that we don't necessarily.While the absent minded professor type and the notion of "book-smart" is a comforting archetype, actual deep experience with people shows its far worse than that.  A very clear cut example is the person who his highly literate but completely innumerate, and has despite their great literacy no power to change that.   In some cases, I've met people so learning disabled with regard to math, that they have difficulty counting (no real conception of numbers at all, except as a sequence of sounds that occur one after the other), but capable of reading, evaluating and reasoning about any story I was capable of reading.   That matches up with 'word smart' and 'math smart' in Gardner's diagram, but the reality is I think much much more granular than that.  One example I like is the counting ability of Chimpanzees.  They can count well up to about 5, but not beyond it.  And they can also reason well about numbers up to about 5, but only if the objects in question are not food, which they cannot reason about because food.   I'm convinced humans are equally limited, we are just utterly blind to our limits.  (Think for example of the circumstances leading to the discovery of statistics!)</blockquote>

Verification