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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35888 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Intelligence is usually understood as an ability, the cognitive processing power, your ability to deal in abstractions and meta levels, notice patterns, keep more stuff in your working memory, etc.

I mean, I could say something similar about some of these. Working memory isn't part of intelligence, it's just a separate trait. You can be incredibly intelligent, but just not have the working memory to keep a big list of facts or intermediate steps (although is this actually how working memory really works? idk.), and thus waste your potential in practice. But in practice it's a key component (not to say anything about what memory is or how it's constructed, which, idk, and the same is true of that "drive", they could all be high-level features of some more complicated underlying mechanism that doesn't have those as levers). Which is kind of my argument - intelligence is complicated and messy, it's related to many mechanisms in the brain, and there's not really a particular reason to say that the 'drive' isn't intelligence but working memory is - and we don't really know how intelligence works, so decomposing it in ways that seem convenient isn't necessarily the best approach.

If an intelligent person is externally motivated to do stuff, by teachers, parents, expectation, poverty etc. they can perform well.

So basically, drive can be substituted by something else, but the cognitive power of your brain can't be replaced through external influence.

To tie it back to the original point: just because you get good grades in high school, and get good test scores, doesn't mean you'll be a good at practical programming. You can even do a full CS degree program and still not be good at programming compared to your peers who pour a lot of hours into it from this itch to create stuff.

That's true, but I'm trying to say that a person with that 'drive' will, all else equal, understand things more deeply, figure out more stuff, and therefore be "more intelligent" in every observable sense we say "intelligence", and that's part of why they're better at programming. So saying it's separate from intelligence isn't quite right imo

You are setting up a circular argument. Good programmers need intelligence. By intelligence we mean whatever makes people good at programming.

This has no explanatory power.

This isn't about the programming thing anymore, i'm just saying that 'intelligence', in the sense that we commonly understand it, already includes some component of 'self-driven desire to understand things deeply'.

The explanatory power would be that very good programmers would tend to be very intelligent in most other areas too, and that the 'taking stuff apart, trying things over and over even if they fail' causes / is caused by intelligence. Obviously you can have some of the latter without some of the former but they are related, and aren't just distinct traits

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