stevestory
Posts: 13407
Joined: Oct. 2005
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Speaking generally about 'intelligence', the older I get the less I respect IQ. When I was a young high-IQ kid I thought it was the be-all, end-all. Now I look at the kind of abstract pattern-matching it reflects as just one facet of thinking.
Think of it like muscles. If you're a teenage powerlifter, you're probably inclined to think of raw strength as the ne plus ultra. But as you get older, you learn to appreciate other qualities like cardiovascular endurance, or the sinewy aesthetic look of swimmers, or you notice that powerlifters don't necessarily have the best health. As you mature you see there's more to it than that one aspect.
It's similar evolutionarily. Nature gives people a range of strengths. Maximizing raw strength isn't ever the best. There are compromises. You want strength, but you also want efficiency, and flexibility, and other things. A mutant cheetah can have really doubly strong legs but if they get tired in 50 feet he starves to death. Gotta have a good balance of qualities. IQ intelligence is nice, but not the best by itself. Paul Erdos I'm sure had an IQ way above mine, but I wouldn't trade my brain for his--he was socially retarded. He had one really high aspect of thinking, but was really deficient in others. He didn't have that good balance.
The fact that some people arrive with mutant IQs doesn't impress me any more than that baby with the mutant strength who looked like a little bodybuilder. A mutation happens, and the toddler can lift 100 lbs but then he gets some weird disease. A mutation happens, and William James Sidis can learn a language in a single day, but then he dies of a brain hemmorhage at 46. I think in both cases we're overrating a single factor without appreciating other subtler factors that are important for the overall performance of the organism.
As a consequence of this, I think that with IQ, like with strength, it's possible we'll find some simple chemical device that really boosts that particular single factor. Get some injections and they'll alter your brain in the way that Langan's or Sidis's brains are abnormal, and you too will be able to play pan-dimensional chess. But there will be trade-offs, just like with steroids. Maybe you'll get a hyper IQ, but you'll try to feed your dog by throwing cereal on the floor, like Erdos, or become friends with nonexistent people, like John Nash, or fear your wife will poison you, like Kurt Godel.
If you wonder why we don't all have fantastic IQs, like we don't all have fantastic strength, well, Erdos, Sidis, Godel, and Isaac Newton left behind a combined zero children....
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