On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 6:51 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > > As soon as you refer to IQ you lose me. Can you restate your argument > > without such mythology. > > Raghu's argument is that intelligence is like beauty: there's > no scalar metric like IQ -- that's a myth, as he agrees -- but > we can all tell a stupid person from an intelligent person, just as > we can all tell an attractive person from a troll. > > It's an original argument -- or at least, I haven't heard it before -- > but it gives away a lot to the anti-intelligence crowd, like Carrol > and me. > > After all, everybody knows that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; > what was beautiful to Rubens is pretty repulsive to a lot of people > nowadays. >
Perceptions of beauty are subjective - and culturally determined, but not entirely. This is a "glass half-full" story, but what I find remarkable is the surprising amount of cross-cultural *agreement* on perceptions of beauty. A better analogy than "beauty" would perhaps be musical tastes. It is obviously silly to assign numerical scores or ranks to pieces of music, but surely we would not go so far as to assert that there is no such thing as good music or bad music and that it is all just a matter of opinion? > So it's odd to see Raghu in the same breath claiming that Obama > is 'objectively' more intelligent than Bush. How can something so > subjective be objectively determined? > I don't think this is inconsistent at all. Please see above. -raghu.
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