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The Intelligence Dilemma: Why It’s So Hard To Say Who Is Intelligent
Intelligence is very subjective as it depends on the kind of intelligence you are talking about and who you are comparing yourself to.
Compared to the past, the overall IQ tests have to be adjusted to 100 reflecting the average. This means that, overall, we are getting smarter (The WISC test estimates this to be by about 3 points every decade).
But the IQ test only measures one type of intelligence, and that not even all that well. Why? Because it wasn’t designed for it.
IQ Tests were designed for people to estimate how good a student would do in school. That is all.
It does not reflect their overall intelligence, wisdom or smarts.
On top of all of that, when we think about intelligence we only think about one type of intelligence, not all the others.
In 1983 an American developmental psychologist Howard Gardener described 9 types of intelligence:
- Naturalist — Understanding of living things and reading Nature.
- Musical — The ability to discern sounds, their pitch, tone, rhythm and timbre.
- Logical-mathematical — Quantifying things, making hypotheses and proving them. (This is the one mostly used to determine your IQ).
