"SE-I" Definition of Intelligence:   Intelligence, to our mind, is the art of rapid and reliable gist-finding, crux-spotting, bull’s-eye-hitting, nub-striking, essence-pinpointing. It is the art of, when one is facing a new situation, swiftly and surely homing in on an insightful precedent (or family of precedents) stored in the recesses of one’s memory. That, no more and no less, is what it means to isolate the crux of a new situation. And this is nothing but the ability to find close analogues, which is to say, the ability to come up with strong and useful analogies.    - " Surfaces and Essences "  This is a working definition of intelligence provided by the two authors, who are (not surprisingly) stunningly intelligent by their own definition. The book is itself a massive collection of strong and useful analogies. IQ The "man on the street" more or less equates "intelligence" with IQ . It's something people "have"...

Last night I attempted to introduce the idea of "Spinosa's God" to a MENSA group. I got my head torn off. Although these people are in the top 3% on the IQ scale, they are all over the map on the "emotional intelligence" scale, nor can one assume that they are widely informed outside of their various specialties, even though they tend to assume that. It is famously difficult to know what you don't know, but especially difficult for smart people. I call this the Donal Rumsfeld syndrome. But don't get me started ... "Spinosa's God", defended by Einstein and the coincidentally recently deceased Stephen Hawking refers to the unexpected deep order in the Universe. This "God" is not a person behind the scenes, pulling the strings to punish the bad guys and reward the good guys. "He" is totally impersonal - another name for physical law, which turns out to be comprehensible by the human mind - mostly in terms of mathematics. I...

It's called the " Flynn effect " — the fact that each generation scores higher on an IQ test than the generation before it. Are we actually getting smarter, or just thinking differently? In this fast-paced spin through the cognitive history of the 20th century, moral philosopher James Flynn suggests that changes in the way we think have had surprising (and not always positive) consequences.                    -  Ted Talk by James Flynn James Flynn It is well established that we are, as a culture, getting better at IQ tests. There is a lot of debate over this effect, but I like the explanation offered by Flynn himself.  He takes the bold position that we are, in fact, getting smarter - not just better at taking IQ tests. In a nutshell, he claims that we have more powerful intellectual tools. Every member of this culture is trained in these tools from birth. The tools are shared. This has profound implications for one of he centr...

If IQ is a measure of intelligence, we are much smarter than previous generations. This is a verified fact. In this presentation, Flynn himself analyses the effect. At the core of his argument is the idea that we are getting better and better at considering the "hypothetical". This can also be seen as an enhanced capability to use analogy and find abstract categories: an ability that increases with successive generations. Taking it all together, we see the power of analogy growing through time. In other words, it's culture as a whole that's getting "smarter".