Friday, February 04, 2005

How Did You Get so Smart?

Michael Dean is typing about smarts. Oh and he's talking about me. Mostly about this post and the comments in this one. My ears and gmail inbox were burning.
I consider Jeff to be a incredibly intelligent person, one who almost makes me feel inferior.
Heh. When I do my site redesign (and it is coming because Harbor is getting tired), I'm going to have to save a prominent place for that quote. Honestly I think part of the reason Michael may feel inferior is because I'm so damn intellectually pompous and he's pretty darn humble. Frankly, as the length of this article shows, I just like hearing myself talk or type sometimes. It's probably some residual teachers-pet-ness from the old days.

Frankly, I may test better than him, but that's nothing special. I have said this before and I will say it again, standardized testing measures how well you do on standardized tests. I think it is a necessary evil to gather statistical metrics on student performance, but I do not think it is a general measure of intelligence. My GRE scores were better than any grad student my advisor had ever seen, but I almost failed out in my first semester because I got a D+ in Linear Algebra.

Amybear typically doesn't do so well on testing because she gets nervous and hates math. One of my great failings in our relationship is that I intellectually underestimated her early on. She has more tact and a higher emotional awareness than me, but I always assumed I was the thinker. You know what they say about ass-u-me-ing. Long story short, she took a class that involved Feminist Theory and she realized she disliked a lot of the big feminist's ideology. I basically agreed with her on every point and thought that it took a lot of smarts to see what she did. I realized that we just thought differently. Amybear's intuition and subjective reasoning is much better than mine. But that doesn't show on standardized tests which are usually objective not subjective. I had to apologize profusely for that one. Since I brought it up I better apologize again, sorry dear. I love you.
Interestingly enough, one of those reasons is that they both have excellent verbal skills, have an incredible vocabulary, and both write extremely well.
I don't think I write extremely well. I may write extremely well for an engineer, but that's something else. I do have decent vocabulary, but I have found myself mixing words up and using screwy spelling a lot since I started blogging. You may notice an individual post changing slightly over time as I realize that some of my language is needlessly circuitous and streamline things. Hmm like perhaps that last sentence.

But let me get to the real meat of things:
In one of my Mensa books, it stated that in a study of Mensa members 80% attributed their intelligence to their parents reading to them as children. I've posted this here before, but I still find it fascinating. I know that my mother read to me a lot as a child and instilled the love of reading in me. I'm curious how Jeff feels about that statement.
My parents did read to me as children. Actually as soon as I was capable, they made me read to them. I hated it. A lot. In the end though I really learned to love reading, I loved it so much I have probably destroyed my eyesight by reading in poor light. I also grew up watching semi-education shows on airplanes, cars, and technology. To this day I really don't watch sports much. But "Go Eagles!" anyway.

I think one of the great predictors of intelligence is parental involvement. But I'm not a childhood development guru, that's Amybear's job. Maybe she'll weigh in here. Still, I've heard that from a lot of friends who are teachers. Children are always learning at home and school and having the parents involved in that process is really important. It gives the kids more positive reinforcement for the at-school learning. It also may give almost 50% more learning hours in a day. That is a big number.

I don't know where that weighs in with genetics though on the grand scheme of intelligence indicators. It may be trumped my heredity. Like I said, I'm no child development guru. I'm an engineer and operations research systems analyst who likes to talk out his ass.

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