There are a whole bunch of mental faculties—skill at which scientists have demonstrated is represented pretty well by a single quantity, g. That result leaves remarkably little space for a different, but nearby concept of instrumental rationality.
There is a recent book, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, by Keith Stanovich which argues that the g measured by IQ tests actually leaves out many other cognitive skills that are necessary for epistemic and instrumental rationality.
So: we need some philosophers of science to wade in and propose some resolutions to this mess.
He proposes to use “intelligence” to refer to g, and “rationality” for epistemic and instrumental rationality, but since our community is perhaps more closely linked to the field of AI than to psychology, I don’t know if we want to follow that advice.
The certainly looks like a relevant book. I didn’t like some of Keith Stanovich’s earlier offerings much, and so probably won’t get on with it, though :-(
Reading summaries makes me wonder whether Stanovich have any actual evidence of important general intellectual capabilities that are not strongly correlated with Spearman’s g.
It is easy to bitch about IQ tests missing things. The philosophy behind IQ tests is that most significant mental abilities are strongly correlated—so you don’t have to measure everything. Instead people deliberately measure using a subset of tests that are “g-loaded”—to maximise signal and minimise noise. E.g. see:
He cites a large number of studies that show low or no correlation between IQ and various cognitive biases (the book has very extensive footnotes and bibliographies), but I haven’t looked into the studies themselves to check their quality.
Right—well, there are plenty of individual skills which are poorly correlated with g.
If you selected a whole bunch of tests that are not g-loaded, you would have similar results.
What you would normally want to do is to see what they have in common (r) and then see how much variation in common cognitive functioning is explained by r.
The classical expectation would be: not very much: other general factors are normally thought to be of low significance—relative to g.
The other thing to mention is that many so-called “cognitive biases” are actually adaptive. Groupthink, the planning fallacy, restraint bias, optimism bias, etc.
One would expect that many of these would—if anything—be negatively correlated with other measures of ability.
There is a recent book, What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, by Keith Stanovich which argues that the g measured by IQ tests actually leaves out many other cognitive skills that are necessary for epistemic and instrumental rationality.
He proposes to use “intelligence” to refer to g, and “rationality” for epistemic and instrumental rationality, but since our community is perhaps more closely linked to the field of AI than to psychology, I don’t know if we want to follow that advice.
The certainly looks like a relevant book. I didn’t like some of Keith Stanovich’s earlier offerings much, and so probably won’t get on with it, though :-(
Reading summaries makes me wonder whether Stanovich have any actual evidence of important general intellectual capabilities that are not strongly correlated with Spearman’s g.
It is easy to bitch about IQ tests missing things. The philosophy behind IQ tests is that most significant mental abilities are strongly correlated—so you don’t have to measure everything. Instead people deliberately measure using a subset of tests that are “g-loaded”—to maximise signal and minimise noise. E.g. see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_intelligence_factor#Mental_testing_and_g
He cites a large number of studies that show low or no correlation between IQ and various cognitive biases (the book has very extensive footnotes and bibliographies), but I haven’t looked into the studies themselves to check their quality.
Right—well, there are plenty of individual skills which are poorly correlated with g.
If you selected a whole bunch of tests that are not g-loaded, you would have similar results.
What you would normally want to do is to see what they have in common (r) and then see how much variation in common cognitive functioning is explained by r.
The classical expectation would be: not very much: other general factors are normally thought to be of low significance—relative to g.
The other thing to mention is that many so-called “cognitive biases” are actually adaptive. Groupthink, the planning fallacy, restraint bias, optimism bias, etc. One would expect that many of these would—if anything—be negatively correlated with other measures of ability.
Thanks, Wei, that’s very useful.