Four seems very young. It looks like brain development continues in a non-trivial way for a long time, and late adolescence (i.e. 15ish) is when IQs stabilize, if I remember the literature correctly.
If this was true, wouldn’t 4-year-olds perform very nearly as well as adults on IQ tests like Raven’s Progressive Matrices? I haven’t actually looked it up, but I would be very surprised if pre-adolescent children score the same as adults on these tests.
As far as I know, by most any commonly used metric, both of these will increase well beyond four years of age. Vaniver mentions 15 years old, and I recall 19-20 years old being the number given for maximum fluid intelligence in the psychology textbook I had in undergrad.
It’s a thought that occurred to me. Opinions are welcome.
Some explanatory footnotes:
“Four-year old” is just a focal example. Consider anyone, young, your own age, or old (these are the three ages of man) with whom you think there is a large conceptual distance to cross. Blues will be thinking of Greens and vice versa, but that’s nothing on the scale of what I’m trying to point to. But very young children are a real example, not merely a parable.
When you are face to face with a stranger, you are looking at an alien AI. Their fundamental mechanism of discerning truth from falsity may be just as acute as yours, but is operating on completely different data. And it is the same for them, face to face with you.
There is more context for that thought, but that will do for now.
A child of four is just as intelligent as the adult they will eventually become. They just have less knowledge to work with.
Four seems very young. It looks like brain development continues in a non-trivial way for a long time, and late adolescence (i.e. 15ish) is when IQs stabilize, if I remember the literature correctly.
If this was true, wouldn’t 4-year-olds perform very nearly as well as adults on IQ tests like Raven’s Progressive Matrices? I haven’t actually looked it up, but I would be very surprised if pre-adolescent children score the same as adults on these tests.
This sounds a lot like the theory of crystallized vs fluid intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelligence
As far as I know, by most any commonly used metric, both of these will increase well beyond four years of age. Vaniver mentions 15 years old, and I recall 19-20 years old being the number given for maximum fluid intelligence in the psychology textbook I had in undergrad.
Is it true?
It’s a thought that occurred to me. Opinions are welcome.
Some explanatory footnotes:
“Four-year old” is just a focal example. Consider anyone, young, your own age, or old (these are the three ages of man) with whom you think there is a large conceptual distance to cross. Blues will be thinking of Greens and vice versa, but that’s nothing on the scale of what I’m trying to point to. But very young children are a real example, not merely a parable.
When you are face to face with a stranger, you are looking at an alien AI. Their fundamental mechanism of discerning truth from falsity may be just as acute as yours, but is operating on completely different data. And it is the same for them, face to face with you.
There is more context for that thought, but that will do for now.
We share the same physical reality, don’t we?