We all know confidently incorrect people. People displaying dunning-kruger. The majority of those people have low education and without someone giving them objectively true feedback on their opinions through their developmental years, they start to believe everything they think is true even without evidence.
Memorizing facts, dates, and formulas aren’t what necessarily makes someone intelligent. It’s the ability to second guess yourself and have an appropriate amount of confidence relative to your knowledge that is a sign of intelligence.
I could be wrong though.
I am a flight instructor. I had to study the fundamentals of instruction to earn that title, so I believe I can speak with some authority on this subject.
When discussing facts, figures and such, we consider four levels of learning. The easiest, fastest and most useless is rote memorization. Rote memorization is the ability to simply parrot a learned phrase. This is fast and easy to achieve, and fast and easy to test for, so it’s what schools are highly geared toward doing.
An example from flight school: A small child, a parrot, and some Barbie dolls could be taught that “convective” means thunderstorms. When a meteorologist says the word “convective” it’s basically a euphemism for thunderstorms. You’ve probably already memorized this by rote. You would correctly answer this question on the knowledge test:
Which weather phenomenon is a result of convective activity?
A. Upslope Fog
B. Thunderstorms
C. Stratus Clouds
People in this thread have a hard time understanding what intelligence denotes.
Hint: it’s not success or being smart.
Yet again, we have difficulty having shared definitions of the most basic words.
We really need to address this some day. So much conflict will go away once we stop arguing about the definitions of words.
Maybe words are too imprecise, and we need something else. But on the other hand, we have precise words for lots of things. But it’s considered elitist or whatever to use them. “$10 words” are often just very precise and replace a bunch of other words in a sentence.
Without both perfect symbols and perfectly understanding wielders of those symbols, there is no such thing as perfect communication.
To me, this unfortunately means that your dream will forever remain a dream because there is no such thing as perfection in any field. People will always make associations with words that were not initially intended to be made with those words, meaning that, even if we correctly define something and generally agree on that definition, through culture and more specific types of interaction with symbolic phenomenon, those true meanings will all always be open to alteration and redefinition. Making words more precise does not change the user-end of this phenomenon, meaning that no amount of accuracy will be enough to correct for human blunder and ignorance. I dont think there is a proper way to fix this problem :(
Memorizing data doesn’t make one smarter… but learning concepts absolutely does.
The classic, “we’ll never need this in adult life” is math like Pythagoras’ theorem, or factoring binomial equations (remember FOIL?). We don’t learn that math because it’s practical for adult life… we learn that math so that grown ass adults don’t think someone using algebra is performing black magic.
Seems silly… but it’s just like how many folks never learned past middle school biology and now think XX&XY are the only chromosomal possibilities.
How about we meet in the middle and say “learning the concept that you might be wrong will help your intelligence”?
My mother who “allegedly” graduated high school has more confidence than anyone I know and will say things like “you can’t divide a small number by a bigger number” or “temperatures don’t have decimals, only full numbers”. Then as you stare at her blankly trying to figure out if she’s joking or not, she’ll tell you you’re clearly not very smart if you don’t know that
IMO you’re just describing a closed mind versus an open mind. Learning the concept that you might be wrong is fundamental to having an open mind.
And it’s difficult if not impossible to be more intelligent with a closed mind no?
Funny enough, it was an agricultural class where the utility of the quadratic equation hit me. Professor didn’t even call it that, but we used it to calculate maximum efficiency in fertilizer spread.
o shit. Im gonna be expanding my garden next year. Didn’t know Id need my math text book haha
Another way to think about it is to say that education is the memorization of knowledge, while intelligence is the application of said knowledge. i.e. book smarts vs. street smarts. They aren’t the same things, but are two building blocks that work together.
At least that’s how I look at it.
I disagree about education being about memorization. Education is about knowledge being imparted. Testing is often about memorization, although I’d argue that’s usually only with poorly designed tests. To me, a good education is also a lot about teaching critical thinking skills.
Intelligence is such an elusive concept, but here goes anyway…
Knowing stuff makes you knowledgeable. You’re either born intelligent, stupid or somewhere in between. No amount of studying will ever change that, unless studying also involves copious amounts of alcohol. In that case, you’ll only get dumber.
Anyway, studying gives you information and tools, and what you’re talking about is a bit of both. If you go through a training system like that, you’ll be equipped to process and evaluate information, but none of that changes how intelligent you are. Sure, you can sound really smart to other people by using fancy terms and explaining complicated things. Those words alone don’t make you intelligent. Having the innate ability to understand that level of information does.
I’m sure there are really smart people living in rural parts of India where they don’t learn to read or even count very far, but they can do really clever stuff when hunting birds or weaving baskets. Even though they didn’t receive much education beyond what they learned from the local villagers they can still be intelligent. If they were born in a wealthy family in UK, these people would probably go to Oxford and graduate with a PhD in no time.
I’m not saying people without formal education don’t have the capacity for intelligence, I’m saying education increases intelligence through reevaluating your own thoughts.
From what I recall, it’s generally accepted that your potential for intelligence is based primarily on your genetic luck and environmental factors. Your genetic potential being how well your biological processes work, the hardware you’re given, and then environmental factors like injury, nutrition, and education that determine how much of your potential you reach or are hindered from.
If there were 2 clones, one born to a rich family with high IQ parents that understand how to nurture intelligence and one born to 2 mentally challenged parents who not only lack the ability to take care of their kid properly but require their kid to take on a caregiver role as a child. 99% of the time, one of them would reach their full potential while the other wouldn’t.
You’re mixing up knowledge, (or maybe “being smart”) with intelligence. You also just repeats the post ls claim you’re answering to, that an intelligent person in the UK will have better opportunities than in a poor country.
Knowledge is remembering facts, intelligence is pattern recognition and problem solving. Where did I mix the two?
I could be wrong though
Lol
I think part of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns that can be abstracted and generalized, and memorizing data is just one means of making the data available to your brain for pattern recognition. Like, if you come up with a possible theory, the quickest way to test it is to see if anything you already know would invalidate it; so the more you know, the more quickly you can sift through possible theories.
So, yeah—education reminds you that you might be wrong, while memorizing things gives you a tool to prove yourself wrong.
I don’t think it’s related to patterns, it’s the methodology.
Sure, there’s some groundwork that needs to be memorized in different fields, but this is like learning your first words. These are necessary so that we can communicate with each other, and they serve as building blocks upon all rest is built upon.
Everything else we are mostly taught by learning how some old guy came up with an answer, making clever use of the tools that we also have.
After a while it sort of clicks that there’s a method to the madness, you build up and up until you get to the moon, and you get this feeling that anything can be explained logically - we might not know how yet, but surely it will be at some point.
Unless it’s quantum physics, fuck that.
It feels like there’s a lot of people who skipped these building steps, maybe they were just memorizing stuff to get by the exams without exercising their brains on the methods to reach those solutions, or were simply never taught, and now they just don’t have the tools to make sense of what’s around them, and will blindly follow a monster that assures them that they’ll be ok as long as they do this or that…
Many times when I post on Lemmy I am then educated. I do appreciate it a lot, thanks everyone.
A healthy level of skepticism, both of other people’s ideas and of one’s own, is a sign of great intelligence.
Unfortunately this also gets abused by some people who believe they have a healthy level of skepticism, but actually are way off the deep end. Like anti-vaxxers, flat-Earthers, and other anti-science people.
So “healthy” in this context shouldn’t be defined by the individual.
You’re right (but obviously not completely)
The most important skill anyone can have is information literacy. Schools don’t reach it at all.
I’d say it’s critical thinking, with information literacy being part of the critical thinking process.
I’d argue that learning to socialise, and the so-called social intelligence that comes with it, is THE killer argument for schools and against homeschooling.
Every adult I’ve known to be homeschooled is weird as hell.
Don’t get me wrong, I personally love weird people, but I was usually their only friend, because our coworkers would just avoid anyone who didn’t fit in with the norm.
I’m not advocating that everyone conform to the norm and change who they are, but if you don’t know how to blend in when needed, you’re going to have a rough time.
