Vixen, you ignore all of my arguments and examples. Instead of dealing with them, you present new examples to illustrate your beliefs, but they don't really support what you think they support.
Your anecdote demonstrates one thing only, which illustrates my point:
You are better at and thus score higher at tests when you know what the tests are about.
That is true for (almost) any test, including driving school exams. If you expect a driving test to be about what makes vehicles move or about how engines work, but don't know traffic signs and what a red light means, you'll fail the test. Like most tests (at least the ones that aren't about motor skills
*), it's a test of
knowledge. So are IQ tests even though they pretend not to be.
If you look at my first examples (a, b, c and d) at the beginning of the article
How intelligent is the average IQ test designer?, you'll notice that they can't be done if you haven't learned and mastered addition, subtraction and multiplication. You should also be aware that the procedures may change when you go to the next number. If the testees (the spell checker really doesn't like that word!), for whatever reason, don't know addition, subtraction and multiplication, they're screwed. If they do, they'll be able to figure out the change in procedures, but they'll do so much faster if they are already familiar with the principle, i.e. if they have done IQ tests
or something similar before.
You can't expect somebody living in an area without schools to know these things, which is why they came up with an ingenious (= utterly moronic) way of testing people like that: They reduced the IQ test to reaction time.
'When the lamp lights up, you press the button.'
I once did a similar test at a permanent science exhibition in Copenhagen,
Experimentarium. It told me that I had the reaction time of somebody 30 years older than I was. Being the kind of competitive Westerner that I am, I got all fired up and and took the test again, and then my reaction time corresponded to somebody 10 years younger than me.
In other words, tests like those depend not only on
knowledge but also on
attitude. If you pull somebody out of the Amazon jungle or the African savanna and expose them to tests like this, their test results will differ depending on what they think of the test before it even begins. If the attitude is:
'OK, let's see what whitey has come up with this time. Pressing a button when that thing lights up? Yeah, I can do that, but that ain't fun at all.' I predict that the reaction time may be even slower than mine when I was told that I had the reaction time of an 80-year-old.
The best thing about your anecdote is that it illustrates how you presuppose your own idea as true, because it confirms your confirmation bias from
post 257:
"No amount of coaching could make a 'dumb' kid bright."
You don't consider any of all the other reasons why your bully didn't do as well as you and the other
"high achievers." I mentioned several other reasons in
post 262, but in your one-dimensional mind, you can think of no other reasons than your favourite: dumb versus intelligent. That he was a bully and you were his victim probably doesn't help. Being bullied doesn't usually inspire empathy.
A funny parallel to the moral of your anecdote occurs to me. Last month's:
"You can't outtrain being retarded."
Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy: You’re all ‘lazy,’ ‘mediocre’ and ‘retarded’ (YouTube, Dec 27, 2024)
And the moral of their story is actually less one-dimensional than yours. They at least add
lazy to the equation in addition to
dumb!
"Understanding the principles of why, how and what" is essential to almost all kinds of learning. (In the case of motor skills, understanding may actually be an obstacle to learning.
* )
In your IQ obsession, it doesn't even occur to you that there could be
other reasons (again: see
post 262) why your bully didn't do as well in school as the
"high achievers." In his case, the unaffordability of private coaching obviously wasn't the case, but there could be any number of other reasons. You, however, seem to consider your anecdote to be proof.
In the case of rich brats, I have sometimes noticed that their status makes them think that they don't have to make an effort. A (former) friend of mine, a physicist gone businessman, has two sons. They didn't do particularly well in school, and one went to jail for trying to rob a bank, the other was dealing drugs in high school, so the father sent him to the kind of high school that in some respects can be compared to the military academies in the USA. I don't know where they are now. I think that the reason why we are no longer friends is that I sent him a couple of educational links after he told be that he believed in some Indian guru's ability to be in two places simultaneously. (So much for the (probably) high IQ of physicists!)
* Two examples of this:
1) I once had a conversation with a couple of Cuban salsa teachers about the difference between nationalities. They made a living teaching foreigners to dance. Their first observation was one that I had made myself: In general (!), women learn faster than men.
The second one was that Germans tend to be very slow learners. They make the mistake of thinking that very detailed descriptions and explanations about what they have to do are necessary for them to be able to do it. They insist that those descriptions and explanations will help them learn. The Cubans knew that it wasn't true, but they had become used to the demand, which became an obstacle to learning. They would give the Germans what they wanted. It never helped them learn the moves that the Cubans were trying to teach them. But the Cubans had learned that it was something they had to do simply to get it over with. Otherwise, the demand would remain an obstacle. One of them had even made diagrams, which seemed to satisfy the Germans. It didn't help them learn the moves, but it helped them get past the point that they thought was a prerequisite for learning what the Cubans were trying to teach them.
2) As a motorcyclist, I have taken classes in safe riding. One of them was the braking-and-avoding technique, i.e. how to avoid collisions with any kind of object, be it trucks or children. The class began with an explanation of how a two-wheeled (inline) vehicle turns. It sounds illogical, but you actually do it by first making the vehicle lean to the side you want it to turn, which you do
by turning the handlebars to the opposite side of where you want to go. You only begin to turn the handlebars to the side you want to go once you've made the vehicle lean to that side. It's the same principle with a bicycle.
The Counterintuitive Physics of Turning a Bike (minutephysics on YouTube, July 15, 2015 - 1:46 min.)
Counter Steering: The interesting physics behind it (Sabins Civil Engineering on YouTube, Dec 31, 2019 - 5:29 min.)
However, if you already
can (know how to, but it has nothing to do with knowledge) ride a bicycle or a motorcycle, knowing the physics doesn't
help you
at all. But it's not only superfluous knowledge. Thinking about it when you are about to make a turn screws up what you are already doing right. Besides, when you are in a situation where a fast reaction is necessary to avoid a collision, you don't have time to think. It has to be internalized as 'body-knowledge', a reflex.
When we moved on the the practical exercises, I had to force myself to forget all about what we had just been told. Otherwise it would have screwed up my reaction time.
