3 Islamic articles on: intelligence

Table of contents for the topic intelligence
  1. Intelligence: All That Matters by Stuart Ritchie
  2. On the Scrabble and IQ debate, or why mastering Scrabble doesn’t require genius
  3. Why pupil size is associated with intelligence

Intelligence: All That Matters by Stuart Ritchie

IQ and intelligence, as a topic of study in themselves, no longer interest me very much because they are largely a foregone conclusion for me. Long ago I was convinced of the very realness and importance of IQ and of the fact that it is largely a genetically-mediated trait. What interests me these days is applying the knowledge gleaned from this field to other areas of inquiry that interest me.

I made an exception for the very short book Intelligence: All That Matters by the young researcher Stuart Ritchie, hoping that it would b an authoritative summary of the field that I can refer other people to in my work. And the book serves this function reasonably well.

On the Scrabble and IQ debate, or why mastering Scrabble doesn’t require genius

My answer to the Scrabble-IQ debate which keeps coming up on the Unz Review, from a comment I wrote on there:

The entire debate may be about crystallized versus fluid intelligence.

Scrabble requires that one be intelligent enough to be able to “crystallize” the patterns for solving each situation, so that a person can do it without having to think about it the next time they run into the same situation, but no more intelligent than that.

Winning games like chess and Scrabble requires some fluid intelligence (IQ), and massive amounts of crystallized intelligence (stored solutions), which is why they need so much training.

If you are familiar with computing, it is easy to understand what this means. A lower-IQ person can simulate high IQ in a game like Scrabble using this function:

solve(game_context) {
  if(cached_answer_exists(game_context)) {
    return get_cached_answer(game_context); // extremely fast, even for a low IQ person
  }
  else {
    return compute_answer(game_context); // slow, even for a very high IQ person
  }
}

So a game like Scrabble has a very high “caching advantage”, a person who spends immense amounts of time with it will have thousands, maybe millions, of cached answers in their heads, that enable them to nearly instantaneously find the solution for a new game context, because there is no computation involved, the solution is cached in their brains.

A lower-IQ Scrabble “genius”, however, will be incapable of mastering a topic of study they have never studied before (such as economics), so that they can quickly (within a year or two) come up with original and interesting solutions and ideas within the field, because their genius is about being good at caching answers. Their genius has nothing to do with fluid intelligence, the type of intelligence needed to handle massive data, operate on it and synthesize new things from it. Your millions of cached Scrabble solutions are just that, millions of cached Scrabble solutions. A Scrabble genius is like a computer that has tons of Scrabble solutions and is very good at winning Scrabble games, but that cannot do much of anything else. The computer is not an AI genius, it simply has a hard drive that is filled with canned solutions.

My hypothesis, therefore is this: A race or nationality’s ability to master Scrabble does not predict its intellectual, scientific or technological achievements, because Scrabble does not require very high IQ, while the rest of these things do.

In fact, I would hazard a guess that very few really-high-IQ people (135+) bother to play games like Scrabble, because they would rather do something open-ended, rather than something entirely unproductive, with their time.

Another hypothesis is this: A Scrabble genius will be very bad at games with a low caching advantage. Thus a race or nationality that is good at Scrabble will perform worse at Go than a higher IQ nation, because Go has a lower caching advantage (it requires more fluid intelligence, i.e. IQ, since the situations that arise in the game are too diverse to cache, there will of course still be some caching advantage, therefore we must find a game that has a very low caching advantage, such as…Raven’s Progressive Matrices1).

Why pupil size is associated with intelligence

People of higher intelligence have wider pupils than people of lower intelligence. A possible reason for this is that a wider pupil allows more photons to enter the retina. A person of higher cognitive capacity will be able to make good use of these photons, as they have the hardware to analyze the added photons, meaning the increase in the amount of photons entering the retina provides a selective advantage for these people.

In other words, when high intelligence is paired with wider pupils, human vision becomes more powerful, as there is more visual data received, and there is the power to process these data. By taking in more photons, these people are able to have better distant vision (as their pupils offer a wider surface area for distant photos to be captured) and better peripheral vision, giving them an advantage in hunting, warfare, and perhaps most importantly, social learning. If Kevin Laland’s theory is true that teaching and social learning are the reason our big brains developed, then better vision would have been crucial to this process and would have been selected for. Better visual fidelity would have enabled better ability to learn from the facial expressions of other humans and see their fine hand movements in things like tool-making. It would have also enabled better learning and data-gathering at a distance, so that a person could learn important information even from unfriendly individuals by watching them from a distance.

The theory, therefore, is that higher intelligence and wider pupils together enable humans to have higher visual fidelity compared to other humans. Add this to the much faster reaction times of a high IQ person and you have a person who is better than others at social learning and data-gathering and better at hunting as well.