“As early as the 1920s, researchers giving IQ tests to non-Westerners realized that any test of intelligence is strongly, if subtly, imbued with cultural biases… Samoans, when given a test requiring them to trace a route form point A to point B, often chose not the most direct route (the “correct” answer), but rather the most aesthetically pleasing one. Australian aborigines find it difficult to understand why a friend would ask them to solve a difficult puzzle and not help them with it. Indeed, the assumption that one must provide answers alone, without assistance from those who are older and wiser, is a statement about the culture-bound view of intelligence. Certainly the smartest thing to do, when face with a difficult problem, is to seek the advice of more experienced relatives and friends!”
— Jonathan Marks - Anthropology and the Bell Curve (via leofarto)
I was reading an interesting article years ago about collective memory. There have been a lot of thinkpieces over the years about how humans are getting lazier and worse at remembering things thanks to technology. There’s a tendency, particularly in the western world, to behave as if memorization was all people did prior to the internet.
But outside of artificial school test-taking environments, human beings have always relied on the collective memory of their close peers to keep track of information. Anyone who’s ever worked clothing retail knows that no single employee has the location of every item in the store memorized, but as long as you have enough people working the floor, nobody will ever have to waste time searching for an item because at least one employee is bound to remember which rack it’s on.
TL&DR - brains were never designed to function in isolation.
Testing the intelligence of an individual in an isolation is never going to give you an accurate idea of a person’s true intellectual potential.
TL&DR TL&DR
Two (or more) heads is better than one.
My maternal grandfather was a math professor at the City University of New York. He died before I was born, but he passed a key bit of wisdom to my mother, and she passed it on to me:
The important thing is not knowing the answer, it’s knowing how to find the answer.
It our era of text and alphabets, that’s often knowing how to look something up. But for most of human existence, there were no alphabets. So knowing how to find the answer meant finding the person who knew the answer.
All human knowledge is cooperative.
intelligence is a myth
