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How many phone numbers does anyone remember these days?

However, memorisation is a skill that one can improve if necessary. I don't know how much it has to do with general intelligence.

Psychologists view general intelligence as the capacity for abstract thinking. I don't think anyone claims there is a reliable test for this, unless they have some kind of axe to grind. (Like "proving" that white people are naturally cleverer.)

That certainly used to be the case and was used to justify various prejudices about race and class.

However, modern IQ tests are designed to test pure abstract thinking.

If there is a visible decline in intelligence in the test group, it could be caused by selection of a test group with declining intelligence, and not representative of the population as a whole.

For example, 30 years ago about 10% of British teenagers went to university. It is now about 40%. That would seem likely to dilute the talent pool a bit, resulting in lower average scores.

In the UK the problem is we start to separate the children at age 7 -- which is before some countries start teaching reading! -- and there isn't a proper non-academic path to send them down.

The answer to academic studies at university learning to no obvious career path (e.g. English Literature degree) are that university level study equips you with skills for research, studying, analyzing texts, formulating ideas and arguments and supporting them in well argued terms.

All of which are general skills for any kind of job which doesn't immediately required specialised knowledge or technical skills. (Any science based degree will also equip you with some useful mathematical skills.)

If you look up UK ambassadors, a suprising number of them have English degrees. It's probably because you don't go and go a degree in engineering with the idea of getting into the diplomatic service, but that said, all countries need diplomats as well as engineers.

Intelligence (as defined in cognitive psychology) is very much about abstract thinking.

There are all sorts of logic problems to test intelligence.

The common mistakes people make with these problems arise because people tend to approach the situation from the angle of real world experience, which doesn't fit the abstract problem because real world experience tends to develop intuitive solutions to problems.

Here are some examples:

https://www.cambridgebrainsciences.com/more/articles/try-this-3-question-test-of-cognitive-ability

i'm not qualified to judge you and this isn't a complete intelligence test. It's just an indication of the kind of abstract problem for which a higher rate of correct solutions correlates with higher IQ.

We could say that's a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the tests are designed to "catch out" people. But that's the point, They look like pretty straightforward real world problems, but the obvious intuitive solution is wrong and they need to be analysed logically.

A alternative example is the "nine dot problem", which is an abstract puzzle.

Yes, that's true.

However you could combine BMI with body fat percentage (from a different test) and height, and be able to select people who correlated with being large, strong and fit, purely from their stats. But you still might select someone with undetected early stage cancer, or a wide range of serious allergies or some other health problem.

Intelligence testing is a bit like that. You can take a set of tests, and the results correlate generally with the ability to do abstract thinking. It doesn't guarantee people will be good at any specific job.

I encouraged my daughter to do International Baccalaureate instead of A Levels partly because the UK system is so politically driven, while IB is organised by a multi-national organisation which is pretty apolitical. I also think it's a better curriculum, offering a more broad-based education like Scottish Highers.

To got back to the Maths issue, though, lots of basic maths already is taught using real world examples, from "take one apple away from a bag of five, and how many left" to the questions about two trains on opposing tracks st different speeds and departure times.

It doesn't seem to help. In fact when you go back to those intelligence testing problems I mentioned previously, people tend to get them wrong precisely because they seem like real world problems, when they need to be analysed abstractly.

I think that maths becomes abstract very quickly when you get beyond the basics. Even something like calculating the area of a circle can't be done without an irrational number. What about differential equations, probability, and statistics? Lots of this stuff is very abstract and counter-intuitive.

Having said all that, I think it's important for everyone to be taught up to a reasonable level which at least allows them to critically evaluate things. In statistics, for instance, if you don't understand how the appearance of a chart can be altered by selection of the scales, you're probably getting conned every time you open a newspaper.

The whole point of algebra is that it uses abstract variables, unlike simple arithmetic.

You've made some good points.

I don't know what it's like today, but when I was at school we didn't start any serious analysis of texts until O-Level. At prep school in the late 60s, early 70s we read aloud the recommended books in class, or read at home, and did some discussion on them. I remember these included King Solomon's Mines (1885), The Hobbit (1937), Animal Farm (1945), 1984 (1948), Lord of the Flies (1954) and others I don't remember.

I see these titles as an accessible selection of boy relatable fiction covering a suitable time period given it was about 1970. The purpose was to get youngsters into the habit of reading and thinking about literature, and it worked for me.

I can't remember doing Shakespeare or anything earlier than King Solomon's Mines until O-Levels. (When I encountered the desperately boring Tess of the D'Urbervilles.)

However I disagree that Shakespeare is boring. Shakespeare's plays contain all kinds of interesting plots, ranging from comedy to tragedy, with the historical plays mixing the genres. The problem with Shakespeare is the difficulty of reading a playscript compared to a normal novel, and even more, the difficulty of reading the language. Once you get your ear in, though, it becomes obvious why Shakespeare is still regarded as once of the pillars of world literature.

I know from my daughter's education that a lot more attention is now paid to the development of creative writing, and this requires reading well-written stuff.

Of course as you've mentioned, you can't compel children to have an interest in anything, and it's difficult to get people to bother with things they are not interested in.

Everyone can find a book they don't like.

The problem is to find enough books that people do like to get them reading and keep them reading so that they have the chance to develop critical faculties instead of being turned off the whole thing.

I believe some good work has been done with graphic novel adaptations of Shakespeare.

(I remember learning Latin and French partly from Asterix books, because they are fun and you can cross read with the English version.)


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Totally agree that Shakespeare comes alive when actually performed. That's when youre ear gets tuned to the language and you begin to appreciate the poetry.

I wonder how many English schools don't have drama classes and facilities, and don't have the money to send pupils to professional theatre. Even so, they could use taped performances as you suggested.

How do you know what the examiner's pre-set opinion is of any particular book?

And yet somehow everyone doesn't get a A+.

Here's a logic problem from Radio 4's problem of the day feature.

Someone is driving on the motorway. Due to roadworks they have to drive at 30 mph for 10 miles, then at 60 mph for 10 more miles.

What is their average speed over the 20 miles?

(Change mph/miles to kph/km if you like.)

Exactly. It's an example of how "practical problems" can be confusing because your mind tends to jump to the "obvious" real-world solution, when it needs an abstract approach.

It's another illustration of the fact that humans have two modes of problem solving.

The normal mode is everyday pattern matching, in which the mind recognises a problem and quickly solves it by using a solution which has worked for similar problems in the past. This is generally good because it works very quickly.

The drawback is that problems can sometimes look familiar, but don't work the way you think. This fools the mind into picking an incorrect method of solving them.

In this case, we automatically think, "Oh, half the distance at 30 and half at 60, so average 30 + 60 = 45." Only this is wrong, because it's the time taken which determines the average speed, as shown by the solution.

Therefore the second mode of intelligence, which is abstract thinking, has to be used in situations like this. Abstract thinking is slower and more difficult than pattern matching, and it's what is normally meant by "intelligence".

I wasn't aware of that particular title, but it looks interesting.

My information came frome some of the psychology titles in the Oxford University Press "Very Short Introduction" series.

They are fantastic little books absolutely crammed with information.

Speaking of the advance of science by team effort, the mystery of cubical wombat poo has been solved!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-46258616

This offers a potential new way to advance manufacturing technology.

I've got a degree in management, which I studied for at night school, as well as a bunch of professional training and real life experience. It definitely made me a better manager, but it didn't help get me promoted. I realised you need to have a desk as close as possible to the boss, agree with what he says, and generally be 'pally' with the top table people.

What I remember from my management degree is that interviewing has a coefficient of correlation with job performance of about 0.2, which isn't very good but it's better than (for example) graphology which has a coefficient of 0.

There are cognitive psychology theories to explain this.

So. There are better methods of selection but they are a lot more expensive, and interviewing remains a kind of default.

Of course, measurement of job performance is a dicey proposition anyway.

The modern opinion of interviews is that it's a way for the company to give information to the candidate about the realities of the role, so it's a lot less to do with selection by the company and a lot more to do with acceptance by the candidate.

With current UK law defining an employed person as someone who has done 1 hour's employed work in the last fortnight (I think we can see here a correlation with the current record high level of "employment") one might question the realistic agency of a candidate for a job to refuse it based on an interview.

(Signed, an old cynic with a degree in management and 38 years experience in the UK job "market".)

[Drinks a whisky drink.]

There is a fairly low coefficient of correlation between personality type and actual job performance, except in very extreme cases such as major introverts being employed as circus ringmasters and that kind of thing.

The tests for reasoning and so on are more useful, though of course you can prepare for them. When I worked at Sony, we had a standard programming test for any programmer applicants.

We should make a start-up company to automate prisons.

Of course it has always been acceptable for upper class women not to work, since they are maintained by their rich husbands, and society doesn't see this as a problem of idleness.

To be un-sexist, no doubt there are also upper class men sustained by their rich wives.