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.
Memorization have importance. We, as a species, are as intelligent as primitive cavemen. Our brains haven’t changed that much since those times.
What allows us to be different, to have a prosper civilization, is the information we have stored. Much of that information is stored in our brains.
Critical thinking is of great importance. Of course. But let’s not dismiss the ability to store that critical information.
Memory is often used as a facade to demonstrate intelligence that lacks thinking, though.
If we define intelligence by the development of the brain’s abilities, memorization is one of those abilities. Then, great memorization would be, per se, a feat of intelligence.
I think that’s a good part of it, learning fundamentals of things you’ll need is also vital. I’ve grown to mostly appreciate learning how to learn. It’s a skill that’s implicit, but putting the building blocks in at an early stage regarding how to seek and learn knowledge sets you up so well for the rest of your existence.
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
Okay, what should a pilot do about thunderstorms? Are they bad? What about a thunderstorm is bad? A student who can answer those questions, who can explain that thunderstorms contain strong turbulence and winds that can break the airplane or throw it out of control have reached the Understanding level.
Problem: Sitting in the classroom talking about something is NOT flying a plane. I’ve had students who can explain why thunderstorms are dangerous fly right toward an anvil-shaped cloud without a care in the world, because they didn’t recognize a thunderstorm when they saw one. Living in a forest, people around here don’t get a good look at them from the side; the sky just turns grey and it rains a lot and there’s bright flashes and booming noises. If you can get a good look at one, it’s a tremendously tall cloud that flattens out way up high and tends to have a bit that sticks out like the horn on an anvil. Even in the clear air under that horn you’ll get severe turbulence. A student that can identify a thunderstorm and steers to avoid it can Apply their knowledge, and have thus reached the Application level.
It’s a sign that you’re ready for your checkride if, upon getting a weather briefing that includes convective activity, the student makes wise command decisions to either reschedule the flight for a day of safer weather, or for isolated storms plots a route that steers to the safe side of the weather and plans for contingencies such as turning back or diverting to alternates. A student that alters his navigational choices based on weather forecasts has reached the correlation level.
It’s difficult to go beyond the understanding level in a classroom with textbooks and paper tests, which is too much of what K-12 and college is like.
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.
remember FOIL?
A lot of adults don’t, then proceed to argue about order of operations, having forgotten that Brackets have to be all expanded out before doing anything else at all.
We don’t learn that math because it’s practical for adult life
Yes we do. I use Maths every day, quite separate to the fact I teach it.
We don’t learn that math because it [isn’t] practical for adult life
I love this argument because it’s like a guy who catches and eats raw fish saying that we don’t need fire. Like, man, you’re not even trying to use it, though.
Students asking “why do we need to learn this” or worse graduates who proudly proclaim “Day 19,337 of never using the quadratic equation” are a symptom of teachers who haven’t read their Thorndike.
Learning is an active process. It takes effort to do. People do not like being made to waste effort. Students will be much more effective learners when they understand the value of the lesson to them in their lives. “You never know when this will come in handy” is not good enough. This is Thorndike’s principle of readiness. And especially high school teachers are bad at satisfying it.
Math teachers get it very often, because for some reason we approach teaching math to a nation full of hormonal teenagers as if they all want to grow up to be mathematicians. Starting in about the 7th grade they stop giving practical examples and teach math as a series of rules to be applied to contextless problems, and to the student it feels like years of pointless busywork.
And while I can’t claim to have ever factored a polynomial in my daily life since leaving school, I did recently come up against the order of operations. I calculated the width of some cabinet doors, and I factored in the gaps between them wrong. 3 doors, 4 gaps between the doors. I did door_width = opening_width / 3 - 4 * gap_width. When I needed to do door_width = (opening_width - 4 * gap_width) / 3. In the first case, you end up subtracting all 4 gap widths from each door. I would be better at math today if you’d explained it to me like that when I was 12.
we approach teaching math to a nation full of hormonal teenagers as if they all want to grow up to be mathematicians
No we don’t.
Starting in about the 7th grade they stop giving practical examples
No we don’t. Just check out some final exams to see plenty of them still included.
if you’d explained it to me like that when I was 12
Most teachers do, but some aren’t very good, especially in the U.S. where it’s not even required to have Maths qualifications to be a Maths teacher.
No we don’t.
I mean, go ahead and lie about how I spent 6 years of my own life to my face. Memorizing proofs and working endless assignments of just…equations. Here is an equation. Do thing to it. Solve it, simplify it, factor it, graph it. I plugged and chugged so many numbers into the quadratic equation, I don’t think I was ever told what that’s for. Some chapters had token word problems.
A lot of the math I actually know I learned in physics class, where you’d do unit math. That 25 meters traveled in 5 seconds means a velocity of 5 meters/second. Science class math comes with sniff tests that math class math doesn’t.
The way I was introduced to order of operations was, the teacher wrote a long expression on the board, this plus that divided by such minus thus times such plus this times that. Spend a second solving this. Okay, who got 7? Who got -23? If you got -23, you’re right.
That is FUCKGARBAGE teaching. It may be the flight instructor in me, that my classroom is an actual airplane that we fly over actual people and their homes, but few things piss me off as deeply as setting up your students to fail. Because introducing the subject this way separates your class into two groups: Those that already have a functioning understanding of the topic whose time is being wasted, and those who don’t already understand it and need you to teach them this skill, who now feel tricked, confused and frustrated.
This teacher went on to explain Order of Operations as a series of rules you follow because following rules is what you do. “You do parenthesis before exponents before multiplication/division before addition/subtraction.” PEMDAS, Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. This was taught with the same “This is how nature is” attitude as the planets of the solar system or how ionic bonds work, except algebraic notation is artificial. It’s manmade, like the English language. It’s a method of communicating ideas, except it was taught as a series of rules and procedures that you were supposed to memorize how to do without understanding the goal, and fuck your life if you lacked the vocabulary to describe what about it you didn’t understand.
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
I think that kind of thing is more cultural than anything. Probably she doesn’t care very much whether it’s actually true or not, and feels she’d be losing face by being anything but confident about it.
Imo it’s more important that people learn that being wrong can be empowering, and how to have conversations where someone is wrong but not being put down for it, than just learning that they can be wrong.
Very possible. I just couldn’t see myself purposely saying something I didn’t think was true and then doubling up with calling the other person dumb over it. I don’t agree with almost anything she does though so that checks out.
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
People in this thread have a hard time understanding what intelligence denotes.
Hint: it’s not success or being smart.
Definition of smart
Cambridge:
intelligent, or able to think quickly or intelligently in difficult situations:
Mirriam-Webster:
1: having or showing a high degree of mental ability : intelligent, bright
Oxford:
intelligent
Could you share your definition that somehow contradicts all the major dictionaries?
Nah that’s about it, what’s your worry?
How are being smart and being intelligent not synonyms?
To be smart you need to be intelligent, but being intelligent doesn’t mean you’re smart.
It has a broader definition.
To me, they certainly are.
However, many people seem to think that you can get smarter. There’s even a YT channel with a name like that, so I guess smart means something different.
Fair enough, we can split that nebulous concept into innate intelligence which refers to your mental capacity, and being booksmart, i.e. having read many books and knowing stuff. In that sense, you can get smarter by learning more information or mastering new tools.
Getting more intelligent happens naturally as children age, but eventually it’s all downhill. You can choose to drink alcohol and and reduce your intelligence that way, but I’m not aware of any method of increasing your intelligence. Many people seem to use this term in a very different way, so I might be in the minority here.
Either way, I would still argue that, intelligence isn’t something you can simply increase.
I think intelligence could be malleable to a degree. Neural plasticity is pretty powerful, and we’re still on the cutting edge of figuring that stuff out.
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 :(
I know. 😔
I mostly share these feelings because it illuminates the issue a bit for some people who otherwise have not considered it.
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…
Dunning-kruger is probably not an actual thing. It just conforms to our biases.
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.
It’s good to be skeptical about vaccines or a round earth. Then you investigate and find out that vaccines work and the earth is a pseudosphere.
Skeptical doesn’t have to mean that you straight up deny everything. It only means that you do not blindly believe it. That’s how science is actually suppose to mean. The best way to prove a scientific theory is trying to disprove it as hard as you can.
Skepticism doesn’t necessarily entail outright rejection of something. Like, I could be sceptical about vaccines and their side effects, but still get the vaccine because it is the best option available to me right now.
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’m saying education increases intelligence through reevaluating your own thoughts.
Education gives you tools and information. Intelligent people are able to put those to good use. Stupid people are unable to, no matter how hard they try.
Tools and info yes, but the feedback is what I’m saying teaches people to adjust their confidence levels closer to their actual understanding of a subject.
Like if you wrote tests but never got graded or told what you got wrong, your confidence in your ability likely wouldn’t match your understanding of what you were tested on. Someone who wrote tests and were shown what they got wrong has a better understanding of how well they know something. I think that constant feedback is important and not something many people consider as a takeaway from being educated.
And yes, “stupid” people don’t have the ability to connect all the dots
Totally agree with you about the importance of feedback. With no feedback, you won’t know how wrong or right you are. You’ve also connected feedback with confidence, and that was a pretty good point. Formal education provides the feedback, which then adjusts your confidence to a more realistic level. Great observations, good post. 👍
However, many people get sidetracked by the way you mix up terminology. Maybe you should stop and think what exactly goes into the list you label “intelligence” or “being smart”. Are they the same thing, or are those lists different? Maybe they are separate lists, but there’s overlap? Either way, I suggest you sit down and reflect on the meaning of those terms. Maybe even write that list. Once you’ve done that, see how wikipedia describes intelligence.
As you can see from the number of comments, most people don’t agree with the way you use these terms. That’s the feedback you’re getting from this post, and it’s a great learning experience. Think of it like an exam, where the 100 teachers in this post are taking out their red markers and crossing out half your post.
I may have missed it but I’ve only seen you and 1 other comment say I mix up the terms, if you can point out where I’m mixing them up then maybe I can correct or clarify myself. I am fully aware of the difference between knowledge and intelligence.
I could be wrong though
Lol
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.
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.
Many times when I post on Lemmy I am then educated. I do appreciate it a lot, thanks everyone.
