On Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences Saturday, Nov 28 2009
intelligence and IQ 2:33 pm
As somewhat of an aside, Mr. Lynch criticized my critique of Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences” as “irreverent”. This is extremely unfair. All I said was that his theory is “something that doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny.” I criticize an ad hoc, unscientific theory that has practically no empirical evidence to support it, and the popular appeal of which derives entirely from its egalitarian and inclusive political flavor, and get called irreverent.
Calling Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences unscientific is not even nearly the most irreverent thing I’ve said, by a long shot. It shouldn’t even be considered irreverent, period. Theories of this sort, which have great popular appeal to the public and practically zero appeal to cognitive psychologists, should be regarded as guilty before proven innocent. Skepticism should be our default mode. Rain on as many unscientific parades as you can.
Are you sure you know what the word irreverent means? It’s generally complimentary and certainly not something that would normally be considered an insult.
To be irreverent means, crudely, to take the piss out of something that is often taken over-seriously. Taking the piss out of such things is generally recognized as a positive activity.
Here’s from my Oxford dictionary:
irreverent adj. (usually approving)
not showing respect to sb/sth that other people usually respect.
Imagine if he had called you “reverent” towards someone’s ideas. Now, that would be an insult.
Intelligent people attack ideas with full force to test their merit. Being reverent towards an idea is a sign of stupidity.
If you actually read the reference in context, you can see that Mr. Lynch gives it a negative connotation.
Mitch I don’t think Michael got what you where trying to imply ;)
g is Michael’s holy cow (his most revered belief ). He is blind to anything that disagrees with it. Without g he would be just a washed up 25 year old kid who would be better off in school. With g he becomes an expert on all topics. Can’t really blame a guy for his beliefs and dreams can you?
I did read the reference in context, of course, and the negativity of it is in your own mind, I think. Because “irreverent” doesn’t have a negative connotation, I have to read it as “what one observer who doesn’t show undue respect to things…” etc.
He meant that by comparing Kurzweil to Sinatra you were, in an amusing way, putting Kurzweil in perspective. That’s somewhat complimentary, which is how the word “irreverent” is usually perceived and meant.
Also, he referred to you as an observer, in other words, someone who observes the scene, not someone who is blindly involved. Yup, nothing negative here directed at you.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says, but it’s easy to see in his writing that he has a sensitivity to language and would be unlikely to use a word like “irreverent” incorrectly.
I don’t agree with what “the man with the screaming brain” has to say. I wasn’t trying to imply anything.
Oh, reading back I see that I made a mistake. I just followed the link and read until I reached the first use of “irreverent”, forgetting that the whole point was that you were supposed to be being irreverent about Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences rather than the singularity summit.
But where did he originally say you were being irreverent about Gardner? That’s not where the link leads and a search of his blog for Gardner, multiple intelligences, Anissimov just leads me in a circle.
Ah, I see. Sorry, I had skipped that part.
But what I said still applies. Irreverence in itself is a good thing, but he’s saying that it can put the mainstream off, by being offensive,
and since you want to get the mainstream more aware, irreverence might be counterproductive.
But I agree with another commenter there that irreverence is probably not the correct word to use for what you said about Gardner. What you said is pretty generally recognized as hard, sober truth, isn’t it? No joking about it.
Anyway, next time I’ll read the whole thing first, before commenting.
Well, not the entire source.
Sorry.
I really don’t understand how anyone can in this day and age just accept G as fact. I thought that the last 20 years of developments in both numerology and computer science put that in doubt. The more we learn about the human brain the more apparent it becomes that it has no gspot, you cant cut open a brain and find a place from which all intelligence emerges, because it doesn’t exist. G is so 19th century.
Instead of the brain having a single source of intelligence it appears to have many parts which function to a large degree independently each doing a portion of the processing, possible even in conflict with other parts of the brain. The same thing, happened in computer science people started to realize how different the types of problems which a AI would facer were, and more and more started to focused on individual problems. The only working general intelligence at the end of the day appears to be nothing more then a group of highly effect narrow intelligences.
The last gasp for the G lovers is consciousness, unfortunately many people in the know believe it is really just an illusion. Accepting consciousness as an illusion is the same as accepting that G does not exist.
Any algorithmic based intelligence even a very advanced human brain simulation will be by nature ultimately created for a large number of individual algorithms running in parallel. Describe what G is mathematically other then a abstract measure of a complex systems performance at a series of task.
I think g correspond roughly to the size of working memory. However, whether or not Howard Gardner is for real, I’m not sure that a unitary g makes that much at high levels. At low low levels it certainly does, someone of high intelligence might actually understand things where someone not as bright would take cognitive short cuts that could go completely wrong.
As an example, a smart person might understand special relativity and even be able to visualize relativistic effects correctly (I can’t) where a stupid person confuse physical relativity with moral relativism and hope it to be proven false.
Where g breaks down is that if quickly understanding relativistic effects is useful, a special ability to do that might more useful than higher general intelligence.
Gspot, while I’m somewhat skeptical of g, dismissing consciousness as an illusion strikes me as counter to the best current work in neuroscience. See Jakk Panksepp, for example.
Dang. That’s just about the most jacked up thing I’ve seen today. But, I’m not positive, myself.