Comment by mrspuratic
11 hours ago
I prefer to think of "smart" as a vector, I'm more interested in the dot-product with the situation at hand.
11 hours ago
I prefer to think of "smart" as a vector, I'm more interested in the dot-product with the situation at hand.
Interesting take! But don't you think that smartness would be something that would work across all/many domains?
Which part of smartness? Knowing a lot of things? Ability to research and learn quickly? Fast decision making?
I'm not sure you can say that it's a single dimension, and plenty of people who are very educated or have had impressive careers in one field seem out of their depth in some other area. There's definitely some skill under that all that can transfer, but you'd need to cut through a lot of other traits to try and identify it and it might not be 'smarts'. (Persistence or motivation seem like large factors.)
Decades of research on the g factor seem to imply that most cognitive tasks are indeed heavily correlated.