Comment by nunodonato
19 hours ago
Interesting take! But don't you think that smartness would be something that would work across all/many domains?
19 hours ago
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.
Yes and it's not just purely cognitive tasks. In fact, pretty much everything requires you to use your brain, so smarter people tend to do better on pretty much everything regardless of their familiarity/talent for the task at hand.
But this is something most people prefer to ignore because the implications are pretty big and we already had a war around that...