> From: Ron Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > It seems to me that the "most successful" would be those who can > master the social needs (get good grades from approved testbooks, > etc), while still being able to think outside the box.
Ron, I can't give your remark the attention it deserves because this topic is way OT, but I find no way to resist saying just a little. Your implication that students who know how to work within the system tend to get good grades strikes me as accurate, as is the implication that good grades don't necessarily correlate with "intelligence." However, there are some serious problems lurking behind these platitudes. We have no satisfactory measure of intelligence, certainly not the discredited "IQ" test. We therefore must always specify just what we mean by intelligence, particularly the context in which it is manifested. There's probably different kinds of intelligence that are only loosely correlated with mental acuity. For example, I have an intuitive sense that some people really pick things up quickly and frequently come up with unusual insights. I suppose that is a sign of their native intelligence. Unfortunately, that ability correlates poorly with success in school and with success in life. Many of these people have difficulty with formal college courses because they find it difficult to fit into the grove of the system's implicit assumptions and goals and lack the presumed fundamental information and skills. Many of these people don't do particularly well on the job, either, for they may not have some necessary social skills or not take seriously the rules governing work, or perhaps are simply not given opportunity or reason to act creatively. While I think of such people as sharp, and I find them interesting and fun to be with, their mental sharpness may do them really little good. That is, they are not really "intelligent" in the sense that they can think constructively "outside the box." Sometimes they are not so much "outside the box" as "off the wall". Creative thinking, just as creativity in the arts, requires discipline, the mastery of certain skills and possession of a body of knowledge. The issue, I believe, is not thinking "outside the box," as if honed skill and the possession of information is somehow the enemy of creative thinking, but being creative in terms of one's skills and knowledge. Intelligence or creativity without material constraint to give it meaning and direction seems vacuous (lecture here on thermodynamic engines, and how structures give rise to improbable outcomes by constraining a dissipative system's degrees of freedom, etc., etc., etc.). For example, with baroque music there were many geniuses and a lot of hacks whom we seldom hear. The former struggled with and bent conventions to create extraordinarily powerful music. On the other hand, today there's not much left of the old rules, and so it becomes very difficult for a composer to produce anything but soon-to-be-forgotten "elevator music." We are heirs of an ideological contradiction between freedom and determinism, while in fact, in human affairs and to a significant extent in the natural sciences, causality is probabilistic. This suggests the contradiction is false. Haines Brown -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
