[ralusek]

Our definition of intelligence continues to refine itself to be a highly generalizable aptitude for certain abstract skills. Your example of equating intelligence with wealth or bridge building is not even close to how intelligence is measured. It will be measured in dimensions like long term memory, working memory, pattern recognition, rotation of visual space, strategy/problem solving. And these abilities invariably dictate how people will be able to learn or perform at things like bridge building or software engineering. You will never be an exceptional software engineer if you cannot keep a suitably sized problem space in working memory.

It's so frustrating to me that we keep regressing our political conversations with assertions of this nature, that intelligence is a social construction, when in doing so we are literally turning a blind eye to what is arguably one of the greatest injustices our society faces. Intelligence is not a social construction, and it's not distributed equitably, and that isn't fair. It's the single greatest psychological signifier for material success. I'd much rather accept reality as it is, and spend resources attempting to ameliorate objective injustices, rather than making assertions that intelligence is a social construction because it gives some opening for a utopian alternative that can simply dispense with our "oppressive conceptions of competence."

[erikpukinskis]

Our definition of intelligence comes from a set of measures which were calibrated to correlate with measures of success. Success is by definition a measure of societal “fit” and so the whole program is by definition socially constructed.

Doesn’t mean it’s not “real”. But I also would not say it’s “abstract” in any meaningful sense. It’s certainly not derived from first principles, nor do we have any kind of theoretical model of intelligence that’s good enough to construct measures around.

[renlo]

I agree with you, believe it or not, what I was referring to was “our definition of intelligence” (edit: ie, the collection of traits we see as “ingelligent”), not the underlying traits.

[astazangasta]

>Our definition of intelligence continues to refine itself to be a highly generalizable aptitude for certain abstract skills.

This is exactly what social construction is: reifying a set of observations into an abstract notion. Intelligence is a social construction.