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by thomasqm 2224 days ago
They are commonplace puzzles that serve to measure commonplace intelligence. What else were you thinking?
1 comments

Taking a far-reaching and encompassing notion that's very ingrained in everyone's vocabulary, redefining it so that it's easier to measure, and reducing it to a bunch of puzzles, seems to be a favorite pastime of psychologists.
For example?
I'm always impressed by psychologists' claim to be able to accurately define and measure intelligence, creativity, or indeed most personality traits, when researchers from other, presumably adjacent fields (AI to neuroscience to animal behavior to developmental biology) haven't come near approaching these notions. Not only that, but (in the case of intelligence) it apparently stems from the ability to match words and recognized predefined patterns very quickly? This is such an extraordinary claim to make, so either psychologists are onto something people from other fields are too close-minded or feeble-minded to grasp, or some kind of intellectual shortcut was taken there.