Re: The constancy of the black/white IQ gap is a myth
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Originally Posted by Degenuicide
I myself am dubious about combining the words emotion and intelligence, especially because intelligence in many ways is rational understandings of anything, and sometimes irrational concepts, and emotion is definitely not a rational thing, since its a part of the human social interaction and its workings. And I could see how a person could thus bias the definition of the EI as being something regarded "good" or skilled inside human social and emotional interaction and behavior, instead of a universal rational understanding of it, out of its own particular context. Human social and emotional interaction is not based on argumentative reasoning, but automatic stimulations (that are only socially interactive) that influence the individual on a constant basis. A common definition of EI is "an ability, capacity, or skill to perceive, assess, and manage the emotions of one's self, of others, and of groups" - which is what you would expect of a such definition. And in that case, a truly emotional intelligent person would be a manipulator, that isnt deceived by the outer workings of the mind or emotions, or deceived by inherited perceptions of morality and is more or less sociopathic in being detached from the primitive influence on the mind and decision taking, that emotions normally consist of. And I am sure the common specific definition of EI would be more moralistic, in having a bias in its conception of such sociopathic behavior as being excluded as non-emotionally intelligent behavior by the moralistic distinction between good and evil. Because emotional intelligence objectively must be any behavior that especially qualifies as the "capacity, skill or ability to perceive, manage and assess the emotion of one self and others".
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Well, your critique on emotional intelligence, which as I see you made extensive to the current conception of "socially acceptable" behaviours, has a lot of sense, however, we cannot take if out from what it's intended to cover. Sure, socialization changes from time to time and between cultures as well. For example, what we nowadays consider typical of someone with high social capabilities (sarcasm, irony, use of trendy expressions, etc), decades ago would have been misunderstood by most people or directly considered a freak. But EI as we know appeared almost "by force", for the urgency to explain certain happenings that made no sense to psychologists at the time, while simultaneously, mantaining the credibility of the IQ test (wheter if it actually has or not, I will not enter to opine). What made no sense to them was the fact that many people with a modest IQ (around 80) obtained great sucesses in life and studies, while others with 130 (all of them healthy persons), had one failure after another. Then, by studying many of these opposed cases, some guy identified varied patterns and converged them in a theory, which for what I know, was widely accepted by most scholars and began to be teached at school almost instantly. That we don't like what's trendy on social relationships shouldn't be an impediment to accept that there's some reason for the existence of EI, since the ability to adapt yourself on a community certainly requires intelligence, and in any case, EI is much more than that. For example, you can take the case of someone who considers himself too much intelligent for not having understood some matter after 1 or 2 attempts, and instead of continuing focusing just on it, will begin to develop some negative information which after a considerable acumulation will act as some kind of spyware or hidden process on his brain, definitely "blocking" him in the end, while the one considering himself less intelligent, will just insist with the same thing all the hours needed for it until overcoming it. As we see, there's no need for social skills to surpass such situation, but there's indeed a need for imposing certain kind of thoughs over others, as I said earlier, those that favour self-motivation and promote the will to sacrifice yourself for a goal. Also, while many would agree that EI is the most definitive factor for success, none would say that cognitive intelligence is useless either, in fact part of their definition of EI states that someone emotionally intelligent is "able to combine cognitive knowledge with emotional knowledge and use them in tandem." If I did chose such extreme example in the previous post was to highlight a point.
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"Do not be suprised, my friend, that I long so much for remote lands in which people feel immensely rich with very little; it is true that I live in Rome enjoying a life of fame and prestige, but it is also true that I was born from Celts and Iberians."
--Marcus Valerius Martialis, Epigrammata
Last edited by Ferran; Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 19:02.
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Monday, December 10th, 2007
Well, you know how science works, all theories are pseudo-science until they are at least proved to "make a little more sense" to what was previously accepted. Of course, we must take into account that human intelligence is being studied day by day and we are still far to know some basic things about human brain. But taking into account that some few persons from different countries who had a slight level of Syndrome of Down finished a career, I tend to agree that a high "cognitive intelligence" is not that relevant, even if just for studies.
I winnnN! I think my percentile thing was 0.26
