1. „Fast learners are more intelligent than slow learners“
Everybody knows the story of a „wunderkind“ which could do complicated calculations already as a small child. We usually attribute such extraordinary early cognitive performance to the superior intelligence of the child.
But, somewhat counterintuitively, this not true in general. While it seems to be easily possible to design an intelligent entity which can learn to walk on four legs within a few hours (like a deer, for instance), the far more complex tasks a human can undertake with its extremities („building a watch“, „dance“) take many years to learn. Deers are, as we all know, not really geniuses! There must be a reason why humans, while cognitively more capable in most aspects than deer, need so much more training time. The reason might be: entities with broad cognitive capabilities learn tasks at a higher abstraction level. These generally need more samples to learn, as each task executed while training is only a sample for a narrow use case of the more general concept. If, on the other hand, the narrow use case is all that is needed (like in the case of walking for a deer) few samples are sufficient to learn the task.
Therefore: kids with a predisposition to develop a broad intelligence need more time to develop, not less!
2. „People who perform well at some tasks usually also perform well at other tasks (because of their generally higher intelligence)“
You can find videos on youtube of apes solving memorization puzzles at deeply superhuman performance. They solve the problems so fast, that humans have serious difficulties understanding what is actually going on in the videos. But nobody would attribute apes with a higher intelligence than humans. So there must be a problem with this popular view. I think the misconception comes from our shared observation that people which are good at rational thinking have usually more successful professional careers than others who are not so great. Sadly, we have organized our society in way that only a very small subset of our cognitive capabilities is required to be economically successful. This subset (mostly rational intelligence and language skills) we call „intelligence“ and we measure it with IQ tests which claim to be a predictor for any other task. But my hunting dog would have scored 0 points in an IQ test but he could run through an almost pitch-black forest at an incredibly fast speed. For me an unimaginable feat and a impressive demonstration of an extremely developed sensomotoric intelligence. I have friends who are social geniuses and others are fantastic artists or dancers.
Let‘s call IQ tests what they really are: the winners defining science to keep the upper hand over the others, the dominating fraction of the population explaining the others that they are more valuable humans. But fortunately it‘s only really poor pseudoscience.
Therefore: just laugh about it!
3. „Old people think slower than young people“
We all have experienced it: our smartphones seem to get slower and slower over the years. But, of course, they are not really getting slower. Even if the battery gets weaker over time, the processor is still running at exactly the same clock speed. We all know the true reason: regular updates of the operating system and the apps we use require more and more processing power. The reason is that both software systems improve over time: they get more features, get more user friendly and are useful in a broader range of use cases.
The same effect can be observed in humans: the older we get, the more we develop interdisciplinary thinking. We learn that there are sometimes connections between nodes in our knowledge graph which reach surprisingly far. These nodes need a lot more processing time when we are thinking about certain questions compared to the predominantly short hops of the young person. Or in other words: old people integrate far more knowledge in their thinking process compared to young people.
Unfortunately we cannot simply buy a „larger brain“ every few years (as we do with our smartphones).
Therefore: please give old people seriously more time to think! You will get far better results from them this way.
Image: Shutterstock Cait Eire
Follow me on X to get informed about new content on this blog.
