Intelligence
In 2019-20, CQ asked you: What is intelligence?
What is intelligence? How is it measured and recognized by ourselves and society? What is emotional intelligence and what is artificial intelligence? How do trees communicate? What do we already know, from our own lives?
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Kaufman, Post-Traumatic Growth: Finding Meaning and Creativity in Adversity
Image source: Scientific American
“By embracing psychological flexibility, we face the world with exploration and openness and are better able to react to events in the service of our chosen values.”
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Vesla Weaver, “The State from Below: Urban Citizenship in Policed Communities” (2019)
“Citizenship in poor communities is greater than the sum of exclusions…. Instead, it is a broad difference in the way the government—from police to schools to the welfare system—orients itself towards its residents.”
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Jorge Luis Borges, “Funes, His Memory” (1942)
I don’t know how many stars he could see in the sky.
Read more…Image retrieved from https://lithub.com/the-self-portrait-jorge-luis-borges-drew-after-going-blind.
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Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, & Geofrey Hinton, “Deep Learning” (2015)
Instead of translating the meaning of a French sentence into an English sentence, one can learn to ‘translate’ the meaning of an image into an English sentence.
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Angeles Salles, Kirsten Bohn, & Cynthia Moss, “Auditory Communication in Bats: What We Know and Where To Go” (2019)
“Echolocation is achieved through a sophisticated audio-vocal system that allows bats to emit and detect frequencies that can range from ten to hundreds of kilohertz.” Read more…
Image retrieved from https://pixabay.com/photos/bat-mammal-wildlife-spooky-wing-1695186
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Scott Hartley, “The Fuzzy and the Techie” (2017)
One of the most immediate needs in technology innovation is to invest products and services with more human qualities, with more sensitivity to human needs and desires.
Read more…Image retrieved from https://www.artsandmindlab.org/category/art
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Andrei Cimpian and Sarah-Jane Leslie, “The Brilliance Trap” (2017)
Both philosophers and psychologists ask questions about how people perceive and understand the world, how they decide between right and wrong, how they learn and use language, and so on…How could two such closely related fields be so vastly different in membership?
Read more…Image retrieved from https://pixabay.com/photos/lego-children-toys-colorful-play-674880
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Ibram X. Kendi, “I Want You to Make History, Not Be History” (2016)
How much you know has no bearing on how much you are an intellectual.
Read more…Image retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTIho5SFDu8
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Alex Garland, “Ex Machina” (2014)
“Ava [the AI] was a rat in a maze. And I gave her one way out. To escape, she’d have to use self-awareness, imagination, manipulation, sexuality, empathy, and she did. Now, if that isn’t true AI, what the fuck is?” See more…
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Martha Nussbaum, “Emotions as a Judgment of Value and Importance” (1998)
In grief and in love we live, suddenly, surprisingly, in a world of mountains and valleys, of sheer rock, and black water radiant as diamonds…
Read more…Image retrieved from https://pixabay.com/photos/mountains-death-valley-minerals-1149727
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Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself, 6 [A child said, What is the grass?]” (1855)
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses
Read more…Image retrieved from https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47db-c75f-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
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Mary Ruefle, “I Remember, I Remember” (2012)
I remember (later) thinking that it was actually hilarious that I used to read poetry to cows, that they were an integral part of my most serious moment.
Read More…Image retrieved from http://lissadellhouse.com/yeats/william-butler-yeats
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Jonathan Plucker and Amy Shelton, “General Intelligence (g): An Overview of a Complex Construct and Its Implications for Genetics Research” (2015)
…the focus in the genetics of g [general intelligence] has shifted from questions about the degree of heritability to questions about the specific genes associated with differences in g.
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Shelley Washington, “Towers” (2018)
I chose to highlight the simultaneous feeling of power and powerlessness, and the often crushing isolation that comes with my being a black woman in higher academia.
Listen here…Image retrieved from https://youtu.be/dxCaZHhAGLQ
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Radiolab, “From Tree to Shining Tree” (2016)
In this story, a dog introduces us to a strange creature that burrows beneath forests, building an underground network where deals are made and lives are saved (and lost)…leading some researchers to rethink what it means to be intelligent.
Read More…Image retrieved from https://pixabay.com/photos/trees-forest-nature-landscape-3736129
Keep Reading
Esther Perel, “The Erotic is an Antidote to Death” (2019)
Eroticism thrives on the ritual and the celebration and the infiniteness of our imagination and on the forbidden, for that matter, too.
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David Epstein, “What the Childhood Years of Tiger Woods and Roger Federer Can Teach Us About Success” (2019)
The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking and delayed concentration.
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Fei-Fei Li, “How to Make AI That’s Good for People” (2018)
No technology is more reflective of its creators than A.I. It has been said that there are no “machine” values at all, in fact; machine values are human values.
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Wharton Stories, “Humans in Control: Prof. Kartik Hosanager Argues for an ‘Algorithmic Bill of Rights’” (2019)
People…feel like ‘yes, algorithms are all around us and they inform my decisions, but usually I nod politely and do mostly what I want.’ But actually, the data suggests otherwise.
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Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury” (1977)
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.
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Glenn Gould, Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15 (1962)
So why am I conducting it?…We can all learn something from this extraordinary artist who is a thinking performer.
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Rodrigo QuianQuiroga, “Borges and Memory: Encounters with the Human Brain” (2012)
All action requires forgetting, just as the existence of all organic things requires not only light, but darkness as well.
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James Tabery, “Why Is Studying the Genetics of Intelligence So Controversial?” (2015)
From the very beginning…studies of the nature and nurture of intelligence were closely associated with an interest in intervening, and those interventions were surrounded by controversy.
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Maureen N. McLane, “OK Let’s Go” (2016)
Let’s enroll ourselves/ in the school of the sky.
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Sy Montgomery, “Deep Intellect” (2011)
Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms.
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American Visionary Arts Museum
AVAM’s Educational Goal #5: “Promote the use of innate intelligence, intuition, self-exploration, and creative self-reliance.”
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Jiayang Fan, “How I Would Have Fared on the SAT Adversity Score” (2019)
…to expect an appended metric to fix an inequality that is a symptom not only of the education system but of society as a whole seems like another kind of self-deception.
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Seth Gershenson and Nicholas Papageorge, “The Power of Teacher Expectations” (2018)
You have to ignore it when a child says, ‘I don’t want to,’ because what they’re really saying is, ‘I don’t think I can and I need you to believe in me until I can believe in myself.’
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Langston Hughes, “Theme for English B” (1951)
But I guess I’m what / I feel and see and hear.
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Finn Brunton, “AI: Machines or Magic?” (2019)
We undervalue some of the truly surprising results of AI research in our desire for theology by other means.
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John Allen and Amir Husain, “On Hyperwar” (2017)
The major effect/result of all these capabilities coming together will be an innovation warfare has never seen before: the minimization of human decision making in the vast majority of processes traditionally required to wage war.
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Robert Plomin interview: “What We Get Wrong about the Influence of Parents” (2018)
We can now better explain differences in national test scores in the UK based on genes than we could by knowing parents’ years of education.
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Nathaniel Comfort, “Genetic Determinism Redux” (2018)
[Plomin’s] utopia is a forensic world, dictated by polygenic algorithms and the whims of those who know how to use them. People would be defined at birth by their DNA. Expectations would be set, and opportunities, resources and experiences would be doled out — and withheld — a priori.
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Karen Russell, “Helping Hands” (2015)
Working with one’s hands is working with one’s mind.
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Siddartha Mukherjee, ‘Genetic Therapies: Post-Human’ from The Gene: An Intimate History (2017)
We know of no other mechanism to understand the world: to create the sum of the parts, we must begin by dividing it into the parts of the sum.
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Tim Rogan, “Know-How” (2019)
The apprenticeship that humans go through to learn to tell a freckle from a cancer is not simply a matter of processing piles of empirical information to discern what function of X input (symptoms with which potentially cancerous patients present) Y (cancer) happens to be.
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Emily Dickinson, “The Brain—is wider than the Sky—” (1862)
The Brain is just the weight of God—