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squidbeaktoday at 6:10 PM2 repliesview on HN

I'm a layman to this jargon, but are 'crystallized intelligence' and 'emotional intelligence' in any actual sense 'intelligence'? I can't see how these terms mean anything other than judgement, experience, maturity etc, which are already good enough labels for this stuff. Can anyone explain what these flashier new terms offer over them?


Replies

jltsirentoday at 9:02 PM

Intelligence is a vague concept anyway.

One way to look at this is that "fluid intelligence" represents potential intelligence or raw processing power. "Crystallized intelligence" and "emotional intelligence" are then actual intelligence, or the intelligence another person can see.

Or maybe a bit less seriously: In my experience, fluid intelligence often manifests as stupidity in young people, for whatever reason. Crystallized intelligence and emotional intelligence then represent intelligence as a lack of stupidity.

eudamoniactoday at 7:09 PM

They offer the dilution of the word "intelligence" so that we can pretend ever more strongly that it doesn't really exist as a concept, and therefore eventually stop measuring it (especially across populations)