"I.Q.", "G," & "MI" at the U and my "almost too dumb to be alive" acquaintance.

OR

Beating Around the Cliche Bush with the Ugly Stick

OR

"Help! Those Ninjas Stole My Multiple Intelligences!"

Ok, so as you might have guessed, this post has to do with concepts of "beauty and intelligence," "stereotyped perception and cliches" and "Ninjas kicking butts."

Well, actually, it doesn't have much to do with Ninjas kicking butt.... However I did have an unfortunate reunion with what has to be the dumbest person I've ever encountered, and I really wish someone would drop kick her butt. But, uh, I'll try to work in the Ninjas somewhere anyhow.

About this woman:

Kurt Vonnegut once described a character in a novel as being "almost too dumb to be alive." This acquaintance of mine might be the only person I have ever met worthy of such a description.

For example, I once witnessed her volunteering to explain to someone what a "denominator" was. It was bad enough that she clearly had no idea that this was the word for the unlucky chap on the underside of a fraction, but couldn't admit her ignorance. No, what followed was one of the greatest displays of dumb I have ever witnessed, and god, I wish I had it on tape. And let me stress, this spectacle was completely in earnest: she transformed before our eyes into Coach Z. She kept trying to say the word "denominator" over and over agian, and somehow couldn't say it right. Actually, she couldn't even get close. She is a native speaker of English, but I have never heard the sounds she was making in any language before-- it could easily have been the native language of Pluto:

"dee- norm-men-urgenerg"

'dee-nort-enizer"

"dee-neg-gent-urger"

And she kept stopping and shaking her head, slapping her own face and saying "why can't I say it?" And then she would try again, fail, and then make a raspberry type of farting noise, and try some more:

"dee-germ-entyper"

Then, she even wrote the word down. She studied it carefully, and tried again very slowly. Each time we thought she was going to be successful until at the last moment she would somehow miss it:

(very slowly and deliberately:) "deeeeeee-noooooom-eeeeeeen-aaaaa--geerrggggeoorrrrrrggg."
"deeeeeee-nooooooom-eeeeeeen-gerrrrggggggner.

This went on for what seemed like an hour. She must have tried literally at least 40 times.... (denomejader)

And this story by no means exhausts this being's vast resources of stupidity....

So, as you can imagine, the only thing that gets me through any meeting with this person are my fantasies of her being ripped apart by Ninjas while she inexplicably and gleefully makes fart noises and shouts "look dancer, Whooo! I learned to crochet!" (which she annoyingly pronounces "crotch it.")

IQ

But not only is her existence personally trying, her irrefutable dunder-headed-ness is intellectually upsetting for me as well.

You see, her absolute lack of intelligence is the only sure refutation of my insistence that there is no such thing as "general intelligence" ("g") or even more broadly intelligence as a whole.

"No such thing as intelligence?" you ask? Yes, the idea of "so and so" being smarter than "whosey who" has become an unquestionable assumption in our culture. But it is just these types of absolute truths that we need to question the most. When someone says "boy, that sure is a smart kid!" or "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" or some other well-worn platitude, it carries the power of generations of acceptance. Hence it's veracity is never questioned. Which is really too bad.

Firstly, these cliches make a duality where there is more likely a continuum: "either beauty is in the eye of the beholder or it isn't." The truth however is probably more gray than black and white. I think we continue to use cliches because we want them to be true, not because they are. The idea of intelligence is very flattering if you come out on the "superior" side while it makes a lovely excuse for ones failings if we land on the downside. So for a long time we had the idea of "general intelligence," which as we now know, was invented by a couple of Phrenologists for the purpose of showing that white people were better than people with other colors of skin, after measuring skulls failed to verify Arian superiority.

But there were lots of problems with "G." Firstly, it didn't seem to be a good predictor of anything (not even race, which to some was it's greatest failing.) One kid gets a high IQ and another gets a low IQ. Statistically their odds of success remained the same.

But then Howard Gardner back-flipped onto the scene with his theory of Multiple Intelligences and saved the day. Gardner gave us the idea that there is no such thing as "g", but instead there are "self smarts," "music smarts," "body smarts," "math smarts," "picture smarts," "word smarts," "nature smarts" and the "popular girl smarts." Well, I guess that's a little better.... And it does seem to be a slightly better predictor of success-- at least in specific endeavors.

However, here is the problem. Take Mozart for example. Did he have "music smarts." Sure he did. Did he have lots of other smarts too? Of course. But why was Mozart so great? Was it just a gift for tunefulness? Absolutely not. Perhaps it was his math smarts which allowed him to construct such perfectly ordered compositions. Or his "popular girl smarts" that enabled him to communicate so fully with us. And what happens when we compare Mozart to Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Lizt or Mahler? Well, we see that one is a great composer because of his picture smarts, one because of his self smarts, one because his nature smarts and one because of his body smarts. How important were their "music smarts?" I'm not sure there even is such a thing!

And the same would be true for writers, mathematicians, and popular girls.

So because of this failing, certain people have tried expanding Multiple Intelligences into a complex swirling entangled grid of fluctuating kinds of intelligence. Though I enjoy contemplating these theories to the music of Pink Floyd, they are basically worthless for understanding anything about so-called intelligence

The truth is that as our concepts of "intelligence" come closer to the real world, "intelligence" becomes synonymous with "individuality." Mozart was a genius because of his specific life experiences and understandings. Same with all the other composers, and same with every other human. We each have something unique and powerful that we can all learn from-- we are each a clever solution to the problems that we encounter. And even a lack of typical "g" can represent a powerful intelligence of a sort. Those of us who encounter difficulties learning may become geniuses at teaching! Remember that Einstein declared that his eventual insights were due to the relative trouble he had at understanding concepts that were easy for his contemporaries.

The truth is that their ARE multiple intelligences-- somewhere's around 6 billion of em.

And as for my ridiculously stupid friend from above, I even learned from her! I'll be consulting with her about my new theory of "singular dumbs."