A forum for discussion ideas
Years ago, when I was an undergraduate, specializing in mathematics and physics at the University of Toronto, my colleagues and I were filled with an inflated sense of our abilities and were inclined to dismiss anyone outside our realm as irrelevant. However, as time unfolded, life taught us lessons in humility. Two years ago, I …
In 1651, Thomas Hobbes described the life of man as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Indeed, the average life expectancy in England in the 17th century was 35 years (before adjusting for infant mortality). Throughout most of human history, life has been as Hobbes described it. However, today, most citizens in the Western cultures …
What may be Thanksgiving’s greatest Intellectual Challenge? Read More »
Many people ask how we can identify intelligence. Chapter 1 of this book provides some answers.
The war of words on giftedness rages on. Many who subscribe to an egalitarian ideology argue that, except for the mentally challenged, we all have roughly the same intelligence. They claim that those who demonstrate prowess in academics, athletics or creative invention are no more capable than anyone else–they merely work harder and longer. In …
What Personality Traits Distinguish the Gifted from the Rest? Read More »
From our earliest beginnings, we humans have been mystified by our dreams, investing considerable effort into interpreting their meaning and their purpose. A dream’s clandestine existence below our level of consciousness, engages us during sleep and then melts away like a snowflake when we awake and attempt to recover it. The Poincaré-Hadamard model for discovery …
What can we Learn about a person from a question they pose? When people submit questions for inclusion on the Quora site: Intelligence & IQ, the first question I ask myself is, “Is this something that would be of interest to a large number of our followers?”; if so I’ll search for an answer already …
In recent times, an egalitarian ideology has prompted many to argue that, except for the mentally challenged, we all have roughly the same intelligence. Those who demonstrate prowess in academics, chess or creative invention are no more capable than anyone else–they merely work harder and longer. In 1993, psychologist Anders Ericsson challenged the concept of …
In his seminal book *Thinking, Fast and Slow*, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman wrote: Social scientists in the 1970s broadly accepted two ideas about human nature. First, people are generally rational, and their thinking is normally sound. Second, emotions such as fear, affection, and hatred explain most of the occasions on which people depart from rationality. …
Are the so-called Intellectuals Falling into the Politically Motivated Reasoning Trap? Read More »
Today’s post is an answer to the question above posed by Kay C. An overwhelming amount of research supports your assertion that intelligence has a strong genetic component. In 1990, Thomas J. Bouchard et al. published a seminal article titled, Sources of Human Psychological Differences: The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart in which they assembled …
The United States is the world’s strongest economy and contains more Nobel Prize winners by far than any other nation in the world, but is its population as intelligent as the populations of other nations? According to a report on Forbes at Ranked: The 25 Smartest Countries In The World, the American population ranks 4th in intelligence among …
What Nations have the Most Intelligent Populations? Read More »
