“Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”
— Charles Addams
Intelligence Quotient
IQ is a measure of a person’s mental ability to perform functions considered valuable. The metric was created at a time when eugenics was on the rise, and people were being ranked according to their race, age, gender, and cultural background.
In the early 20th century psychological semi-sciences were being applied to education and social engineering. The goal was to identify people most likely to outperform in a modern, Western society. IQ is useful in predicting how a person will perform on tests administered in schools.
IQ is not so much measured by IQ tests as it is defined by them. These tests do measure something. A person’s IQ is stable over time as long as they don’t try to improve their skills on these tests, but the tests are neither comprehensive nor intrinsic. You can improve your IQ score with training.
Those people who do the best on IQ tests are those people who think linearly, which is like the questions on the tests, and who respond receptively to being told they need to answer questions. The questions on IQ tests are narrow-minded and specifically focus on circumscribed, deductive thinking.
Creative people perform below what is expected of them because they are inclined to think differently, which means they distort the questions they’re asked. People rarely value another person’s distortion of their questions.
There are tests that purport to measure divergent thinking, and there is a generally accepted hypothesis that creativity requires a minimum level of intelligence. The idea that you need to be intelligent in order to be creative is called “the threshold effect.”
“Investigations of the relationship between intelligence and creative potential provide a scattered view: While some studies support a threshold effect, others report low to moderate positive correlations throughout the whole spectrum of intellectual ability… intelligence may increase creative potential up to a certain degree where it loses impact and other factors come into play.” — Emanuel Jauk et al. (2013)
Creative people question tests, the questioners, and the context of being tested. One does not need to disparage or be annoyed by the IQ test to do poorly, one simply has to explore alternatives to the approach the test givers expect because, according to those who have designed the test, those explorations are a waste of time.
For example, when given a picture of a three dimensional shape and asked to rotate this shape and pick what would appear, the good IQ test taker will focus on the shape, take careful note, carefully define an axis, and carefully visualize the rotation in their mind.
In contrast, a creative thinker will imagine themselves sitting on this shape and what this reminds them of. Then they will imagine themselves traveling over a landscape, meeting other shapes, and perhaps hear a symphony of shapes and colors. They will leave the IQ question behind as uninteresting. They will spend their energies on other things and be told this reflects a lack of intelligence.
Emotional Intelligence
EI is an alternative notion of intelligence that distinguishes itself from IQ. The notion of emotional intelligence is both a reaction against the tendency of valuing people according to their intellect, and the recognition that managing people and resources is rarely deductive, and needs another means of description.
Emotional intelligence emerged from the areas of business, management, and consulting and not from academics or personal ranking. EI is more a matter of being socially effective than being solution capable. In this regard, EI differs from IQ in its use, goal, and meaning. And where IQ is presented as something intrinsic to a person, EI is seen as a quality that can be developed.
From a pragmatic viewpoint, EI and IQ came from different perspectives and developed to satisfy different needs. This undermines any attempt to combine them into an inclusive measure of ability. We intuitively recognize EI and IQ as exclusive and necessary abilities, and we’d like to see them as complementary.
There are tests to measure EI. They are different from IQ tests in being qualitative, specific to a given culture, and based on social norms. Current EI tests distinguish these aspects: experiential and strategic emotional insight, and the perceiving, understanding, and managing of emotion.
It would be interesting to ask the hard questions about a person’s EI, such as their ability to love, empathize, be creative, and achieve emotional stability. But in the current cultural context, these questions are considered to reflect prejudice, and so they’re avoided.
Analyses revealed that EI was not related to IQ but was related, as expected, to specific personality measures like empathy, life satisfaction, and mood stability. There is no reliable or accepted measure or even definition of emotional intelligence. It’s a convenient buzz word, but measurements of it are not taken seriously anywhere.
The value of measuring a person’s EI is similar to the value of measuring a person’s IQ. Three positive ways to use this information include:
Further developing the abilities of young people with high emotional intelligence.
Providing remedial help to those with low innate emotional intelligence.
Determining if a person’s families and schooling helps or hinders their emotional skills.
Ranking of people according to their EI is more ill advised because EI is a biased, arbitrary measure. But then, so is IQ to some extent, still it’s useful in some contexts nonetheless.
Chaotic Agility
Being able to navigate uncertainty involves resilience and foresight. It also involves conviction and commitment. Conviction is not commitment. The first means to be certain while the second means to be reliable. You can be committed to what is uncertain. In reality, nothing is certain, and that’s why commitment is so important.
“Far from automatically miring us in cognitive paralysis, uncertainty plays an essential role in higher-order thinking, propelling people in challenging times toward good judgment, flexibility, mutual understanding, and heights of creativity.. It is the portal to finding your enemy’s humanity, the overlooked lynchpin of superior teamwork, and the mindset most needed in times of flux.”
— Maggie Jackson (2023), journalist
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