https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=P4Ac8otMlds
I think the right way to think about intellect is that it’s the personality instantiation of IQ, roughly speaking. And the reason I think that is because, well first of all, working memory predicts intellect quite nicely, and working memory tests are very, very highly correlated with G, and specifically G being the first factor that you pull out of any set of IQ tests, right? That’s the technical definition of G. You set up sets of questions, do a factor analysis, and extract out the first factor, which is roughly equivalent, by the way, to the total or to the mean of the items. If there’s a one factor solution, it’s not much different than the average. So the average is actually a factor that’s where the hypothesis is that every single item loads equally on that factor, right? Because you’re adding them all up and then dividing them by the number. So it’s no different than a factor analysis. Sometimes you’ll hear people, like Stephen Jay Gould did this when he was complaining about IQ back in the 90s, he said, a factor analysis like a factor is just a mathematical abstraction. It’s like, well, yeah, so is the average. You think is the average of a set of numbers real? And the answer to that question is, it depends on how you define real. You can use it for certain functions, which is a pretty good definition of real as far as I’m concerned, but when you ask questions like that, you have to define both your terms and you do that somewhat arbitrarily. Anyways, people with high IQs tend to think that they’re smart, which is, and that’s right, and so then they tend to describe themselves as smart if you give them the opportunity to do that. And then that shows up when you ask them questions about their problem solving ability and that loads mostly on intellect. And so it isn’t even obvious that there’s any real utility in assessing intellect from the self-report perspective when you could replace that with an IQ test, because the IQ test is way more accurate. So, but that gives you some sense. You think about the whole five-factor model, you know where intelligence slots. It slots in underneath openness. Now, the openness, proper part of openness to experience, which I tend to think about as creativity, you can use that at least as a shorthand to sort of aid your understanding in what it is. Creativity seems related to IQ in that more people with higher IQs are likely to be creative, or if you take people who are noted for their creativity, there’s a high probability that they’ll have a higher IQ. But there’s more to it than IQ. And what creativity seems to be associated with, then again depends on whether or not, on how you define creativity, because you could define it as the sum total of creative achievements that you’ve made in your life, which would be the actual production of, say, artifacts of one form or another, performances or inventions or artworks or what have you. We’ll go over the dimensions in a minute. Or you could also define it as the proclivity to engage in creative thought. And I think we’ll start with that first. So what does it mean to think creatively? It’s sort of like, it’s something like this. Imagine that I toss you out an idea, and there’s some probability that when I toss you that idea that that will trigger off other ideas in your imagination. So you could think about it as a threshold issue. If you’re not very creative, I’ll throw you an idea and hardly any other ideas will be triggered. And the ones that will be triggered are going to be very closely associated with that initial idea. So let’s say I tossed each of you an idea, and I asked you to tell me the first thing that comes to mind. Okay, so what we would see first is that the first thing that comes to mind in all likelihood would be shared by many of you. Okay, so then you could think about that as a common response, right? And so that’s a less creative response. And then there’ll be some things that come to mind for you that are so idiosyncratic that you’re the only person that thinks it and no one can understand it. Well, that’s also not exactly creative, because the thing that you… For something to be creative, it has to be novel and useful at the same time. That’s sort of a rough definition. Something creative is novel and useful. You