William Kitchen wrote:
> If the village idiot's brain were a few orders of magnitude
> faster, he might not seem like much of an idiot.
>
I question this statement somewhat. To my perception, it is not usually
the speed with which someone arrives at the "correct" answer, but rather
the level of "correctness" of the answer. In my mind, a village idiot
does, as you say, exhibit properties of slowness of thought, but
exhibits incorrect thought more so. So, simplistically put, the V.I.
arrives at the wrong answer faster than ve would normally.
I view perceived intelligent behavior as being a result of several
components (each of which has subcomponents/behaviors):
1. Output style/skill
a. Modes: speech, written, iconic(diagramatic), body language, etc.
2. Raw processing speed/time
a. Speed of data acquisition
b. Speed of data retrieval
c. Speed of data manipulation/combination (effects on 4.)
d. Speed of transmission (effects on 1.)
3. Knowledge base
a. It's direct effect on 1. (i.e., vocabulary)
b. Relevance to the problem domain
c. Level of accuracy for any problem domain
4. Ability to combine items from 3. into solution sets
a. Filter out distractions (emotions where appropriate, erroneous
data, etc.)
b. Creative/novel connections between data
5. The totality of 1 through 4 for the *perceiver* of the
to-be-assessed-intelligence of a person
So, increases in 2. only may not necessarily give the V.I. a substantial
increase in intelligence, real or perceived.
-Dana
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