> Fluid intelligence, which peaks near age 20 and declines materially across adulthood [...] while fluid intelligence may decline with age, other dimensions improve (e.g., crystallized intelligence, emotional intelligence)
As someone well past "peak" fluid intelligence at this point, I always hate reading research like this. "Crystallized intelligence" and "emotional intelligence" are the consolation prizes no one really wants.
I'd rather we instead perform research to identify how one might reverse the decline of fluid intelligence...
Emotional intelligence is pretty useless (not really, especially since it’s important for career progression) but crystallized intelligence seems pretty solid.
> Yet, human achievement in domains such as career success tends to peak much later, typically between the ages of 55 and 60. This discrepancy may reflect the fact that, while fluid intelligence may decline with age, other dimensions improve (e.g., crystallized intelligence, emotional intelligence).
Isn't it about accumulated human capital (aka social networks) and experience more than anything else?
This is pretty silly. Your memory obviously gets a little worse as you age, with most of the noticeable decline coming in very late age. But the artificial measures/definitions of things like "fluid" intelligence are mostly useless. Just pulling up one of the studies cited in the article which is supposed to measure the "reasoning" aspect of "fluid" intelligence, presents a huge host issues immediately [1].
Aside from the lack of randomization, you have obvious validity problems. The interpretation of nebulous words like "reasoning" as being accurately measured by e.g. accuracy on Raven matrices (construct validity?) and younger participants having been primed by recent test-taking experience while real-world reasoning skills aren't really reflected - it's all quite specious.
Real-world decisions are value-laden and constraint-laden! "Intelligence" does not mean "maximizing abstract pattern detection". If you keep your brain active with a wide range of creative, interesting problems, you will be fine apart from neurodegenerative diseases, which have real effects.
That's exactly how intelligence in measurement setting is defined. That's how the word is defined. What's interesting is that it correlates with so many unrelated real world outcomes. And other definitions and measurements do not.
I'm a layman to this jargon, but are 'crystallized intelligence' and 'emotional intelligence' in any actual sense 'intelligence'? I can't see how these terms mean anything other than judgement, experience, maturity etc, which are already good enough labels for this stuff. Can anyone explain what these flashier new terms offer over them?
One way to look at this is that "fluid intelligence" represents potential intelligence or raw processing power. "Crystallized intelligence" and "emotional intelligence" are then actual intelligence, or the intelligence another person can see.
Or maybe a bit less seriously: In my experience, fluid intelligence often manifests as stupidity in young people, for whatever reason. Crystallized intelligence and emotional intelligence then represent intelligence as a lack of stupidity.
I quite like this paper. Does a great job laying out scientific support for things we already "knew" in our guts - like having retirement ages at around 65, for instance, being an ideal milestone to start transitioning folks from leading hard work to supporting activities.
Where I worry is that these papers will be used to justify ageism. Looking through these comments, there's quite a lot of positions being bandied around that I've heard justify some truly atrocious hiring/firing decisions before, and we need to be cognizant of the reality that age alone is not an indicator of success or failure for a given role or task. It's helpful to keep looking into this, but we also need to be aware of our own biases.
If fluid intelligence is based on the ability to recognize new patterns (unsupervised learning) and crystallized intelligence on recognizing known patterns (supervised learning), then more than physiology, age alone may differentiate the two.
Youngsters know no patterns so they can't match new events to known ones. Oldsters know that most seemingly new stuff is not really new, it's just the same old stuff, so they reduce the cost of thinking and reject the noise by adding the new unlabeled event to an existing cluster rather than creating a new noisy one. That's wisdom. But that's also a behavior that will inevitably increase as we age and our clusters establish themselves and prove their worth.
So aren't those two forms of intelligence less about a difference in brain physiology and more about having learned to employ common sense?
Do we peak or are there fewer patterns than we want to believe and eventually accept and just quit looking?
Sure we can generate syntactic and semantic descriptions endlessly but to use software as an example, we made a lot of the same things that look different only in the symbols used.
Ansible and Chef. Terraform and Pulumi. Ruby and Python. Windows and Linux. Burger shack 1, burger shack 2. They all solve the same problem.
Being able to generate semantics endlessly does not upend our daily patterns and routines. Life on Earth is pretty obvious.
Fluid intelligence must be the classical one that the IQ measures. Crystallized and emotional must be the experience, professional and social respectively.
In my case I was quite good with numbers in my 20s, not any more in my late 40s. But I believe now I know the world best in my life and that is increasing.
21 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 41.8 ms ] threadAs someone well past "peak" fluid intelligence at this point, I always hate reading research like this. "Crystallized intelligence" and "emotional intelligence" are the consolation prizes no one really wants.
I'd rather we instead perform research to identify how one might reverse the decline of fluid intelligence...
Isn't it about accumulated human capital (aka social networks) and experience more than anything else?
Still in the game :-)
Aside from the lack of randomization, you have obvious validity problems. The interpretation of nebulous words like "reasoning" as being accurately measured by e.g. accuracy on Raven matrices (construct validity?) and younger participants having been primed by recent test-taking experience while real-world reasoning skills aren't really reflected - it's all quite specious.
Real-world decisions are value-laden and constraint-laden! "Intelligence" does not mean "maximizing abstract pattern detection". If you keep your brain active with a wide range of creative, interesting problems, you will be fine apart from neurodegenerative diseases, which have real effects.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30211596/
That's exactly how intelligence in measurement setting is defined. That's how the word is defined. What's interesting is that it correlates with so many unrelated real world outcomes. And other definitions and measurements do not.
One way to look at this is that "fluid intelligence" represents potential intelligence or raw processing power. "Crystallized intelligence" and "emotional intelligence" are then actual intelligence, or the intelligence another person can see.
Or maybe a bit less seriously: In my experience, fluid intelligence often manifests as stupidity in young people, for whatever reason. Crystallized intelligence and emotional intelligence then represent intelligence as a lack of stupidity.
Where I worry is that these papers will be used to justify ageism. Looking through these comments, there's quite a lot of positions being bandied around that I've heard justify some truly atrocious hiring/firing decisions before, and we need to be cognizant of the reality that age alone is not an indicator of success or failure for a given role or task. It's helpful to keep looking into this, but we also need to be aware of our own biases.
Youngsters know no patterns so they can't match new events to known ones. Oldsters know that most seemingly new stuff is not really new, it's just the same old stuff, so they reduce the cost of thinking and reject the noise by adding the new unlabeled event to an existing cluster rather than creating a new noisy one. That's wisdom. But that's also a behavior that will inevitably increase as we age and our clusters establish themselves and prove their worth.
So aren't those two forms of intelligence less about a difference in brain physiology and more about having learned to employ common sense?
Sure we can generate syntactic and semantic descriptions endlessly but to use software as an example, we made a lot of the same things that look different only in the symbols used.
Ansible and Chef. Terraform and Pulumi. Ruby and Python. Windows and Linux. Burger shack 1, burger shack 2. They all solve the same problem.
Being able to generate semantics endlessly does not upend our daily patterns and routines. Life on Earth is pretty obvious.
In my case I was quite good with numbers in my 20s, not any more in my late 40s. But I believe now I know the world best in my life and that is increasing.