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There is a distinction I have periodically been thinking about: it is a conceptual distinction between a gentleman's duel and an assassin's duel.
Both represent a kind of contest between two people, but contests of two different sorts. Don Quixote refers to knightly duels in which both parties were meticulously careful to make all things equal: both swords the same length, both parties standing at equal angles to the sun so that neither one would have the sun in his eyes more than the other. This is an extreme form of the basic idea of the gentleman's duel. At the other end, there are no rules and no concept of fairness; an assassin might accept another's challenge, and then arrange to have him shot by archers. Westley's battle of wits with Vizzini in The Princess Bride represents the quintessential assassin's duel.
The two frameworks for a contest, or a test, offer distinct conceptions of how a person's ability may be measured. I have seen a number of gentleman's duel IQ tests, for instance; I am not aware of any established tests that operate like assassins' duels, and the ability to function effectively outside of external structure (the cliche is 'think outside the box') is one of the distinctive features of intelligence.
Catholics speak a great deal about the primacy of Peter among Christ's disciples, but there is also a primacy to John. Peter had a unique place in the nurture of the church ("Feed my sheep,"), but it was John who was closest to Jesus, John the mystic, who had a stunningly brilliant mind and probably understood him best. In a technology corporation, Peter might be compared to the CEO, and John to the prize research scientist.
My apartment is a sparse place, slightly messy and having no television. It is not really decorated; an outer austerity conceals an active life of the mind.
People's homes can give insight into those who dwell there. My apartment does not exude the same romantic warmth as many other places, but that is because my attention is elsewhere.
I have a different perspective on aging than what I have seen about me. It always makes me slightly sad when I hear my father saying, "We're getting old," not because it is false, but because he says it as a confession of weakness. I view aging as getting closer to Heaven, (as described in Hebrews) as approaching the finish line of a great race. My way of holding this belief has a dark side -- I sometimes look on life as enduring time so as to be past it and into eternity -- but I still think I am better off not to be approaching my thirtieth birthday as when I will become a has-been.
I wrote about two types of welder above. I realized a certain affinity between the apostle Paul and myself, especially as regarded the welder distinction. Paul, as an apostle, skipped from place to place and culture to culture, with a veritable rainbow of activities: planting churches and writing were just the beginning. He certainly travelled more than I have.
Seeing a sort of kindred spirit (even if separated by millenia), and in someone whom I greatly respect, was warming to me.
I have thought that the entrenched numerical scale of IQs are unfortunate. The numbers corresponding to a person's weight are proportional; one person who weighs 200 pounds has as much body-stuff as two people who weigh 100 pounds each, or four children who weigh 50 pounds each. It is simply not true, in a corresponding sense, that one person with an IQ of 200 has exactly twice as much thinking-stuff as two people with IQs of 100 each. A programmer with an IQ of 150 is quite possibly capable of doing feats that could not be accomplished by any number of programmers with IQ 100. There are not just quantitative differences (for which an exponential scale might be preferable), but qualitative differences as well.
The other critique I have of the concept of IQ is that it equates (for children and adults) higher intelligence with functioning at a more advanced mental age. This is true, in a sense, and brilliant adults grow out of precocious children, but there is an important mental dimension that is well-developed in most children and atrophied in most adults: mental flexibility/openness/creativity/curiosity. Experiments have found gradeschool children to be more creative than professional engineers; it is a rare mind that can enter adulthood without losing childhood creativity. A child with a high IQ, one would hope, is not simply at a cognitive level normally associated with people a few years older; he may be capable of tasks most people cannot complete until a few years older, but he retains the mental flexibility associated with his chronological age -- perhaps a younger age. "A more intelligent child mentally functions like an older person" is a good rough take on the matter, but the basic concept of "older [up to mental maturity] = better" has room for further nuance.
The mathematical model used of the four dimensions of the Meyers-Briggs Personality Indicator is one-dimensional: one is introverted to the extent that one is not extraverted. So being more introverted is always at the expense of being less extraverted, and being more extraverted is always at the expense of being more introverted. The structure of the personality test reflects this perspective: each question is a forced choice between two preferences, and each point that a person scores for one preference is a point he didn't score for the opposite preference.
That seems to me to be acceptable as a rough model, but on further reflection, a two-dimensional variant seems preferable. So, instead of the following scale:
+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+ 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Introversion 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 Extraversion
I would suggest something more like the following:
I 10 +
n 9 + A B
t 8 +
r 7 +
o 6 +
v 5 + C
e 4 +
r 3 +
s 2 +
i 1 + D E
o 0 +--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
n 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Extraversion
On this scale, most people would likely fall somewhere between A (introverted, not extraverted) and E (extraverted, not introverted), but it is also possible to be at D (neither introverted nor extraverted -- but not what is meant by 'X', namely half-and-half -- that is 'C'), or 'B' (both introverted and extraverted, but again not half-and-half).
When I first took the Myers-Briggs, I had difficulty answering the thinking-feeling questions -- because I embodied both of the qualities which the test portrays as opposites. I had equal difficulty answering the judging-perceiving questions -- but for a different reason: I was not familiar with, and did not identify with, either modus operandi. On a two-dimensional scale such as I drew above, I would be around point B for thinking-feeling, and point D for judging-perceiving.
My office had a Secret Santa gift exchange, and I got one of my co-workers a boxed set of Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. I was warmed to find out that she'd been wanting to get that series for a couple of years.
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