A rant on the celebration of “abstract thinking” as intelligence-

A third interview was conducted with someone about the North Pole. And Luria said, “At the North Pole, there is always snow. Wherever there is always snow, the bears are white. What color are the bears at the North Pole?” And the response was, “Such a thing is to be settled by testimony. If a wise person came from the North Pole and told me the bears were white, I might believe him, but every bear that I have seen is a brown bear.” Now you see again, this person has rejected going beyond the concrete world and analyzing it through everyday experience, and it was important to that person what color bears were – that is, they had to hunt bears. They weren’t willing to engage in this. One of them said to Luria, “How can we solve things that aren’t real problems? None of these problems are real. How can we address them?”

(source - https://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_why_our_iq_levels_are_higher_than_our_grandparents/transcript )

It’s funny to think that modern humans look down on these people saying they have lower intelligence.

As much as I value the concept of abstract thinking, given its heavy application in my education and career, the idea that it is somehow inherently superior than “concrete” thinking is hilarious. If anything, it is the toxic pervasiveness of these so called “abstract” thinking that has led modern society into chasing symbols of no substance, while fooling itself that it has achieved great success. The folly is not in the abstractedness per-se, but rather in the inability of some less gifted individuals to connect the abstract with the concrete.

For example, it is fine to apply logic deduction given a set of facts, but are the premises really true ? Surely you can find a black bear in the North Pole if you look hard enough (you can always smuggle one there yourself) – so the original problem posed as-is is nothing more than intellectual masturbation, a grossly simplified model of our world that is designed to teach a moral (rules of logical inference), but if seriously believed and relied upon, could lead to disaster.

I’d argue that in our everyday mundane life, “concrete” reasoning has much greater applicability than “abstract” reasoning. In fact, much of modern human infatuation with “abstract” thought is premised upon the revolutionary discoveries made by a select few using this method, and that in attempt to be more like those wise men of old – Aristotle, Euler, Newton, Einstein, etc, we imitate the thinking patterns they used when making those remarkable discoveries, as if such “abstract” reasoning were somehow better for our own purposes.

It is a testament to human nature how unsuccessful we are in such imitation, for example you wouldn’t refuse to believe your eyes if you see a black bear in the North Pole. Despite the lip service we give to “abstract” thinking, most of us still resort to “common sense” in critical moments, and this gives our society the sanity it needs to survive another day. We generally don’t make long-chained deductions from simple facts and treat it as certainty. Instead we gather evidence from multiple sources, assign them with varying degrees of trustworthiness, and make an educated guess.

Which is exactly what the “less intelligent” person was trying to do – consult a wise person, instead of blindly deducing a “logical conclusion” of which its truth solely depends on a given set of facts with unknown merit.

That modern society has managed to supplant this common-sensical approach to reasoning with “abstract” logic, reflected in the rise of “IQ” in modern humans, is a testament of how much the modern education system has been increasingly able to “teach” people to think in a mode thinking which encourages accepting singular sources of axioms without criticism. This, my friends, is also known as “brainwashing”.

It is then, a tad bit ironic, how somebody like me, who has gone through this “brainwashing” process, to emerge on the other side and criticizing what made me in the first place. But those who truly understand “abstract thinking” are those who sees its limitations. We don’t worship it as inherently superior, but rather treat it as a tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver. The idea that people who use hammers are somehow better than people who use screwdrivers is laughable, but with modern society’s fixation on some abstract idea of “intelligence”, the joke is probably on us all.