Debunking the Theory of Multiple Intelligences

Excerpt of "2017 Personality 18: Biology & Traits: Openness/Intelligence/Creativity I" by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

[mitchjohnson]

It's fun to watch his gestures and try to figure out what pictures he is drawing in the air.

[paubabau]

The reason people cling to the multiple intelligences theory is that IQ is excedingly stratifying and deterministic. To think somebody is smarter than you is too similar to thinking that someone is straight better than you; it's a menacing idea, especially for materialists.

[MTread]

He states in another video that we already have a perfectly useful word for these "intelligences" and that is "Talents"

[akseltigerstedt]

It should be noted that he is talking about intelligence in a very specific context. When the word is used in psychology it doesn't refer to the intuitive meaning of the word "intelligence", instead it refers to an artificial meaning of the word which he just defined in this video. While watching Jordan's lectures, you should always keep in mind that they are psychology lectures, not speeches.

[MrApplewine]

I think the term would be aptitudes, not intelligences.

[andreasberger]

The problem is that intelligence is a vague term to summerize abilities instead of adressing each individual ability.
Memory, pattern recognition, spacial awareness, imaginative and many more abilities are not something you can just boil down to one simple term without complications.
Ect. I have ADHD, i do well with regards to logic, but my memory is weak and i have a hard time keeping my attention. While i score high on an IQ test, i struggle in university because of issues like planning and short term memory issues.
Intelligence is too ofte used as lazy nonsense word meaning overall ability to solve complex task, while in reality specific task need specific abilities.

[aienbalosaienbalos]

I know it’s beside he point, but I’d say a major factor to predicting university success besides knowledge is how much someone cares about grades vs how much someone cares about learning.

In my experience if you only care about learning that will usually give you at least 75% of the grade.

To get more you need to start working to get better grades that doesn’t really
teach you anything, just training to do exercises faster and making mistakes less frequently under stress.

With some extra training you can get the 100%.
The problem with that is people already are spending a lot of their time learning. What ends up happening is, to train these abilities, many people sacrifice their learning time train “doing exams”.

In the end you can get pretty high disparity in course knowledge between people with say 85% of the grade even. I’ve personally had 90% grades in classes I didn’t learn much at all, I just train to predict what to put on the test, and I’ve had 65% on tests I knew absolutely everything deeply and could had done the full test easily, if it weren’t for the stress coupled with tight time constraint.

Many times, this “exam doing” abilities matter more than actual knowledge.

Now, the next question becomes how much do we define that as an intelligent action and if we want our definition of intelligence to be correlated with that, or if we want it to just be correlated with how much someone has learned.

[kylersloan]

He has made these arguments, and yet when discussing his own IQ on a YouTube Q&A, yields to the difference between "verbal intelligence" and "quantitative intelligence"; the standard, IQ, already takes into account the idea that each person is better at using a specific kinds of symbols. Those lacking keen visualization skills are less likely to thrive as engineering students, etc. At the same time, concepts depending less upon visualization may yield a predominantly verbal intelligence. In the end, the question is, do you have the mental equipment needed to employ the symbols required to solve the problems you are interested in? So much depends on our language(s).

[MarshallBrandt]

This argument relies heavily on his definition of intelligence, a word with no consensus on its meaning. Claiming that multiple intelligence theories are debunked due to his semantics is not helpful for students, who should be approaching unsolved theories of the brain with an open mind.

[juliandavidac]

So true, being extroverted/ontroverted is not intelligence is Personality, Having a high spacial, musical, body kinesthetic qualities, is not intelligence it is *talent*

[ramkumarr]

In Tamilnadu, often actors who are good at one intelligence go on to build careers in all kinds of intelligence.

[kennyliu]

I'd like to see Jordan Peterson debate Howard Gardner

[handless]

I'm doing a course and they presented Gardner's theory as the material, i could barely get through reading it, and had to see if anyone questioned it. wasn't surprised to see it has been debunked several times.

[concernedcitizen]

I think it comes down to definitions here. we are trying to describe concepts and mechanisms we don't fully understand with an imperfect language. I believe that this area of psychology is much more intricate and nuanced than perceived. yes, you could indeed call these intelligences, but the word intelligence has already been defined as something concrete and measurable. my personal definition of intelligence encompasses more and to include the multiple intelligences is just my way of redefining the word intelligence to mean something more. to me, intelligence describes your brain's ability to do anything and the level of intelligence is determined by your brain's ability to do those things (how well it does these things). I don't believe that these intelligences are separate from one another but more that they exist as part of a singular intelligence. there is one intelligence made up by the brain's faculties but I like to describe these multiple intelligences as such because they are abled by the one intelligence. So in conclusion: I don't actually believe that there are different forms of intelligence, but I do like to define intelligence in a way that allows any process within the brain to be a product of intelligence and therefore these multiple intelligences, what Peterson describes as talents, are parts of one's intelligence. This is just what feels most true to me and I would love to gain more insight by debating this.

Maybe I misunderstood and actually agree with Jordan? Open my eyes!

[eastpaw]

The best part of comment sections of scientifically accurate videos about intelligence is that they are a hilarious demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

[DirtyAtreyu]

The main issue I have with IQ, aside from the definition being a tautology (spare me your semantic arguments calling other intelligences "talents") is that it assumes that your uncertainty over a short period of time equates to a slower learning speed in the long term.

[alessiomarin]

I would like to see all these people having a go at Dr. Peterson debate him on this topic face-to-face, in real time.

[legacific]

As a teacher, I see that kids, starting at around 2 years old, acquire different skills at different rates e. g. When two kids are exposed to same 2 lessons, Kid A will be better than Kid B at lesson I. Yet, Kid B will be better at lesson II.
How can that be explained? Aptitudes? I'm sure many would agree that it's a synonym of intelligence.

[grantivie]

Dude the ending of this speech is fucking brilliant. He just explains it so simply.

[sthou]

"If you are cooperative, are you more intelligent? That's emotional intelligence"
Reducing emotional intelligence to "being cooperative" is like reducing "being good at maths" to "knowing 100 digits of pi"