We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.  – Albert Einstein

When people criticize IQ, they often argue that personality and character are equally important, as indeed they are. For Stanovich, however, even those critics give too much credence to intelligence. Not only are there many non-cognitive factors that matter, he argues, but IQ does not even capture cognitive ability: it measures intelligence, narrowly defined, but not what he calls rationality.

Intelligence, he suggests, is the ability to achieve a specific task or objective, as measured by IQ tests. Rationality, in contrast, is the ability to select goals and objectives. It is divided into instrumental rationality, which helps you achieve what you want for the minimum resources, and epistemic rationality, which ensures your beliefs actually correspond to reality.

The distinction is one any video-gaming teenager could tell you; characters in video games have both wisdom and intelligence, and absent-minded professors have only one of the two. To make the general case, Stanovich points to individuals given problem solving tasks. When given clear directions on how to solve the problem, high-IQ people do better: without directions, IQ appears to give little advantage in figuring out how to solve the problem in the first place.

Perhaps Stanovich’s most useful insight though is that of mindware. No matter how intelligent or wise you are, he points out, if you haven’t been taught probability you will struggle with some problems. “Installing” mindware like probability theory, expected utility, and others is essential. All of us benefit from focusing not just on learning knowledge, but on developing approaches and mental models that can serve us in a variety of situations. We can also benefit from reducing contaminated mindware: mindware that reduces our ability to think critically or analyze problems effectively, be those instinctive biases or taught ideologies.

There’s no denying that intelligence tests miss a phenomenal amount of what is important, and anything that contributes to our understanding is helpful. This doesn’t mean IQ tests are meaningless, of course; simply that they should be treated as one, very limited, piece of the puzzle. What Intelligence Tests Miss is by no means the final word on this subject, but it’s a good attempt on a very complicated issue.

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