Intellectual Grounding

What's your point, Coberst? Clearly, different professions require different skills. Some jobs are more suited to creative analytical thinkers, and others are better suited to grunts.

coberst,

In psychological testing for recruitment the definition of skill or aptitude is often avoided by simply giving your star worker a battery of any tests in order to provide a "profile" against which to measure that of a potential recruit. (Mathematically your star worker's profile is a vector against which you measure the angle of the recruit's vector. The closer the cosine of the angle is to 1, the better the correlation)
Although not essential. in practice it is of course desireable for your test battery to have some relationship to the nature of the job, and to supplement your selection process with interviews etc. The problem is essentially not an intellectual one, but an economic one involving allocation of training resources and risk factors.

BTW. "Intellectual Ability" is often tested by the "Miller Analogies Test" which is a timed battery in the form A is to B as C is D, where the relationship is randomly historical, mathematical, phonetic, scientific, etc etc. One example I remember which links with your opening post is:
Cleopatra is to Asp as Socrates is to........"

What a cop out.

Black frilly suspender belts are to eye bulging as open crotch panties are to.....

Isn't it interesting that "We do not even have a metric for understanding." Perhaps I am wrong? I think it is worth comment that writing is a very important element in understanding. Perhaps you disagree?

I didn't think this statement was supported or clarified by the previous writing...I'm not exactly sure what you mean by it.

There are many metrics for understanding. IQ, SAT, ACT, GPA...

505

Non sense.

Sample questions from Miller Analogies Test.

1. SPRING : RING :: COIL : (a. rope, b. loop, c. cowl, d. stretch)

2. 97° : 45° :: (a. obtuse, b. equilateral, c. angle, d. cosine) : ACUTE

3. MOLLUSK : (a. fish, b. cell, c. plant, d. mammal) :: PEARL : AMBERGRIS

4. (a. epistemology, b. axiology, c. teleology, d. pedagogy) : ONTOLOGY :: KNOWLEDGE : BEING

5. ELBOW : NERVE :: HINGE : (a. lever, b. electricity, c. fulcrum, d. wire)

6. INDIVIDUAL : MUNICIPALITY :: LOAN : (a. county, b. bond, c. stock, d. certificate)

7. HOMOPHONE : (a. paradigm, b. antonym, c. synonym, d. acronym) :: SOUND : MEANING

8. (a. Rembrandt, b. Dalí, c. Cassatt, d. Matisse) : MONET :: WHISTLER : CÉZANNE

9. -IVE : -ION :: ADJECTIVE : (a. verb, b. noun, c. conjunction, d. adverb)

10. CONSTITUTION : MAGNA CARTA :: UNITED STATES : (a. Pilgrims, b. Virginia, c. England,
d. Rome)


Answers on
http://harcourtassessment.com/haiweb/Cultures/en-US/dotCom/milleranalogies/about/Sample+Analogies+and+Annotated+Answers.htm