Earlier this week I passed a personal milestone. Yes, that’s right, I finally finished that book in Spanish that I told you about and then suddenly deleted all reference to. For the first time in a very long time, I’ve accomplished some tangible portion of one of my inane personal goals. This sort of thing hasn’t happened since years ago when I finally got my world banknote collection all nicely sorted out. Subsequently of course I’ve tried maddeningly to rid myself of that same collection but at least it was finished… for a while.
Banknote tangents aside, this Spanish thing brought me around to the usual depressing thoughts that accompany any of my rather arbitrary goals. The first is the usual ‘Why?’ which I covered at length in my ‘Empty Erudition’ post from April of this year. The question remains a valid one but one that I’m happy to ignore for the moment. The question that really bothers me is how one measures any of this. Obviously, slogging through an entire book in Spanish can’t be hurting my grasp of the language but is it really doing any good? Would I be better served to go sit in a Mexican restaurant at lunch hour or religiously read a few dozen Spanish blogs? I’m a simple man with simple needs and one of those needs is to have at my disposal a set of several thousand real-time metrics that measure my mental acuity in a multitude of subject areas.
It is ironic that for all of mankind’s efforts to measure, quantify and explain the universe around him, his own mind is almost completely unknown to him. Mankind has absolutely no reliable tools to assess the human mind… well, except for one. More on that later. In general, people believe that tests exist which will plumb the depths of human knowledge. The SAT, IQ Tests and a myriad of others attempt to determine exactly what you know and reduce your knowledge to a simple integer value but despite all the hubbub and the allure of such tests, they’re nothing more than humbug.
Take the SAT as an example; it measures mathematical and verbal skills for students heading for a University education. Its testing base is relatively broad and is widely accepted as THE test to take if you’re going on for more education after High School. The problem with this is that people cheat the system. They don’t write the answers on their arms but they study materials directly related to the content of the test. In any bookstore you can find a plethora of books whose sole purpose is to help you improve your SAT scores. Worse than that, many schools focus their curricula on the content of standardized tests. Because of all this outside influence on the minds being tested, these tests aren’t a measure of your aptitude so much as a measure of your ability to buy and study a book. It has always been my decided opinion that studying for any test is a form of cheating. The test was intended to measure what you learned or what you know, not your ability to cram a litany of facts into your short-term memory. This is as true of the SAT as it is of the final exam in Mr. Shilling’s calculus class.
As a supplement and formalization of the testing procedure that society uses to measure our intellects we now have hundreds of certifications and degrees that are aimed at proving just how intelligent we are. In the computer trades especially, there is a wide range of tests and certifications designed to quantify technical intellect and reduce it to a three or four letter abbreviation. You can be an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) or an OCP (Oracle Certified Professional) and for each of these esteemed positions there’s a test (or tests) and of course for each test there’s a big $50 book to study. Personally, I find these tests utterly laughable. All the really good engineers I know don’t bother with such certification and those who have them always seem to be the most intellectually vacuous. But yet this process is supposed to be the main basis by which we hire and promote people in the technology sector? Pish.
So a few hundred words back I mentioned a wonderful and objective tool that would help us to really measure our own intellect. Obviously from my previous ranting it’s not in the form of any test so what is it? Well, unfortunately, it’s complicated, it’s not objective but it is wonderful. The only tool anyone can use to estimate the breadth and depth of a person’s psyche is another human psyche. As humans, we’re REALLY good at assessing each other. We do it instantly without even trying. If I went up to a native speaker of Spanish and tried to address her in her native tongue she’d be able to tell me more about my level of skill in 10 seconds than hours and hours of standardized testing. The same goes for just about every facet of human knowledge plus or minus the much practiced art of ‘bullshit’ most commonly seen in job interviews and used car sales.
Ultimately though, even that tool does us little good. Brains are good at comparing but they lack good points of reference. I can say “I know more about calculus than Joe” and Joe can say “Rob knows more about calculus than I do” but that’s about it. Without any absolute measure of intelligence we both run the risk of being total idiots relative to someone who really knows what they’re talking about. Beyond meaningless relativistic measures of intelligence with no grounding in anything strictly quantifiable the problem is completely insolvable. I suppose I’ll have to be content in the knowledge that my Spanish is at least better than the local car dealer who proudly displays the sign:
“Seablamos hespañol.”
But yet probably worse than the average Madrid-born 6th grader’s. C’est la vie. Crap. Wait, that’s not even Spanish. Hrmph.
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