Why the very concept of 'general knowledge' is under attack | Times2 | The Times - 0 views
www.thetimes.co.uk/...edge-is-under-attack-5l36s0ksd
intelligence fluid crystallized theory knowledge general psychology facts
shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 22
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why has University Challenge lasted, virtually unchanged, for so long?
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The answer may lie in a famous theory about our brains put forward by the psychologist Raymond Cattell in 1963
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Cattell divided intelligence into two categories: fluid and crystallised. Fluid intelligence refers to basic reasoning and other mental activities that require minimal learning — just an alert and flexible brain.
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By contrast, crystallised intelligence is based on experience and the accumulation of knowledge. Fluid intelligence peaks at the age of about 20 then gradually declines, whereas crystallised intelligence grows through your life until you hit your mid-sixties, when you start forgetting things.
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that explains much about University Challenge’s appeal. Because the contestants are mostly aged around 20 and very clever, their fluid intelligence is off the scale
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On the other hand, because they have had only 20 years to acquire crystallised intelligence, their store of general knowledge is likely to be lacking in some areas.
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In each episode there will be questions that older viewers can answer, thanks to their greater store of crystallised intelligence, but the students cannot. Therefore we viewers don’t feel inferior when confronted by these smart young people. On the contrary: we feel, in some areas, slightly superior.
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They argue that all knowledge is contextual and that things taken for granted in the past — for instance, a canon of great authors that everyone should read at school — merely reflect an outdated, usually Eurocentric view of what’s intellectually important.
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there is a real threat to the future of University Challenge and much else of value in our society, and it is this. The very concept of “general knowledge” — of a widely accepted core of information that educated, inquisitive people should have in their memory banks — is under attack from two different groups.
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The other group is the technocrats who argue that the extent of human knowledge is now so vast that it’s impossible for any individual to know more than, perhaps, one billionth of it
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So why not leave it entirely to computers to do the heavy lifting of knowledge storing and recall, thus freeing our minds for creativity and problem solving?
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The problem with the agitators on both sides of today’s culture wars is that they are forcefully trying to shape what’s accepted as general knowledge according to a blatant political agenda.
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And the problem with relying on, say, Wikipedia’s 6.5 million English-language articles to store general knowledge for all of us? It’s the tacit implication that “mere facts” are too tedious to be clogging up our brains. From there it’s a short step to saying that facts don’t matter at all, that everything should be decided by “feelings”. And from there it’s an even shorter step to fake news and pernicious conspiracy theories, the belittling of experts and hard evidence, the closing of minds, the thickening of prejudice and the trivialisation of the national conversation.