Oh my goodness, a Dungeons and Dragons-themed thread
and a good discussion on intelligence? My birthday was last week, but by heck I'll take it
I'm rolling on the 3 - 18 scale
@Synsensa, I was something of a munchkin in 3.5ed (for the uninitiated and generally lucky in life, a munchkin is not a good thing), so I like keeping to more vanilla stat rolls these days (I don't play anymore, but I keep tabs on the scene, because I'm a massive nerd). I think it was the Player's Handbook that gave rough roles for regular humans; 8 to 9 was generally fair / decent. Adventurers were meant to be the paragons of their type, so even if someone is 10s across the board, that's still better than average. This informs my scoring.
Strength:
11, maybe 12. I'm not a huge guy, but I regularly play water polo. I'm stronger than I look, though starting to go downhill with that already (at the tender age of 31!). Having to be better with how I lift things, and so on.
Dexterity:
9. Absolutely average. Every excellent catch I do in polo you can weight against me dropping a glass in the house.
Constitution:
12, maybe 13. I'm rarely ill, and when I am I shake it off faster than any person I know. I recover well from physical injury, and I have a solid tolerance for alcohol (it used to be a lot better, but hey. I'm nominally sensible these days).
Intelligence:
16, maybe 17. I'm generally the best in any discipline I put my mind to, but I'm privileged to know people that make me (for any definition of intelligence) look like a fool. This also helps my neuroses balance out between self-deprecation and ego
Wisdom:
7. This is kinda a trainable thing? I don't know. I'm still prone to ready-fire-aim kind of thinking, and a lot of things become obvious to me in hindsight.
Charisma: again
12, maybe 13? I'm a Nerd and prone to saying the wrong thing and reading situations badly (better than I was, but still), but am definitely likeable, crossed multiple cliched friend groups at university, and have no problems in general in social situations. Bit awkward at putting myself on the spot in a crowd, though.
Perception:
14. I have fantastic vision, and I try to take care of it. Will still definitely end up with glasses, under no illustions there. My baseline gut feeling on things, and reading of situations, only gets better with age, too.
Mental strength / stability: bit of a cop out, but ranges from 3 to 18. It's a difficult one to unpack for me, and I'd need to go into way more depth than I'm comfortable expressing publicly. The
tl;dr is that I have problems, but I think I deal with them well enough, and also support my wife through her own (and anybody else I'm close with).
Bonus alignment: Chaotic / Neutral Good (depending on my mood. When I was quite a bit younger - Lawful Good, all of the time).
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The intelligence discussion is fascinating. I come down more on
@yung.carl.jung's side in terms of the arguments, but I can appreciate where
@hobbsyoyo is coming from. So much of our understanding of intelligence has been retrofitted to uphold a class-based society (with some ugly holdovers from racism and sexism and outright eugenics thrown in the mix). Actual professional discussion on the concept is separated so badly from what schools and the education system (specifically in the UK, but I see it elsewhere) define "intelligent" as. Intelligence is basically played out as "doing well". There is some aspects of the concept of somebody's
potential, but it becomes a definition for somebody's limits, and thus the attention and care given by the state (body, i.e. school) to the individual. This limits people!
I want to contrast my wife and myself, not going into too much detail because I try not to share much about people who aren't me online. She comes from a schooling background where they gave everyone an intelligence test (it's pretty standard over here) and basically predict your grades as a consequence. Don't get me started on grades and schooling in general, this part of my post is shaping up too long as it is
Anyhow. She was predicted terrible grades, her teachers wrote her off and in some cases basically told her she'd amount to nothing (fair point to this anecdote - this is a singular experience and doesn't necesssarily represent the feelings on these tests across the nation. But, in my experience, it's a common thing). She was put in classes that help people with specific conditions to do extra learning. Suffice it to say, this was moderately embarrassing to the point of being traumatic, especially compounded by her parents (another derail, and not for a public forum). It underpinned her drive to achieve academically for the next decade or so (possible more). She did nowhere near as badly as the test predicted, and the teachers were so impressed at her beating her predictions (even though, arguably, they weren't accurate) she got an award. The trauma remained. The fear of failing, or being seen like that, remained.
She's an incredible woman, and she's been through
so much. My opinions on intelligence were (rightfully or wrongfully) relatively cemented by the time she was able to open up about this to me, it wasn't foundational to me. My own experience
was, though. Predictably.
Now, me. I've aced every single intelligence / IQ test that's been put in front me through the years. My parents had high expectations of me (
another derail, haha) ever since I had the luck to be picked out of my incredibly normal / lower-middle-class primary school to sit an entrance exam for one of the best private grammar schools in the country. I passed the test, and qualified for a bursary (to pay for the tuition, because my parents were poor in those days). My problem was my test performance never really compared. I struggled for focus on anything, and generally didn't get on well with any education all the way up until the end of university. That's on me. I'm past it nowadays, barring the usual struggles people have working on boring things they don't enjoy. But school was a negative experience because there was no attempt to provide any kind of support beyond just . . . giving me more work. One of the best schools in the country (I'm not bigging it up, it was usually ranked quite highly on whatever ranking tables count in the UK) and the only reaction to the divide in my theoretical and actual scores was "make up the grade". In classes I was engaged and communicative, I could problem-solve well, and was absolutely a teacher's pet (sorry). But there was nothing custom in their approach to handling me, and well that went as well as you'd think. I rebelled in the most nerdy, boring ways possible. I kept trying to find ways around the IT admin staff, breaking and taking control of machines, practising my 2D art (I was pretty good!) in other lessons. Basically finding the stuff that made me tick (I'm an incredibly creative person) and doing more of it.
I was aware this was a problem by about sixth form (16 to 17). Lifting myself
out of that was far more difficult, compounded by the (to be fair, fair) expectation that I was just going to screw up. It took a lot of work through university, that was in turn affected by some bad luck (horrendous wisdom teething in my second year, causing me to fail it) and also bad habits (I found out I could drink, and drink well. Grades generally don't survive this, nomatter how well you can process the alcohol
). Final year I genuinely enjoyed, it was a combination of subjects that both pushed my understanding of the field (Computer Science) but also subjects that I found interest in. My wife (then girlfriend) supported me through all of this, though not without our arguments, haha. I can't blame her.
Fast-forward most of a decade, to me now. I recognise my "intelligence", for whatever that counts for, and my ability to learn in general. But it's definitely not just as simple as "I'm clever, ergo I'm clever at all things" (I'm looking at you, modern / "New" atheism). A lot of what people consider "intelligence" is just specific effort in a particular subject for a length of time. It's hard work. I dislike that there's so much emphasis in general terms (as supposed to in, say, research, where minds with specific abilities and tendencies come into play) in intelligence being the decided for a person. So much of it is (informed) opinion, there's no right or wrong because somebody happens to rank higher in debate techniques, or made a particularly well-timed gotcha. But that's
so much of supposed educated-debate, and that really grinds my gears, all the way back to my early school experiences.
