I actually have a lot more respect for those who were able to answer the question instead of nitpick about fluid vs crystallized intelligence. I'm very appalled at those who attack others just because they think differently. Did I hurt your ego when I think psychiatry / psychotherapy relies more on crystallized intelligence over fluid intelligence? Or did you want to fluff up your pride because you think you're right and I'm wrong?
Regarding people being largely predictable, this is seen in many different fields. How do you think someone would react if he or she got slapped in the face for no reason? I think a lot of us would come up with the same answer to that question. The fact that therapy is systemized (such as in manuals) is proof that people respond predictably on the large part. If there is no predictable response, there wouldn't be a system. But go ahead and say I'm wrong because of "scientific literature". I prefer to do my own thinking based on what I see.
This topic is actually really interesting and I think you'll love this blogpost about it. It's the best I've read about it, better than that Atlantic article. He talks about how fluid intelligence decreases in the 30's (psychological reason for stagnation). But there's also an under appreciated "sociological" reason I quoted below. Also, a healthy diet and regular exercise are the best ways to preserve fluid intelligence.
"Friedman jets from boardroom to newsroom to state welcoming hall. He is a traveler of the gilded paths, a man who experiences the world through taxi windows and guided tours. The Friedman of the 20th century rushed to the scene of war massacres; the Friedman of the 21st hurries to conference panels. What hope does a man living this way have of learning something new about the world?
More importantly: What incentive does he have to live any other way?
The trouble is that just as our historian reaches her full stature as a public name, her well of insight begins to run dry. A true fan of her works might trace elements of their name-making title back to the very first monograph she published as a baby academic. She was able to take all of the ideas and observations from her early years of concentrated study and spin them out over a decade of high-profile book writing. But what happens when the fruits of that study have been spent? What does she have to write about when they have already applied their unique form of insight to the problems of the day?
Nothing at all, really. Historians like this have nothing left to fall back on except the conventional opinions common to their class. So they go about repackaging those, echoing the same hollow shibboleths you could find in the work of any mediocrity.
In each case the intellectual in question is years removed from not just the insights that delivered fame, but the activities that delivered insight.
The tricky thing is that it is hard to go back to the rap and scrabble of real research when you have climbed so high above it. Penguin will pay you a hefty advance for your next two hundred pages of banal boilerplate; they will not pay you for two or three years of archival research on some narrow topic no one cares about. No matter that the process of writing on that narrow topic refills the well, imbuing you with the ideas needed to fill out another two decades of productive writing.
There are practical implications for all this. If you are an intellectual, the sort of person whose work consists of generating and implementing ideas, then
understand you are working against time. Figure out the most important intellectual problem you think you can help solve and
make sure you spend your thirties doing that. Your fifties and sixties are for teaching, judging, managing, leading, and dispensing with wisdom. Your teens and twenties are for gaining skills and locating the problems that matter to you. Your thirties are for solving them.
Public intellectuals who do not wish to transition in the their forties from the role of thinker to mentor or manager are going to have a harder time of it.
Optimizing for long term success means turning away from victory at its most intoxicating. When you have reached the summit, time has come to descend, and start again on a different mountain. There are plenty of examples of this—Francis Fukuyama comes to mind as a contemporary one—but it is the harder path.”
www.theatlantic.com
