How to pull a car out of the snow

[Tommy]

CobraEd,

Thanks for giving me an excuse to continue the discussion by disagreeing with your point about intrinsic intelligence. IMO, children arrive with no understanding of how the universe around them works. That's why they take such interest in things like watching a toy fall to the ground. Parents soon find it annoying to have to pick the toy up over and over again. But very young children have to see it happen many times to accept that the toy won't occasionally fall up instead of down. The same sort of thing happens as we learn to walk and then throw a ball. We learn how the universe works by trial and error regardless of our intelligence.

Trial and error is fine for learning the basics, but if you've never seen a complex task like jumping from a boat to a dock, how are you to know the safe way to do it. If you have an understanding of some of the fundamental laws of science, you may be able to deduce a safe way to proceed even without having had specifc experience. A person who understands Newtonian physics will be able to envision the boat moving backwards when the person tries to jump forward, concluding that it is not a good way to proceed. The person without that knowledge can only guess and suffer the consequences.

To conclude, I'm saying that some people make better guesses than others because they happened to have had more helpful trial and error experiences in their past, not because they are intrinsically more intelligent. The people who make better decisions because they have a better understanding of how the laws of physics work are not necessarily more intelligent. They're just better educated in science.