The examples you gave only have issues in not knowing the sizes of things. They have nothing to do with thinking in 'foreign ways'. If I show someone a golf ball and ask how many fit into a wagon I expect them to at least say "a lot". If they have math skills then I expect an order-of-magnitude estimate.
If you don't know the sizes, then the test-maker has failed you. If you know the sizes and still can't answer, then yes it is a lapse in intelligence.
Can you give me an example of a problematic question that isn't caused by using unfamiliar nouns?
This isn't exactly the same thing as "no camels" but it feels like it's in a similar completely-out-of-your-frame-of-reference ballpark: People thought all-touchscreen devices with no keypad would be useless as phones—they didn't see how the inconvenience of punching numbers in on a touch screen without tactile feedback could be greatly outweighed by other stuff the large touchscreens would end up enabling. Yet it would be ridiculous to say the reason anyone failed to initially grasp the possibilities was a lack of intelligence.
I imagine that being told "there are no camels in Germany; how many camels are in this German city?" simply sounded ridiculous to the rural Russians. And so I assume that with no background in abstract reasoning or "word problems" where you're supposed to rely on just the information presented in the problem, they fell back on what they knew about cities: they're places with camels. Imagine if someone came to you from another country and said something like "we don't have people in our cities. But Atlantis is our biggest city. So how many people do you think live there?" It would sound meaningless.
As far as the phone example, that's just disagreeing about tradeoffs. These people could easily see the uses, they just thought buttons were better.
Honestly, with the camel example, I think it was a problem of asking a really dumb question without explaining that the question might be so dumb. If you ask me the Atlantis thing out of the blue I might give a weird answer. But if you specifically assure me that you're not trying to trick me in your Atlantis scenario and you just want to hear my answer to the question then I'll say no people and wonder if it's abandoned or filled with robots or cats.
Well, if you know how to solve the problems I mentioned, you would be aware that they have nothing to do with knowing the sizes of things. To solve these problems, you must think practically and state assumptions about how much you expect the average sizes to be and how much in comparison. For example, the way to solve the high school question is start off with assuming the amount of people living in is about 300-400 million range and that maybe 10-20% of those are old enough to be attending high school. And then you go to estimate the amount of high schoolers in each state and whether that state was small, medium, or large, etc. Those problems are only about approaching a problem with those sorts of practical, reasoned thoughts in your head. To alot of people, including myself, this way of thinking is very foreign. However, if you were to ask me to design a database, I'd have no problems. This discrepancy does not show a lapse in intelligence.
Also, "a lot" is obviously not an acceptable answer if "I don't know, there should be some there" isn't for you.
> Can you give me an example of a problematic question that isn't caused by using unfamiliar nouns?
Maybe if I tried really hard? But that's the point I'm contending. A lot of IQ and standards test use unfamiliar nouns/concepts/abstractions to test intelligence, so does a certain group of people struggling with them show their lack of knowledge?
You yourself listed the big problems of not knowing how many students go to a school or how large America is. All I'm looking for in answer to that question is taking the number of people in America [pre-knowledge unless the test-maker screwed up], guessing what percent are in high school [pre-knowledge unless the test-maker screwed up], and dividing the size of a high school [pre-knowledge unless the test-maker screwed up]. It's all about figuring out how to combine knowledge to get an answer. Which is also what you use a relational database for so I don't see how you can do one and not the other.
Also, "a lot" is obviously not an acceptable answer if "I don't know, there should be some there" isn't for you.
Well I'm only going to accept "a lot" as a final answer if they have no math skills at all. That depends on the culture. But it shows a basic idea that yeah, it takes a whole bunch of golf balls to fill it up. Just like saying "no camels means no camels" indicates an understanding of the dumb-but-simple question. Saying "some camels" is the answer I won't accept.
It's all about figuring out how to combine knowledge to get an answer. Which is also what you use a relational database for so I don't see how you can do one and not the other.
Which is exactly my point, again. It's not that I can't do both. It's that, although both questions take similar intelligence, one of them is phrased in an unfamiliar way. I start off disadvantaged in the former question because my lack of familiarity with what the "correct" answer should look like. With the latter, I know how to begin thinking and answering. Yet, an IQ only provides one of these options so if I got the one I was not familiar with, I would score low. My point is that is not a sign of a lack of intelligence.
Just like saying "no camels means no camels" indicates an understanding of the dumb-but-simple question. Saying "some camels" is the answer I won't accept.
But to understand a question, the premise of it has to make sense to you. For my example, I can understand the question because I'm aware that there is a real solution. In the example from the article, to ask farmers who only know about cities with camels about the camels in a city where there are no camels doesn't make sense to them. It's an unnecessary abstraction and just shows that they haven't experienced a situation rather than that they can't answer a simple question.
To me it's almost as if someone asked me "in a math system where 1 * a is not a, what is 1 * a?" or "what is 2 + 2 for arbitrarily large values of 2?" Simplicity is subjective.
>To me it's almost as if someone asked me "in a math system where 1 * a is not a, what is 1 * a?"
Hmm, I think it's more like "a math system where 1 * anything is 1". It's baffling to my understanding of math but it still fully explains itself. "Like multiplication, but different" "like a normal country, but without camels" I have no idea why it's this way but I can still make use of it and answer the question.
If you don't know the sizes, then the test-maker has failed you. If you know the sizes and still can't answer, then yes it is a lapse in intelligence.
Can you give me an example of a problematic question that isn't caused by using unfamiliar nouns?