Intelligence Quotients: science or pop pyschology?

All in all I think we're not far from agreement. But: Well, I certainly question it. After all, that's what IQ tests were developed to measure - how much schooling you had received. (I suggest you look up Alfred Binet, the inventor of the IQ test, and read about his goals for the test.)IQ tests do have merit in some situations. For instance, they accurately detect both mental retardation and high-functioning geniuses. It's the small perturbations in the middle that, in my view, are weighted well beyond what they signify. If, today, we both took a test, and I scored 130 and you scored 132, what would that mean in the real world? And how would we know that, the next day, our scores might not be reversed, and I 2 points higher than you?(This is the realm of the racial difference so commonly referred to, but from a difference that's all but meaningless, all manner of racial disparities are ironed over, justified by "biology", and removed from the list of problems we have a responsibility to solve. Quite an accomplishment for a few points!)Lastly - it's worth pointing out that the highest IQ on record belongs to columnist Marylin vos Savant, who scores 212 or so on tests. While Albert Einstein is not known to have ever been tested, psychologists have estimated a score of 160-180.Einstein, of course, needs no biography here. vos Savant hasn't done much but write a newspaper column. As you ask - what, indeed, is all the fuss about?

Well, I've taken several - and no, they don't. They can't. They'd have to get inside your head to do that, and obviously they're not privy to your thought processes. They have literally no idea how you solved the problem. They're just scored like regular tests, with the additional factor that they're usually timed. Well, you'd think so - but even the format of the test itself can be a cultural factor. Sure, you and I grew up taking Scantron tests with the ol' #2 pencil. That kind of thing might be totally alien to someone from a completely different culture. I'm a genius, according to the tests. (I've been pretty copiously tested by parents who wanted to know why their brainy son had such poor grades.)I can't play chess for shit. There's a kind of strategic thought that I'm not any good at, and so I'm the worst player I know at games like chess and go.But I'm a great tactician. And I'm not even sure I can explain the difference between tactics and strategy; but it's abundantly clear when I'm hanging out with my best friend. (Brilliant chess player.) Tactics is what I'm good at. Strategy is what he's good at. If he's Ender, then I'm Bean. (Oddly enough, though, he's the short one.)So clearly chess is not a great metric for intelligence. Or maybe I'm just not that intelligent? Maybe I'm good at test-taking. My best friend swears I'm smarter than he is, and I know the reverse is true. Either way it convinces me that there's something to human intelligence and genius that doesn't fit on a linear scale. You've come to the same conclusion, if I read you right. Well, for instance:Question 3 assumes you're from a culture with a 24 hour day and a 60 minute hour;Question 4 makes a pretty large assumption about your cultural background, assuming that you're familiar with the phrase "birds of a feather", which is an English-language idiom;Question 10 makes an assumption about your knowledge of geometry and names for shapes;Question 11 makes the assumption about your familiarity with English-language idioms again;And of course the whole test makes a pretty big assumption about your familiarity with multiple-choice questions, since it doesn't give instructions about how to answer the questions.I'm not saying that any one of these are tantamount to a question like "Are you black? If you answered yes, subtract ten points." But in aggregate they disadvantage people from cultural backgrounds different from the culture the people who wrote the test thought was "normal." Even if the difference was only 1-2%, well, that would be the so-called "racial" difference between white scores and black scores, right there. Indeed. Test-taking is a skill itself, and that's a factor that, in my opinion, confounds the ability of IQ tests to measure minute differences in IQ (if there even is such a thing.)Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Obviously you know why this is, but to elucidate for others, IQ score measures your relationship to the scores of the others in your age group. So the trend that you saw was not you getting dumber over time; it was simply a slowing of the rate at which you were getting smarter, like a marathon runner ahead of the pack who begins to slow towards the finish line. The people behind him begin to catch up, but he;s still well out in front.Like I said I'm sure you knew all that already, but others might not have.

Not in the way you claim. If the test measured how you solved the problem, they'd never have to worry about cheaters.But the test can't detect cheating like that; they have no idea if you solved the problem by figuring it out according to how they designed the problem, or according to some other means, or by guessing, or by looking it up in your stolen copy of the answer key and writing it down after waiting an appropriate period of time.The test doesn't measure how you solved the problem. They can only design the problem to make certain kinds of thinking more likely to arrive at the solution the fastest, but they can't read your mind and see how you, the particular test taker, solved the problem. It made a difference in the scores, sure. Probably for several reasons. Some of that was surely that people unused to the scantron method introduced mistakes into their work that they wouldn't have made, otherwise.Since that says nothing about their ability to solve the problems the IQ test tests with, that's clearly a confounding bias. (I'm using the term "bias" in a statistical sense, not in a social justice sense.) I don't like the term "idiot savant"; I think you're referring to things like autistic savant syndrome. It's probably off-topic here, but I've heard several interviews with autistics and autistic savants and what I think is going on is this - everybody is a kind of savant; we're savants in terms of processing language, recognizing faces, and navigating complex social interactions. These are things that a "normal" person's brain is specialized in. We're not so specialized in mathematics, for instance.Some people are different; they're specialized in mathematics but they lack specialization in language, or faces, or social situations. I think we're all savants, in a way; we're just savants about different stuff. The next time you wonder why there's a man who lives in Kent who can see the color of numbers and recite hundreds of thousands of digits of pi over 5 hours, wonder too why you have the ability to recognize the same face with different expressions - and to recognize what each of those expressions might be communicating. And imagine trying to communicate how you do that to that man in Kent, or more interestingly, how you might write a computer program to do that. Heh. The man in Kent wants to know the same thing about you. How can you excel beyond measure in the complicated tasks of talking to people and recognizing faces, but you can't manage the simplest of tasks, like calculating what day of the week someone's birthday falls on? And why can't you see what color a given number is? Maybe I'm like the man in Kent in that I can't well explain the difference. In my head it's very simple - tactics is what I'm good at and strategy is what I'm no good at. And it's often obvious to me what kind of thinking is tactical thinking and what kind is strategic thinking. Trying to explain it might be the subject of many posts and I don't want to detract from your topic.I know the military defines these terms differently, and informally, I'd say that tactics are what you build strategies out of. Oh, I definitely think it's useful for that. Obviously I found it very helpful for that, even if I'm no good at the game. Likewise, of course. Clearly you have a substantial intellect, but given the venue neither of us should find that surprising. I don't know what race they belonged to, but clearly they wrote the test with the (usually subconscious) idea that "white culture" was the same as "neutral culture", which is the anglonormative bias I've told you about in the past. And certainly black people or asian people or whatever can be biased to think that their own culture is "ethnic" and white culture is "non-ethnic", or "normal".There's really no such thing, as near as I can tell.