Intelligence Quotients: science or pop pyschology?

I don't think that there is a single thing that can be labelled intelligence. What we call intelligence is the aggregation of a number of abilities which are not always simple to test. I would add that wehat we call intelligence is a product of training as well as native ability or potential.Your turn. How would you explain the Flynn effect ?

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.

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An IQ test often doesn't measure what variable you pick, rather, it measures how you solved the problem.

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You don't need to be watching a person's thoughts in realtime in order to determine whether inductive or deductive reasoning is being employed. I had a similar argument with a fly-by-night poster a few months back. He asserted that Artificial Intelligence was real, and yet, he couldn't explain what intelligence is. Obviously, such a thing as intelligence is real. We know that people can express that intelligence on these tests, because we can examine how they came to their answers. If your argument is that quantifying intelligence is subjective, I would be inclined to agree with you. But it sounds as if you believe there is no validity to the test or its questions. When IQ tests transfered from paper to bytes on a computer did it really make a difference? If a person can't understand how to fill in bubbles on the appropriate answer, maybe they aren't intelligent enough to take the test itself. That's probably because grades often don't reflect the intelligence of the student. Its been my experience that it mostly reflects the students commitment and motivation. I was getting straight A's until third grade. After that time it was all downhill from there. Its not because I couldn't do the work. And I'm sure the case was the same with you. It sounds like perhaps you and I just didn't want to do the work. Well, this is kind of what I was saying earlier. You don't need to be a chess tactician in order to be smart. There are different ways we can exhibit intelligence. Math for me is difficult. Its slow going for me to learn it, whereas my peers just get it. And maybe its a lot like that Matt Damon movie, Good Will Hunting. He was on a date with his Harvard girlfriend, played by Minnie Driver, and she asked him what it was like for him. He tried to explain by using the piano as a reference. He said that when he sees a piano, he sees a box made out of wood, with keys and peddles. It was foreign to him. But Mozart, he says, Mozart just got it. And he was a musical genius. For Will Hunting, he just got math. He was a mathematical anomaly.Maybe its like this for all of us. Maybe we all have our talents that we are exceptional in, whereas in other areas, we just don't get it. I've often wondered what makes idiot savants tick. How can they be retarded and thereby hindered in the simplest of tasks, but excel beyond measure in one or two areas? Isn't a strategist and a tactician pretty much the same thing, just worded differently? Perhaps its a way of uncovering our thought process. For all our arguing aside there is no doubt that you have more than one marble rolling around in your head. Yes, I agree. Terms like "smarter" and "smartest" in linear terms just don't apply. And in that way, "high IQ's" are just sort of self-congratulatory endeavors. I think there is no doubt that you can learn a lot about how a person analyzes things with these tests, but as you pointed out, does it mean Madam Savant was "more" intelligent than Einstein because her IQ score was higher than his? I'm not aware of any culture that does not use this time scale. But you could make a better case by saying the test assumes that its test takers speak English. I'm not seeing how that's "racist." What does that have to do with race though? Figuring out how to solve it is probably the biggest thing they are looking for. LOL! Yeah, that would be really messed up. You are assuming that the makers of the test must somehow be white. What if you were to find out that the drafters were all black, or all hispanic, or all Indian? Would that effect how you viewed it?

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"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell." -C.S. Lewis

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.

Agreed. I would agree, but I think this extends to many people of all nations.__

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"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell." -C.S. Lewis

The Flynn Effect is probably the number one objection to IQ testing, but this seems to based off of graphs showing a trend that IQ scores are increasing. It bases its conclusions on a variety of reasons like a better diet, more familiarity with multiple choice questions, etc. But these objections, though perfectly valid, don't really undercut the intelligence quotient in my opinion. My contention is that we have two schools of thought, both pro and con, that may view their tenability or untenability on the basis of tautologies.In my own view, I think the Flynn Effect has done a lot of good at exposing the pitfalls of the intelligence quotient by forcing the deviser's of the test to rethink its application. At the same time, I wonder if most of the objections stem from a perceived "holier than thou" mentality. Or in this case, "smarter than thou." I just think that there is some measure of IQ tests, but in linear terms, they simply can't produce a true algorithym that has any real meaning in the real world.

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"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell." -C.S. Lewis

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The Flynn Effect is probably the number one objection to IQ testing, but this seems to based off of graphs showing a trend that IQ scores are increasing. It bases its conclusions on a variety of reasons like a better diet, more familiarity with multiple choice questions, etc. But these objections, though perfectly valid, don't really undercut the intelligence quotient in my opinion.

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That's badly confused. The Flynn effect is the OBSERVED increase in measured IQ shown in the graphs - and it is consistently found in different studies on different populations. "Better diet" is one of the factors that might explain it. So you are confusing the effect with possible explanations of the effect. Objecting to those explanations doesn't help you.So I'm going to have to ask you again. What is your explanation for the Flynn effect ? Surely it demonstrates that there is some factor in measured IQ other than an inherited basic ability because if it were IQ would tend to remain stable.

Maybe this focus on IQ tests and other standardised test is acting to positively select for those who do well on this sort of test TTFN,WK

Just a clarification. The ASVAB is an aptitude test, not an IQ test. The Army doesn't conduct an IQ test as far as I know.As for the rest of the topic, I've worked with soldiers that have had very high GT (General Technical = Sum of Word Knowledge and Paragraph Comprehension, scaled + Arithmetic Reasoning scores)scores that I would classify as book-smart or simply good test takers, but they were not intelligent. The only guy I ever met that had the highest GT score you can get was only good with paperwork, but couldn't conduct drill and ceremony or teach a class to save his life.

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News Media: Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory 1 negative report at a time.

Any other possibilities or factors? I am curious if the way we think changes over the years, and if education could actually be a stumbling block to basic abilities.I don't know how to express it scientifically, but I know that sometimes instead of thinking critically, we can start to apply some of the learned 'fundamentals' to a problem, and thus limit the possibility we have of actually reaching an answer that is outside of what we have learned as a formula.I also think that schraf's stats are lacking; she does not know or say how well the other children in her age-group were doing. It is quite possible that everyone reaches this stage of leveling off. Maybe that was what your post was about?