A great tool for making broad diagnostics with regard to childhood-to-adult brain development. Also useful for identifying disabilities and neurodivergence.
But useless as a means of stack ranking already demonstrably intelligent people or sifting for “genius” intelligence in a pool with variation in education and experience. Getting a “good IQ score” is like bragging about acing your “Do you have Alzheimers?” cognitive exam. “Oh! He can draw clocks twice as fast as any of his peers! Incredible!”
Sure. Just remember there’s a strong correlation between high IQ results and frequency of taking IQ tests, meaning that IQ tests can absolutely be trained. Yet so many treat it as a “general intelligence” measure, when it’s more accurate to say it just measures practice at things the IQ test tests, and at some level some ability in the areas it tests.
The first time I took it, my mom wasn’t happy that my score was low, so she demanded that I be tested again, and told me she’d buy me ice cream if I did better. The second time, I was miraculously a genius.
correlation between high IQ results and frequency of taking IQ tests
Oh yeah, because like basically everything else, IQ testing can be a learned skill.
But again, that goes back to factors like education and free time and nutrition and stress, all of which have a bigger impact on your mental capacity than a native aptitude eugenists are looking for.
the general public misinterprets them far too often.
I mean, they don’t recognize the Q part. What’s the point of chasing outlayers when the median is what matters.
The person with the 100 IQ can be scrounging a subsistence living, pounding widgets on an assembly line, or crafting high art, entirely dependant on the social structure they’re born into.
Sure, but you need to be careful about what the median represents. It doesn’t represent the median of all humans, just the humans that have taken the test, and it only reflects performance on the test. This can be useful, but it gets used for a lot of stuff it really shouldn’t (e.g. comparing results from one region w/ another, when those regions have very different education systems and thus exposure to different sorts of problem solving).
The person with the 100 IQ
They could also be a professor or other highly educated person. It all depends on how familiar they are with the concepts covered by the test, how well they were feeling that day, how well the questions were worded, how much time they took, etc. There are a ton of variables, and your score on a test could vary quite wildly between takes.
It’s just not a good general measure of much of anything. It can be helpful in a clinical setting, though, to diagnose things like neurological divergence and whatnot, but it isn’t a particularly good test of “intelligence,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.
A great tool for making broad diagnostics with regard to childhood-to-adult brain development. Also useful for identifying disabilities and neurodivergence.
But useless as a means of stack ranking already demonstrably intelligent people or sifting for “genius” intelligence in a pool with variation in education and experience. Getting a “good IQ score” is like bragging about acing your “Do you have Alzheimers?” cognitive exam. “Oh! He can draw clocks twice as fast as any of his peers! Incredible!”
Sure. Just remember there’s a strong correlation between high IQ results and frequency of taking IQ tests, meaning that IQ tests can absolutely be trained. Yet so many treat it as a “general intelligence” measure, when it’s more accurate to say it just measures practice at things the IQ test tests, and at some level some ability in the areas it tests.
Example article about limitations, and the this one mentions its roots in eugenics (i.e. racism).
IQ tests can be useful, e.g. for the reasons you specified, but the general public misinterprets them far too often.
The first time I took it, my mom wasn’t happy that my score was low, so she demanded that I be tested again, and told me she’d buy me ice cream if I did better. The second time, I was miraculously a genius.
Oh yeah, because like basically everything else, IQ testing can be a learned skill.
But again, that goes back to factors like education and free time and nutrition and stress, all of which have a bigger impact on your mental capacity than a native aptitude eugenists are looking for.
I mean, they don’t recognize the Q part. What’s the point of chasing outlayers when the median is what matters.
The person with the 100 IQ can be scrounging a subsistence living, pounding widgets on an assembly line, or crafting high art, entirely dependant on the social structure they’re born into.
Sure, but you need to be careful about what the median represents. It doesn’t represent the median of all humans, just the humans that have taken the test, and it only reflects performance on the test. This can be useful, but it gets used for a lot of stuff it really shouldn’t (e.g. comparing results from one region w/ another, when those regions have very different education systems and thus exposure to different sorts of problem solving).
They could also be a professor or other highly educated person. It all depends on how familiar they are with the concepts covered by the test, how well they were feeling that day, how well the questions were worded, how much time they took, etc. There are a ton of variables, and your score on a test could vary quite wildly between takes.
It’s just not a good general measure of much of anything. It can be helpful in a clinical setting, though, to diagnose things like neurological divergence and whatnot, but it isn’t a particularly good test of “intelligence,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.