The elephant in the room is that whatever IQ is measuring, it is strongly correlated with all of the things people would generally agree correlates with intelligence. It is a strong predictor for what is generally considered success: financial, health, achievements, career. It is a strong predictor for how fast people learn things or become competent in roles generally associated with intelligence.
You can nitpick it, you can be right, but you are also preaching to the rocks and trees. The fact is people with low IQs are going to struggle more and people with high IQs do not need to struggle as much, in all areas of life. The exact number, or accuracy, or whether it is really intelligence does not change the reality.
"I would definitely never say something like “IQ doesn’t matter at all.” I wouldn’t even say “IQ is unimportant.” I think it is important, in that it’s one of the only measurements we have that does an okay job at capturing intelligence, in that it’s not too bad at this when it comes to the center of the distribution, although it gets increasingly bad at it at the tails.
And, from a practical perspective, there is a sense in which I’m actually very pro-IQ tests!"
> although it gets increasingly bad at it at the tails.
In my experience, typical measures of intelligence become less meaningful with those who have a combination of unusually high and unusually low abilities on different dimensions of intelligence. With the majority of people most abilities tend to correlate but in a significant minority they don't.
And there are other people living in the same zip code as you. A single family may even have more than one child living under the same roof. Naturally the question will arise anyway as to why there are differences in learning speed or fluency.
I think people read too much into IQ tests. IQ tests will test what sub skills you have and don’t have currently. They do not test your innate abilities and one can improve their sub skills within your lifetime.
Moreover, people assume having a higher IQ means you are definitely smarter than someone with a lower IQ. However, IQ does not measure how much rigorous thinking you have done in your lifetime — a metric that would better score how many useful insights you have gathered in your life — nor does it measure what domain-knowledge connections you have in your brain that are useful. It just measures a subset of cognitive subskills that makes it easier for one to pickup ideas: not that you actually have used them for such purposes nor that you have used these subskills to their full abilities.
Additionally, these subskills can also be a hindrance to your learning. Neurodivergent people — who typically perform worse on IQ tests — can often be forced to learn MORE effective systems and will outperform high-IQ neuro-typical people’s performances as they were forced to adapt around their subskill insufficiencies: analogous to a blind person learning how to echo-locate and can see in 360 degrees with their clicks bouncing off walls and objects (something seeing people typically can not do).
IQ tests are misleading because people believe they measure a person’s life-long cognitive ceiling and that it tests more than it actually does. IQ does not test intelligence nor learning abilities. It tests a subset of subskills that are the most common tools that most people use to learn. The test does not measure all the possible learning tools one can use to learn. IQ does not test how much one’s organization and scheduling abilities can help overcome IQ insufficiencies. IQ does not test one’s ability to pick which learning tactics is best to use when studying a given subject. IQ does not test how well one can update their priors — which is probably one of the most important items when measuring how intelligent/informed a person will become in their lifetime. IQ also does not test how well a person can reframe an issue/discussion to be more constructive and accurate.
IQ measures much less about intelligence than the complete set of subskills that are relevant to a person’s cognitive ceiling. IQ measures enough to draw a regression line on a graph between it and perceived intelligence. Any stronger statement one could make about IQ’s implication on measuring intelligence is simply conjecture.
How does the conclusion "The fact is people with low IQs are going to struggle more and people with high IQs do not need to struggle as much" logically follow? I would urge you to explain how you came to this conclusion (logically speaking).
Just a thought but often times people who score very high on IQ tests face much more adversity in their lives if they also have autism, adhd or comorbidities. Children who undergo an adhd diagnosis often also do an IQ test as part of that procedure; this seems to be standard practice.
Imagine I give you a Ferrari and it's your only car. It gets 4 MPG, tires need replacing at $15,000 every 4 months and you live in the city with hills and stop and go traffic, and you don't really know how to drive stick (when you were in driving training they said 'I'm sure you can figure it out' and focused on the other people). Sweet car, but it's not really the 'gift' that it seems.
If you dont have those you can’t really relate the sensation of cold / warm to the scientific concept of temperature. Unless you blindly trust what someone else does
> If you dont have those you can’t really relate the sensation of cold / warm to the scientific concept of temperature
It doesn't make it less of a fact.
> Unless you blindly trust what someone else does
I don't have to blindly trust. I can just plainly trust. The same way I do with many things in my life.
If I limited myself to what I can perceive myself I would be limited severely. And also wrong many times because personal perceptions are sometimes flawed and misleading.
> And also wrong many times because personal perceptions are sometimes flawed and misleading.
For example what you perceive others say and do, they're just perceptions, n=1, but somehow, for some reasons, you think they're above others experiences you have in life, and you can qualify them as "good facts"
I value research of people that spent their lives on it more than my personal illusions.
Reading someone's research has way less opportunities for lying to yourself than trying to form an opinion on this subject from your own experiences only.
Sure, my perceptions of reading someone's research are burdened with errors just like everything else I perceive in life. But since the knowledge is distilled and condensed then there's less opportunities to mess it up, compared to the alternative of "doing my own research".
I don't see how that's controversial for you. That's how science works. You read what other people wrote first. Then you try to make some contribution if you are so inclined.
I’ve often wondered how IQ correlates with the ability to visualize or recall audio of certain things.
For example, my neighbor in California - he had an ability to look at an equation and actually visualize the plot of it like a graphing calculator. That is certainly intelligence.
I got into asking people how they visualized for a while because I myself don’t. But then I’m apparently good at knowing if I’ve seen somebody or not, no matter how short of time it was I’ve seen them. I’m sorta the same way with having been a place, usually knowing how to get back there, without actually seeing it. Sometimes I wonder if I do that “similar” thing with everything, including ideas.
My stepdad once said he met Clinton briefly once and then Clinton saw him many years later at a Razorback game and he instantly remembered my dad’s name. That’s a level of intelligence.
And if somebody has perfect pitch, or can listen to a song and play it back in the piano, then that’s also intelligence of a certain type, maybe.
So what makes an IQ test be able to measure such variety when some have totally different modes of thinking?
> For example, my neighbor in California - he had an ability to look at an equation and actually visualize the plot of it like a graphing calculator. That is certainly intelligence.
That is certainly something you develop - and even make a conscious effort to develop - if you work a lot with equations. Some level of mathematical intelligence might be a necessary prerequisite for learning it, sure, but it is something that quantitatively inclined people can learn to do.
Source: I'm a theoretical physicist, and visualizing equations is certainly the traditional way work in this field (although nowadays computer simulations are also there)
I've never taken an actual IQ test but I've always done very well at academic testing in the abstract with basically any subject I encountered (with some knock-on effects; for example, nobody ever teaching how or why to study anything, leading to a crash-and-burn in college).
I have almost zero visual recall, to the point that I would describe myself as mostly aphantasic. For example, without a reference photo, I'm literally unable to describe most peoples' faces outside of the most generic details ("white guy with uhhh, intact face and no beard?"), even if I know them well.
I always had 19.5/20 at school no matter the subject, if the subject involved logic and even if I didn't learn anything.
On the other part, my grades in other subjects such as history were much more "ordinary".
I skimmed through the academic part of my life without paying any attention to what the teachers were telling, drawing stuff in a notebook.
On the other hand, I cannot remember simple things such as where to go to <enter the name of a place> and I often have to wander and explore when I ride my car ...
Also, if you ask me what I did yesterday, it is highly probable that I won't be able to tell.
Also, I never know what day of the week we are, and sometimes I don't even know what month we are.
For every other aspect, learning new things is like learning things I already know.
I had the exact same experience. Top grades in math etc without paying attention or studying for tests etc. Terrible at history and similar classes that mostly require you to remember trivia.
Also struggle to remember directions, I lean heavily on Google maps and might use it 3-5 times before I actually remember the route. Terrible with faces and names. Get easily distracted but some times I can focus for hours at a time. Other times I can't focus for the life of me, it's like my brain just isn't working.
I feel I am in a perpetual day-dream; hence space and time go unnoticed by my "brain".
Logical articulation, -and I don't know why- resonnates perfectly with my state of mind. If the "memory task" can be represented as a tree or axioms and theorems, then it feels like I already know it by heart (the information is compressed and can be developped from a small piece of information, be it a formula or a fact).
The weirdest is that some aesthetical ability in my brain allow me, through some kind of hallucination (There's no other word) to perceive logical articulation where it doesn't exist: I can remember phone numbers only because I see a "discourse" or articulation in them, when truly that's plainly wrong.
I also noticed I was much more "affected" by signs that weren't part of the road signalization when driving, and sometimes I know where a graffiti is, for example, better than I know which of the next two village is the nearest. (But at least I make people laugh).
I am amazed by my wife that is able to travel a whole country knowing almost exactly which town and village we will go through without looking at a map, while telling me about the names of the different mountains, hills and vegetal species around us (??????).
Respectfully no, I don't think they are. They are talents. Your neighbor probably cannot not teach someone how to look at an equation and visualize a plot of it. That's just a thing he can do.
Bill Clinton probably cannot teach someone how to remember a rando's name after several years. That's just something he can do that makes him a uniquely talented politician.
Intelligence is intended to be a metric, and that requires commonality. Mostly anyone can be taught to read, write, do basic math, recognize patterns in shapes, etc. That's why these things are used as indicators of intelligence. Saying that someone is more intelligent than everyone else because they possess a certain non-replicable talent undermines the entire endeavor.
I disagree. There is no qualifier in intelligence that would require the person to be able to transfer it to another person.
In fact, I think the IQ as a metric is fundamentally flawed. IIRC it rose from detecting learning disabilities, like if you are 10 years old and still don't know that if I write 1, 2, 3 and you don't guess the next number is 4, then there is likely something wrong and your IQ is below average. So, they took that test and wrote new, more advanced questions, like 2, 3, 5, what's next? Could be 7 (primes) or could be 8 (Fibonacci).
And the problem with that is that they really rely on what you are learning or not learning in school. The math example above might be passable but what about similes in literacy or what sides does this dodecahedron disassemble to. The former where somewhat taught in my school but not well and the latter... well, the children are supposed to experiment with shapes in their own time, apparently.
I do agree with you that it's some metric, but it just measures how well the material in the IQ test is taught in schools, it does not measure a person's intelligence, which is IMHO an innate quality.
I'm not defending or critiquing IQ tests. I am saying that defining individual or quirky talents as "intelligence" is not useful. By saying, "You're not as politically intelligent as Bill Clinton because he can remember the name of someone he met in a crowd three decades ago", all you're saying is, "You're not Bill Clinton".
Intelligence is a standard which is usually defined by your ability to make predictions about systems in various domains.
Now if you said, "You're not as politically intelligent as Bill Clinton because he was able to understand that by positioning himself these ways on these issues, he'd win over a lot of voters without appearing self-contradictory or disingenuous," that's a much more defensible example of intelligence in a non-traditional sense.
The idea of general intelligence arose out of correlation between test performances, and that there was a more "general" capability that people were tapping into to solve the plethora of different intelligence tests.
It isn't unqiue, Dale Carnegie Jr talked about that sort of easy recollection of names and gave explanations of how people who did recall names a decade later do it.
I think the way our memory works shapes a lot of what we become. I can remember numbers, algorithms, weird words and 3D shapes. But struggle with music (piano), names, what I did a week ago, and what your birthday is. That shapes what I become interested in, because I can't progress my abilities if I can't remember. E.g. I could hit keys at the piano, but I could never remember ("have a feel for") the music I was playing. And I lost interest.
Another example is chess. I always sucked at chess, because I can't remember opening books, prior games and other useful information. It both means I can't progress in games, and that I'm not fun in a social chess setting.
What I'm proposing, I guess, is that IQ tests are really judging what type of information you can remember/recall. E.g. extending number series: you can solve them either by remembering rules you can apply, or instances of them you've seen before. If you can remember instances, you'll be named a prodigy because you can do it much faster than learning rules. If you tend to remember instances, you'll probably want to continue finding examples to learn, as a dopamine hit.
I think when it comes to "super recognizers," their fusiform face area (FFA) in the temporal cortex of the brain may be better/differently connected. The opposite end of this spectrum is prosopagnosia, where you can't remember any face. There is also prosopometamorphosia, where you perceive faces to be wildly disproportionate and demon-like (google it). So these might not be necessarily correlated with IQ as much as they are related to specific neural pathways/circuitry. Same can be true for visualization of data. There are many autistic savants who can perform specifically remarkable feats, but this isn't really translated perfectly onto the IQ test. The IQ test is probably an imperfect measure of all types of intelligence, but for general intelligence, it provides some level of useful data, but I don't think you can say that data covers all different specific scenarios like those described, sometimes it certainly might. There are probably people who can score 150 on an IQ test, but are actually unable to do any productive creative activity meaningfully.
I've become convinced of the idea that everything on some level is a matter of practice, and that effortless practice comes from enjoyment.
Maybe your neighbor can visualize graphs because he practiced visualizing graphs a lot. And he did that because he found an odd joy in it that others didn't.
Bill Clinton knew he wanted to be in politics at a very early age by all accounts. And considering he didn't exactly come from a powerful political family with a clear path forward, it's likely he decided to practice remembering people and by the time anyone could comment on it, he'd had decades of practice. But honestly maybe he just had fun seeing what he could remember about the people he met and that turned it into a fun game for him that paid off big.
When I was young, I played a game where I would count the letters in the words people were saying to determine whether the total sentence was divisible by three. So for a time in my life I was unusually good at doing modulo division on people's conversation.
I've since lost that ability (not much use to it), but I wasn't some savant. My mother worked early shifts at the hospital and would drive me and my siblings to my grandmother's house, and the fog and dew would cling to the windshield regardless of whether it was raining so the windshield wipers would be on. And I would sync the voices on the AM radio to the three positions of the wipers, left, middle, right, left, middle, right. It was a game to pass the time because I couldn't fall back asleep after being woken up. By the time I could do it as a party trick, I'd had hundred of hours of practice.
I think you underestimate the role that hardware acceleration plays. Take the Clinton example — about 2% of the population has prosopagnosia (“face blindness”), where no amount of practice will improve recognition because of defects in the fusiform gyrus.
But! Just like some percentage don’t have the neurons to be great at recognizing people, there are “super recognizers” where the fusiform gyrus overperforms. fMRI studies have shown these people have more activity in this area.
Some skills, like your letter counting, probably do not have an evolved area of the brain and are purely cognitive, so perhaps more amenable to training. But even then there may be aspects that are hardware accelerated with some intrinsic genetic predisposition to be good / bad at.
> fMRI studies have shown these people have more activity in this area.
Neuroscience is paradoxically a poor indicator for how the brain works in response to stimuli. The reason is that what you do literally reshapes your brain and how you respond to things. For a common example a chess master and a chess amateur use different parts of then brain when analyzing positions. Here [1] is some random study on it - there's a bunch. It's well known and not controversial. But the thing is, that chess master was also once a chess amateur. And so practice literally changes how your brain responds to various stimuli to the point of complete shifting the area used for processing.
So showing that [people of this group] have [this distinct brain activity] in response to [whatever] doesn't really say anything at all, which it makes for endless easy mode studies for now. Hence people exposed to [video games, porn, gender dysmorphia, etc] all 'change the brain' and/or have 'different brains than normal.' Well duh, now so do you after reading this paragraph.
That said, I obviously would not dispute that people are inherently different, but I think the most obvious ways to try to demonstrate that are irreparably flawed.
>But the thing is, that chess master was also once a chess amateur. And so practice literally changes how your brain responds to various stimuli to the point of complete shifting the area used for processing.
How do we know that people that go on to become chess masters don't just have better brains for chess? Have studies tracked people learning chess and shown different brain structures being used later in chess careers? Or looked at kids and then looked again at them as adults and seen the ones that became chess masters moved their chess processing?
I can speak from personal experience there, for myself, or for students. I've worked with students from when they were complete beginners all the way to master, and they were still very much amateurs (with 'amateur brain') at the beginning. And in fact while you can kind of get some vague impressions, you can't really tell who's going to excel.
Famously, Mikhail Botvinnik (a world champion seen as the 'patriarch' of the Soviet Chess school) chided a young Anatoly Karpov who showed up to one of his chess schools, "The boy doesn't have a clue about Chess, and there's no future at all for him in this profession." Anatoly Karpov would go on to be one of the most dominant world champions of all time.
Even Magnus Carlsen - he is arguably the strongest player of all time and had one of the most meteoric rises to the top. Yet he was at one time rated 900. A year later, with world class coaching and living and breathing chess, he made extremely rapid progress (to about 1900) yet that's still very far from master class.
Sure, maybe. Some people might have some level of cognitive multiplier, but most of us aren't Ramanujan, most of us are some gradient of normal. Putting emphasis on practice and hard work and finding joy in getting good at something would pay greater dividends generally than trying to pinpoint a perfectly quantifiable intelligence.
I don’t disagree, with the caveat that setting expectations that anyone can be a [notably exceptional person] with practice and hard work is a recipe for creating unhappiness.
A face blind person will never have eidetic memory for someone they met 30 years ago, an average person will never be Ramanujan, and there are mediocre athletes who work harder than Jordan ever did. We excel when we align hard work to areas where we won the genetic lottery.
Famously, Michael Jordan was cut from his sophomore high school team.
I won't deny there are people who have disabilities or genetic advantages. But we overestimate the necessity of innate talent and severely underestimate the potential of practice, hard work and mentorship (and raw obsession if we're being honest) in most people, outliers notwithstanding.
Yeah, I think “outlier” is the key word there. Within the realm of typical physiology, typical genetics, typical nurture (say within two standard deviations for all of those), there’s huge opportunity for hard work and growth.
> I’ve often wondered how IQ correlates with the ability to visualize or recall audio of certain things.
Discussing these kinds of differing facets of intelligence with friends and co-workers over the years, my sense is that rather than one linear scale, intelligence is best modeled as being along a varying number of different dimensions. I picture these each as a vector shooting off in divergent directions and the scales on each can differ and be non-linear. Frequent examples include sensory types like visual, audible, spatial, tactile, etc but they can be far more granular and specific than people initially assume. One common area of difference is how the ability expresses itself, for example, in superior processing or superior recall. Sometimes these two correlate but not always. There are a variety of such independent variables like speed and depth which don't always correlate and can vary widely from dimension to dimension in the same person.
This degree of variety makes thinking about and assessing relative intelligence far more complex and interesting than typically assumed. For example, my wife and I are both good Scrabble players, however our mental approaches couldn't be more different. Her searches are faster but not as deep as mine. I'm slower but find more multi-word crossing combos based on obscure words. Who wins depends almost entirely on the turn time we set for the game.
Another area where we're highly divergent is spatial processing. I always have a general sense of my spatial orientation, whereas she has to stop and think about which way to turn even on familiar local streets. We jokingly say that she "has no Tab key" based on the key often used in RPG games to bring up the overhead map. However, when it comes to processing a complex visual field and identifying a different pattern among many similar patterns, I'm objectively terrible. She says I'm "Where's Waldo challenged." This is to the extent that she won't even ask me to pick up something at the store if she knows I don't know what it looks like and she can't tell me exactly which shelf it's on. I could spend five minutes trying to find an unfamiliar box on a packed 12-foot wide section of seven foot tall store shelving. When I'm buying items I've bought before in a store I've been to before, I'm the world's fastest shopper because I know exactly where each item is and my brain intuitively maps an optimized path to collect everything. And all this occurs with no conscious effort on my part. Yet, I'm super slow when in an unfamiliar store or trying to find items I haven't logged a location for.
Well stated. These abilities amplify the effectiveness of mental models we use to build useful systems i.e. they're force multipliers in discrete domains. People with these unique cognitive strengths become what we know as "principals." They can push beyond normal limitations in their areas.
Further, an organization that spots this dynamic and builds around it gains a real edge, assuming the company culture supports it.
what you are desribing is a mental state, sometimes called "flow" where everything is on top
ie: zero latency
it's fun and effortless, but dependent on a general feeling of wellbieng
there is a dark cousin, that works in.a do or die situation, that can dredge up poorly understood information, and present a plausible action
genius is best described as an idea that once put forward, everyone else can recognise and say "of course" ie: its implimentable and imediatly usefull
and an iq test is fine as general indicator of mental agility, but will miss many exceptionaly intelligent people, for the simple reason, that they are "bored now" and are playing to loose
and others that are distracted in one of the inumerable possible ways, to be distracted, revealing the fundamental flaw in "testing" is that the first "test" is to submit, and sit down and comply, and fill in the shit forms, and so reveals "pleasers" and "malcontents" as much as anything else
> For example, my neighbor in California - he had an ability to look at an equation and actually visualize the plot of it like a graphing calculator
This actually isn’t too hard for common functions if you know a few simple rules. Polynomials, quadratics, trig functions, exponentials, logarithmic functions, and rational functions are pretty easy to do this for.
IQ tests measure certain intellectual skills—solving certain visual problems, interpreting and synthesizing language, audio-visual processing, memory for nonsense—but not all intellectual skills. There are so many ways of being “intelligent” that it’s silly to pretend one number is meaningful as an overall universal measure.
Excellent points. I’d add that the idea of intelligence diversity extends beyond people. We have extremely biased definitions intelligence that are very conveniently aligned with human strengths.
when i was a child i was tested in this manner. the test was called the "woodcock johnson iv" (har)
i remember a big chunk of the test was repeating back increasingly long auditory digit strings in reverse and drawing increasingly more complex ensembles of basic shapes from memory.
sat and classic iq tests seem more achievement focused, where this thing seemed to be instead trying to measure properties of raw cognitive function like working memory size.
But apparently it's possible for anyone to learn mental math with very large numbers with practice, which suggests either the working memory can be extended, or at least specialized for numbers.
I struggle to remember faces, but I remember audio exactly - I have like “photographic memory” but for sound - and this includes conversations.
I can remember long conversations, exactly word-for-word of each participant, 10 years later. But if I meet someone on zoom, and then in real life, I really struggle to notice it’s the same person.
In any field, what it even means to be good morphs as you go up in skill level. Non mathematicians know only about arithmetic so they often imagine that mathematicians must be really really good at arithmetic. But this isn't so. Likewise, non musicians think what must make a great musician is perfect pitch. But some of the greatest musicians in history didn’t have it while many mediocre ones do. Similarly, non chess players think GMs must be good at calculating zillions of moves in advance, but apparently they only calculate a small set of moves, which somehow are the right ones.
To take an example cited in the article, Einstein was so far up there that it’s nearly impossible for a non physicist to even understand what he was so good at — crude measures like high school grades or “IQ” barely scratch the surface of the skill that he was a genius at.
Now, perfect pitch does modestly correlate with musical ability, mathematicians are better than average at arithmetic, GMs do calculate more moves than the average shmo, and Einstein got much better than average grades (after all he was accepted at ETH). But that’s all, modest correlations.
There is such a thing as talent in music, mathematics, etc. but it isn’t something a psychologist standing outside these domains would ever be able to devise a test for.
What people typically refer to as an IQ test was not designed nor is it considered to be an accurate test of genius. It is not meant to mean anything if someone scores particularly well. The reason these tests are administered is to understand if there is perhaps a learning disability. If you score low overall, or low in a particular area that is then used as a diagnostic tool. For example, a normal score overall with a markedly low working memory score might point to a number of diagnoses.
Yes, scoring high is impressive, but is pretty meaningless in terms of outcomes beyond a point. Most IQ test scores are just made up. And there are plenty of self proclaimed genius IQ people who seem to be completely unremarkable beyond being a good test taker.
> The reason these tests are administered is to understand if there is perhaps a learning disability. If you score low overall, or low in a particular area that is then used as a diagnostic tool. For example, a normal score overall with a markedly low working memory score might point to a number of diagnoses.
That's how I discovered my learning disability. Sort of ironic given that I'm a voracious learner and have become quite proficient in a couple of fields. However I'm a relatively slow learner, sometimes have quite dumb moments, and struggle with tests or being put on the spot. Usually when I do grasp a topic it's at a deep intuitive level.
Still a psychologist gave me a proper IQ exam after I emailed him saying I felt something was off in my brain. Testing took half a day. When I went back for results my score was close to the average for college graduates. Yet the phycologist asked me when I was going to get a PhD.
That confused me as my core didn't seem impressive. Then he said I probably had ADHD. Like many 80's kids I'd always sorta thought ADHD was mostly made up. Well he explained the results to me, in particular my low working memory compared to the rest of my scores on other subtests. My IQ dropped 40-50 points on some particular subscores which correlates very highly with ADHD.
By the end of that meeting I'd begun to realize, that it made a lot of sense with my struggles over the years. So yes, IQ tests are very helpful for diagnosis. I later got an official diagnosis at university.
I'm glad the psychologist offered me that IQ test. I hope others consider IQ testing if you're "smart but stuck".
It's unfortunate you didn't understand your cognitive differences early on. I was lucky in that I was tested in third grade and identified as ADD. This was pretty rare in the early 1970s. I was unlucky in that I was immediately separated, had to ride a literal "short bus" to another elementary school where I went to a special classroom off on its own in a temporary building that was helpfully labeled on the door "Educationally Handicapped". Good that there was a smaller class size and a teacher with some special training but bad that I was socially ostracized and, having been so clearly labeled by the system, ended up tacitly internally labeling myself too.
But I was different than my classmates in the special classroom. I could tell and they could tell too. I couldn't pay attention but I could figure things out on my own and I didn't have the behavioral problems they did. What saved me was a state-mandated standardized test that every student (even the handicapped ones) had to take in eighth grade. It was the first time since being separated in third grade that I'd taken an objective standardized test. I remember a few weeks after the test, the principal came to the special classroom, got me and took me back to his office where he had me take the test again. The next day he came back and took from the educationally handicapped classroom to the special classroom for "mentally gifted minors". It was great because I excelled in some subjects. But it sucked because in a few subjects I wasn't even close to cutting it.
That was when it slowly started dawning on me that I didn't fit any of the typical models for assessing intelligence. I had some genuine superpowers but I also had some serious deficits in other areas. And this has remained true throughout my entire life and career. I had periods of abject failure and I also had periods where I reached the absolute pinnacles of career, professional and financial success. Over time I learned the key difference between the two was when I took active steps to mitigate my many deficits and maximize the returns from superpower. Denial definitely didn't work. Sometimes this looked weird from the outside, like when I quietly hired a friend from the finance group to moonlight and help me complete my departmental budget forecasts. I was the only VP at the global F500 tech company who couldn't do my own budget homework yet I was making >$1M/yr. I once told the CEO and he said he didn't care what help I needed as long as I kept delivering the stellar results. I was also the only senior exec with no college degree. This used to bother me. For a while it was an ego issue. Other times I just thought it was a terribly embarrassing, dark secret about me. Then I finally broke through and accepted that I'm just different. If I work it right, my downsides from my extreme deficits average out against the benefits of my superpowers. The net result is significantly on the positive side.
The moral of the story: It sucks that in third grade I was labelled, segregated and made to feel like a stupid loser, but the silver-lining was that by being mistreated to an almost comical extent, I simply accepted that I was forever going to be different. I'd have to work harder than others, I'd need to find and learn special tools to help me and, as I aged, I'd need to continually work on finding a combo of meds that kept my worst deficits manageable with sufficient effort. And, the best part is, after a lot of failures and struggle figuring out patterns and tools that worked, this odd path ultimately resulted in a happy ending as I was able to retire early at the top of my chosen field.
IQ measures how good you are at IQ tests. I'm brilliant at those tests, I consistently score 5+ SD above 100.
I'm also an idiot, and pretty much an asshole. IQ itself puts no beans on the table, and has little to no relationship to how good a human being you are.
> I'm brilliant at those tests, I consistently score 5+ SD above 100.
Are those professional tests supervised by a psychologist? Or rather "IQ tests" on websites that vastly inflate results to get you to share the results on social media? Both the "consistently" and the "5+ SD" (equivalent to an IQ of 175) make me think it's the latter.
I'm talking about sit down in a room with a psychologist for hours, lots of questions, coloured blocks, tricky pictures, with stop watches etc. Reciting lists of numbers backwards and forwards, the _real_ tests, not pop quizes.
Scores that high mean very little, because a) there are so few people who might qualify for such high scores that they can't be assessed reliably and b) the people who wrote the tests weren't at that level and thus could not write questions capable of distinguishing them from the rest. Anything above about 3 SD (score of 145) is just noise.
High IQ is the ability to think faster, not better. And what you are going to do with that ability is determined by all other factors of who you are and what environment you are in.
Yes, there is a pattern. Most of my relatives are very quick, those tested all come out 120+. Two of my sons have absurd IQs like me. My second is about my level (170+), and my youngest is some kind of megamind mutant. His brain scares me. He's very very clever.
No mention of standard deviation? Just by the fact the IQ is your place on a normal curve, with a 15 point standard deviation, there are at least 100K+ people in the world with an IQ of 160.
The point of the article was that above around 120 or so (and also at the low tail), the tests become very unreliable (due to a chicken-and-egg problem of finding people to calibrate the tests on). So an IQ score of 160 is highly suspect, and subject to even 2-digit variance.
In theory yes, but when the number of people at the tail ends of intelligence are vanishingly small, how does one check that the questions in the test can actually measure their intelligence accurately?
IQ as an intelligence rank does indeed follow the standard distribution, but in practice IQ is estimated by tests. I believe the GP wanted to ask about a distribution of such "estimated" IQs.
Your score on an IQ test is reflective of your percentile amongst all IQ test takers. That is, if 50% of takers did better than you and 50% did worse than you, then you score a 100 (regardless of the actual number of questions you got right or wrong).
So, yes, IQ scores always necessarily follow a normal distribution - because that's how the scores are determined in the first place.
If that's true my IQ score is necessarily updated every time other takers take the test, because it necessarily depends on the current distribution right now. In reality such update happens very rarely and most IQ tests would give you a confidence interval instead, which is based on the distribution constructed via the past validations. There is no guarantee that those scores are indeed normal.
the parameters of the test scoring formulas are _by construction_ such that the IQ scores we find in the wild indeed follow the standard distribution. the scores. not the ticked boxes in the test sheets. but the "graded" evaluation.
If you actually look at common IQ tests like WAIS, you will find that's not true because they directly give the score (and confidence interval) and not the rank [1]. Their weights are indeed scaled in order to approximate the true distribution in advance, but individual tests may well have a different distribution.
[1] Compare with standardized tests with a similar principle, where your scaled scores are never available immediately. They are available only after collecting all raw scores to construct the reference distribution. No IQ tests I'm aware work like that.
Rather that it cannot be said simply "by construction" when the calibration only happens every few years. And I'm very sure that the calibration is done by sampling.
Theoretically, yes. We chose 100 as a midpoint for convenience. (Practically, there is a lower bound beyond which we cannot meaningfully interpret test results.)
That isn't at all what the central limit theorem says. The whole point is it holds independent of the actual shape of distribution of the population. You could use the same argument to say social security numbers are normally distributed.
One way to explain things like height being normally distributed is that there are a bunch of independent factors which contribute, and the central limit theorem applied to those factors would then suggest the observed variable looking normal-ish.
I've joined Mensa a few months ago and I've never met so many idiots in my entire life. It's a small percentage of the members overall but they take over the online communities compulsively and make the environment miserable. Ant they all have the same political profile (won't say which one).
Mensa is sadly a combination of positive and negative selection. Positive: by IQ. Negative: by having nothing more important to do than become a Mensa member.
If instead you took random people on the street and gave them IQ tests, and invited those who passed the IQ 130 bar to a meetup, it would be much more interesting than a typical Mensa meetup.
When I first started using OTPs from Google Authenticator I found it difficult to remember random 6 digit numbers in one glance. Today after doing it almost daily for years and years I find it easy. Almost anything can be improved with training, including IQ test tasks, contrary to what test makers say. But I don't believe that such training improves general intelligence.
I still find it hard to remember 8 digit OTPs, and work around that by repeatedly "singing" them in my mind while I type them. I can easily repeat those 8 meaningless words in my mind, and then decipher only the next digit I need to type.
When I was a teen I took a IQ test that was supposed to measure up to 160. It had quite a few questions but due to the scaling, just getting one question correct made it declare you had like 120 IQ or so.
Turned out I did indeed get one of the questions right, a fairly straight forward math question. Decided the test was probably bogus, just seemed dumb to conclude IQ based on a single correct answer.
Growing up some more I realized intelligence is complicated and multifaceted.
That I can solve some puzzles and usually think things through doesn't preclude me from being dumb as a brick in other situations.
When I did a psychologist-administered IQ test it took like 3 hours and resulted in four scores on different metrics. For example I had a pretty average 103 IQ on language, but about 120 IQ on logical thinking. In the end you get a total score from the average of the subcategories.
All IQ tests are pretty incomplete and a bit stupid, but some are less stupid than others
That isn't an IQ test. You can't do them on computers. They are assessed in person by professionals. You can't practice because the test aren't publicly available.
As an aside — intelligence is not the same thing as accomplishment. A lot of people do well in school (and do well on IQ tests) and do not achieve anything of note. The people we remember are those who achieve great things, not those who do well on puzzle-solving tests. Those aren't the same thing, and this is probably why Stephen Hawking said that caring about IQ is for losers.
Hawking was undoubtedly a smart guy, but that fact alone did not make his career. He did a lot of hard work in a field he was passionate about. Why would you tell Stephen Hawking how good you are at solving puzzles — why would he care about that? I'm sure he would have found news of some finding relevant to his research interests much more compelling.
Now, are IQ-type tests useful? Yes. They are quite good to administer in school to gauge people's reasoning abilities — to a certain point. The point of the tests was never to rank the smartest people, and to think about these edge cases — the ones tests are worst at measuring — is pointless. There are better things to concern yourself with; life is not an IQ leaderboard.
The first ever intelligence test (Binet-Simon) was designed partly in order to identify children who have intellectual disability and give a better treatment for them. The test itself was crude, but I believe that should be the only meaningful use of IQ tests because overly low or high IQ does predict certain kinds of complications. Otherwise they are easy to game, they only measure a particular slice of human intelligence, and their error bar is large enough that even a unit difference in SD can be not meaningful [1]. IQ is just a meaningless number that whoever have a higher one tends to have unjustified superiority over others.
[1] Depends on the particular test of course, but I can safely guess that +2 SD and +2.5 SD are not statistically distinguished by most tests.
I will define "IQ" as what your score will be on a ideal IQ test (rather than an actual IQ test, although then you will have to define how the "ideal IQ test" is working, which is presumably like an actual IQ test if made and administered in the ideal way, however that might be). It is correlated with intelligence (which cannot be measured by a single number), but is not the same thing as intelligence. (I think it also not the same thing as genius, although that is also correlated with high intelligence, since intelligence is one of the things to be genius but is not the only part of it.)
Not only is IQ a poor measure that's perhaps best at capturing near average performance, "intelligence" is an attribute that's not readily ranked in a linear manner as height can be.
You said "'intelligence' is an attribute that's not readily ranked in a linear manner" while complaining about IQ. IQ doesn't rank intelligence linearly.
> I'll assume you understand the difference between a 1D line, a 2D plane
IQ isn't linear because it is not superposable. A 100 IQ person isn't twice as clever, within the definition of cleverness IQ measures, as someone with a 50 IQ. (An 8' man is twice as tall as a 4' child.) If you need to force it into a geometric analogy, the distribution IQ rests on cannot be described by a line.
> IQ isn't linear because it is not superposable. A 100 IQ person isn't twice as clever, within the definition of cleverness IQ measures, as someone with a 50 IQ.
You appear to be thinking of a uniform distribution as compared to a normal distribution.
Nominally both height and IQ approximate a normal distribution (sans the infinite tails, leaving aside discrete ordinal bucketing).
"Linear" (see the O.E.D. for example) is a word with many meanings, mostly pertaining to lines and things resembling a line.
You can line up people by height or by IQ score, you cannot line up people by "intelligence", it's a partial order at best.
> the distribution IQ rests on cannot be described by a line.
You're the only one of us that connected the scalar IQ distribution to a line .. I've been aware of the central limit theorem for 45+ years now.
The geometric analogy is that mapping people by intelligence to a line is a poor fit, to a plane or higher space would make more sense.
You probably meant that there doesn't exist a total order for comparing intelligence and/or that it isn't a scalar quantity like height, but "linear" didn't convey that meaning.
Intelligence clearly isn't a scalar quantity like height, the implication is that a faux scalar quantity like IQ or other ordinal scale doesn't well describe intelligence.
I agree, I think any test that gets you a meaningfully different result if you take it twice or are coached beforehand isn't measuring something intrinsic or meaningful, I'm just trying to help bridge a miscommunication.
Ranking people by "intelligence" is compounded by it being multifactored, language skills and numerical skills can differ independently, spatial skills are a third vector unaligned with either.
One thing I have found funny is that people want to have a high IQ after they've gotten wherever they've gotten (often they are failures) but it actually highlights something else. Conditional on one getting somewhere, a high IQ actually means they suck at life. They were given a racecar and all they did is drive into a ditch.
On the other hand, with my 100 IQ I have had a successful time running engineering in ad-tech and HFT. Where does that put me? I'm the driver of a VW Polo that beats other drivers in F1 cars. Whatever gifts nature has given others in intelligence, I am handily superior in whatever else matters. Fascinating.
This is pretty much the exact way I think about it. IQ tests roughly measure the output of the engine but don't say anything about the driver. Metacognition and executive function for instance are cognitive domains which IQ tests don't really capture but are nevertheless essential for many real world cognitive activities.
IQ is just the ability to think faster. If you have incentive and time to think longer there's really very little benefit to having high IQ.
Using your car analogy. It doesn't really matter how fast is the car you drive it you get to where you wanted to get to because you weren't distracted or bored along the way. Pretty much any car can do that.
I think this is relevant to ideas about AI explosions.
There's a standard argument that's something like "once the machine reach 150 IQ, we've reached AGI and humans are done". Not that the AI isn't making leaps but this much too simplistic. Human capacities are much more than what's measured on an IQ test. Just as starter for considering , look at Moravec's paradox.
On the other hand, I’ve also been lucky enough to be able to meet, and occasionally work alongside, people I would consider scientific geniuses. Yet never once did I feel that an IQ test would capture these people operating at the highest level of intellectual output (who I will avoid the embarrassment of name dropping).
Why does Erik think he can predict the outcome of an IQ test, based on information gleaned solely from 'working alongside' people?
Some of the comments here remind me of Malcolm Galdwell's spaghetti sauce talk or similar about how the air force discovered you can't average pilot characteristics to develop a cockpit.
Both are examples where you can't use a single metric for something that varies on multiple independent axes. That's what IQ is trying to do. It doesn't work. You can develop different IQ systems for IQs on different axes (logic, memory, visual acuity, etc. etc. etc.) but trying to have a single number that represents all of them will never work.
"People who boast about their IQ are losers." I actually LOL'd at that but then I generally have a dislike of boastful people. and I could imagine that the type of person that would boast about IQ would probably dismiss Hawking as somehow not "really" intelligent.
IQ numbers for some current well known figures are also made up. I have found an inverse correlation between people who keep repeating that they are very smart and their high IQ number and their actual intelligence.
I think the article misses another crucial point: the fact that IQ numbers are frequently redefined to have the average remain at 100.
This means that if you say that Einstein had an IQ of 160, he actually would have had an IQ of 250+ back in his days. Voltaire ? Probably in the thousands.
This highlights how ridiculous those claims are, given how nobody tests at 250, 400, 1,000 and above nowadays.
If you really want to be pedantic, "from hoi polloi" is incorrect, because it does not use the correct Greek declension to go with a "from" preposition.
The normal thing to do in that case is to ignore the parts that are just artifacts of the other language, so you'd say "the polloi". (Or, really, you'd say "the many"; it's not an esoteric concept.)
If you read older translations of mythology, you'll see that inflectional endings for foreign nouns are just left off, so you have e.g. Jormungand instead of Jormungandr and Thor instead of Thorr. (It's true for history too, where we prefer Virgil to Vergilius and Ovid to Ovidius.) Recently there's been some kind of fetish for including foreign artifacts in borrowed words, even when those words are already well established without them.
I kind of get the sense that this kind of thing is driven by people who think that learning a foreign alphabet is the same thing as learning a foreign language.
"The hoi polloi" is a fixed phrase in English. Its etymology is irrelevant. We don't pronounce it "properly" either. Thay is because it isn't Greek! It is English. It has Greek origins but it was long ago borrowed into English and now follows English rules. ~Everyone knows "hoi" means "the" in Greek. But the phrase in English is "the hoi polloi". It is never found except as "the hoi polloi". If you said "Hoi polloi are upset" in real life people would look at you funny. There are loads of other examples of this happening. For example there are various verbs and adjectives from Latin that have been borrowed as nouns into English. If you go "uhm actually that is a verb in Latin actually" you are annoying and wrong. Language evolves.
Showing off your education is oftentimes used to signal high status. That often fails. You can of course argue with the OED:
Hoi is the Greek word for the, and the phrase hoi polloi means ‘the many.’ This has led some traditionalists to insist that hoi polloi should not be used in English with the, since that would be to state the word the twice. But, once established in English, expressions such as hoi polloi are typically treated as fixed units and are subject to the rules and conventions of English.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the οἱ ὀλίγοι from the colonies, so the only thing I was learnt is baaaaaaa.
Fellow Kiwi? The tone of your comment makes it sound to me like you disagree with me but I agree with everything you are saying.
I am usually a traditionalist but on this one I think the tradition to follow is the English one. I prefer the traditional English pronunciation of Latin (so "caveat" is "kay-vee-it"). Hell, I would prefer if we still nativised foreign loanwords and names: Saint Peter wasn't called "Peter" obviously, but I don't speak Greek or Aramaic or whatever. Peking isn't what the Chinese call it but neither is "Bayzhing" which is how English people pronounce Beijing, and so on. Plus now "Peking duck" doesn't make any sense...
From Christchurch. I was attempting to take the mick out of myself actually. I'm so humble.
Opinions on language are often subconscious status signaling. And too often people incorrect other people with the pretentions of displaying intelligence but actually displaying ignorance (oooooo judgy!). I fight the tendency within myself.
We end up with a half-assed attempt to be cultured for subconscious reasons, and it is often unappreciated by others.
I have become a weird rotator.
> Peking
My examples are Cristóbal Colón (Christophorus Columbus) and Pirata Drake (I didn't understand who it was when I first heard it). I've wondered how English names get mashed in Asian languages (especially Mandarin).
Did you notice the Wikipedia entry:
there is also widespread spoken use of the term in the opposite sense to refer denigratingly to elites that is common among middle-class and lower income people in Australia, ...
That calls to my love of the antipodes and I fear I'm going to rewire my brain to discorrect myself.
[for approximations that make sense in English: zhan like "John"; ni like "knee"; fu like "foo", an like "on", si like "sick" without the K at the end of the syllable, dun like... it begins with "dw", the vowel is as in "book", then it ends with N. If pinyin were more regular, dun would be spelled "dwen".]
圣文森特和格林纳丁斯 shèng wén sēn tè hé gé lín nà dīng sī [Saint Vincent and the Grenadines]
[圣 shèng and 和 hé are translations, not sound equivalents, of the English words "saint" and "and".
The vowel "e" in the first six syllables is best approximated by the vowel of the English word "book". As before, the vowel written "i" in "lin" and "ding" is the English FLEECE vowel, and the vowel of "si" is different, more like KIT.
The consonants should be intuitive to you, except that the W in "wen" might sound more like a W or like a V depending on the whims of the speaker.]
> I prefer the traditional English pronunciation of Latin (so "caveat" is "kay-vee-it").
...That's not an example of the traditional English pronunciation of Latin. The traditional English pronunciation of Latin caveat would have /kæ/ (TRAP vowel) in the first syllable, not /keɪ/ (FACE vowel).
> when a vowel is followed by a single consonant (or by a cluster of p, t, c/k plus l, r) and then another vowel [...]
> [such a vowel bearing stress in any syllable other than the penultima] is closed and the vowel is short [unless the vowel is U].
hoi polloi was borrowed into english as a way not only of saying "the masses", but of signalling one's own status above the masses. Another way of signalling such status is to show off one's deeper familiearity with obscure details of foreign languages.
or to put it another way, only hoi polloi say "the hoi polloi"; on this same topic linguists are generally incoherent, so intent are they to repeat yet again "descriptivism doncha know"
I'm aware of that, but it is not typical of borrowed terms. You can't explain the oddity of the phrase by appealing to the idea that that's how foreign terms are borrowed into English, because it isn't.
The elephant in the room is that whatever IQ is measuring, it is strongly correlated with all of the things people would generally agree correlates with intelligence. It is a strong predictor for what is generally considered success: financial, health, achievements, career. It is a strong predictor for how fast people learn things or become competent in roles generally associated with intelligence.
You can nitpick it, you can be right, but you are also preaching to the rocks and trees. The fact is people with low IQs are going to struggle more and people with high IQs do not need to struggle as much, in all areas of life. The exact number, or accuracy, or whether it is really intelligence does not change the reality.
The author spoke to this:
"I would definitely never say something like “IQ doesn’t matter at all.” I wouldn’t even say “IQ is unimportant.” I think it is important, in that it’s one of the only measurements we have that does an okay job at capturing intelligence, in that it’s not too bad at this when it comes to the center of the distribution, although it gets increasingly bad at it at the tails.
And, from a practical perspective, there is a sense in which I’m actually very pro-IQ tests!"
> although it gets increasingly bad at it at the tails.
In my experience, typical measures of intelligence become less meaningful with those who have a combination of unusually high and unusually low abilities on different dimensions of intelligence. With the majority of people most abilities tend to correlate but in a significant minority they don't.
And that's fine. IQ tests aren't designed to be comprehensive (and rightly so).
The ZIP code you're born in is a stronger predictor of all those things than IQ.
And there are other people living in the same zip code as you. A single family may even have more than one child living under the same roof. Naturally the question will arise anyway as to why there are differences in learning speed or fluency.
Do you have a citation for that?
Do you even need one?
Your parents income is an even stronger predictir
smart people love to stick together
rich*
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I think people read too much into IQ tests. IQ tests will test what sub skills you have and don’t have currently. They do not test your innate abilities and one can improve their sub skills within your lifetime.
Moreover, people assume having a higher IQ means you are definitely smarter than someone with a lower IQ. However, IQ does not measure how much rigorous thinking you have done in your lifetime — a metric that would better score how many useful insights you have gathered in your life — nor does it measure what domain-knowledge connections you have in your brain that are useful. It just measures a subset of cognitive subskills that makes it easier for one to pickup ideas: not that you actually have used them for such purposes nor that you have used these subskills to their full abilities.
Additionally, these subskills can also be a hindrance to your learning. Neurodivergent people — who typically perform worse on IQ tests — can often be forced to learn MORE effective systems and will outperform high-IQ neuro-typical people’s performances as they were forced to adapt around their subskill insufficiencies: analogous to a blind person learning how to echo-locate and can see in 360 degrees with their clicks bouncing off walls and objects (something seeing people typically can not do).
IQ tests are misleading because people believe they measure a person’s life-long cognitive ceiling and that it tests more than it actually does. IQ does not test intelligence nor learning abilities. It tests a subset of subskills that are the most common tools that most people use to learn. The test does not measure all the possible learning tools one can use to learn. IQ does not test how much one’s organization and scheduling abilities can help overcome IQ insufficiencies. IQ does not test one’s ability to pick which learning tactics is best to use when studying a given subject. IQ does not test how well one can update their priors — which is probably one of the most important items when measuring how intelligent/informed a person will become in their lifetime. IQ also does not test how well a person can reframe an issue/discussion to be more constructive and accurate.
IQ measures much less about intelligence than the complete set of subskills that are relevant to a person’s cognitive ceiling. IQ measures enough to draw a regression line on a graph between it and perceived intelligence. Any stronger statement one could make about IQ’s implication on measuring intelligence is simply conjecture.
The author doesn’t dispute that at all. The author disputes that high intelligence is necessary for genius.
An IQ of 125 isn't low by any standard.
How does the conclusion "The fact is people with low IQs are going to struggle more and people with high IQs do not need to struggle as much" logically follow? I would urge you to explain how you came to this conclusion (logically speaking).
Just a thought but often times people who score very high on IQ tests face much more adversity in their lives if they also have autism, adhd or comorbidities. Children who undergo an adhd diagnosis often also do an IQ test as part of that procedure; this seems to be standard practice.
Yet I have high IQ and life is a struggle.
I hear you.
Imagine I give you a Ferrari and it's your only car. It gets 4 MPG, tires need replacing at $15,000 every 4 months and you live in the city with hills and stop and go traffic, and you don't really know how to drive stick (when you were in driving training they said 'I'm sure you can figure it out' and focused on the other people). Sweet car, but it's not really the 'gift' that it seems.
You got this. I'm sure you can figure it out ;)
"Throwing a die, a number higher than 1 is very likely." - "And yet I threw a 1."
That is no contradiction.
That being said I hope you can overcome the issues that make your life a struggle.
IQ is just an ability to often (but not always) process things faster. It's useful for some people and things. Useless for others. Useless for most.
What can you logically do with those correlations ? They’re just correlations
How can it be a predictor when we don’t know the value ? Ive never taken a test and I dont know anyone who’s ever made a test
How can a temperature be a predictor of getting burned if I don't have a thermometer and no one I know does either?
If you dont have those you can’t really relate the sensation of cold / warm to the scientific concept of temperature. Unless you blindly trust what someone else does
> If you dont have those you can’t really relate the sensation of cold / warm to the scientific concept of temperature
It doesn't make it less of a fact.
> Unless you blindly trust what someone else does
I don't have to blindly trust. I can just plainly trust. The same way I do with many things in my life.
If I limited myself to what I can perceive myself I would be limited severely. And also wrong many times because personal perceptions are sometimes flawed and misleading.
> And also wrong many times because personal perceptions are sometimes flawed and misleading.
For example what you perceive others say and do, they're just perceptions, n=1, but somehow, for some reasons, you think they're above others experiences you have in life, and you can qualify them as "good facts"
I value research of people that spent their lives on it more than my personal illusions.
Reading someone's research has way less opportunities for lying to yourself than trying to form an opinion on this subject from your own experiences only.
Sure, my perceptions of reading someone's research are burdened with errors just like everything else I perceive in life. But since the knowledge is distilled and condensed then there's less opportunities to mess it up, compared to the alternative of "doing my own research".
I don't see how that's controversial for you. That's how science works. You read what other people wrote first. Then you try to make some contribution if you are so inclined.
I’ve often wondered how IQ correlates with the ability to visualize or recall audio of certain things.
For example, my neighbor in California - he had an ability to look at an equation and actually visualize the plot of it like a graphing calculator. That is certainly intelligence.
I got into asking people how they visualized for a while because I myself don’t. But then I’m apparently good at knowing if I’ve seen somebody or not, no matter how short of time it was I’ve seen them. I’m sorta the same way with having been a place, usually knowing how to get back there, without actually seeing it. Sometimes I wonder if I do that “similar” thing with everything, including ideas.
My stepdad once said he met Clinton briefly once and then Clinton saw him many years later at a Razorback game and he instantly remembered my dad’s name. That’s a level of intelligence.
And if somebody has perfect pitch, or can listen to a song and play it back in the piano, then that’s also intelligence of a certain type, maybe.
So what makes an IQ test be able to measure such variety when some have totally different modes of thinking?
> For example, my neighbor in California - he had an ability to look at an equation and actually visualize the plot of it like a graphing calculator. That is certainly intelligence.
That is certainly something you develop - and even make a conscious effort to develop - if you work a lot with equations. Some level of mathematical intelligence might be a necessary prerequisite for learning it, sure, but it is something that quantitatively inclined people can learn to do.
Source: I'm a theoretical physicist, and visualizing equations is certainly the traditional way work in this field (although nowadays computer simulations are also there)
For an anecdotal case:
I've never taken an actual IQ test but I've always done very well at academic testing in the abstract with basically any subject I encountered (with some knock-on effects; for example, nobody ever teaching how or why to study anything, leading to a crash-and-burn in college).
I have almost zero visual recall, to the point that I would describe myself as mostly aphantasic. For example, without a reference photo, I'm literally unable to describe most peoples' faces outside of the most generic details ("white guy with uhhh, intact face and no beard?"), even if I know them well.
I always had 19.5/20 at school no matter the subject, if the subject involved logic and even if I didn't learn anything. On the other part, my grades in other subjects such as history were much more "ordinary". I skimmed through the academic part of my life without paying any attention to what the teachers were telling, drawing stuff in a notebook.
On the other hand, I cannot remember simple things such as where to go to <enter the name of a place> and I often have to wander and explore when I ride my car ...
Also, if you ask me what I did yesterday, it is highly probable that I won't be able to tell.
Also, I never know what day of the week we are, and sometimes I don't even know what month we are.
For every other aspect, learning new things is like learning things I already know.
I had the exact same experience. Top grades in math etc without paying attention or studying for tests etc. Terrible at history and similar classes that mostly require you to remember trivia.
Also struggle to remember directions, I lean heavily on Google maps and might use it 3-5 times before I actually remember the route. Terrible with faces and names. Get easily distracted but some times I can focus for hours at a time. Other times I can't focus for the life of me, it's like my brain just isn't working.
I feel I am in a perpetual day-dream; hence space and time go unnoticed by my "brain".
Logical articulation, -and I don't know why- resonnates perfectly with my state of mind. If the "memory task" can be represented as a tree or axioms and theorems, then it feels like I already know it by heart (the information is compressed and can be developped from a small piece of information, be it a formula or a fact).
The weirdest is that some aesthetical ability in my brain allow me, through some kind of hallucination (There's no other word) to perceive logical articulation where it doesn't exist: I can remember phone numbers only because I see a "discourse" or articulation in them, when truly that's plainly wrong.
I also noticed I was much more "affected" by signs that weren't part of the road signalization when driving, and sometimes I know where a graffiti is, for example, better than I know which of the next two village is the nearest. (But at least I make people laugh).
I am amazed by my wife that is able to travel a whole country knowing almost exactly which town and village we will go through without looking at a map, while telling me about the names of the different mountains, hills and vegetal species around us (??????).
Respectfully no, I don't think they are. They are talents. Your neighbor probably cannot not teach someone how to look at an equation and visualize a plot of it. That's just a thing he can do.
Bill Clinton probably cannot teach someone how to remember a rando's name after several years. That's just something he can do that makes him a uniquely talented politician.
Intelligence is intended to be a metric, and that requires commonality. Mostly anyone can be taught to read, write, do basic math, recognize patterns in shapes, etc. That's why these things are used as indicators of intelligence. Saying that someone is more intelligent than everyone else because they possess a certain non-replicable talent undermines the entire endeavor.
I disagree. There is no qualifier in intelligence that would require the person to be able to transfer it to another person.
In fact, I think the IQ as a metric is fundamentally flawed. IIRC it rose from detecting learning disabilities, like if you are 10 years old and still don't know that if I write 1, 2, 3 and you don't guess the next number is 4, then there is likely something wrong and your IQ is below average. So, they took that test and wrote new, more advanced questions, like 2, 3, 5, what's next? Could be 7 (primes) or could be 8 (Fibonacci).
And the problem with that is that they really rely on what you are learning or not learning in school. The math example above might be passable but what about similes in literacy or what sides does this dodecahedron disassemble to. The former where somewhat taught in my school but not well and the latter... well, the children are supposed to experiment with shapes in their own time, apparently.
I do agree with you that it's some metric, but it just measures how well the material in the IQ test is taught in schools, it does not measure a person's intelligence, which is IMHO an innate quality.
I'm not defending or critiquing IQ tests. I am saying that defining individual or quirky talents as "intelligence" is not useful. By saying, "You're not as politically intelligent as Bill Clinton because he can remember the name of someone he met in a crowd three decades ago", all you're saying is, "You're not Bill Clinton".
Intelligence is a standard which is usually defined by your ability to make predictions about systems in various domains.
Now if you said, "You're not as politically intelligent as Bill Clinton because he was able to understand that by positioning himself these ways on these issues, he'd win over a lot of voters without appearing self-contradictory or disingenuous," that's a much more defensible example of intelligence in a non-traditional sense.
The idea of general intelligence arose out of correlation between test performances, and that there was a more "general" capability that people were tapping into to solve the plethora of different intelligence tests.
It isn't unqiue, Dale Carnegie Jr talked about that sort of easy recollection of names and gave explanations of how people who did recall names a decade later do it.
I think the way our memory works shapes a lot of what we become. I can remember numbers, algorithms, weird words and 3D shapes. But struggle with music (piano), names, what I did a week ago, and what your birthday is. That shapes what I become interested in, because I can't progress my abilities if I can't remember. E.g. I could hit keys at the piano, but I could never remember ("have a feel for") the music I was playing. And I lost interest.
Another example is chess. I always sucked at chess, because I can't remember opening books, prior games and other useful information. It both means I can't progress in games, and that I'm not fun in a social chess setting.
What I'm proposing, I guess, is that IQ tests are really judging what type of information you can remember/recall. E.g. extending number series: you can solve them either by remembering rules you can apply, or instances of them you've seen before. If you can remember instances, you'll be named a prodigy because you can do it much faster than learning rules. If you tend to remember instances, you'll probably want to continue finding examples to learn, as a dopamine hit.
I think when it comes to "super recognizers," their fusiform face area (FFA) in the temporal cortex of the brain may be better/differently connected. The opposite end of this spectrum is prosopagnosia, where you can't remember any face. There is also prosopometamorphosia, where you perceive faces to be wildly disproportionate and demon-like (google it). So these might not be necessarily correlated with IQ as much as they are related to specific neural pathways/circuitry. Same can be true for visualization of data. There are many autistic savants who can perform specifically remarkable feats, but this isn't really translated perfectly onto the IQ test. The IQ test is probably an imperfect measure of all types of intelligence, but for general intelligence, it provides some level of useful data, but I don't think you can say that data covers all different specific scenarios like those described, sometimes it certainly might. There are probably people who can score 150 on an IQ test, but are actually unable to do any productive creative activity meaningfully.
I've become convinced of the idea that everything on some level is a matter of practice, and that effortless practice comes from enjoyment.
Maybe your neighbor can visualize graphs because he practiced visualizing graphs a lot. And he did that because he found an odd joy in it that others didn't.
Bill Clinton knew he wanted to be in politics at a very early age by all accounts. And considering he didn't exactly come from a powerful political family with a clear path forward, it's likely he decided to practice remembering people and by the time anyone could comment on it, he'd had decades of practice. But honestly maybe he just had fun seeing what he could remember about the people he met and that turned it into a fun game for him that paid off big.
When I was young, I played a game where I would count the letters in the words people were saying to determine whether the total sentence was divisible by three. So for a time in my life I was unusually good at doing modulo division on people's conversation.
I've since lost that ability (not much use to it), but I wasn't some savant. My mother worked early shifts at the hospital and would drive me and my siblings to my grandmother's house, and the fog and dew would cling to the windshield regardless of whether it was raining so the windshield wipers would be on. And I would sync the voices on the AM radio to the three positions of the wipers, left, middle, right, left, middle, right. It was a game to pass the time because I couldn't fall back asleep after being woken up. By the time I could do it as a party trick, I'd had hundred of hours of practice.
I think you underestimate the role that hardware acceleration plays. Take the Clinton example — about 2% of the population has prosopagnosia (“face blindness”), where no amount of practice will improve recognition because of defects in the fusiform gyrus.
But! Just like some percentage don’t have the neurons to be great at recognizing people, there are “super recognizers” where the fusiform gyrus overperforms. fMRI studies have shown these people have more activity in this area.
Some skills, like your letter counting, probably do not have an evolved area of the brain and are purely cognitive, so perhaps more amenable to training. But even then there may be aspects that are hardware accelerated with some intrinsic genetic predisposition to be good / bad at.
> fMRI studies have shown these people have more activity in this area.
Neuroscience is paradoxically a poor indicator for how the brain works in response to stimuli. The reason is that what you do literally reshapes your brain and how you respond to things. For a common example a chess master and a chess amateur use different parts of then brain when analyzing positions. Here [1] is some random study on it - there's a bunch. It's well known and not controversial. But the thing is, that chess master was also once a chess amateur. And so practice literally changes how your brain responds to various stimuli to the point of complete shifting the area used for processing.
So showing that [people of this group] have [this distinct brain activity] in response to [whatever] doesn't really say anything at all, which it makes for endless easy mode studies for now. Hence people exposed to [video games, porn, gender dysmorphia, etc] all 'change the brain' and/or have 'different brains than normal.' Well duh, now so do you after reading this paragraph.
That said, I obviously would not dispute that people are inherently different, but I think the most obvious ways to try to demonstrate that are irreparably flawed.
[1] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-study-shows...
>But the thing is, that chess master was also once a chess amateur. And so practice literally changes how your brain responds to various stimuli to the point of complete shifting the area used for processing.
How do we know that people that go on to become chess masters don't just have better brains for chess? Have studies tracked people learning chess and shown different brain structures being used later in chess careers? Or looked at kids and then looked again at them as adults and seen the ones that became chess masters moved their chess processing?
I wouldnt be surprised at either outcome.
I can speak from personal experience there, for myself, or for students. I've worked with students from when they were complete beginners all the way to master, and they were still very much amateurs (with 'amateur brain') at the beginning. And in fact while you can kind of get some vague impressions, you can't really tell who's going to excel.
Famously, Mikhail Botvinnik (a world champion seen as the 'patriarch' of the Soviet Chess school) chided a young Anatoly Karpov who showed up to one of his chess schools, "The boy doesn't have a clue about Chess, and there's no future at all for him in this profession." Anatoly Karpov would go on to be one of the most dominant world champions of all time.
Even Magnus Carlsen - he is arguably the strongest player of all time and had one of the most meteoric rises to the top. Yet he was at one time rated 900. A year later, with world class coaching and living and breathing chess, he made extremely rapid progress (to about 1900) yet that's still very far from master class.
Sure, maybe. Some people might have some level of cognitive multiplier, but most of us aren't Ramanujan, most of us are some gradient of normal. Putting emphasis on practice and hard work and finding joy in getting good at something would pay greater dividends generally than trying to pinpoint a perfectly quantifiable intelligence.
I don’t disagree, with the caveat that setting expectations that anyone can be a [notably exceptional person] with practice and hard work is a recipe for creating unhappiness.
A face blind person will never have eidetic memory for someone they met 30 years ago, an average person will never be Ramanujan, and there are mediocre athletes who work harder than Jordan ever did. We excel when we align hard work to areas where we won the genetic lottery.
Famously, Michael Jordan was cut from his sophomore high school team.
I won't deny there are people who have disabilities or genetic advantages. But we overestimate the necessity of innate talent and severely underestimate the potential of practice, hard work and mentorship (and raw obsession if we're being honest) in most people, outliers notwithstanding.
Yeah, I think “outlier” is the key word there. Within the realm of typical physiology, typical genetics, typical nurture (say within two standard deviations for all of those), there’s huge opportunity for hard work and growth.
> I’ve often wondered how IQ correlates with the ability to visualize or recall audio of certain things.
Discussing these kinds of differing facets of intelligence with friends and co-workers over the years, my sense is that rather than one linear scale, intelligence is best modeled as being along a varying number of different dimensions. I picture these each as a vector shooting off in divergent directions and the scales on each can differ and be non-linear. Frequent examples include sensory types like visual, audible, spatial, tactile, etc but they can be far more granular and specific than people initially assume. One common area of difference is how the ability expresses itself, for example, in superior processing or superior recall. Sometimes these two correlate but not always. There are a variety of such independent variables like speed and depth which don't always correlate and can vary widely from dimension to dimension in the same person.
This degree of variety makes thinking about and assessing relative intelligence far more complex and interesting than typically assumed. For example, my wife and I are both good Scrabble players, however our mental approaches couldn't be more different. Her searches are faster but not as deep as mine. I'm slower but find more multi-word crossing combos based on obscure words. Who wins depends almost entirely on the turn time we set for the game.
Another area where we're highly divergent is spatial processing. I always have a general sense of my spatial orientation, whereas she has to stop and think about which way to turn even on familiar local streets. We jokingly say that she "has no Tab key" based on the key often used in RPG games to bring up the overhead map. However, when it comes to processing a complex visual field and identifying a different pattern among many similar patterns, I'm objectively terrible. She says I'm "Where's Waldo challenged." This is to the extent that she won't even ask me to pick up something at the store if she knows I don't know what it looks like and she can't tell me exactly which shelf it's on. I could spend five minutes trying to find an unfamiliar box on a packed 12-foot wide section of seven foot tall store shelving. When I'm buying items I've bought before in a store I've been to before, I'm the world's fastest shopper because I know exactly where each item is and my brain intuitively maps an optimized path to collect everything. And all this occurs with no conscious effort on my part. Yet, I'm super slow when in an unfamiliar store or trying to find items I haven't logged a location for.
Well stated. These abilities amplify the effectiveness of mental models we use to build useful systems i.e. they're force multipliers in discrete domains. People with these unique cognitive strengths become what we know as "principals." They can push beyond normal limitations in their areas.
Further, an organization that spots this dynamic and builds around it gains a real edge, assuming the company culture supports it.
what you are desribing is a mental state, sometimes called "flow" where everything is on top ie: zero latency it's fun and effortless, but dependent on a general feeling of wellbieng there is a dark cousin, that works in.a do or die situation, that can dredge up poorly understood information, and present a plausible action genius is best described as an idea that once put forward, everyone else can recognise and say "of course" ie: its implimentable and imediatly usefull and an iq test is fine as general indicator of mental agility, but will miss many exceptionaly intelligent people, for the simple reason, that they are "bored now" and are playing to loose and others that are distracted in one of the inumerable possible ways, to be distracted, revealing the fundamental flaw in "testing" is that the first "test" is to submit, and sit down and comply, and fill in the shit forms, and so reveals "pleasers" and "malcontents" as much as anything else
> For example, my neighbor in California - he had an ability to look at an equation and actually visualize the plot of it like a graphing calculator
This actually isn’t too hard for common functions if you know a few simple rules. Polynomials, quadratics, trig functions, exponentials, logarithmic functions, and rational functions are pretty easy to do this for.
IQ tests measure certain intellectual skills—solving certain visual problems, interpreting and synthesizing language, audio-visual processing, memory for nonsense—but not all intellectual skills. There are so many ways of being “intelligent” that it’s silly to pretend one number is meaningful as an overall universal measure.
Excellent points. I’d add that the idea of intelligence diversity extends beyond people. We have extremely biased definitions intelligence that are very conveniently aligned with human strengths.
when i was a child i was tested in this manner. the test was called the "woodcock johnson iv" (har)
i remember a big chunk of the test was repeating back increasingly long auditory digit strings in reverse and drawing increasingly more complex ensembles of basic shapes from memory.
sat and classic iq tests seem more achievement focused, where this thing seemed to be instead trying to measure properties of raw cognitive function like working memory size.
But apparently it's possible for anyone to learn mental math with very large numbers with practice, which suggests either the working memory can be extended, or at least specialized for numbers.
Yeah, there’s so much variance in abilities,
I struggle to remember faces, but I remember audio exactly - I have like “photographic memory” but for sound - and this includes conversations.
I can remember long conversations, exactly word-for-word of each participant, 10 years later. But if I meet someone on zoom, and then in real life, I really struggle to notice it’s the same person.
Aren’t our brains weird?!
You are likely highly intelligent give your strong recall!
In any field, what it even means to be good morphs as you go up in skill level. Non mathematicians know only about arithmetic so they often imagine that mathematicians must be really really good at arithmetic. But this isn't so. Likewise, non musicians think what must make a great musician is perfect pitch. But some of the greatest musicians in history didn’t have it while many mediocre ones do. Similarly, non chess players think GMs must be good at calculating zillions of moves in advance, but apparently they only calculate a small set of moves, which somehow are the right ones.
To take an example cited in the article, Einstein was so far up there that it’s nearly impossible for a non physicist to even understand what he was so good at — crude measures like high school grades or “IQ” barely scratch the surface of the skill that he was a genius at.
Now, perfect pitch does modestly correlate with musical ability, mathematicians are better than average at arithmetic, GMs do calculate more moves than the average shmo, and Einstein got much better than average grades (after all he was accepted at ETH). But that’s all, modest correlations.
There is such a thing as talent in music, mathematics, etc. but it isn’t something a psychologist standing outside these domains would ever be able to devise a test for.
What people typically refer to as an IQ test was not designed nor is it considered to be an accurate test of genius. It is not meant to mean anything if someone scores particularly well. The reason these tests are administered is to understand if there is perhaps a learning disability. If you score low overall, or low in a particular area that is then used as a diagnostic tool. For example, a normal score overall with a markedly low working memory score might point to a number of diagnoses.
Yes, scoring high is impressive, but is pretty meaningless in terms of outcomes beyond a point. Most IQ test scores are just made up. And there are plenty of self proclaimed genius IQ people who seem to be completely unremarkable beyond being a good test taker.
> The reason these tests are administered is to understand if there is perhaps a learning disability. If you score low overall, or low in a particular area that is then used as a diagnostic tool. For example, a normal score overall with a markedly low working memory score might point to a number of diagnoses.
That's how I discovered my learning disability. Sort of ironic given that I'm a voracious learner and have become quite proficient in a couple of fields. However I'm a relatively slow learner, sometimes have quite dumb moments, and struggle with tests or being put on the spot. Usually when I do grasp a topic it's at a deep intuitive level.
Still a psychologist gave me a proper IQ exam after I emailed him saying I felt something was off in my brain. Testing took half a day. When I went back for results my score was close to the average for college graduates. Yet the phycologist asked me when I was going to get a PhD.
That confused me as my core didn't seem impressive. Then he said I probably had ADHD. Like many 80's kids I'd always sorta thought ADHD was mostly made up. Well he explained the results to me, in particular my low working memory compared to the rest of my scores on other subtests. My IQ dropped 40-50 points on some particular subscores which correlates very highly with ADHD.
By the end of that meeting I'd begun to realize, that it made a lot of sense with my struggles over the years. So yes, IQ tests are very helpful for diagnosis. I later got an official diagnosis at university.
I'm glad the psychologist offered me that IQ test. I hope others consider IQ testing if you're "smart but stuck".
It's unfortunate you didn't understand your cognitive differences early on. I was lucky in that I was tested in third grade and identified as ADD. This was pretty rare in the early 1970s. I was unlucky in that I was immediately separated, had to ride a literal "short bus" to another elementary school where I went to a special classroom off on its own in a temporary building that was helpfully labeled on the door "Educationally Handicapped". Good that there was a smaller class size and a teacher with some special training but bad that I was socially ostracized and, having been so clearly labeled by the system, ended up tacitly internally labeling myself too.
But I was different than my classmates in the special classroom. I could tell and they could tell too. I couldn't pay attention but I could figure things out on my own and I didn't have the behavioral problems they did. What saved me was a state-mandated standardized test that every student (even the handicapped ones) had to take in eighth grade. It was the first time since being separated in third grade that I'd taken an objective standardized test. I remember a few weeks after the test, the principal came to the special classroom, got me and took me back to his office where he had me take the test again. The next day he came back and took from the educationally handicapped classroom to the special classroom for "mentally gifted minors". It was great because I excelled in some subjects. But it sucked because in a few subjects I wasn't even close to cutting it.
That was when it slowly started dawning on me that I didn't fit any of the typical models for assessing intelligence. I had some genuine superpowers but I also had some serious deficits in other areas. And this has remained true throughout my entire life and career. I had periods of abject failure and I also had periods where I reached the absolute pinnacles of career, professional and financial success. Over time I learned the key difference between the two was when I took active steps to mitigate my many deficits and maximize the returns from superpower. Denial definitely didn't work. Sometimes this looked weird from the outside, like when I quietly hired a friend from the finance group to moonlight and help me complete my departmental budget forecasts. I was the only VP at the global F500 tech company who couldn't do my own budget homework yet I was making >$1M/yr. I once told the CEO and he said he didn't care what help I needed as long as I kept delivering the stellar results. I was also the only senior exec with no college degree. This used to bother me. For a while it was an ego issue. Other times I just thought it was a terribly embarrassing, dark secret about me. Then I finally broke through and accepted that I'm just different. If I work it right, my downsides from my extreme deficits average out against the benefits of my superpowers. The net result is significantly on the positive side.
The moral of the story: It sucks that in third grade I was labelled, segregated and made to feel like a stupid loser, but the silver-lining was that by being mistreated to an almost comical extent, I simply accepted that I was forever going to be different. I'd have to work harder than others, I'd need to find and learn special tools to help me and, as I aged, I'd need to continually work on finding a combo of meds that kept my worst deficits manageable with sufficient effort. And, the best part is, after a lot of failures and struggle figuring out patterns and tools that worked, this odd path ultimately resulted in a happy ending as I was able to retire early at the top of my chosen field.
IQ scores in the "sweet spot" (80-120) correlate quite well with academic achievement and income.
IQ measures how good you are at IQ tests. I'm brilliant at those tests, I consistently score 5+ SD above 100.
I'm also an idiot, and pretty much an asshole. IQ itself puts no beans on the table, and has little to no relationship to how good a human being you are.
> I'm brilliant at those tests, I consistently score 5+ SD above 100.
Are those professional tests supervised by a psychologist? Or rather "IQ tests" on websites that vastly inflate results to get you to share the results on social media? Both the "consistently" and the "5+ SD" (equivalent to an IQ of 175) make me think it's the latter.
I'm talking about sit down in a room with a psychologist for hours, lots of questions, coloured blocks, tricky pictures, with stop watches etc. Reciting lists of numbers backwards and forwards, the _real_ tests, not pop quizes.
My apologies, I stand corrected.
How are you managing to convince psychologists to repeatedly test you?
I used to work at a university. There were people there who found me interesting. No accounting for taste with some people.
I'd imagine that somebody with scores consistently that high would be of interest to lots of researchers.
It's not hard, for instance you can pay them. If it's a PhD student, free pizza may be enough.
How many of these have you taken, and why?
Scores that high mean very little, because a) there are so few people who might qualify for such high scores that they can't be assessed reliably and b) the people who wrote the tests weren't at that level and thus could not write questions capable of distinguishing them from the rest. Anything above about 3 SD (score of 145) is just noise.
High IQ is the ability to think faster, not better. And what you are going to do with that ability is determined by all other factors of who you are and what environment you are in.
> I consistently score 5+ SD above 100
You consistently score 175+ on IQ tests?
Consistently scoring 175 on tests that have a maximum of 140 is no small feat. If that is not a sign of superior intelligence, I don't know what is.
Yes. IQ tests are easy. Life, now that's a real challenge.
Do you have any other family members with very high IQs?
Yes, there is a pattern. Most of my relatives are very quick, those tested all come out 120+. Two of my sons have absurd IQs like me. My second is about my level (170+), and my youngest is some kind of megamind mutant. His brain scares me. He's very very clever.
What was your experience like in school and university? Have you come across people who you thought were at a similar level intelectually as you?
No mention of standard deviation? Just by the fact the IQ is your place on a normal curve, with a 15 point standard deviation, there are at least 100K+ people in the world with an IQ of 160.
The smartest 0.0032% of the population.
The point of the article was that above around 120 or so (and also at the low tail), the tests become very unreliable (due to a chicken-and-egg problem of finding people to calibrate the tests on). So an IQ score of 160 is highly suspect, and subject to even 2-digit variance.
> a chicken-and-egg problem of finding people to calibrate the tests on
Aren't we supposed to calibrate the tests on (random selection of) the entire population?
In theory yes, but when the number of people at the tail ends of intelligence are vanishingly small, how does one check that the questions in the test can actually measure their intelligence accurately?
Does intelligence follow the standard distribution?
> Does intelligence follow the standard distribution?
Intelligence may or may not. IQ, by definition, does.
IQ as an intelligence rank does indeed follow the standard distribution, but in practice IQ is estimated by tests. I believe the GP wanted to ask about a distribution of such "estimated" IQs.
Your score on an IQ test is reflective of your percentile amongst all IQ test takers. That is, if 50% of takers did better than you and 50% did worse than you, then you score a 100 (regardless of the actual number of questions you got right or wrong).
So, yes, IQ scores always necessarily follow a normal distribution - because that's how the scores are determined in the first place.
If that's true my IQ score is necessarily updated every time other takers take the test, because it necessarily depends on the current distribution right now. In reality such update happens very rarely and most IQ tests would give you a confidence interval instead, which is based on the distribution constructed via the past validations. There is no guarantee that those scores are indeed normal.
the parameters of the test scoring formulas are _by construction_ such that the IQ scores we find in the wild indeed follow the standard distribution. the scores. not the ticked boxes in the test sheets. but the "graded" evaluation.
If you actually look at common IQ tests like WAIS, you will find that's not true because they directly give the score (and confidence interval) and not the rank [1]. Their weights are indeed scaled in order to approximate the true distribution in advance, but individual tests may well have a different distribution.
[1] Compare with standardized tests with a similar principle, where your scaled scores are never available immediately. They are available only after collecting all raw scores to construct the reference distribution. No IQ tests I'm aware work like that.
I'm not sure what you mean to my understanding all tests are calibrated regularly every few years. and from that calibration they get the weights.
Are you saying you're sceptical about the calibration process?
Rather that it cannot be said simply "by construction" when the calibration only happens every few years. And I'm very sure that the calibration is done by sampling.
So IQ can be negative? (Normal distribution has non zero probability mass for all real numbers)
> IQ can be negative?
Theoretically, yes. We chose 100 as a midpoint for convenience. (Practically, there is a lower bound beyond which we cannot meaningfully interpret test results.)
Average intelligence does :)
I am pretty sure that the central limit theorem applies to a sample size as big as all living humans.
That isn't at all what the central limit theorem says. The whole point is it holds independent of the actual shape of distribution of the population. You could use the same argument to say social security numbers are normally distributed.
One way to explain things like height being normally distributed is that there are a bunch of independent factors which contribute, and the central limit theorem applied to those factors would then suggest the observed variable looking normal-ish.
IQ does, by definition.
I've joined Mensa a few months ago and I've never met so many idiots in my entire life. It's a small percentage of the members overall but they take over the online communities compulsively and make the environment miserable. Ant they all have the same political profile (won't say which one).
Mensa is sadly a combination of positive and negative selection. Positive: by IQ. Negative: by having nothing more important to do than become a Mensa member.
If instead you took random people on the street and gave them IQ tests, and invited those who passed the IQ 130 bar to a meetup, it would be much more interesting than a typical Mensa meetup.
I joined about 15 years ago and never interacted with any Mensa member since then.
Being top 1 in 50 on thinking speed is a very lax filter.
When I first started using OTPs from Google Authenticator I found it difficult to remember random 6 digit numbers in one glance. Today after doing it almost daily for years and years I find it easy. Almost anything can be improved with training, including IQ test tasks, contrary to what test makers say. But I don't believe that such training improves general intelligence.
I read that studying for an IQ test generally causes a gain of about 6 points at most. (Which is quite a bit.)
I still find it hard to remember 8 digit OTPs, and work around that by repeatedly "singing" them in my mind while I type them. I can easily repeat those 8 meaningless words in my mind, and then decipher only the next digit I need to type.
When I was a teen I took a IQ test that was supposed to measure up to 160. It had quite a few questions but due to the scaling, just getting one question correct made it declare you had like 120 IQ or so.
Turned out I did indeed get one of the questions right, a fairly straight forward math question. Decided the test was probably bogus, just seemed dumb to conclude IQ based on a single correct answer.
Growing up some more I realized intelligence is complicated and multifaceted.
That I can solve some puzzles and usually think things through doesn't preclude me from being dumb as a brick in other situations.
When I did a psychologist-administered IQ test it took like 3 hours and resulted in four scores on different metrics. For example I had a pretty average 103 IQ on language, but about 120 IQ on logical thinking. In the end you get a total score from the average of the subcategories.
All IQ tests are pretty incomplete and a bit stupid, but some are less stupid than others
Most IQ tests are fake, especially all online tests. You often get IQ 120 just by answering randomly.
Yeah that was exactly what I realized after reading the test. Was a good experience to have early on.
on an old computer I got an IQ score of 210 just by memorizing all the results still felt pretty good
That isn't an IQ test. You can't do them on computers. They are assessed in person by professionals. You can't practice because the test aren't publicly available.
That does not preclude a lot of them to claim they're IQ tests...
As an aside — intelligence is not the same thing as accomplishment. A lot of people do well in school (and do well on IQ tests) and do not achieve anything of note. The people we remember are those who achieve great things, not those who do well on puzzle-solving tests. Those aren't the same thing, and this is probably why Stephen Hawking said that caring about IQ is for losers.
Hawking was undoubtedly a smart guy, but that fact alone did not make his career. He did a lot of hard work in a field he was passionate about. Why would you tell Stephen Hawking how good you are at solving puzzles — why would he care about that? I'm sure he would have found news of some finding relevant to his research interests much more compelling.
Now, are IQ-type tests useful? Yes. They are quite good to administer in school to gauge people's reasoning abilities — to a certain point. The point of the tests was never to rank the smartest people, and to think about these edge cases — the ones tests are worst at measuring — is pointless. There are better things to concern yourself with; life is not an IQ leaderboard.
The first ever intelligence test (Binet-Simon) was designed partly in order to identify children who have intellectual disability and give a better treatment for them. The test itself was crude, but I believe that should be the only meaningful use of IQ tests because overly low or high IQ does predict certain kinds of complications. Otherwise they are easy to game, they only measure a particular slice of human intelligence, and their error bar is large enough that even a unit difference in SD can be not meaningful [1]. IQ is just a meaningless number that whoever have a higher one tends to have unjustified superiority over others.
[1] Depends on the particular test of course, but I can safely guess that +2 SD and +2.5 SD are not statistically distinguished by most tests.
Caring too much about IQ is not exempt from Goodhart's law.
I will define "IQ" as what your score will be on a ideal IQ test (rather than an actual IQ test, although then you will have to define how the "ideal IQ test" is working, which is presumably like an actual IQ test if made and administered in the ideal way, however that might be). It is correlated with intelligence (which cannot be measured by a single number), but is not the same thing as intelligence. (I think it also not the same thing as genius, although that is also correlated with high intelligence, since intelligence is one of the things to be genius but is not the only part of it.)
Not only is IQ a poor measure that's perhaps best at capturing near average performance, "intelligence" is an attribute that's not readily ranked in a linear manner as height can be.
> "intelligence" is an attribute that's not readily ranked in a linear manner as height can be
IQ isn't a linear scale [1][2]. (It is ordinal.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superposition_principle
Who said that it was?
> Who said that it was?
You said "'intelligence' is an attribute that's not readily ranked in a linear manner" while complaining about IQ. IQ doesn't rank intelligence linearly.
I'll assume you understand the difference between a 1D line, a 2D plane, a 3D space and grasp basic english.
What is your issue here?
> I'll assume you understand the difference between a 1D line, a 2D plane
IQ isn't linear because it is not superposable. A 100 IQ person isn't twice as clever, within the definition of cleverness IQ measures, as someone with a 50 IQ. (An 8' man is twice as tall as a 4' child.) If you need to force it into a geometric analogy, the distribution IQ rests on cannot be described by a line.
> IQ isn't linear because it is not superposable. A 100 IQ person isn't twice as clever, within the definition of cleverness IQ measures, as someone with a 50 IQ.
You appear to be thinking of a uniform distribution as compared to a normal distribution.
Nominally both height and IQ approximate a normal distribution (sans the infinite tails, leaving aside discrete ordinal bucketing).
"Linear" (see the O.E.D. for example) is a word with many meanings, mostly pertaining to lines and things resembling a line.
You can line up people by height or by IQ score, you cannot line up people by "intelligence", it's a partial order at best.
> the distribution IQ rests on cannot be described by a line.
You're the only one of us that connected the scalar IQ distribution to a line .. I've been aware of the central limit theorem for 45+ years now.
The geometric analogy is that mapping people by intelligence to a line is a poor fit, to a plane or higher space would make more sense.
As evidenced by this exchange.
You probably meant that there doesn't exist a total order for comparing intelligence and/or that it isn't a scalar quantity like height, but "linear" didn't convey that meaning.
Intelligence clearly isn't a scalar quantity like height, the implication is that a faux scalar quantity like IQ or other ordinal scale doesn't well describe intelligence.
I agree, I think any test that gets you a meaningfully different result if you take it twice or are coached beforehand isn't measuring something intrinsic or meaningful, I'm just trying to help bridge a miscommunication.
Appreciated.
Ranking people by "intelligence" is compounded by it being multifactored, language skills and numerical skills can differ independently, spatial skills are a third vector unaligned with either.
generally intelligent people tend to perform well on intelligence tests
people who perform well on intelligence tests may not present as generally intelligent
can we put the "your" back in the title? it's currently unfairly ungrammatical.
I’m curious what could be the intent behind that rewrite rule.
In all honesty I just thought I was getting stupider over time. Glad to hear I'm just bouncing around the margin of error.
One thing I have found funny is that people want to have a high IQ after they've gotten wherever they've gotten (often they are failures) but it actually highlights something else. Conditional on one getting somewhere, a high IQ actually means they suck at life. They were given a racecar and all they did is drive into a ditch.
On the other hand, with my 100 IQ I have had a successful time running engineering in ad-tech and HFT. Where does that put me? I'm the driver of a VW Polo that beats other drivers in F1 cars. Whatever gifts nature has given others in intelligence, I am handily superior in whatever else matters. Fascinating.
This is pretty much the exact way I think about it. IQ tests roughly measure the output of the engine but don't say anything about the driver. Metacognition and executive function for instance are cognitive domains which IQ tests don't really capture but are nevertheless essential for many real world cognitive activities.
IQ is just the ability to think faster. If you have incentive and time to think longer there's really very little benefit to having high IQ.
Using your car analogy. It doesn't really matter how fast is the car you drive it you get to where you wanted to get to because you weren't distracted or bored along the way. Pretty much any car can do that.
I think this is relevant to ideas about AI explosions.
There's a standard argument that's something like "once the machine reach 150 IQ, we've reached AGI and humans are done". Not that the AI isn't making leaps but this much too simplistic. Human capacities are much more than what's measured on an IQ test. Just as starter for considering , look at Moravec's paradox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
> Human capacities are much more than what's measured on an IQ test.
Sure but IQ test result correlates with many of them.
Even something as strange as athletic performance:
https://www.scitepress.org/Papers/2017/70672/70672.pdf
Some of the comments here remind me of Malcolm Galdwell's spaghetti sauce talk or similar about how the air force discovered you can't average pilot characteristics to develop a cockpit.
Both are examples where you can't use a single metric for something that varies on multiple independent axes. That's what IQ is trying to do. It doesn't work. You can develop different IQ systems for IQs on different axes (logic, memory, visual acuity, etc. etc. etc.) but trying to have a single number that represents all of them will never work.
"People who boast about their IQ are losers." I actually LOL'd at that but then I generally have a dislike of boastful people. and I could imagine that the type of person that would boast about IQ would probably dismiss Hawking as somehow not "really" intelligent.
IQ numbers for some current well known figures are also made up. I have found an inverse correlation between people who keep repeating that they are very smart and their high IQ number and their actual intelligence.
Basically, whatever IQ measures, its only meaningful at the extremes.
I think the article misses another crucial point: the fact that IQ numbers are frequently redefined to have the average remain at 100.
This means that if you say that Einstein had an IQ of 160, he actually would have had an IQ of 250+ back in his days. Voltaire ? Probably in the thousands.
This highlights how ridiculous those claims are, given how nobody tests at 250, 400, 1,000 and above nowadays.
look dear, the hoi polloi are seething again
> look dear, the hoi polloi are seething again
"hoi" means "the" in greek. So, if you want to set yourself off from hoi polloi, don't include the "the"
If you really want to be pedantic, "from hoi polloi" is incorrect, because it does not use the correct Greek declension to go with a "from" preposition.
Except that's not how we do it when borrowing phrases from other languages as glorified nouns. We say "The [thing]", thus "the hoi polloi".
The normal thing to do in that case is to ignore the parts that are just artifacts of the other language, so you'd say "the polloi". (Or, really, you'd say "the many"; it's not an esoteric concept.)
If you read older translations of mythology, you'll see that inflectional endings for foreign nouns are just left off, so you have e.g. Jormungand instead of Jormungandr and Thor instead of Thorr. (It's true for history too, where we prefer Virgil to Vergilius and Ovid to Ovidius.) Recently there's been some kind of fetish for including foreign artifacts in borrowed words, even when those words are already well established without them.
I kind of get the sense that this kind of thing is driven by people who think that learning a foreign alphabet is the same thing as learning a foreign language.
"The hoi polloi" is a fixed phrase in English. Its etymology is irrelevant. We don't pronounce it "properly" either. Thay is because it isn't Greek! It is English. It has Greek origins but it was long ago borrowed into English and now follows English rules. ~Everyone knows "hoi" means "the" in Greek. But the phrase in English is "the hoi polloi". It is never found except as "the hoi polloi". If you said "Hoi polloi are upset" in real life people would look at you funny. There are loads of other examples of this happening. For example there are various verbs and adjectives from Latin that have been borrowed as nouns into English. If you go "uhm actually that is a verb in Latin actually" you are annoying and wrong. Language evolves.
But you wrote it in English. Perhaps if you were taught in a grammar school, you would write it by hand something akin to: οἱ πολλοί
For some UK examples of usage listen to: https://youglish.com/pronounce/Hoi_polloi/english/uk
Showing off your education is oftentimes used to signal high status. That often fails. You can of course argue with the OED:
Disclaimer: I'm one of the οἱ ὀλίγοι from the colonies, so the only thing I was learnt is baaaaaaa.Fellow Kiwi? The tone of your comment makes it sound to me like you disagree with me but I agree with everything you are saying.
I am usually a traditionalist but on this one I think the tradition to follow is the English one. I prefer the traditional English pronunciation of Latin (so "caveat" is "kay-vee-it"). Hell, I would prefer if we still nativised foreign loanwords and names: Saint Peter wasn't called "Peter" obviously, but I don't speak Greek or Aramaic or whatever. Peking isn't what the Chinese call it but neither is "Bayzhing" which is how English people pronounce Beijing, and so on. Plus now "Peking duck" doesn't make any sense...
(grumble)
From Christchurch. I was attempting to take the mick out of myself actually. I'm so humble.
Opinions on language are often subconscious status signaling. And too often people incorrect other people with the pretentions of displaying intelligence but actually displaying ignorance (oooooo judgy!). I fight the tendency within myself.
We end up with a half-assed attempt to be cultured for subconscious reasons, and it is often unappreciated by others.
I have become a weird rotator.
> Peking
My examples are Cristóbal Colón (Christophorus Columbus) and Pirata Drake (I didn't understand who it was when I first heard it). I've wondered how English names get mashed in Asian languages (especially Mandarin).
Did you notice the Wikipedia entry:
That calls to my love of the antipodes and I fear I'm going to rewire my brain to discorrect myself.> I've wondered how English names get mashed in Asian languages (especially Mandarin).
詹妮弗·安妮斯顿 zhān nī fú ān nī sī dùn [Jennifer Aniston]
[for approximations that make sense in English: zhan like "John"; ni like "knee"; fu like "foo", an like "on", si like "sick" without the K at the end of the syllable, dun like... it begins with "dw", the vowel is as in "book", then it ends with N. If pinyin were more regular, dun would be spelled "dwen".]
圣文森特和格林纳丁斯 shèng wén sēn tè hé gé lín nà dīng sī [Saint Vincent and the Grenadines]
[圣 shèng and 和 hé are translations, not sound equivalents, of the English words "saint" and "and".
The vowel "e" in the first six syllables is best approximated by the vowel of the English word "book". As before, the vowel written "i" in "lin" and "ding" is the English FLEECE vowel, and the vowel of "si" is different, more like KIT.
The consonants should be intuitive to you, except that the W in "wen" might sound more like a W or like a V depending on the whims of the speaker.]
> I prefer the traditional English pronunciation of Latin (so "caveat" is "kay-vee-it").
...That's not an example of the traditional English pronunciation of Latin. The traditional English pronunciation of Latin caveat would have /kæ/ (TRAP vowel) in the first syllable, not /keɪ/ (FACE vowel).
> when a vowel is followed by a single consonant (or by a cluster of p, t, c/k plus l, r) and then another vowel [...]
> [such a vowel bearing stress in any syllable other than the penultima] is closed and the vowel is short [unless the vowel is U].
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_English_pronunciat... )
/'ka.ʋɛ.at/ -> /'kæv.i.ət/
hoi polloi was borrowed into english as a way not only of saying "the masses", but of signalling one's own status above the masses. Another way of signalling such status is to show off one's deeper familiearity with obscure details of foreign languages.
or to put it another way, only hoi polloi say "the hoi polloi"; on this same topic linguists are generally incoherent, so intent are they to repeat yet again "descriptivism doncha know"
> "The hoi polloi" is a fixed phrase in English.
I'm aware of that, but it is not typical of borrowed terms. You can't explain the oddity of the phrase by appealing to the idea that that's how foreign terms are borrowed into English, because it isn't.
> ~Everyone knows "hoi" means "the" in Greek.
Try running a poll.