Do you believe in I.Q tests (and I.Q score in general)? - sleep deprived and overcaffeinated man has thonk over thonk points

What's your stance on it?

  • It does an almost perfect job at reflecting individual problem solving skills and/or intelligence.

  • Neutral/Other.

  • No.

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I think these kinds of questions (whether IQ is "real intelligence," etc.) are unnecessary and besides the point. They're mostly spread by politicized individuals, not psychological experts.

IQ tests predict outcomes on standardized tests, educational attainment, and a variety of other life outcomes very well. That's why they're used in psychology, and they have real utility for things like determining what children should be designated mentally retarded and put in special education classes, for example. Saying that IQ is tRuE iNtElLiGeNcE doesn't help.
 
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Getting tard comed said:
Yes, I.Q as a measurement is the best approximation of intelligence we have but people apply way to much importance to it. Theres also a huge misunderstanding that people with high IQs are always going to be succesful when we already know people have trouble communicating with others when a 20point IQ gap exists. It's why, generally speaking, the most succesful people in most fields tend to measure around the 115-130 IQ range due to them being able to communicate with the average which is around 100.

It matters more so on a group scale than individually. That being said a person who has a 100 IQ is probably going to have a harder time being a lawyer than a person with a 125 IQ. Doesn't mean person A can't be succesful in life though.

Recently Nassim Talib has made a case against I.Q. that while compelling, I haven't personally looked into all of the details of his claim. My opinion may change after I do.
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There are several responses with elaborate citations tearing Taleb's arguments to shreds. Here's a few:


And several posts by James Thompson, who has many publications in intelligence research:
 
Some truly gifted people can't be assed to put it to use, so what is worse: being happy because you're too stupid to know any better, or being intelligent and lazy? Neither will ever contribute to the world, but one is shielded from that fact by their idiocy.
 
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kūhaku said:
Being 150 IQ because you have a high score in one skill vs a high score in another is a big difference especially in the practicality of said skill. It works as a general guideline but doesn’t tell you much else.
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I think you're misconceiving what causes high IQ scores.

IQ scores are arrived at from a battery of tests that will look at different types of reasoning. These won't all correlate perfectly, but they do overwhelmingly tend to correlate. What researchers have found is that for any kind of test of mental ability, there is a common factor - which has been called 'g' for 'general intelligence'. How much it contributes to the variance between individuals for any particular test score will differ. For some intellectual tasks (usually those which are relatively simple), about 20% of the variance will be caused by differences in g. For others, it can be over 80%.

Now, there are other mental aptitudes that contribute to IQ scores which will explain some of the difference between individuals. Some of these other mental faculties may affect scores over not just one type of mental task but several. But none appear in anywhere near as many task types as g. Consequently, it would be incredibly unusual for a difference of say 20 IQ points or more to be because one individual has special domain-specific abilities, but isn't generally more intelligent than another.

I know what you're getting at - 'clever sillies'. People with high IQs who lack what might be called 'common sense'. I'll write something more about that later - there are studies on this, cliffnotes for now: there are people who score well on IQ tests but may be deficient in some judgment aspects one would think devolve from intelligence, but they're rather uncommon. In general a higher IQ does go with better practical judgment.

(Lest anyone think I believe IQ is determinative of someone's worth or whatever, I don't, and there are other factors contributing to many outcomes which can lead to lower IQ people outperforming a higher IQ person on any given measure. The IQ difference just makes that the less probable outcome, all else being equal.)
 
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Honestly anyone can repeat stuff they have retained. That's all IQ test are. Repeat what you know. You can get a few bonus points by using context clues. You want to see an actual intellectual person. Make them apply it.


Give a man a fish he eats for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he'll never go hungry.


I bet a large % of people who preach an ideological point of view can't even farm or hunt.
 
Yes, I think that IQ is a thing and that the test can be legit.
However it should be done by professionals not some dumb Facebook tier test.
 
IQ is the single most powerful predictor of all sort of life outcomes that any of the social sciences has. In many cases the replicability/statistical validity of IQ is higher than some research done in "hard" sciences.
That being said, it is just a proxy to "g" and as such there will be variance within the same IQ score; on an individual level your range matters more than your score, but on a macro level it is an extremely useful statistic.
 
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Foghot said:
A lot of pepole like to dunk on dudes with shit I.Q scores, but what truly are your thoughts?

From what i'm observing, I personally believe modern I.Q tests haven't fallen into obsolesence because of two major things:

1) An overwhelming majority in the neuroscientific and psychological fields tend to over-rely on it without really bothering to at least develop it further or consider other ideas more seriously, leading to entire generations worth of research papers and education techniques being themselves closely intertwined with this concept.

2) Mongoloids of all avenues put too much stock on it, therefore creating more demand for I.Q testing, not unlike fortune telling in a lot of ways.

None of it is helped by the fact that it is also very easy to cheat on these tests, even on printed ones, since most test sheets will resemble each other with minor variations sprinkled here and there.* The only reason that I.Q is still considered relevant I have found so far is that the majority of times (say, about 55% of the time) pepole find it accurate in it's context and/or selectively start considering it irrelevant the moment it doesn't suit them even though it is in fact linked to their situation.

*: Some would say cheating in this situation would be a sign of higher intelligence, and this isn't completely unlikely, but regardless of how smart you are, anyone can learn by heart how to deal with raw logic tests, it will just take a bit longer.
It's most likely whoever did that never understood the ideas and logic behind the questions.
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They are good at spotting retards, too low of a score is a good indicative of someone who is probably going to have a shit life and perform poorly on everything but doesn't seem to be such a strong predictor when talking about normal or high scores.

Seems like if you are at least on the normal to good side your chances can be more varied and a larger array of other factors than iq come into play. So high iq is not always a clear determination of level of success and i feel there are a lot of losers who got a high iq tests and are insufferable about le "dumber" people making more money, getting laid more often and being more happy than them.
 
In a way it can be accurate to measure intelligence (but not completely), but personally it's just a dick-measuring contest at this point.

Besides hypothetically if someone takes the IQ test multiple times and begins to know the patterns of how these IQ questions work especially with how these IQ questions usually consist of objective questions, he'd just get a pretty high score at the end, but it won't improve his intelligence, it'd just improve his performance at IQ tests.
 
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It's not a perfect system, but currently, it's the best system available. The main detractors against it are people who don't like it because it shows what any empirical system meant to measure intelligence would (e.g. countries that haven't left the stone age have populations with a lower average intelligence than countries currently exploring space).
 
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I've worked with severely retarded indivudals where iq score was helpful in getting them services. I'm talking sub 30 uneducable iqs. It also is helpful in pinpointing what aspects of education can work for an individaul due to sub tests. You can see if they score different on abstract, concrete, langauge, math, etc.
 
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IQ knowledge is one of the two a battering rams to the ideas that immigration is a solution to low birth rates.

Immigration explains why IQ is decreasing. Also why democracy is breaking down.

The other battering ram being Putnam's as well as 40+ other studies that show breakdown of community trust as they become more multicultural (really: multiethnic).

IQ has to be attacked and dismantled and it mostly has been. That's why all this unscientific "emotional intelligence" and gardner's multiple intelligences. That's why people bring up things like:

The Last Stand said:
Some people would be considered "intelligent" but have terrible personalities.

There's more to talent than just book smarts.
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It's a cope that intelligence is not only thing that matters. And it isn't. But it is probably one of the most important things in assessing potential. It's not even discussing whether IQ has a relation to intelligence.

There's more to intelligence than book smarts.
 
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believe all women said:
I think these kinds of questions (whether IQ is "real intelligence," etc.) are unnecessary and besides the point. They're mostly spread by politicized individuals, not psychological experts.

IQ tests predict outcomes on standardized tests, educational attainment, and a variety of other life outcomes very well. That's why they're used in psychology, and they have real utility for things like determining what children should be designated mentally retarded and put in special education classes, for example. Saying that IQ is tRuE iNtElLiGeNcE doesn't help.
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This is correct and I wish more people understood this. The IQ Test is an aptitude test. The original model was created by a man named Alfred Binet to test for disabilities in schoolchildren of similar backgrounds. It tested for things like memory, attention, speed, etc. and was never intended to be a true measure of intelligence. It also was used to assign a “mental age” to children, something that’s important to know if a person is severely mentally disabled. His model was later standardized and given the misleading term “Intelligence Quotient.” Also, getting tests like these can be expensive and they’re often a waste of money if you don’t have a good reason to believe that you’re disabled or unjustly struggling in some aspect of education.

In other words, getting a good IQ score doesn’t mean you’re smart as much as it means you’re not retarded.

https://www.verywellmind.com/history-of-intelligence-testing-2795581 (Only good source I could find that wasn’t behind a paywall, sorry.)
 
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Lil' Misogynist said:
This is correct and I wish more people understood this. The IQ Test is an aptitude test. The original model was created by a man named Alfred Binet to test for disabilities in schoolchildren of similar backgrounds. It tested for things like memory, attention, speed, etc. and was never intended to be a true measure of intelligence. It also was used to assign a “mental age” to children, something that’s important to know if a person is severely mentally disabled. His model was later standardized and given the misleading term “Intelligence Quotient.” Also, getting tests like these can be expensive and they’re often a waste of money if you don’t have a good reason to believe that you’re disabled or unjustly struggling in some aspect of education.

In other words, getting a good IQ score doesn’t mean you’re smart as much as it means you’re not retarded.

https://www.verywellmind.com/history-of-intelligence-testing-2795581 (Only good source I could find that wasn’t behind a paywall, sorry.)
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See here we have the lie. The mirage.

Binet was neither the first or most important person in development of IQ tests. It has some relevance in the context of the US as it became the most popular type of IQ test in the US, but only up to the 60s, when it was overtaken by Wechsler. It was continually revised and nowadays Stanford Binet test incorporates many of the elements of the Wechsler tests.

They are intended to measure g.

For whatever their flaws and imperfect accuracy, your conclusion is wrong and a common myth.
 
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I think everyone's brought up all the best points so far (g factor > IQ, work vs talent, it's a test of incompetence more than intellect, etc), but here are a few more nitpicks I have with it:

If you want to measure strength, it's fairly easy to get someone's 1RM bench and gauge how strong they are. If you want to measure dexterity, we have those pegboard tests. These have a consistent, unchanging score to compare others to. While it's technically accurate to say someone is "strong" because they can lift 60 lbs if the rest of the population could only lift 30, they're still not strong enough for most tasks. Same with someone who has Parkinson's disease being "dexterous" because everyone else got their fingers cut off. If I'm not mistaken, this is how IQ is measured, where 100 is the mean, and will change as the population loses or gains intelligence. It would be much more helpful to have a constant score of intelligence, so that time does not expire the results of previous generations of test takers.

My second and biggest issue with IQ tests is this: If we have accurate, fine-tuned tests you can take from a psychologist, why do we still have these awful ones online? I can get anywhere between 100 and 165 IQ depending on where I take my test. I don't think it's a standard deviation problem (consistent scores with the same testing site), but it may be their sampling pool (only 150 people took one test vs 40,000 on another) which can be fixed by combining results into a large database. If that's not the problem, I'm more worried that these online tests are actually testing different things, and are all just put under the blanket "IQ" label. either way, I'm not trusting any of these scores until I get a .gov site with easy to access statistics on test takers. Anonymously, of course.
 
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GhostNotes said:
My second and biggest issue with IQ tests is this: If we have accurate, fine-tuned tests you can take from a psychologist, why do we still have these awful ones online? I can get anywhere between 100 and 165 IQ depending on where I take my test. I don't think it's a standard deviation problem (consistent scores with the same testing site), but it may be their sampling pool (only 150 people took one test vs 40,000 on another) which can be fixed by combining results into a large database. If that's not the problem, I'm more worried that these online tests are actually testing different things, and are all just put under the blanket "IQ" label. either way, I'm not trusting any of these scores until I get a .gov site with easy to access statistics on test takers. Anonymously, of course.
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The tests online aren't really IQ tests at all. Those are not the questions you get on an actual IQ test and due to rules set on testers you won't find real ones posted anywhere really.
 
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