105 points | by paulpauper19 hours ago
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!"
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.
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 ;)
That is no contradiction.
That being said I hope you can overcome the issues that make your life a struggle.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 (??????).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Further, an organization that spots this dynamic and builds around it gains a real edge, assuming the company culture supports it.
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.
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.
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?!
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.
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.
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.
You consistently score 175+ on IQ tests?
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).
The smartest 0.0032% of the population.
Aren't we supposed to calibrate the tests on (random selection of) the entire population?
Intelligence may or may not. IQ, by definition, does.
So, yes, IQ scores always necessarily follow a normal distribution - because that's how the scores are determined in the first place.
[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.
Are you saying you're sceptical about the calibration process?
Theoretically, yes. We chose 100 as a midpoint for convenience. (Practically, there is a lower bound beyond which we cannot meaningfully interpret test results.)
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
All IQ tests are pretty incomplete and a bit stupid, but some are less stupid than others
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.
Being top 1 in 50 on thinking speed is a very lax filter.
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.
[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.
IQ isn't a linear scale [1][2]. (It is ordinal.)
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.
What is your issue here?
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.
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.
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.
people who perform well on intelligence tests may not present as generally intelligent
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure but IQ test result correlates with many of them.
Even something as strange as athletic performance:
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.
"hoi" means "the" in greek. So, if you want to set yourself off from hoi polloi, don't include the "the"
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.
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.
> ~Everyone knows "hoi" means "the" in Greek.
Try running a poll.