7 ms·

Doesn't this just mean that IQ Scores don't measure what they're supposed to? My understanding is that IQ scores measure how smart you COULD be, all things cons

Doesn't this just mean that IQ Scores don't measure what they're supposed to? My understanding is that IQ scores measure how smart you COULD be, all things considered. But if you can increase this with schooling, isn't it just how smart you are right now?

lainon 10y ago
From my own experience, you're able to prepare for IQ-tests. I scored slightly below average (below 90 actually) on the IQ-test I did with 7. Average (104) on the one I did with 16. And actually made it in to Mensa with a result of 144 on the IQ-test I did aged 18. I was in a good mood the day I did that IQ-test, and learned math, memory techniques etc. a few weeks before. So, IQ-tests really aren't that reliable.
- tdb7893 10y ago
  Ya, turns out people can learn just about anything with practice
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Around here those tests seems to be careful to avoid maths, memory etc and only try to test your ability to recognize patterns or find missing solutions.
  - lainon 10y ago
    >Around here those tests seems to be careful to avoid maths I was required to do mental calculation during the WAIS-IV I did.
  - gohrt 10y ago
    So you practice patterns to raise your score.
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      No, not really. Never felt I had time. I also think they try to introduce elements that makes it hard to prepare for the test. That said if someone has never taken one of these then getting used to how the test works and doing a sample test could help them get a better score right away.
- vacri 10y ago
  Were your IQ tests run on a 1:1 basis with a trained practitioner over the course of several hours? If not, they're not one of the actual formal IQ tests, but either some form of proxy or some random unrelated test that someone has slapped the label on. This is why there's so much confusion about "how can the IQ test be considered studied and reliable, bah!" - because the ones that are properly performed are labour-intensive and require a lot of training - and this is why results are all over the place. It's just not the case that $RANDOM_YAHOO[1] on the internet knows more about the caveats around IQ tests that the professionals who apply and study them. Disclaimer: have formally studied 'intelligence' (and cognition, perception etc) and been given a partial IQ test myself by a properly trained professional, which came with the caveat "the results can't be properly used, because you're familiar with the process, which confounds the results". [1] I don't mean you, I just mean that this is a common complaint
  - alasdair_ 10y ago
    The Mensa tests are generally done in a room with an experienced practitioner. The "take home" tests are just used as a marketing tactic and/or as a way to decide if you should even bother with a formal test.
- jgord 10y ago
  Maybe your actual IQ was varying, and the tests were accurate enough to show that ? We should consider the real possibility that both a) IQ tests are a reasonably good proxy for general intelligence AND b) preparation by training on problem solving improves IQ Id really like to know how much IQ is improvable. If the brain is plastic and physically adapts to training, what are the most effective methods? It seems an important issue, not least for schooling.
  - mcv 10y ago
    Depends on what you mean by IQ. If IQ is simply the result from the test, then it's clearly varying. If you define IQ as some sort of intrinsic and mostly unchanging ability for intelligence, then IQ tests are clearly very imperfect. Part of the problem is that there are too many slightly different definitions of IQ and intelligence, and what's worse: we're not even sure what exactly we mean by "intelligence".
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Doesn't this just mean that IQ Scores don't measure what they're supposed to? No, it does not mean that IQ scores don't measure general intelligence. It does mean that things some people believe about general intelligence may need to be reevaluated. > But if you can increase this with schooling, isn't it just how smart you are right now? That intelligence (and particularly IQ) can change over time, and that there were environmental contributors to that change has been well-know for some time. That education in adolescence is a relevant factor is perhaps new, and certainly challenges the treatment of education and intelligence as orthogonal factors that contribute to outcomes.
- jt2190 10y ago
  For those of us with only a layman's understanding of the term "general intelligence", would you mind posting a definition?
  - JamesBarney 10y ago
    The best way to understand general intelligence is to understand why general intelligence is around and what phenomenon is explains. It started long ago when everyone thought you could be good at Math, or good at History, or good at Science, and sometimes good at all 3. One day Suzy(named changed and story overly simplified for explanatory purposes), a very smart math teacher, was promoted to principal. So she finally had the chance to look at students grades from every class. And she found something curious. Her students that succeeded in her Math class also succeeded at Science. And kids that did well at History, scored highly in English. So Suzy decided to call these newly discovered traits "Verbal Ability" and "Quantitative Ability" respectively. But Suzy didn't stop there, her investigations found that Verbal and Quantitative were correlated with each other. So she invented a third trait which was the combination of Verbal and Quantitative ability and she called that g for General Intelligence. Of course Suzy wanted to measure this g with a test so she could predict(though by no means perfectly) a student's Math, Science, English, and History grades from just one score. She settled on IQ as the measure of this test, and thus IQ was born. Basically when we give someone a whole bunch of different tests we find that if someone does well on one, they will probably do well on others. For instance if we know someone is really good at theoretical physics we know they'll be good at working memory, and solving silly matrix puzzles. But if we know someone is really good at poetry we don't know as much about how good their working memory is, or how good they are at solving silly matrix puzzles.
devinhelton 10y ago
I think the way to understand IQ scores is that they are proxies for measuring general intelligence (general intelligence being ability to solve novel, abstract cognitive problems). The art of designing an IQ test is in making it as good as proxy as possible. Usually this is done by either testing stuff that everyone has exposure too under a time limit (general knowledge, basic math, vocab) or by testing stuff that people generally don't spend time practicing (Raven's matrices). But if a person deliberately tries to cram for an IQ test, they may increase their score, without increasing their general intelligence. And so with any policy that increases IQ scores, you have to try and figure out if it really increased general intelligence, or just increased their familiarity with the kinds of questions that appear on an IQ test. This can be tricky to figure out.
- aaron695 10y ago
  From other quotes/pdf "The measure of IQ used in the analysis was obtained from tests of cognitive ability administered by the Norwegian military to all draft-eligible men at approximately the age of 19 y as part of the universal military draft in Norway. " So they weren't even IQ tests. So there are issues with the results, but the results as they stand seem to contradict current understanding. Is the pdf significant or not? You'd need an expert to say.
- gohrt 10y ago
  Also, "general intelligence" ("G) is a hypothesized abstract concept, not well-defined. The non-existence of a non-gameable IQ test shows that G is not well defined.
- lostboys67 10y ago
  IQ tests really need to be take cold with no cramming before hand.
  - mcv 10y ago
    That would mean only your first IQ test ever can be meaningful. Every IQ test also teaches you a bit about the kind of thing IQ tests are looking for. I don't think any kind of a training is ever going to get you more than 10 points extra, but I'd be very surprised if at least a few points isn't doable. There's also the fact that IQ tests need to be designed for a specific culture. Taking an IQ test for a very different culture is likely to cost you a couple of points. They're unavoidably subjective.
bildung 10y ago
> Doesn't this just mean that IQ Scores don't measure what they're supposed to? My understanding is that IQ scores measure how smart you COULD be, all things considered. Actually there is no precice definition of intelligence outside IQ tests. My psychology professor had a nice saying: "Intelligence is what an IQ test measures". IQ tests in general have very low prognostic reliability, e.g. they neither say how smart you could be (neglected children can easily rise more than 20 points after living a a few years with a nurturing foster family) nor how successful you'll be in your professional life (where motives and motivation play a more important role).
topynate 10y ago
> Doesn't this just mean that IQ Scores don't measure what they're supposed to? The most cautious defensible position, in my opinion, is that "we can crudely measure a quantity that is related to the folk notion of intelligence"[1]. IQ tests are good, not great, at measuring something which 1) correlates to performance on just about any task that we regard as "mental", and 2) which we are thus far unable to divide any further – it appears to be impossible to split this "something" into a bundle of uncorrelated disparate abilities[2]. This "something" is called general intelligence, or g. However, all IQ tests are trainable and have different emphases; there is no bulletproof g test. > My understanding is that IQ scores measure how smart you COULD be, all things considered. The g factor is not a potential. It is defined by statistically extracting a factor common to all (or all minus epsilon) measures of intelligence, which factor is then found – empirically – to predict future performance. It does appear to measure a kind of intellectual potential[3], which is one reason psychologists are interested in it. So, does this notion of general intelligence contradict the findings linked in this post? Logically, not at all; there is no reason a priori why the general factor should not be malleable. The question is if the general factor is in fact altered. Not an easy question to answer, due to the fact that g, being a statistical construct, cannot directly be measured, but must be inferred from other observations and tests.[4] Since the linked Brinch-Galloway paper was published in 2011, others have attempted to determine whether education changes g[5]. Briefly, the authors measure a set of other cognitive skills, only partially correlated with g, but which cognitive tests also measure, and compare three models: A) that education affects these skills via g; B) that education partially affects these skills via g, but also directly affects some of these skills; C) that education does not affect g, but only these domain-specific cognitive skills. In this last model, the positive effects of education on cognitive test scores are fully mediated by domain-specific improvements. They find that Model C is favoured (p=0.04). The state of play is that education appears to improve performance in things like "Logical Memory" (the capacity to recall ideas and the logical connexions between them), and that this is what causes gains on IQ tests. Practically, this means that education is good, very good even, but that there's something that it doesn't seem to touch. At this point one may wonder what exactly is so great about g compared to domain-specific cognitive skills. For probably the majority of jobs out there, domain-specific skills are exactly what are required; provided one has some moderate level of general intelligence to cover exceptional situations, the rest is trainable. If this becomes the received wisdom I wouldn't exactly be upset, as it would likely take a good deal of the heat out of "the IQ controversy". Perhaps instead of "general intelligence" we would refer to "abstract generalization capacity" or "cross-domain transfer ". With the great g threat on the back-burner for the time being, the discussion on trends towards increased demand for generalization skills on the decadal scale would then have room to breathe. Some of the proposed solutions[6] are rather radical for the current political climate... [1] Steve Hsu, http://infoproc.blogspot.co.il/2013/04/myths-sisyphus-and-g.html#comment-886406467 http://infoproc.blogspot.co.il/2013/04/myths-sisyphus-and-g.... [2] Not for want of trying – most prominently Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, which is quite popular outside of psychology, but which lacks empirical evidence (Waterhouse (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4104_5 http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4104_5) [3] With a few exceptions, by far the most significance of which is childhood neglect, as commented by bildung at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13183521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13183521 . But his point on motivation as a factor is misplaced – yes, motivation matters, but on average g will also have its effect. It is the combination of g and other specific factors which predicts any given facet of an individual's life. [4] All this hairsplitting is an unfortunate consequence of the lack of a firm reductionist model of g. If we had such a model (grounded in neuroscience, for instance) we could just study the effect of educational interventions on the brain directly. Of course we can (and do) do this anyway, but it tells us a lot less without the model. [5] Ritchie, Bates and Deary (2015), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4445388/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4445388/ [6] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-genetically-engineer-intelligence-2016-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-genetically-engineer-i...

lainon 10y ago

From my own experience, you're able to prepare for IQ-tests. I scored slightly below average (below 90 actually) on the IQ-test I did with 7. Average (104) on the one I did with 16. And actually made it in to Mensa with a result of 144 on the IQ-test I did aged 18. I was in a good mood the day I did that IQ-test, and learned math, memory techniques etc. a few weeks before. So, IQ-tests really aren't that reliable.

tdb7893 10y ago
Ya, turns out people can learn just about anything with practice
reitanqild 10y ago
Around here those tests seems to be careful to avoid maths, memory etc and only try to test your ability to recognize patterns or find missing solutions.
- lainon 10y ago
  >Around here those tests seems to be careful to avoid maths I was required to do mental calculation during the WAIS-IV I did.
- gohrt 10y ago
  So you practice patterns to raise your score.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    No, not really. Never felt I had time. I also think they try to introduce elements that makes it hard to prepare for the test. That said if someone has never taken one of these then getting used to how the test works and doing a sample test could help them get a better score right away.
vacri 10y ago
Were your IQ tests run on a 1:1 basis with a trained practitioner over the course of several hours? If not, they're not one of the actual formal IQ tests, but either some form of proxy or some random unrelated test that someone has slapped the label on. This is why there's so much confusion about "how can the IQ test be considered studied and reliable, bah!" - because the ones that are properly performed are labour-intensive and require a lot of training - and this is why results are all over the place. It's just not the case that $RANDOM_YAHOO[1] on the internet knows more about the caveats around IQ tests that the professionals who apply and study them. Disclaimer: have formally studied 'intelligence' (and cognition, perception etc) and been given a partial IQ test myself by a properly trained professional, which came with the caveat "the results can't be properly used, because you're familiar with the process, which confounds the results". [1] I don't mean you, I just mean that this is a common complaint
- alasdair_ 10y ago
  The Mensa tests are generally done in a room with an experienced practitioner. The "take home" tests are just used as a marketing tactic and/or as a way to decide if you should even bother with a formal test.
jgord 10y ago
Maybe your actual IQ was varying, and the tests were accurate enough to show that ? We should consider the real possibility that both a) IQ tests are a reasonably good proxy for general intelligence AND b) preparation by training on problem solving improves IQ Id really like to know how much IQ is improvable. If the brain is plastic and physically adapts to training, what are the most effective methods? It seems an important issue, not least for schooling.
- mcv 10y ago
  Depends on what you mean by IQ. If IQ is simply the result from the test, then it's clearly varying. If you define IQ as some sort of intrinsic and mostly unchanging ability for intelligence, then IQ tests are clearly very imperfect. Part of the problem is that there are too many slightly different definitions of IQ and intelligence, and what's worse: we're not even sure what exactly we mean by "intelligence".

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Doesn't this just mean that IQ Scores don't measure what they're supposed to? No, it does not mean that IQ scores don't measure general intelligence. It does mean that things some people believe about general intelligence may need to be reevaluated. > But if you can increase this with schooling, isn't it just how smart you are right now? That intelligence (and particularly IQ) can change over time, and that there were environmental contributors to that change has been well-know for some time. That education in adolescence is a relevant factor is perhaps new, and certainly challenges the treatment of education and intelligence as orthogonal factors that contribute to outcomes.

jt2190 10y ago
For those of us with only a layman's understanding of the term "general intelligence", would you mind posting a definition?
- JamesBarney 10y ago
  The best way to understand general intelligence is to understand why general intelligence is around and what phenomenon is explains. It started long ago when everyone thought you could be good at Math, or good at History, or good at Science, and sometimes good at all 3. One day Suzy(named changed and story overly simplified for explanatory purposes), a very smart math teacher, was promoted to principal. So she finally had the chance to look at students grades from every class. And she found something curious. Her students that succeeded in her Math class also succeeded at Science. And kids that did well at History, scored highly in English. So Suzy decided to call these newly discovered traits "Verbal Ability" and "Quantitative Ability" respectively. But Suzy didn't stop there, her investigations found that Verbal and Quantitative were correlated with each other. So she invented a third trait which was the combination of Verbal and Quantitative ability and she called that g for General Intelligence. Of course Suzy wanted to measure this g with a test so she could predict(though by no means perfectly) a student's Math, Science, English, and History grades from just one score. She settled on IQ as the measure of this test, and thus IQ was born. Basically when we give someone a whole bunch of different tests we find that if someone does well on one, they will probably do well on others. For instance if we know someone is really good at theoretical physics we know they'll be good at working memory, and solving silly matrix puzzles. But if we know someone is really good at poetry we don't know as much about how good their working memory is, or how good they are at solving silly matrix puzzles.

devinhelton 10y ago

I think the way to understand IQ scores is that they are proxies for measuring general intelligence (general intelligence being ability to solve novel, abstract cognitive problems). The art of designing an IQ test is in making it as good as proxy as possible. Usually this is done by either testing stuff that everyone has exposure too under a time limit (general knowledge, basic math, vocab) or by testing stuff that people generally don't spend time practicing (Raven's matrices). But if a person deliberately tries to cram for an IQ test, they may increase their score, without increasing their general intelligence. And so with any policy that increases IQ scores, you have to try and figure out if it really increased general intelligence, or just increased their familiarity with the kinds of questions that appear on an IQ test. This can be tricky to figure out.

aaron695 10y ago
From other quotes/pdf "The measure of IQ used in the analysis was obtained from tests of cognitive ability administered by the Norwegian military to all draft-eligible men at approximately the age of 19 y as part of the universal military draft in Norway. " So they weren't even IQ tests. So there are issues with the results, but the results as they stand seem to contradict current understanding. Is the pdf significant or not? You'd need an expert to say.
gohrt 10y ago
Also, "general intelligence" ("G) is a hypothesized abstract concept, not well-defined. The non-existence of a non-gameable IQ test shows that G is not well defined.
lostboys67 10y ago
IQ tests really need to be take cold with no cramming before hand.
- mcv 10y ago
  That would mean only your first IQ test ever can be meaningful. Every IQ test also teaches you a bit about the kind of thing IQ tests are looking for. I don't think any kind of a training is ever going to get you more than 10 points extra, but I'd be very surprised if at least a few points isn't doable. There's also the fact that IQ tests need to be designed for a specific culture. Taking an IQ test for a very different culture is likely to cost you a couple of points. They're unavoidably subjective.

bildung 10y ago

> Doesn't this just mean that IQ Scores don't measure what they're supposed to? My understanding is that IQ scores measure how smart you COULD be, all things considered. Actually there is no precice definition of intelligence outside IQ tests. My psychology professor had a nice saying: "Intelligence is what an IQ test measures". IQ tests in general have very low prognostic reliability, e.g. they neither say how smart you could be (neglected children can easily rise more than 20 points after living a a few years with a nurturing foster family) nor how successful you'll be in your professional life (where motives and motivation play a more important role).

topynate 10y ago

> Doesn't this just mean that IQ Scores don't measure what they're supposed to? The most cautious defensible position, in my opinion, is that "we can crudely measure a quantity that is related to the folk notion of intelligence"[1]. IQ tests are good, not great, at measuring something which 1) correlates to performance on just about any task that we regard as "mental", and 2) which we are thus far unable to divide any further – it appears to be impossible to split this "something" into a bundle of uncorrelated disparate abilities[2]. This "something" is called general intelligence, or g. However, all IQ tests are trainable and have different emphases; there is no bulletproof g test. > My understanding is that IQ scores measure how smart you COULD be, all things considered. The g factor is not a potential. It is defined by statistically extracting a factor common to all (or all minus epsilon) measures of intelligence, which factor is then found – empirically – to predict future performance. It does appear to measure a kind of intellectual potential[3], which is one reason psychologists are interested in it. So, does this notion of general intelligence contradict the findings linked in this post? Logically, not at all; there is no reason a priori why the general factor should not be malleable. The question is if the general factor is in fact altered. Not an easy question to answer, due to the fact that g, being a statistical construct, cannot directly be measured, but must be inferred from other observations and tests.[4] Since the linked Brinch-Galloway paper was published in 2011, others have attempted to determine whether education changes g[5]. Briefly, the authors measure a set of other cognitive skills, only partially correlated with g, but which cognitive tests also measure, and compare three models: A) that education affects these skills via g; B) that education partially affects these skills via g, but also directly affects some of these skills; C) that education does not affect g, but only these domain-specific cognitive skills. In this last model, the positive effects of education on cognitive test scores are fully mediated by domain-specific improvements. They find that Model C is favoured (p=0.04). The state of play is that education appears to improve performance in things like "Logical Memory" (the capacity to recall ideas and the logical connexions between them), and that this is what causes gains on IQ tests. Practically, this means that education is good, very good even, but that there's something that it doesn't seem to touch. At this point one may wonder what exactly is so great about g compared to domain-specific cognitive skills. For probably the majority of jobs out there, domain-specific skills are exactly what are required; provided one has some moderate level of general intelligence to cover exceptional situations, the rest is trainable. If this becomes the received wisdom I wouldn't exactly be upset, as it would likely take a good deal of the heat out of "the IQ controversy". Perhaps instead of "general intelligence" we would refer to "abstract generalization capacity" or "cross-domain transfer ". With the great g threat on the back-burner for the time being, the discussion on trends towards increased demand for generalization skills on the decadal scale would then have room to breathe. Some of the proposed solutions[6] are rather radical for the current political climate... [1] Steve Hsu, http://infoproc.blogspot.co.il/2013/04/myths-sisyphus-and-g.html#comment-886406467 http://infoproc.blogspot.co.il/2013/04/myths-sisyphus-and-g.... [2] Not for want of trying – most prominently Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, which is quite popular outside of psychology, but which lacks empirical evidence (Waterhouse (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4104_5 http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4104_5) [3] With a few exceptions, by far the most significance of which is childhood neglect, as commented by bildung at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13183521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13183521 . But his point on motivation as a factor is misplaced – yes, motivation matters, but on average g will also have its effect. It is the combination of g and other specific factors which predicts any given facet of an individual's life. [4] All this hairsplitting is an unfortunate consequence of the lack of a firm reductionist model of g. If we had such a model (grounded in neuroscience, for instance) we could just study the effect of educational interventions on the brain directly. Of course we can (and do) do this anyway, but it tells us a lot less without the model. [5] Ritchie, Bates and Deary (2015), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4445388/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4445388/ [6] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-genetically-engineer-intelligence-2016-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-genetically-engineer-i...