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As a scientist, I can tell you that there is plenty of agenda in a lot of research. One thing in particular I take issue with is the notion that IQ is some reli

As a scientist, I can tell you that there is plenty of agenda in a lot of research. One thing in particular I take issue with is the notion that IQ is some reliable tracer of "inherent" and genetically heritable "intelligence". This is used to drive all sorts of agendas and has nothing close to what I'd call consensus among scientists.

Robotbeat 9y ago
I do believe there are genetic aspects to intelligence, but it continues to surprise me that there are still people who think IQ measures "innate" genetic intelligence. Have any of you ever taken an IQ test?? It is full of things that require and/or are highly helped by receiving an education (including things you might not immediately think of as something you can teach, like mental models and cognitive tricks). To start out with, it involves reading, which is something that is most certainly "nurture," not "nature." There are also /epi/genetic aspects of intelligence that are inheritable but actually caused by the environment. Not everything that is inheritable is in the DNA.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  I lived in multiple countries when I was young. When I first took my IQ test in my home country, I scored abnormally high. I can't deny this helped me a lot with my confidence growing up. Then I moved away from my home country and lived abroad for a while. Then I moved back. By then I had lost a lot of my language skills for my own native tongue since I've been speaking the other language for a while, as in I could understand and speak fluently, but my language skills were still stuck at the level of my younger self, since that was when I had left the country. A bit after I returned to my home country I took another IQ test because the school made us. I scored low. It wasn't like I scored under average, but it was so significantly lower than my original score that I had an existential crisis. Thankfully I didn't lose all my confidence because I kept doing well in math and other subjects, but I can say it really had a traumatic effect on me. Most people won't understand because nobody goes through such a drastic IQ change in their lives unless they were in an accident or something. Well guess what, I took another test later on in my life after getting my language ability back to normal, and was happy to find that my IQ has recovered. My theory is that a lot of these IQ tests involve language skills. One good example is those logical expression tests where you have to parse through all the cryptic logical expressions and come to a conclusion. But I don't think it's just language skills. There are many other factors that go into IQ tests that make it an extremely unreliable measure for intelligence. After all, none of us--including whoever invented the IQ test--understands even 1% of how human intelligence work. Anyway, all this first hand experience made me realize how stupid this whole IQ thing was. It really fucks with your mentality when it really is NOT an objective way to measure intelligence. (Remember, I now have my high IQ back, so it's not like I'm saying this because I'm salty that I scored low) I'm sure there are many people out there who have very high intelligence in certain areas but got low IQs and just grew up with low confidence. This is absolutely unfair and if anything I think schools should ban IQ tests for this very reason. The IQ test is the very thing that contributes to all this inequality bullshit.

Robotbeat 9y ago

I do believe there are genetic aspects to intelligence, but it continues to surprise me that there are still people who think IQ measures "innate" genetic intelligence. Have any of you ever taken an IQ test?? It is full of things that require and/or are highly helped by receiving an education (including things you might not immediately think of as something you can teach, like mental models and cognitive tricks). To start out with, it involves reading, which is something that is most certainly "nurture," not "nature." There are also /epi/genetic aspects of intelligence that are inheritable but actually caused by the environment. Not everything that is inheritable is in the DNA.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
I lived in multiple countries when I was young. When I first took my IQ test in my home country, I scored abnormally high. I can't deny this helped me a lot with my confidence growing up. Then I moved away from my home country and lived abroad for a while. Then I moved back. By then I had lost a lot of my language skills for my own native tongue since I've been speaking the other language for a while, as in I could understand and speak fluently, but my language skills were still stuck at the level of my younger self, since that was when I had left the country. A bit after I returned to my home country I took another IQ test because the school made us. I scored low. It wasn't like I scored under average, but it was so significantly lower than my original score that I had an existential crisis. Thankfully I didn't lose all my confidence because I kept doing well in math and other subjects, but I can say it really had a traumatic effect on me. Most people won't understand because nobody goes through such a drastic IQ change in their lives unless they were in an accident or something. Well guess what, I took another test later on in my life after getting my language ability back to normal, and was happy to find that my IQ has recovered. My theory is that a lot of these IQ tests involve language skills. One good example is those logical expression tests where you have to parse through all the cryptic logical expressions and come to a conclusion. But I don't think it's just language skills. There are many other factors that go into IQ tests that make it an extremely unreliable measure for intelligence. After all, none of us--including whoever invented the IQ test--understands even 1% of how human intelligence work. Anyway, all this first hand experience made me realize how stupid this whole IQ thing was. It really fucks with your mentality when it really is NOT an objective way to measure intelligence. (Remember, I now have my high IQ back, so it's not like I'm saying this because I'm salty that I scored low) I'm sure there are many people out there who have very high intelligence in certain areas but got low IQs and just grew up with low confidence. This is absolutely unfair and if anything I think schools should ban IQ tests for this very reason. The IQ test is the very thing that contributes to all this inequality bullshit.