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All speculative, but: Part of the IQ test I took years ago involved memorizing and repeating sequences of digits. When I was growing up in the 80s, I had a lar

All speculative, but: Part of the IQ test I took years ago involved memorizing and repeating sequences of digits. When I was growing up in the 80s, I had a large number of phone numbers memorized for friends, family, businesses I needed to contact regularly, etc. Presumably, memorizing dozens of seven- and ten- digit numbers regularly improved my ability to memorize long strings of digits. Today, I no longer know any phone numbers besides my own and my wife's. And I know hers only because it's just one digit different than my own. I'm sure children are not getting any practice at this sort of thing. So, does memorizing strings of digits have anything to do with how smart you are? If this is still part of IQ tests, then I'm not surprised raw scores are decreasing.

anoncake 7y ago
Also: Who's more intelligent, the person who spends time and energy on memorizing phone numbers or the one who buys a notebook?
- gowld 7y ago
  Working memory is tremendously useful for a wide range of intellectual tasks. Imagine a CPU with an eternal spinning-rust hard drive and no cache, vs a computer with a 10x slower CPU and a 4MB cache. Which do you thing is more powerful at solving problems?
  - anoncake 7y ago
    Of course working memory is important and should be tested in an IQ test. But so is being able to use tools to augment yourself and work around your weaknesses. And having a specialized ability to memorize numbers is quite useless.
gowld 7y ago
This is the modern standard IQ test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices
- anoncake 7y ago
  > the Citation needed.
erentz 7y ago
That might be part of the overall testing you did in which more than just IQ was being testing. In a normal barrage you might get tests for working memory, attention, etc. which are not IQ. This sounds like it’s testing working memory.

anoncake 7y ago

Also: Who's more intelligent, the person who spends time and energy on memorizing phone numbers or the one who buys a notebook?

gowld 7y ago
Working memory is tremendously useful for a wide range of intellectual tasks. Imagine a CPU with an eternal spinning-rust hard drive and no cache, vs a computer with a 10x slower CPU and a 4MB cache. Which do you thing is more powerful at solving problems?
- anoncake 7y ago
  Of course working memory is important and should be tested in an IQ test. But so is being able to use tools to augment yourself and work around your weaknesses. And having a specialized ability to memorize numbers is quite useless.

gowld 7y ago

This is the modern standard IQ test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices

anoncake 7y ago
> the Citation needed.

erentz 7y ago

That might be part of the overall testing you did in which more than just IQ was being testing. In a normal barrage you might get tests for working memory, attention, etc. which are not IQ. This sounds like it’s testing working memory.