4 ms·

Weren't IQ tests basically determined to be modern-day phrenology long ago? Has there been any progress on measuring intelligence in a less biased fashion?

by m0zg 7y ago

lowiqengineer 7y ago
Don’t you believe people like me are lower IQ because I got rejected from Google?
- m0zg 7y ago
  I'd bet most people who work(ed) at Google were rejected at least once. I was. I'd also bet that if the current engineers working at Google were to be re-interviewed, at least a half of them would be rejected by Google's interview process. What you've experienced is mostly an artifact of having 100+ people apply for each open position, it says nothing at all about your intelligence.
- kalium-xyz 7y ago
  Just do what Ben Pridmore[1] did and study efficient ways to encode information in memory other memory techniques. It breaks some IQ tests so you can walk into Mensa and such (its not that meaningful but neither is using IQ as a metric for getting rejected at google). unrelated but by your long history of posting about having a low IQ yet working for amazon, what is a low IQ to you? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Pridmore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Pridmore
  - lowiqengineer 7y ago
    Low IQ is apparently getting into Google. I don't think many people regard getting into Amazon as requiring a genius IQ or even an above-average one.
Viliam1234 7y ago
> Weren't IQ tests basically determined to be modern-day phrenology long ago? Nope. (Well, there are people who believe that, but there are also people who believe that vaccines cause autism.) As a scientific consensus, the concept IQ is well supported by psychometric research. The individual IQ tests, of course, may contain mistakes. And any online test is most likely completely made up. > Has there been any progress on measuring intelligence in a less biased fashion? Of course there was progress in reducing bias in tests. For example, older IQ tests often contained questions about history, which is more an evidence of cultural background than of raw intelligence. Or verbal tasks, which disadvantage people who don't take the test in their first language. Modern tests are more about patterns, see e.g. Raven's Progressive Matrices. Yes, even this can be discriminatory against e.g. blind people. It's not perfect, but there is definitely a progress.
- throwaway6575 7y ago
  The idea that a "scientific consensus" exists on IQ makes it sound like stronger than it actually is - the field of psychology is much less rigorous than actual hard sciences and the bar to clear is very low there. That IQ is universally accepted among psychologists despite a number of very obvious glaring flaws is more damning against psychologists than adding to the credibility of the concept.
UncleSlacky 7y ago
They might be a useful guide, but it's a ridiculous oversimplification to reduce human intelligence to a single number. There is also an inherent social and cultural bias in most such tests which also needs to be accounted for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Criticism_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Criticis...

Weren't IQ tests basically determined to be modern-day phrenology long ago? Has there been any progress on measuring intelligence in a less biased fashion?

by m0zg 7y ago

Weren't IQ tests basically determined to be modern-day phrenology long ago? Has there been any progress on measuring intelligence in a less biased fashion?

lowiqengineer 7y ago

Don’t you believe people like me are lower IQ because I got rejected from Google?

m0zg 7y ago
I'd bet most people who work(ed) at Google were rejected at least once. I was. I'd also bet that if the current engineers working at Google were to be re-interviewed, at least a half of them would be rejected by Google's interview process. What you've experienced is mostly an artifact of having 100+ people apply for each open position, it says nothing at all about your intelligence.
kalium-xyz 7y ago
Just do what Ben Pridmore[1] did and study efficient ways to encode information in memory other memory techniques. It breaks some IQ tests so you can walk into Mensa and such (its not that meaningful but neither is using IQ as a metric for getting rejected at google). unrelated but by your long history of posting about having a low IQ yet working for amazon, what is a low IQ to you? 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Pridmore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Pridmore
- lowiqengineer 7y ago
  Low IQ is apparently getting into Google. I don't think many people regard getting into Amazon as requiring a genius IQ or even an above-average one.

Viliam1234 7y ago

> Weren't IQ tests basically determined to be modern-day phrenology long ago? Nope. (Well, there are people who believe that, but there are also people who believe that vaccines cause autism.) As a scientific consensus, the concept IQ is well supported by psychometric research. The individual IQ tests, of course, may contain mistakes. And any online test is most likely completely made up. > Has there been any progress on measuring intelligence in a less biased fashion? Of course there was progress in reducing bias in tests. For example, older IQ tests often contained questions about history, which is more an evidence of cultural background than of raw intelligence. Or verbal tasks, which disadvantage people who don't take the test in their first language. Modern tests are more about patterns, see e.g. Raven's Progressive Matrices. Yes, even this can be discriminatory against e.g. blind people. It's not perfect, but there is definitely a progress.

throwaway6575 7y ago
The idea that a "scientific consensus" exists on IQ makes it sound like stronger than it actually is - the field of psychology is much less rigorous than actual hard sciences and the bar to clear is very low there. That IQ is universally accepted among psychologists despite a number of very obvious glaring flaws is more damning against psychologists than adding to the credibility of the concept.

UncleSlacky 7y ago

They might be a useful guide, but it's a ridiculous oversimplification to reduce human intelligence to a single number. There is also an inherent social and cultural bias in most such tests which also needs to be accounted for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Criticism_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Criticis...