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This is the most important lesson my mother ever taught me. I (like her) have that same type of intelligence, the type that makes IQ tests and school exams far

by corin_ 15y ago

This is the most important lesson my mother ever taught me. I (like her) have that same type of intelligence, the type that makes IQ tests and school exams far easier than they should be, and yet often isn't really that useful in life. I still find myself placing far too much importance in it when judging people, can only imagine how big headed I would be about it if she hadn't constantly reminded me how little IQ really means. Stephen Fry made a similar, though briefer, point (I think in one of his auto-biographies, though I could be wrong)... Actually instead of quoting from memory I googled, it is indeed from his first auto-biography, and here it is: "I actually went so tragically far as to send off for and complete a Mensa application test...It was only then I realised the kind of intelligence that wants to get into Mensa and succeeds in getting into Mensa and then runs Mensa and the kind of intelligence that I thought worth possessing were so astronomically distant from each other that the icing fell off the cake with a great squelch.It is occasions like this I thank God for my criminal tendencies, my homosexuality, my jewishness and loathing of the bourgeois, the conventional and respectable that these seem to have inculcated me. I could so easily given the smallest twist to the least gene on the outermost strand of my DNA have turned into... [one of those awful Midas types on politics forums boasting about my Mensa membership and 'high' IQ.]"

hackinthebochs 15y ago
I don't understand these meme of degrading IQ as having little real world value. That mentality seems to fly in the face of just about every observation one can make. It seems obvious that in general, smarter people tend to get ahead. Of course there are many counter examples, but overall the trend seems obvious. Why is it everyone must apologize, make excuses for, or somehow downplay their own intelligence? Maybe it's just a ploy to be able to say "IQ tests and school exams far easier than they should be" without coming off as boasting?
- corin_ 15y ago
  It's definitely not a case of avoiding boasting in my case - and not because I'm a modest person, but because I'm the exact opposite, and I would have absolutely no problem shouting from the rooftops about how awesome I am based on IQ tests if I felt that to be something worth boasting about. The thing with IQ tests is that it measures a very specific type of skill, and to use that to define intelligence is insulting to an awful lot of people. The two people who own my company, who I work for, don't have degrees, they're not particularly mathematically skilled, and I don't think they'd do particularly well on an IQ test - not saying they'd get a terrible score, but they wouldn't come of as mensa candidates. And yet they're too of the brightest people I know, they've done amazing things in their careers and I have a huge amount of respect for them. My dad is another person with a not-great IQ, and yet in my (admitedly biased) view he's the cleverest person I know Whether it's when he's buying/selling stocks, or betting on horses, or working out taxes, he can do it all in his head at a crazy speed - not with any education, just because maths is easy for him. But that's not why I think he's clever. He's clever because of the way he's lived his life and the decisions he's made, many of which have made me insanely proud. I on the other hand have a high IQ, I did well in school with no work (well, I dropped out at 16 because I was bored, by "did well" I mean stuff like the fact that I got an A* GCSE in French at 15 even though I can't, and couldn't then either, speak French). Sure, it can be useful to be able to float through in areas where that kind of intelligence is useful, but it sure ain't everything. My point is that there's more to life than one very specific set of skills, and to think otherwise is narrowminded and big-headed. Not big-headed about having an IQ, but about thinking that your high IQ makes you better than someone with a lower IQ.
  - onemoreact 15y ago
    People talk about High IQ like it's a large bank account. I can afford not to study and still get good grades etc. What they forget is the compound interest that sustained effort provides. You can coast though school gain as little from it as the average person or you can dig in and actually gain something, but there are reasonably smart people who dig in so eventually coasting along is not enough. It’s like investing 1million @1%APR vs 100k @ 20%. For the first few years it might seem like you are ahead of the game, but after 16 years of schooling you can end up behind the curve. PS: IQ tests are only really meaningful for the young. At 40 I can look at what you have accomplished at 10 that's far less meaningful.
- gurkendoktor 15y ago
  Hmm, but how do you define getting ahead? People with a high IQ will get ahead on stuff that works like IQ tests do, like getting a degree or passing highly selective interviews. Especially interview questions in the finance sector are probably much easier with a better IQ. But that is only because it is easy to make things work like IQ tests. The people that seem to get ahead in society are those with excellent social skills instead. I'd gladly trade a dozen mathy IQ points for eloquence alone. Oh well, no political career for me. And on the "honest work" side of things, people with persistence, a healthy lifestyle and passion for what they do seem to be the most productive. (Some people are also productive because they are obsessive, let's leave those out.) How do IQ tests with their super-clean mini puzzles measure any of those?
  - hackinthebochs 15y ago
    >Oh well, no political career for me. I think this is one of the problems with how we analyze these things. We always want to focus on the very top and point out that those that lead us aren't the brightest of the bunch, but are oozing social skills. Yes at the very top, social skills, being alpha, being able to persuade and lead, etc, are much more critical than a high IQ. But for the rest of us in between, IQ likely does correlate at least somewhat to enhanced life outcomes.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- aik 15y ago
  I think it's partly because the counter examples are many. It's a common activity to quickly judge someone with extraordinary insight as "genius", when the case could be that they slaved for more hours than one would ever believe before the insight came. Even Alfred Binet was against creating any sort of correlation between intelligence and IQ. His main objective was to create a test that would evaluate where students needed the most help, rather than draw any correlation on intelligence which so many love to do. What has become clear from the studies I've read recently is that most IQ tests test fluid intelligence (which isn't fixed, but can definitely be improved) and doesn't even attempt to test for overall potential (a factor that I would consider MUCH more valuable). Nonetheless, many believe there is a factor (called 'g') that does speak for one's overall "intelligence", however most IQ tests aren't built to test it.
- Jach 15y ago
  It is interesting. On the one hand, very few people argue that a person with measured IQ of 80 won't have a hard time in life. On the other hand people dismiss 120 people and pretend IQ doesn't matter. (And it seems a lot of this group is made of 120+ people.) I figure it's just a form of social signaling, a signal of false modesty so the 100s still like you. Though personally I don't see that much difference in the intelligence level of a village idiot and Von Neumann, they're both humans and both way beyond an ant. I'm looking forward to a species that makes modern humans as a whole, from dumbest to smartest, appear as an ant to them.
  - grandalf 15y ago
    It's not that intelligence is irrelevant, it's just far less relevant than a lot of other factors. Also, people are quick to attribute someone else's success to an innate quality like intelligence rather than things like tenacity, hard work, etc., b/c then we don't need to feel lazy.
- al-king 15y ago
  Fry's point in particular is not that IQ is bad or useless; it clearly indicates some kind of talent. It's that treasuring IQ to the point that you join a society for people with high IQ, to Fry, also indicates a vapid intellectual narcissism wholly lacking in other kinds of "intelligence". At the very least, he feels that that's what it would have meant for him. Avoid confusing warnings against a certain kind of vanity with anti-intellectualism, which regrettably is popular enough already.
- codeslush 15y ago
  "tend to get ahead", "trend seems obvious", "fly in the face..." -- I've witnessed a lot of "intelligent" people in my life, and a lot of people on the other end of the spectrum. Intelligent or not, I would suggest that people who "tend to get ahead" are those that ENJOY and are HAPPY with life. I would go so far as to say that IQ doesn't play a part in this outcome - and may make it more difficult to achieve. It's all about the unit of measurement, which I believe is consistent with the article's intent.
  - pjscott 15y ago
    How confident are you in your intuition on this matter? IQ does seem to be significantly correlated with a bunch of things that fall under the general umbrella of "getting ahead in life", like income and job performance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ#Social_outcomes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ#Social_outcomes
    - codeslush 15y ago
      I read the wikipedia article - thank you. However, I think we are speaking of different things! Maybe, maybe not. I speak of true happiness. I look at the people in my life that live "a good life" and the people I see succeeding are those with very little. I don't question, for one moment, that higher IQ leads to more opportunity, more money, more things. When I look at people who are happy, by the values upon which I place importance, the things that high IQ bring to the table aren't relevant. Maybe I have it all wrong, and I certainly don't have a statistical sampling to prove my point - just an observation!
- tokenadult 15y ago
  I don't understand these meme of degrading IQ as having little real world value. Haven't you read Lewis Terman, author of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, on the subject? "There are, however, certain characteristics of age scores with which the reader should be familiar. For one thing, it is necessary to bear in mind that the true mental age as we have used it refers to the mental age on a particular intelligence test. A subject's mental age in this sense may not coincide with the age score he would make in tests of musical ability, mechanical ability, social adjustment, etc. A subject has, strictly speaking, a number of mental ages; we are here concerned only with that which depends on the abilities tested by the new Stanford-Binet scales." (Terman & Merrill 1937, p. 25) Or perhaps you would prefer the point of view of David Feldman, a psychologist specializing in the scholarly study of precocious and highest-IQ individuals? "Put into the context of the psychometric movement as a whole, it is clear that positive extreme of the IQ distribution is not as different from other IQ levels as might have been expected. . . . While 180 IQ suggests the ability to do academic work with relative ease, it does not signify a qualitatively different organization of mind. It also does not suggest the presence of ‘genius’ in its common-sense meaning, i.e. transcendent achievement in some field. For these kinds of phenomena, IQ seems at best a crude predictor. For anything more, we will have to look to traditions other than the psychometric and to variables other than IQ." (Feldman 1984) The one independent science writer who has had access to Terman's longitudinal study files at Stanford points out that IQ tests are a great way to miss future Nobel Prize winners. Amazingly, Terman’s study catchment area in California included two future Nobel Prize winners, but both were rejected from inclusion in the study because their childhood IQ scores were too low (Shurkin 1992, pp. 35, 395). REFERENCES Feldman, David (1984). A Follow-up of Subjects Scoring above 180 IQ in Terman's Genetic Studies of Genius. Exceptional Children, 50, 6, 518-523. Shurkin, Joel N. (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston: Little, Brown. Terman, Lewis & Merrill, Maude (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. After edit: I see several replies elsewhere in this thread are citing Wikipedia articles as the last word on their subjects. It's important to point out that most Wikipedia articles don't reflect the best research literature known even to Wikipedia editors, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/IntelligenceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige... largely because the Wikipedia articles on human intelligence as a broad subject have been the subject of much edit-warring for years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/... and some editors continue to push their point of view, relying on unreliable sources, into multiple Wikipedia articles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence#Case_amendments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...
- kahawe 15y ago
  > I don't understand these meme of degrading IQ as having little real world value The way I understand it: many people equal IQ test scores directly to real-world success and I would say such a direct causality does not exist. Case in point: Mensa members are CEOs all the way down to broke janitors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International#Demographics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International#Demographic...
  - Inufu 15y ago
    Wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_outcomes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_ou...
zb 15y ago
There's a very good interview here: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/20080809 http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/200808... with Jim Flynn (discoverer of the Flynn Effect - essentially IQ inflation) where he talks about how we value different kinds of intelligence and what IQ tests are actually measuring. It's worth listening to if you are at all interested in the subject. (Bonus: RMS!)

by corin_ 15y ago

hackinthebochs 15y ago

I don't understand these meme of degrading IQ as having little real world value. That mentality seems to fly in the face of just about every observation one can make. It seems obvious that in general, smarter people tend to get ahead. Of course there are many counter examples, but overall the trend seems obvious. Why is it everyone must apologize, make excuses for, or somehow downplay their own intelligence? Maybe it's just a ploy to be able to say "IQ tests and school exams far easier than they should be" without coming off as boasting?

corin_ 15y ago
It's definitely not a case of avoiding boasting in my case - and not because I'm a modest person, but because I'm the exact opposite, and I would have absolutely no problem shouting from the rooftops about how awesome I am based on IQ tests if I felt that to be something worth boasting about. The thing with IQ tests is that it measures a very specific type of skill, and to use that to define intelligence is insulting to an awful lot of people. The two people who own my company, who I work for, don't have degrees, they're not particularly mathematically skilled, and I don't think they'd do particularly well on an IQ test - not saying they'd get a terrible score, but they wouldn't come of as mensa candidates. And yet they're too of the brightest people I know, they've done amazing things in their careers and I have a huge amount of respect for them. My dad is another person with a not-great IQ, and yet in my (admitedly biased) view he's the cleverest person I know Whether it's when he's buying/selling stocks, or betting on horses, or working out taxes, he can do it all in his head at a crazy speed - not with any education, just because maths is easy for him. But that's not why I think he's clever. He's clever because of the way he's lived his life and the decisions he's made, many of which have made me insanely proud. I on the other hand have a high IQ, I did well in school with no work (well, I dropped out at 16 because I was bored, by "did well" I mean stuff like the fact that I got an A* GCSE in French at 15 even though I can't, and couldn't then either, speak French). Sure, it can be useful to be able to float through in areas where that kind of intelligence is useful, but it sure ain't everything. My point is that there's more to life than one very specific set of skills, and to think otherwise is narrowminded and big-headed. Not big-headed about having an IQ, but about thinking that your high IQ makes you better than someone with a lower IQ.
- onemoreact 15y ago
  People talk about High IQ like it's a large bank account. I can afford not to study and still get good grades etc. What they forget is the compound interest that sustained effort provides. You can coast though school gain as little from it as the average person or you can dig in and actually gain something, but there are reasonably smart people who dig in so eventually coasting along is not enough. It’s like investing 1million @1%APR vs 100k @ 20%. For the first few years it might seem like you are ahead of the game, but after 16 years of schooling you can end up behind the curve. PS: IQ tests are only really meaningful for the young. At 40 I can look at what you have accomplished at 10 that's far less meaningful.
gurkendoktor 15y ago
Hmm, but how do you define getting ahead? People with a high IQ will get ahead on stuff that works like IQ tests do, like getting a degree or passing highly selective interviews. Especially interview questions in the finance sector are probably much easier with a better IQ. But that is only because it is easy to make things work like IQ tests. The people that seem to get ahead in society are those with excellent social skills instead. I'd gladly trade a dozen mathy IQ points for eloquence alone. Oh well, no political career for me. And on the "honest work" side of things, people with persistence, a healthy lifestyle and passion for what they do seem to be the most productive. (Some people are also productive because they are obsessive, let's leave those out.) How do IQ tests with their super-clean mini puzzles measure any of those?
- hackinthebochs 15y ago
  >Oh well, no political career for me. I think this is one of the problems with how we analyze these things. We always want to focus on the very top and point out that those that lead us aren't the brightest of the bunch, but are oozing social skills. Yes at the very top, social skills, being alpha, being able to persuade and lead, etc, are much more critical than a high IQ. But for the rest of us in between, IQ likely does correlate at least somewhat to enhanced life outcomes.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
aik 15y ago
I think it's partly because the counter examples are many. It's a common activity to quickly judge someone with extraordinary insight as "genius", when the case could be that they slaved for more hours than one would ever believe before the insight came. Even Alfred Binet was against creating any sort of correlation between intelligence and IQ. His main objective was to create a test that would evaluate where students needed the most help, rather than draw any correlation on intelligence which so many love to do. What has become clear from the studies I've read recently is that most IQ tests test fluid intelligence (which isn't fixed, but can definitely be improved) and doesn't even attempt to test for overall potential (a factor that I would consider MUCH more valuable). Nonetheless, many believe there is a factor (called 'g') that does speak for one's overall "intelligence", however most IQ tests aren't built to test it.
Jach 15y ago
It is interesting. On the one hand, very few people argue that a person with measured IQ of 80 won't have a hard time in life. On the other hand people dismiss 120 people and pretend IQ doesn't matter. (And it seems a lot of this group is made of 120+ people.) I figure it's just a form of social signaling, a signal of false modesty so the 100s still like you. Though personally I don't see that much difference in the intelligence level of a village idiot and Von Neumann, they're both humans and both way beyond an ant. I'm looking forward to a species that makes modern humans as a whole, from dumbest to smartest, appear as an ant to them.
- grandalf 15y ago
  It's not that intelligence is irrelevant, it's just far less relevant than a lot of other factors. Also, people are quick to attribute someone else's success to an innate quality like intelligence rather than things like tenacity, hard work, etc., b/c then we don't need to feel lazy.
al-king 15y ago
Fry's point in particular is not that IQ is bad or useless; it clearly indicates some kind of talent. It's that treasuring IQ to the point that you join a society for people with high IQ, to Fry, also indicates a vapid intellectual narcissism wholly lacking in other kinds of "intelligence". At the very least, he feels that that's what it would have meant for him. Avoid confusing warnings against a certain kind of vanity with anti-intellectualism, which regrettably is popular enough already.
codeslush 15y ago
"tend to get ahead", "trend seems obvious", "fly in the face..." -- I've witnessed a lot of "intelligent" people in my life, and a lot of people on the other end of the spectrum. Intelligent or not, I would suggest that people who "tend to get ahead" are those that ENJOY and are HAPPY with life. I would go so far as to say that IQ doesn't play a part in this outcome - and may make it more difficult to achieve. It's all about the unit of measurement, which I believe is consistent with the article's intent.
- pjscott 15y ago
  How confident are you in your intuition on this matter? IQ does seem to be significantly correlated with a bunch of things that fall under the general umbrella of "getting ahead in life", like income and job performance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ#Social_outcomes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ#Social_outcomes
  - codeslush 15y ago
    I read the wikipedia article - thank you. However, I think we are speaking of different things! Maybe, maybe not. I speak of true happiness. I look at the people in my life that live "a good life" and the people I see succeeding are those with very little. I don't question, for one moment, that higher IQ leads to more opportunity, more money, more things. When I look at people who are happy, by the values upon which I place importance, the things that high IQ bring to the table aren't relevant. Maybe I have it all wrong, and I certainly don't have a statistical sampling to prove my point - just an observation!
tokenadult 15y ago
I don't understand these meme of degrading IQ as having little real world value. Haven't you read Lewis Terman, author of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, on the subject? "There are, however, certain characteristics of age scores with which the reader should be familiar. For one thing, it is necessary to bear in mind that the true mental age as we have used it refers to the mental age on a particular intelligence test. A subject's mental age in this sense may not coincide with the age score he would make in tests of musical ability, mechanical ability, social adjustment, etc. A subject has, strictly speaking, a number of mental ages; we are here concerned only with that which depends on the abilities tested by the new Stanford-Binet scales." (Terman & Merrill 1937, p. 25) Or perhaps you would prefer the point of view of David Feldman, a psychologist specializing in the scholarly study of precocious and highest-IQ individuals? "Put into the context of the psychometric movement as a whole, it is clear that positive extreme of the IQ distribution is not as different from other IQ levels as might have been expected. . . . While 180 IQ suggests the ability to do academic work with relative ease, it does not signify a qualitatively different organization of mind. It also does not suggest the presence of ‘genius’ in its common-sense meaning, i.e. transcendent achievement in some field. For these kinds of phenomena, IQ seems at best a crude predictor. For anything more, we will have to look to traditions other than the psychometric and to variables other than IQ." (Feldman 1984) The one independent science writer who has had access to Terman's longitudinal study files at Stanford points out that IQ tests are a great way to miss future Nobel Prize winners. Amazingly, Terman’s study catchment area in California included two future Nobel Prize winners, but both were rejected from inclusion in the study because their childhood IQ scores were too low (Shurkin 1992, pp. 35, 395). REFERENCES Feldman, David (1984). A Follow-up of Subjects Scoring above 180 IQ in Terman's Genetic Studies of Genius. Exceptional Children, 50, 6, 518-523. Shurkin, Joel N. (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston: Little, Brown. Terman, Lewis & Merrill, Maude (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. After edit: I see several replies elsewhere in this thread are citing Wikipedia articles as the last word on their subjects. It's important to point out that most Wikipedia articles don't reflect the best research literature known even to Wikipedia editors, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/IntelligenceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige... largely because the Wikipedia articles on human intelligence as a broad subject have been the subject of much edit-warring for years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/... and some editors continue to push their point of view, relying on unreliable sources, into multiple Wikipedia articles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Race_and_intelligence#Case_amendments http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...
kahawe 15y ago
> I don't understand these meme of degrading IQ as having little real world value The way I understand it: many people equal IQ test scores directly to real-world success and I would say such a direct causality does not exist. Case in point: Mensa members are CEOs all the way down to broke janitors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International#Demographics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensa_International#Demographic...
- Inufu 15y ago
  Wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_outcomes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_ou...

zb 15y ago

There's a very good interview here: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/20080809 http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/200808... with Jim Flynn (discoverer of the Flynn Effect - essentially IQ inflation) where he talks about how we value different kinds of intelligence and what IQ tests are actually measuring. It's worth listening to if you are at all interested in the subject. (Bonus: RMS!)