8 ms·

Douglas Adams made jokes in his fiction about boiling complex systems down to a number. Stephen Jay Gould pointed out how unscientific the idea of IQ is - it's

Douglas Adams made jokes in his fiction about boiling complex systems down to a number. Stephen Jay Gould pointed out how unscientific the idea of IQ is - it's akin to astrological charts. Boiling brains down to one number and ranking them, and saying it comes from genes, nutty. When scientists have no idea why a nematode with 302 neurons turns left or right. You can tell it's religious or political or whatever by how people defend it - no one gets that agitated by how many light years away some star is.

zzt123 5y ago
I don’t know if Jeff Hawkins would agree, but it seems to me that if his ideas involving cortical columns are true, intelligence is indeed capable of being compressed to a single number with statistical significance, due to underlying efficiency differences in the base components which are replicated across the whole neocortex.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  That seems easily testable. Strength sports and fine motor skills have a huge neural component. You can look at people at the top of their fields in lifting in lower weight classes, gymnastics, MLB pitchers, anything that isn't being totally confounded by sheer muscle mass, and see if their success in any way correlates with IQ. Something that makes the entire brain more efficient should have a positive impact on both purely cognitive tasks as well as motor tasks with a large neural component.
  - AlanYx 5y ago
    A decent amount of work has already been done in this area. One common experimental apparatus is a "Jensen box" which is basically a whack-a-mole game, and it turns out that performance does correlate with common general psychometric measures of intelligence, even though it's really not the sort of task you'd think of as requiring intellect.
    - zzt123 5y ago
      I wasn’t aware of this. Wouldn’t the Jensen Box imply a correlation between intelligence and simple reaction time, which seems to be a contentious point? I’m also reminded of the lack of correlation between the Wonderlic Test and NFL performance, although perhaps that speaks more about the test than it does about any correlation with intelligence.
  - zzt123 5y ago
    Not necessarily I think. As I understand, Hawkins envisions motor skills as involving a kind of “system call” to the old brain, and the fact that the cortical columns are more efficient does not seem to necessarily imply that old brain structures are similarly more efficient. So, I’m not sure there would have to be a clear correlation between professional sports and general intelligence.
fullshark 5y ago
It's possible for IQ to be a fairly noisy and imperfect measure of cognitive ability, but still a useful signal here to detect a meaningful trend.
- tux3 5y ago
  Right, and furthermore I think we should welcome other metrics that measure people's abilities, not necessarily among the same axes than IQ tests. IQ is certainly not a perfect metric, but for all the criticisms of it, I haven't seen any reason that psychometrics should not aim to improve. Yet people don't seem to discuss IQ with the intent to improve the metric. Accepting and rejecting it are not the only two options, we could also discuss ways to do better.
  - psyc 5y ago
    Seems to me that people have become allergic to anything that seems elitist or undemocratic. The only acceptable opinion is that anyone with a minimum of privilege and hard work can do anything. I was just talking about this with my therapist, and she noted that people don't seem to have the same problem with admitting top athletes have a genetic advantage.
    - thereisnospork 5y ago
      It has always vexed me how people recognize both the genetically athletically gifted and the intellectually 'disadvantaged'[0] but stumble over the concept of intellectually gifted individuals. [0]E.g. those afflicted with autism spectrum disorders, or dyslexia for two trivial examples.
      - Apocryphon 5y ago
        Is that necessarily true? I think it's common to speak highly of talented individuals as being blessed with "raw intelligence" and the like. The more unseemly thing is to characterize entire groups of individuals with that.
swalls 5y ago
People so desperately want a way to objectively rank themselves against each other that they'll believe IQ is a good way to measure intelligence because their ego needs it to be true.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  I suspect the opposite - people who consistently score poorly want so desperately to believe that they're special that they insist that they have some innate, untestable brilliance.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    Yes. Funny how you never hear the "IQ is BS" argument when the news is about some pollutant that lowers IQ's.
  - NateEag 5y ago
    I've never taken a formal IQ test. I've taken informal ones on the net and came out in the 135 - 140 range, IIRC. I expect I'd do noticeably worse on a real test. I share that as context for the fact that I'm skeptical of IQ as a useful measure of intelligence. I don't think that skepticism is because I'm embarrassed by my lack of an official score or that my unofficial one is too low.
  - KerrAvon 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant#Rise_to_fame_and_IQ_score https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant#Rise_to_fam... > Savant sees IQ tests as measurements of a variety of mental abilities and thinks intelligence entails so many factors that "attempts to measure it are useless".
  - elzbardico 5y ago
    I have the non conventional idea that some of the biggest opponents of any form of innate talent are the already privileged. Thus they can pay lip service to the idea of ending privilege all the while explaining why for now they should be our natural enlightened rulers
commandlinefan 5y ago
> Boiling brains down to one number IQ does measure something, though, and it tracks pretty consistently with that more ephemeral thing that people refer to as "intelligence": if you, personally, found a dozen people you considered "smart" and another dozen you considered "stupid", you'd almost definitely find that the smart ones had high IQs and the dumb ones had low IQs. You might argue about the fine-grained distinction between the smart ones, but you wouldn't find somebody who you considered smart who somehow still had a 50 IQ.
- kuhewa 5y ago
  That's true, but that's a bar for an extremely crude instrument.
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    IQ is an imperfect measure of intelligence. However, it's also the only (objective) measure we have.
    - kuhewa 5y ago
      Yet depending on the use case, a bad map may be worse than no map at all.
- beebmam 5y ago
  Just because something can be measured does not imply that metric accurately depicts reality. Moreover, all metrics should be criticized as to what part of reality they are depicting and what part of reality they are obscuring. I've yet to be convinced that IQ is anywhere near an accurate depiction of reality.
  - engineer_22 5y ago
    I like the way you think. Language, similarly, is not an accurate depiction of reality.
- 5y ago
timmg 5y ago
What's your opinion, then? Is "intelligence" incapable of being measured? Or do we need a "suite" of numbers? (Or something else?)
- VictorPath 5y ago
  Even a suite of numbers for human brains sounds more social scientific than scientific, but it makes more sense than one number. Let's take visuo-spatial ability. Men do better in testing than women generally. So for arguments sake let's say they are correctly measuring a deficiency. So now the question is, is this for cultural reasons or genetic reasons? Laszlo Polgar was a psychologist who raised his daughter to train on visuo-spatial thinking, mostly with chess. She became the youngest grandmaster ever, the youngest person to break into the FIDE 100. She became the 8th best chess player in the world. It's anecdotal, but if she is capable of this, presumably other women are genetically capable of this level of visuo-spatial thinking, so the tested deficiencies might point to culture over genetics. As Gould said, it's not just IQ but the blanket if assumptions around it - it is genetic not cultural, it is not remedial etc. As I said, people don't get this worked up over light year measurements.
  - timmg 5y ago
    I'm not an expert in any way. But my understanding is that they did/do test on a lot of different axes. But what they found was that people tend to have strong correlations between those scores. As in: if you are good at one, you are good at others. Not exactly as good, of course. But a strong correlation. So that's how they arrived at using a "single number".
mc32 5y ago
Would you rather choose a pool of low IQ members or a pool with members above the mean if tasked with achieving some goal?
- NateEag 5y ago
  I would look for a concrete test of their ability to perform the goal.
  - mc32 5y ago
    If you’re given a choice of one group vs the other, which one would you choose? It could be : build a house, a bridge, design a flying machine, a colony on Mars. If IQ does not have any significance with respect to intelligence then you could choose either and be served just as well. On the other hand…
    - NateEag 5y ago
      I would reject the false dichotomy and look for signals I trust.
      - mc32 5y ago
        Is your claim that the groups are a tossup? You may not like the dichotomy, that’s a fair objection, but I think claiming the groups are a tossup is a pretty big claim.
        NateEag 5y ago
        I think "intelligence" is a squishy, complex thing, and if I have a specific job to do, I'm going to look for more concrete, trustworthy signals than IQ to see who I want helping me do it.
tmule 5y ago
Stephen Jay Gould was actually fairly innumerate. It’s clear he didn’t understand even the rather simple math behind the PCA, which underpins IQ measurement. You might find this instructive: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1 https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1 “ Boiling brains down to one number and ranking them, and saying it comes from genes, nutty.” Yeah, except that the number correlates with many things we care about in the real world (educational attainment even at the highest levels, crime), even after controlling for many other things we care about in the real world (conscientiousness, SEC).
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  Well since you are would you like to enlighten us how good PCA is with latent variables?
- kuhewa 5y ago
  > Stephen Jay Gould was actually fairly innumerate. It’s clear he didn’t understand even the rather simple math behind the PCA, which underpins IQ measurement. You might find this instructive: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1 https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1 Not sure the blogpost supports Gould being innumerate or not understanding PCA.. also, an aside, I doubt the author Hsu would agree with your take here, considering his hero Feynman had an underwhelming IQ relative to his success. BTW what do you mean by IQ measurement is underpinned by PCA (principal component analysis? or the requisite math?)?
  - tmule 5y ago
    “ Not sure the blogpost supports Gould being innumerate or not understanding PCA.. also, an aside, I doubt the author Hsu would agree with your take here, considering his hero Feynman had an underwhelming IQ relative to his success.” Actually, here’s Hsu on Gould again: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1 https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1 The author does indeed tackle Feynman’s IQ here, and agrees with me (actually Hsu has informed a large part of my worldview): https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-the-next-einstein/201112/polymath-physicist-richard-feynmans-low-iq-and-finding-another https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-the-next-ein... “ BTW what do you mean by IQ measurement is underpinned by PCA (principal component analysis? or the requisite math?)?” Principal component analysis. More here, again from Hsu: https://www.cog-genomics.org/static/pdf/ggoogle.pdf https://www.cog-genomics.org/static/pdf/ggoogle.pdf
Zenst 5y ago
IQ is like MHz in computers in many ways, whilst an important factor, it's the software that makes the difference.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  Except the likelihood is it is a log scale with all corresponding consequences.
parsimo2010 5y ago
I won't say that IQ is a perfect measure of intelligence. But there is something there that people can spot. I don't know if you're familiar with American (public school) gifted programs, but they are typically done by referral- someone identifies a student that they consider "gifted" and the school does an IQ test. If their IQ is above some threshold the student is admitted into the program and they get a different curriculum. While the benefit of gifted programs is sometimes called into doubt, teachers have an incredible hit rate in terms of IQ scores. Teacher referrals have a success rate (the student IQ beats the threshold) far higher than the ~5% that you would expect if there was no link between classroom performance and IQ scores. Source: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746049.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746049.pdf There's more to intelligence than just classroom performance, but there is definitely something being measured by IQ tests and it's related to intelligence. Just because it's not perfect doesn't mean we need to discount it completely.
- shard 5y ago
  The older I get, the more I think that social intelligence - the ability to know what other people are thinking, the ability to convince other people to your way of thinking - is as important, if not more important, than the analytical intelligence measured by IQ, because it's through social intelligence that things get done in this world. I am not aware of any test or measure which are widely used to judge how socially intelligent someone is.
  - marvin 5y ago
    This isn't quite what you're talking about, but a full-scale IQ test like the WAIS tests a lot more than just the "what is the next symbol in the sequence" kind of IQ test that is associated with Mensa and others. It contains somewhat open-ended knowledge questions you'd likely have been exposed to in your culture, reaction time tests for finding particular symbols among many others, solving mechanical puzzles, definitions of words you will have encountered, mental arithmetic and others. This isn't quite the same as measuring one's ability to communicate well, understand others' intentions or influence others. But it does test a much wider spectrum of cognitive skills than what many people believe about IQ. It's also worth noting that success in the real world also depends on other traits than all the ones we've discussed. Some notable examples which probably aren't talked about so much, is the tendency to stubbornly work through a difficult problem (out of pleasure or innate drive), the capacity to routinely get a lot done or coming up with and thoroughly exploring new (particularly unconventional) ideas. Beyond a certain point, I'm a bit skeptical that social skills in the absence of other intellectual strengths would generally lead to spectacular success. You won't lead a team to success if you don't know where you're going. Although I suppose you could to a certain degree deduce the right direction from the less eloquently communicated knowledge of others. But that does require the ability to distinguish good ideas from bad.
ThrustVectoring 5y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Grs_jJ5U6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Grs_jJ5U6w Here's a monologue from someone with an IQ of 75. Do you expect the problems he describes in his life to be more or less common among people with his IQ than in the general population?
AQuantized 5y ago
There's ample conversation in the linked paper about how the many demands of society and changing culture influence IQ. The reality is that its one of the few psychometrics with strong correlations to a number of long term outcomes like income, wellbeing, crime, fertility, etc., and which is responsive to changes in the environment and demographics of a nation. That said there is a point to be made that IQ is clearly not 1:1 with everything we think of as 'intelligence'. Trivially, most significant accomplishments take place over months or years as opposed to the minutes or hours of an IQ test. However, using it as a useful tool isn't as reductive as dismissing it entirely simply because it isn't a completely perfect or comprehensive metric.
fallingknife 5y ago
You could say the same for BMI. e.g. most NFL running backs are considered "morbidly obese." But if the BMI of the population increases by 5 points, that's very significant. In the same way, I take population IQ measures a lot more seriously than individual.
kbelder 5y ago
Imagine you evaluated the performance of all a human's muscles, and gave an overall 's' score to individuals based on the aggregate. It would be a vast simplification, it would be combining slow and fast twitch muscle fibers, it would be combining heart and legs and torso muscles... you would want to be far more precise when dealing with an individual and evaluating how to benefit or correct their musculature. But still, you could probably take any group of ten people and quickly arrange them in a line from lowest to highest 's' score. You would find a huge correlation between 's' and various professions. Equating it with astrology is silly, a rhetorical flourish that nobody sensible could believe.
vixen99 5y ago
The topic has moved on quite a bit since 2002 when Gould died. For instance: "Childhood intelligence is heritable, highly polygenic and associated with FNBP1L". Molecular Psychiatry (2013), 1–6. Lots more titles like that these days. It's not nature or nurture; it's a question of how much of each & the nature part is definitely significant. At the time, Gould's comments about intelligence were widely discussed and accepted in the popular press (NYT, NY Review of Books, etc.,) but subject to a lot of criticism in the science journals which did not get much coverage.

zzt123 5y ago

I don’t know if Jeff Hawkins would agree, but it seems to me that if his ideas involving cortical columns are true, intelligence is indeed capable of being compressed to a single number with statistical significance, due to underlying efficiency differences in the base components which are replicated across the whole neocortex.

nonameiguess 5y ago
That seems easily testable. Strength sports and fine motor skills have a huge neural component. You can look at people at the top of their fields in lifting in lower weight classes, gymnastics, MLB pitchers, anything that isn't being totally confounded by sheer muscle mass, and see if their success in any way correlates with IQ. Something that makes the entire brain more efficient should have a positive impact on both purely cognitive tasks as well as motor tasks with a large neural component.
- AlanYx 5y ago
  A decent amount of work has already been done in this area. One common experimental apparatus is a "Jensen box" which is basically a whack-a-mole game, and it turns out that performance does correlate with common general psychometric measures of intelligence, even though it's really not the sort of task you'd think of as requiring intellect.
  - zzt123 5y ago
    I wasn’t aware of this. Wouldn’t the Jensen Box imply a correlation between intelligence and simple reaction time, which seems to be a contentious point? I’m also reminded of the lack of correlation between the Wonderlic Test and NFL performance, although perhaps that speaks more about the test than it does about any correlation with intelligence.
- zzt123 5y ago
  Not necessarily I think. As I understand, Hawkins envisions motor skills as involving a kind of “system call” to the old brain, and the fact that the cortical columns are more efficient does not seem to necessarily imply that old brain structures are similarly more efficient. So, I’m not sure there would have to be a clear correlation between professional sports and general intelligence.

fullshark 5y ago

It's possible for IQ to be a fairly noisy and imperfect measure of cognitive ability, but still a useful signal here to detect a meaningful trend.

tux3 5y ago
Right, and furthermore I think we should welcome other metrics that measure people's abilities, not necessarily among the same axes than IQ tests. IQ is certainly not a perfect metric, but for all the criticisms of it, I haven't seen any reason that psychometrics should not aim to improve. Yet people don't seem to discuss IQ with the intent to improve the metric. Accepting and rejecting it are not the only two options, we could also discuss ways to do better.
- psyc 5y ago
  Seems to me that people have become allergic to anything that seems elitist or undemocratic. The only acceptable opinion is that anyone with a minimum of privilege and hard work can do anything. I was just talking about this with my therapist, and she noted that people don't seem to have the same problem with admitting top athletes have a genetic advantage.
  - thereisnospork 5y ago
    It has always vexed me how people recognize both the genetically athletically gifted and the intellectually 'disadvantaged'[0] but stumble over the concept of intellectually gifted individuals. [0]E.g. those afflicted with autism spectrum disorders, or dyslexia for two trivial examples.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      Is that necessarily true? I think it's common to speak highly of talented individuals as being blessed with "raw intelligence" and the like. The more unseemly thing is to characterize entire groups of individuals with that.

swalls 5y ago

People so desperately want a way to objectively rank themselves against each other that they'll believe IQ is a good way to measure intelligence because their ego needs it to be true.

commandlinefan 5y ago
I suspect the opposite - people who consistently score poorly want so desperately to believe that they're special that they insist that they have some innate, untestable brilliance.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  Yes. Funny how you never hear the "IQ is BS" argument when the news is about some pollutant that lowers IQ's.
- NateEag 5y ago
  I've never taken a formal IQ test. I've taken informal ones on the net and came out in the 135 - 140 range, IIRC. I expect I'd do noticeably worse on a real test. I share that as context for the fact that I'm skeptical of IQ as a useful measure of intelligence. I don't think that skepticism is because I'm embarrassed by my lack of an official score or that my unofficial one is too low.
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant#Rise_to_fame_and_IQ_score https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant#Rise_to_fam... > Savant sees IQ tests as measurements of a variety of mental abilities and thinks intelligence entails so many factors that "attempts to measure it are useless".
- elzbardico 5y ago
  I have the non conventional idea that some of the biggest opponents of any form of innate talent are the already privileged. Thus they can pay lip service to the idea of ending privilege all the while explaining why for now they should be our natural enlightened rulers

commandlinefan 5y ago

> Boiling brains down to one number IQ does measure something, though, and it tracks pretty consistently with that more ephemeral thing that people refer to as "intelligence": if you, personally, found a dozen people you considered "smart" and another dozen you considered "stupid", you'd almost definitely find that the smart ones had high IQs and the dumb ones had low IQs. You might argue about the fine-grained distinction between the smart ones, but you wouldn't find somebody who you considered smart who somehow still had a 50 IQ.

kuhewa 5y ago
That's true, but that's a bar for an extremely crude instrument.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  IQ is an imperfect measure of intelligence. However, it's also the only (objective) measure we have.
  - kuhewa 5y ago
    Yet depending on the use case, a bad map may be worse than no map at all.
beebmam 5y ago
Just because something can be measured does not imply that metric accurately depicts reality. Moreover, all metrics should be criticized as to what part of reality they are depicting and what part of reality they are obscuring. I've yet to be convinced that IQ is anywhere near an accurate depiction of reality.
- engineer_22 5y ago
  I like the way you think. Language, similarly, is not an accurate depiction of reality.
5y ago

timmg 5y ago

What's your opinion, then? Is "intelligence" incapable of being measured? Or do we need a "suite" of numbers? (Or something else?)

VictorPath 5y ago
Even a suite of numbers for human brains sounds more social scientific than scientific, but it makes more sense than one number. Let's take visuo-spatial ability. Men do better in testing than women generally. So for arguments sake let's say they are correctly measuring a deficiency. So now the question is, is this for cultural reasons or genetic reasons? Laszlo Polgar was a psychologist who raised his daughter to train on visuo-spatial thinking, mostly with chess. She became the youngest grandmaster ever, the youngest person to break into the FIDE 100. She became the 8th best chess player in the world. It's anecdotal, but if she is capable of this, presumably other women are genetically capable of this level of visuo-spatial thinking, so the tested deficiencies might point to culture over genetics. As Gould said, it's not just IQ but the blanket if assumptions around it - it is genetic not cultural, it is not remedial etc. As I said, people don't get this worked up over light year measurements.
- timmg 5y ago
  I'm not an expert in any way. But my understanding is that they did/do test on a lot of different axes. But what they found was that people tend to have strong correlations between those scores. As in: if you are good at one, you are good at others. Not exactly as good, of course. But a strong correlation. So that's how they arrived at using a "single number".

mc32 5y ago

Would you rather choose a pool of low IQ members or a pool with members above the mean if tasked with achieving some goal?

NateEag 5y ago
I would look for a concrete test of their ability to perform the goal.
- mc32 5y ago
  If you’re given a choice of one group vs the other, which one would you choose? It could be : build a house, a bridge, design a flying machine, a colony on Mars. If IQ does not have any significance with respect to intelligence then you could choose either and be served just as well. On the other hand…
  - NateEag 5y ago
    I would reject the false dichotomy and look for signals I trust.
    - mc32 5y ago
      Is your claim that the groups are a tossup? You may not like the dichotomy, that’s a fair objection, but I think claiming the groups are a tossup is a pretty big claim.
      - NateEag 5y ago
        I think "intelligence" is a squishy, complex thing, and if I have a specific job to do, I'm going to look for more concrete, trustworthy signals than IQ to see who I want helping me do it.

tmule 5y ago

Stephen Jay Gould was actually fairly innumerate. It’s clear he didn’t understand even the rather simple math behind the PCA, which underpins IQ measurement. You might find this instructive: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1 https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1 “ Boiling brains down to one number and ranking them, and saying it comes from genes, nutty.” Yeah, except that the number correlates with many things we care about in the real world (educational attainment even at the highest levels, crime), even after controlling for many other things we care about in the real world (conscientiousness, SEC).

selimthegrim 5y ago
Well since you are would you like to enlighten us how good PCA is with latent variables?
kuhewa 5y ago
> Stephen Jay Gould was actually fairly innumerate. It’s clear he didn’t understand even the rather simple math behind the PCA, which underpins IQ measurement. You might find this instructive: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1 https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1 Not sure the blogpost supports Gould being innumerate or not understanding PCA.. also, an aside, I doubt the author Hsu would agree with your take here, considering his hero Feynman had an underwhelming IQ relative to his success. BTW what do you mean by IQ measurement is underpinned by PCA (principal component analysis? or the requisite math?)?
- tmule 5y ago
  “ Not sure the blogpost supports Gould being innumerate or not understanding PCA.. also, an aside, I doubt the author Hsu would agree with your take here, considering his hero Feynman had an underwhelming IQ relative to his success.” Actually, here’s Hsu on Gould again: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1 https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1 The author does indeed tackle Feynman’s IQ here, and agrees with me (actually Hsu has informed a large part of my worldview): https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-the-next-einstein/201112/polymath-physicist-richard-feynmans-low-iq-and-finding-another https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/finding-the-next-ein... “ BTW what do you mean by IQ measurement is underpinned by PCA (principal component analysis? or the requisite math?)?” Principal component analysis. More here, again from Hsu: https://www.cog-genomics.org/static/pdf/ggoogle.pdf https://www.cog-genomics.org/static/pdf/ggoogle.pdf

Zenst 5y ago

IQ is like MHz in computers in many ways, whilst an important factor, it's the software that makes the difference.

lostmsu 5y ago
Except the likelihood is it is a log scale with all corresponding consequences.

parsimo2010 5y ago

I won't say that IQ is a perfect measure of intelligence. But there is something there that people can spot. I don't know if you're familiar with American (public school) gifted programs, but they are typically done by referral- someone identifies a student that they consider "gifted" and the school does an IQ test. If their IQ is above some threshold the student is admitted into the program and they get a different curriculum. While the benefit of gifted programs is sometimes called into doubt, teachers have an incredible hit rate in terms of IQ scores. Teacher referrals have a success rate (the student IQ beats the threshold) far higher than the ~5% that you would expect if there was no link between classroom performance and IQ scores. Source: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746049.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746049.pdf There's more to intelligence than just classroom performance, but there is definitely something being measured by IQ tests and it's related to intelligence. Just because it's not perfect doesn't mean we need to discount it completely.

shard 5y ago
The older I get, the more I think that social intelligence - the ability to know what other people are thinking, the ability to convince other people to your way of thinking - is as important, if not more important, than the analytical intelligence measured by IQ, because it's through social intelligence that things get done in this world. I am not aware of any test or measure which are widely used to judge how socially intelligent someone is.
- marvin 5y ago
  This isn't quite what you're talking about, but a full-scale IQ test like the WAIS tests a lot more than just the "what is the next symbol in the sequence" kind of IQ test that is associated with Mensa and others. It contains somewhat open-ended knowledge questions you'd likely have been exposed to in your culture, reaction time tests for finding particular symbols among many others, solving mechanical puzzles, definitions of words you will have encountered, mental arithmetic and others. This isn't quite the same as measuring one's ability to communicate well, understand others' intentions or influence others. But it does test a much wider spectrum of cognitive skills than what many people believe about IQ. It's also worth noting that success in the real world also depends on other traits than all the ones we've discussed. Some notable examples which probably aren't talked about so much, is the tendency to stubbornly work through a difficult problem (out of pleasure or innate drive), the capacity to routinely get a lot done or coming up with and thoroughly exploring new (particularly unconventional) ideas. Beyond a certain point, I'm a bit skeptical that social skills in the absence of other intellectual strengths would generally lead to spectacular success. You won't lead a team to success if you don't know where you're going. Although I suppose you could to a certain degree deduce the right direction from the less eloquently communicated knowledge of others. But that does require the ability to distinguish good ideas from bad.

ThrustVectoring 5y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Grs_jJ5U6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Grs_jJ5U6w Here's a monologue from someone with an IQ of 75. Do you expect the problems he describes in his life to be more or less common among people with his IQ than in the general population?

AQuantized 5y ago

There's ample conversation in the linked paper about how the many demands of society and changing culture influence IQ. The reality is that its one of the few psychometrics with strong correlations to a number of long term outcomes like income, wellbeing, crime, fertility, etc., and which is responsive to changes in the environment and demographics of a nation. That said there is a point to be made that IQ is clearly not 1:1 with everything we think of as 'intelligence'. Trivially, most significant accomplishments take place over months or years as opposed to the minutes or hours of an IQ test. However, using it as a useful tool isn't as reductive as dismissing it entirely simply because it isn't a completely perfect or comprehensive metric.

fallingknife 5y ago

You could say the same for BMI. e.g. most NFL running backs are considered "morbidly obese." But if the BMI of the population increases by 5 points, that's very significant. In the same way, I take population IQ measures a lot more seriously than individual.

kbelder 5y ago

Imagine you evaluated the performance of all a human's muscles, and gave an overall 's' score to individuals based on the aggregate. It would be a vast simplification, it would be combining slow and fast twitch muscle fibers, it would be combining heart and legs and torso muscles... you would want to be far more precise when dealing with an individual and evaluating how to benefit or correct their musculature. But still, you could probably take any group of ten people and quickly arrange them in a line from lowest to highest 's' score. You would find a huge correlation between 's' and various professions. Equating it with astrology is silly, a rhetorical flourish that nobody sensible could believe.

vixen99 5y ago

The topic has moved on quite a bit since 2002 when Gould died. For instance: "Childhood intelligence is heritable, highly polygenic and associated with FNBP1L". Molecular Psychiatry (2013), 1–6. Lots more titles like that these days. It's not nature or nurture; it's a question of how much of each & the nature part is definitely significant. At the time, Gould's comments about intelligence were widely discussed and accepted in the popular press (NYT, NY Review of Books, etc.,) but subject to a lot of criticism in the science journals which did not get much coverage.