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> IQ is supposed to be like Horsepower for brains. I don't think this is a very valuable way to think about IQ. It is what it is, nothing more nothing less. It
by anm89 4y ago
> IQ is supposed to be like Horsepower for brains.
I don't think this is a very valuable way to think about IQ. It is what it is, nothing more nothing less. It's the location you fall on in a normal distribution of intelligence as measured by specific tests.
- teaearlgrey_hot 4y agoWe can also test how far most people can jump and their ability to memorize numbers or do arithmetic or algebra quickly. We don’t have a “movement quotient” or a “calculation quotient” so what exactly does an “intelligence quotient” aim to quantify precisely? It’s not intelligence, I’ll argue.
- anm89 4y agoWe absolute have and use these things. This is why the US army makes you run a mile and counts your pull ups. These things are not measures of your "true physical fitness", they are just data points. But they have extremely high correlation on other fitness metrics so we just measure them and assign a score. You could very reasonably label the outcome of that test a movement quotient.
- DarylZero 4y agoFor the general population, pullups are just measuring bodyweight.
- anm89 4y ago??? Yeah if you average everyone together. You could say this about every fitness activity that exists. It doesn't mean you aren't going to see big differences in results when you test it which is why they do it.
- DarylZero 4y agoYou can't say the same thing about everything. If you measured absolute strength the correlation with weight would go the other way!
- lebuffon 4y agoI have heard that IQ measurements correlate very well with general success in society. Peterson says they correlate better than any other measurement in human Psychology. (Paraphrasing and I can't validate it) Peterson also says that it doesn't matter which questions you use. People with hi scores on one test will typically have high scores on the other tests. It seems to be a hard thing for intelligent creatures to hear: There are some smarter that you and some less smart and you are most likely in the middle range somewhere.
- technothrasher 4y ago> There are some smarter that you and some less smart and you are most likely in the middle range somewhere. This always seemed to me like an important piece of social intelligence. I've noticed that people who are intelligent enough to be smarter than most around them, but who take that to mean nobody else is as smart as they are, end up getting played a lot by other folks who recognize this failure.
- anm89 4y agoI'm not disagreeing at all. I'm just saying that isn't what IQ is. It correlates with all sorts of stuff and understanding those correlations is useful. But IQ isn't its correlations. I definitely believe those correlations exist and are pretty strong. It isn't "Mental Horsepower" though. If something called "Mental Horsepower" or "General Intelligence" exist which I don't personally buy, IQ probably correlates with them but it isn't them. IQ is a location on the point of a normalized distribution of scores on a specific set of tests. Nothing more, nothing less. Correlations don't guarantee things to be true. If IQ correlates strongly with "Mental Horsepower" it could still be very possible for a specific individual to have high IQ with low "Mental Horsepower" although it is statistically less likely.