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Intelligence is like the person said above, horsepower for brains. It's about how well you're able to reason things. And often how quickly you're able to do it,
by bena 5y ago
Intelligence is like the person said above, horsepower for brains. It's about how well you're able to reason things. And often how quickly you're able to do it, although this test seems to disregard that portion. Which is fine, they make it clear that it's more of a test to see if you should be tested rather than a test in and of itself.
Pattern recognition is a large part of that. A person who is able to discern patterns more easily, is usually able to reason better. More able to do second and third order thinking.
IQ "tests" that use words or numbers are also testing knowledge to some degree, which isn't something you typically want when you want to test raw intelligence. Being able to do calculus doesn't necessarily prove you're intelligent, it proves you know calculus.
So that leaves abstract concepts. And that's another facet of intelligence, being able to think abstractly. There should also be some "die folding" questions in there. Where it shows you six connected boxes and you pick the cube that it makes. That one is also about spatial relations as you have to model the cube in your head in some fashion.
All that being said: intelligence is nothing on its own. It's a force multiplier. Intelligence allows you to use the knowledge and skills you do have better. It also makes the acquisition of knowledge and skills easier. People with higher IQs have better life outcomes on average than those with lower IQs among every cohort. What that means, if you take all the poor people, those poor people with higher IQs are going to be doing better overall. Still poor, but able to make more of what they have. Tall people? People with higher IQs will be doing better overall than those with lower IQs. Doctors? Same. Welders? Same.
Now, this doesn't mean that every person with a higher IQ is doing better. Success is very multi-faceted and dependent on a lot of things, some of which are outside of our control entirely. But it helps.
- brnaftr361 5y agoOnly if you leave in people with cognitive impairments. IQ against income rapidly decorrelates as you exceed the 80-point threshold; income is probably the only real and hard measure - and frankly even using that measure conflates success. How many conventionally smart people are ascetic or minimalist? Historically, there's a pretty high count.
- bena 5y agoPegging success solely to income is disingenuous. It's not the only measure of success, let alone the only "real and hard measure". There are awards, patents, accomplishments, etc. There are positive correlations between IQ and positive outcomes in general. Basically, take a metric of success and group people into it and you'll find people with higher IQs in the groups with better outcomes. Even if you then slice those groups by other factors.
- brnaftr361 5y agoI already covered that contingency. All the other criteria you've mentioned are qualitative. Which returns us to income levels, which again, IQ doesn't predict very well. And the claim that you'll find people with "higher IQ" (not clinically disabled), to be more successful is specious because you're including the portion of the tail that is dysfunctional.
- bena 5y agoFirst, in terms of salary, people with below 80 IQs aren't included because they generally don't have jobs. Second, why would we even have to cut off the tail portion? Next, you didn't cover that contingency. You keep saying it's all income levels, but it's not. IQ and positive outcomes are positively correlated. Pick a thing, pick a measure of success, you'll find that people with higher IQs will tend towards the successful group. And this is also a "all doctors are tall, not all tall people are doctors" kind of statistic. Higher IQ people will wind up in the more successful groups more often, but being in the more successful group doesn't mean you have a high IQ.
- Sharlin 5y ago> And often how quickly you're able to do it, although this test seems to disregard that portion. It has a time limit, so it does measure how quick you are.
- bena 5y agoYes, there's a 25 minute time limit on the test as a whole. I just recalled the part where they said there was no bonus for finishing fast. So it probably bakes in a range. Like if you complete this test in the allotted time, you will be in this range. But if you completed it in half the time, you'd probably be higher, but they haven't calculated the range you'd be in. They'd just say, "Yeah, you're in the top range".
- Sharlin 5y agoIt probably never makes sense not to use the whole 25 minutes. If you think you got all of them right in less than that time, it pays to use the remaining time to double-check your answers. The test seems to be calibrated such that if you get all the questions right, and use exactly 25 minutes, you score the maximum, 145.
- kbenson 5y agoI clicked finish (without having finished every question) with 2-3 minutes left, and they popped up a dialog suggesting I use the extra time to review my answers (not to keep trying on the question I gave up on).