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IQ tests show the ability to sit down and do pointless tasks which an authority figure has told you are meaningful and you must guess what that authority figure

IQ tests show the ability to sit down and do pointless tasks which an authority figure has told you are meaningful and you must guess what that authority figure wants you to do. Extremely valuable skills for white collar drones. Completely meaningless as a measure of actual intelligence though.

rafaelero 4y ago
tdba 4y ago
IQ is the most reliable and most valid measure of general intelligence we have been able to come up with. It is good enough for many clinical purposes, eg assessing brain damage, and also just so happens to correlate very strongly with just about every "life outcome" you can think of. Does it measure everything imaginable about human intelligence? No. But it measures what we actually know about very well. To call it completely meaningless is absurd.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  You should reread what I said.
  - tdba 4y ago
    Be specific.
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      The ability to do boring arbitrary tasks is much more strongly correlated with the measures that IQ proponents cite as proof it's a meaningful measure than with whatever they mean by intelligence. We could get the same results by forcing people to complete white noise patterns and seeing how long it takes them to quit.
      - tdba 4y ago
        That's an interesting idea, and while I doubt that it is true it seems like something you could determine experimentally. Has anyone done that or are you just asserting it?
prepend 4y ago
I’m not sure what IQ tests you mean but that doesn’t sound like any I’ve used. The intent is to gauge general mental ability, not rule following. Take spatial in tests [0]. They aren’t about rule following so much as problem solving and lateral thinking. Also iq tests are standardized and normalized. They have flaws, certainly, and are no way meaningless. It’s the best that we have until we get something better and there’s lots of correlations between iq and positive life outcomes. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_intelligence_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_intelligence_(psycholo... [1] “ IQ correlates positively with family income, socioeconomic status, school and occupational performance, military training assignments, law-abidingness, healthful habits, illness, and morality. In contrast, IQ is negatively correlated with welfare, psychopathology, crime, inattentiveness, boredom, delinquency, and poverty.” https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/iq-and-society/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/iq-and-...
- thrown_22 4y ago
  >The intent is to gauge general mental ability, not rule following. General mental ability as defined by sitting down and doing an arbitrary boring task, viz. following a rule that you don't see much point in but someone important told you to do. The ability to do well on those tasks correlates much more strongly with: >family income, socioeconomic status, school and occupational performance, military training assignments, law-abidingness, healthful habits, illness, and morality. In contrast, IQ is negatively correlated with welfare, psychopathology, crime, inattentiveness, boredom, delinquency, and poverty than whatever intelligence is. In short: IQ is a great tool to measure your ability to be a white collar drone.
  - prepend 4y ago
    The task isn’t arbitrary. It’s designed to measure mental ability. And it’s not boring as it can be quite short. And the rules should be quite easy to understand as they involve things like “which shapes fit together.” The test is not designed to be confusing or hard to understand. I expect IQ is also correlated with being a white collar drone (pretty awesome) but it’s also correlated with whatever intelligence is, as imperfectly as we’ve defined it.

rafaelero 4y ago

tdba 4y ago

IQ is the most reliable and most valid measure of general intelligence we have been able to come up with. It is good enough for many clinical purposes, eg assessing brain damage, and also just so happens to correlate very strongly with just about every "life outcome" you can think of. Does it measure everything imaginable about human intelligence? No. But it measures what we actually know about very well. To call it completely meaningless is absurd.

thrown_22 4y ago
You should reread what I said.
- tdba 4y ago
  Be specific.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    The ability to do boring arbitrary tasks is much more strongly correlated with the measures that IQ proponents cite as proof it's a meaningful measure than with whatever they mean by intelligence. We could get the same results by forcing people to complete white noise patterns and seeing how long it takes them to quit.
    - tdba 4y ago
      That's an interesting idea, and while I doubt that it is true it seems like something you could determine experimentally. Has anyone done that or are you just asserting it?

prepend 4y ago

I’m not sure what IQ tests you mean but that doesn’t sound like any I’ve used. The intent is to gauge general mental ability, not rule following. Take spatial in tests [0]. They aren’t about rule following so much as problem solving and lateral thinking. Also iq tests are standardized and normalized. They have flaws, certainly, and are no way meaningless. It’s the best that we have until we get something better and there’s lots of correlations between iq and positive life outcomes. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_intelligence_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_intelligence_(psycholo... [1] “ IQ correlates positively with family income, socioeconomic status, school and occupational performance, military training assignments, law-abidingness, healthful habits, illness, and morality. In contrast, IQ is negatively correlated with welfare, psychopathology, crime, inattentiveness, boredom, delinquency, and poverty.” https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/iq-and-society/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/iq-and-...

thrown_22 4y ago
>The intent is to gauge general mental ability, not rule following. General mental ability as defined by sitting down and doing an arbitrary boring task, viz. following a rule that you don't see much point in but someone important told you to do. The ability to do well on those tasks correlates much more strongly with: >family income, socioeconomic status, school and occupational performance, military training assignments, law-abidingness, healthful habits, illness, and morality. In contrast, IQ is negatively correlated with welfare, psychopathology, crime, inattentiveness, boredom, delinquency, and poverty than whatever intelligence is. In short: IQ is a great tool to measure your ability to be a white collar drone.
- prepend 4y ago
  The task isn’t arbitrary. It’s designed to measure mental ability. And it’s not boring as it can be quite short. And the rules should be quite easy to understand as they involve things like “which shapes fit together.” The test is not designed to be confusing or hard to understand. I expect IQ is also correlated with being a white collar drone (pretty awesome) but it’s also correlated with whatever intelligence is, as imperfectly as we’ve defined it.