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>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.

>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.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  The tasks which can be reduced to finite integer sequences are absolutely arbitrary. E.g. you're given a finite set of pictures and expected to guess what the next picture is from a few possibilities. The answer is that it's all of them since any finite sequence has an infinite number of generating functions. The only way to get it right is to try and read the mind of whoever wrote the test and guess what they meant. An invaluable skill to have in the white collar workforce when guessing what your boss actually wants from you. But white collar empathy is not intelligence. From the IQ test listed here: https://www.mensa.org/public/mensa-iq-challenge https://www.mensa.org/public/mensa-iq-challenge literally all of them are reducible to questions about integer sequences.
hardware2win 4y ago
> short: IQ is a great tool to measure your ability to be a white collar drone. But why so snarky?
- prepend 4y ago
  I’m not a fan of ad hominem but the most reasonable guess to me is that someone did poorly on IQ tests and is working to justify why they are bad. Or they have a super high score and are trying to ultimately justify their argument with “well I scored 179 and even I think they are bad.” I don’t think we’ll have closure.

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.

thrown_22 4y ago
The tasks which can be reduced to finite integer sequences are absolutely arbitrary. E.g. you're given a finite set of pictures and expected to guess what the next picture is from a few possibilities. The answer is that it's all of them since any finite sequence has an infinite number of generating functions. The only way to get it right is to try and read the mind of whoever wrote the test and guess what they meant. An invaluable skill to have in the white collar workforce when guessing what your boss actually wants from you. But white collar empathy is not intelligence. From the IQ test listed here: https://www.mensa.org/public/mensa-iq-challenge https://www.mensa.org/public/mensa-iq-challenge literally all of them are reducible to questions about integer sequences.

hardware2win 4y ago

> short: IQ is a great tool to measure your ability to be a white collar drone. But why so snarky?

prepend 4y ago
I’m not a fan of ad hominem but the most reasonable guess to me is that someone did poorly on IQ tests and is working to justify why they are bad. Or they have a super high score and are trying to ultimately justify their argument with “well I scored 179 and even I think they are bad.” I don’t think we’ll have closure.