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> IQ is rife with issues Indeed, and yet people are obsessed with the it and the idea of measuring their own intelligence - I completely do not understand it.

> IQ is rife with issues Indeed, and yet people are obsessed with the it and the idea of measuring their own intelligence - I completely do not understand it. I am in an extremely high percentile, but I am a total moron in a lot of areas and if you met me would likely think so as well. It's a poor predictor for just about everything except how good a person is at recognizing patterns (I know there are many different kinds of tests, but inevitably, it feels like this) and how quickly they can reason. But people are obsessed with it (Go on quora and search "IQ", you probably won't half to though, since half the questions there are seemingly about IQ). A thing I like to say is you didn't earn your intelligence any more than a 7'0" man earned his height - to some degree it seems innate (we don't even really know how). This all said, it seems even more pointless to try to "IQ" test an AI in this manner. What does it predict? What is it measuring? And you're not going to be able to use the same questions for more than 1 test, because the AI will "learn" the answers.

godelski 2y ago
The lowest IQ thing you can do is be obsessed with IQ. There are known knowns, there are known unknowns, and there are unknown unknowns. The wise man knows he cannot know what he does not know and that it'd be naive to presume he knows when he cannot know how much he doesn't know. Therefore, only the unintelligent man really _knows_ anything.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  IQ is compute speed, not storage. It has nothing to do with knowledge. IBM used to give one out as part of their hiring process, years ago, and even I took it the entire test was a timed multiple choice exam where every question was looking at an object made out of cubes and choosing the correct orientation of the object from the choices, after the object was arbitrarily rotated according to instructions in the question. Then, IQ can be derived by determining how quickly all participants can answer the questionnaire correctly, and ranking their speeds, and then normalizing the values so 100 is in the middle. Turns out, scores will fall along a bell curve if you do that. You can call that phenomenon whatever, but most people call it IQ and hopefully I've explained well why that has nothing at all to do with static knowledge in this comment.
  - 11101010001100 2y ago
    Speed can be learned though...chess for example.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      It isn't really possible to learn calculation speed, learning is about memorising shortcuts and heuristics, or perhaps how to spot them. And training to avoid waste. Strategic questions. Consider calculating 1+1*1*1*1*1*1*1*1... (= 2). It doesn't matter how quickly someone attempts to multiply an infinite number of 1s they will never succeed because infinity is too large. They have to notice a shortcut that lets them skip doing all the calculations. That shows the difference between calculation speed and happening upon a superior strategy. But people who can calculate very quickly will have a lot of opportunities to come up with a successful strategy because they can try more in what time they have.
      - 11101010001100 2y ago
        This is exactly what happens in chess... for instance trading into a known winning endgame.
        JohnMakin 2y ago
        this was exactly what I thought of and couldn’t articulate it this briefly - particularly pattern recognition and muscle memory in physical chess. It looks crazy when you see it, but the “tricks” are rote. I play mostly 5m chess because I’m a much faster thinker than I am at depth, and a lot of it is just trained speed since I was a young kid. When you see a particular pattern 50,000 times there are people that are good at just immediately making that synapse connect in their head as to the next move, without thinking, I believe this factor is called “intuition” sometimes on accident. It’s definitely a gift to learn though that I think is often confused with deep intelligence sometimes - which explains certain chess types well too. I am often confused for the latter type when I definitely am not - I think those type of intelligences are better at specialization whereas I’m more of a generalist because I can juggle a lot of things at once. They’re both very different types of intelligence that cannot be measured by iq tests, which is why I tend to scoff at what use they are and their usability in predicting outcomes. Trying to then take this flawed approach and apply it to AI is ludicrous and completely jumping the shark to me. You want to take a flawed measure of human intelligence that we also dont understand fully, and apply it to a machine that we also dont really understand? Ok, then miss me when I laugh at that kind of talk, it is just so silly. This is a more general rant in this broader thread and not directed at anyone spefifically.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
What do you consider a poor predictor? It is correlated with many outcomes and performance measures, with increasing predictive power the further you move towards the extremes. Maybe this is an issue of bubbles, but 90% of the commentary I see about IQ is similar to yours, claiming it is meaningless or low impact.
sanxiyn 2y ago
IQ is a poor predictor of, say, income, in the absolute sense. Correlation is something like 0.4. But compared to what? Compared to personal psychological metrics (of which IQ is one), IQ performs extremely well as a predictor. Things like openness and extraversion correlate at something like 0.1 and others are lower. In fact, IQ is the single best predictor we have and other correlations are usually measured while controlling for IQ.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  It’s one of the most studied Quantitative metrics in psychology.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  Ok, which iq tests are you talking about? there are like 50 flavors and no consistent school of thought about this, and I hate to be this guy, but can you post your sources here?

godelski 2y ago

The lowest IQ thing you can do is be obsessed with IQ. There are known knowns, there are known unknowns, and there are unknown unknowns. The wise man knows he cannot know what he does not know and that it'd be naive to presume he knows when he cannot know how much he doesn't know. Therefore, only the unintelligent man really _knows_ anything.

dingnuts 2y ago
IQ is compute speed, not storage. It has nothing to do with knowledge. IBM used to give one out as part of their hiring process, years ago, and even I took it the entire test was a timed multiple choice exam where every question was looking at an object made out of cubes and choosing the correct orientation of the object from the choices, after the object was arbitrarily rotated according to instructions in the question. Then, IQ can be derived by determining how quickly all participants can answer the questionnaire correctly, and ranking their speeds, and then normalizing the values so 100 is in the middle. Turns out, scores will fall along a bell curve if you do that. You can call that phenomenon whatever, but most people call it IQ and hopefully I've explained well why that has nothing at all to do with static knowledge in this comment.
- 11101010001100 2y ago
  Speed can be learned though...chess for example.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    It isn't really possible to learn calculation speed, learning is about memorising shortcuts and heuristics, or perhaps how to spot them. And training to avoid waste. Strategic questions. Consider calculating 1+1*1*1*1*1*1*1*1... (= 2). It doesn't matter how quickly someone attempts to multiply an infinite number of 1s they will never succeed because infinity is too large. They have to notice a shortcut that lets them skip doing all the calculations. That shows the difference between calculation speed and happening upon a superior strategy. But people who can calculate very quickly will have a lot of opportunities to come up with a successful strategy because they can try more in what time they have.
    - 11101010001100 2y ago
      This is exactly what happens in chess... for instance trading into a known winning endgame.
      - JohnMakin 2y ago
        this was exactly what I thought of and couldn’t articulate it this briefly - particularly pattern recognition and muscle memory in physical chess. It looks crazy when you see it, but the “tricks” are rote. I play mostly 5m chess because I’m a much faster thinker than I am at depth, and a lot of it is just trained speed since I was a young kid. When you see a particular pattern 50,000 times there are people that are good at just immediately making that synapse connect in their head as to the next move, without thinking, I believe this factor is called “intuition” sometimes on accident. It’s definitely a gift to learn though that I think is often confused with deep intelligence sometimes - which explains certain chess types well too. I am often confused for the latter type when I definitely am not - I think those type of intelligences are better at specialization whereas I’m more of a generalist because I can juggle a lot of things at once. They’re both very different types of intelligence that cannot be measured by iq tests, which is why I tend to scoff at what use they are and their usability in predicting outcomes. Trying to then take this flawed approach and apply it to AI is ludicrous and completely jumping the shark to me. You want to take a flawed measure of human intelligence that we also dont understand fully, and apply it to a machine that we also dont really understand? Ok, then miss me when I laugh at that kind of talk, it is just so silly. This is a more general rant in this broader thread and not directed at anyone spefifically.

s1artibartfast 2y ago

What do you consider a poor predictor? It is correlated with many outcomes and performance measures, with increasing predictive power the further you move towards the extremes. Maybe this is an issue of bubbles, but 90% of the commentary I see about IQ is similar to yours, claiming it is meaningless or low impact.

sanxiyn 2y ago

IQ is a poor predictor of, say, income, in the absolute sense. Correlation is something like 0.4. But compared to what? Compared to personal psychological metrics (of which IQ is one), IQ performs extremely well as a predictor. Things like openness and extraversion correlate at something like 0.1 and others are lower. In fact, IQ is the single best predictor we have and other correlations are usually measured while controlling for IQ.

ninetyninenine 2y ago
It’s one of the most studied Quantitative metrics in psychology.
JohnMakin 2y ago
Ok, which iq tests are you talking about? there are like 50 flavors and no consistent school of thought about this, and I hate to be this guy, but can you post your sources here?