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Studies correlating IQ to genius are mostly bad science

113 points by paulpauper 2y ago

defrost 2y ago
Not only is IQ a poor measure that's perhaps best at capturing near average performance, "intelligence" is an attribute that's not readily ranked in a linear manner as height can be.
- trts 2y ago
  generally intelligent people tend to perform well on intelligence tests people who perform well on intelligence tests may not present as generally intelligent
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > "intelligence" is an attribute that's not readily ranked in a linear manner as height can be IQ isn't a linear scale [1][2]. (It is ordinal.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superposition_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superposition_principle
  - defrost 2y ago
    Who said that it was?
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Who said that it was? You said "'intelligence' is an attribute that's not readily ranked in a linear manner" while complaining about IQ. IQ doesn't rank intelligence linearly.
      - defrost 2y ago
        I'll assume you understand the difference between a 1D line, a 2D plane, a 3D space and grasp basic english. What is your issue here?
        JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > I'll assume you understand the difference between a 1D line, a 2D plane IQ isn't linear because it is not superposable. A 100 IQ person isn't twice as clever, within the definition of cleverness IQ measures, as someone with a 50 IQ. (An 8' man is twice as tall as a 4' child.) If you need to force it into a geometric analogy, the distribution IQ rests on cannot be described by a line.
        defrost 2y ago
        > IQ isn't linear because it is not superposable. A 100 IQ person isn't twice as clever, within the definition of cleverness IQ measures, as someone with a 50 IQ. You appear to be thinking of a uniform distribution as compared to a normal distribution. Nominally both height and IQ approximate a normal distribution (sans the infinite tails, leaving aside discrete ordinal bucketing). "Linear" (see the O.E.D. for example) is a word with many meanings, mostly pertaining to lines and things resembling a line. You can line up people by height or by IQ score, you cannot line up people by "intelligence", it's a partial order at best. > the distribution IQ rests on cannot be described by a line. You're the only one of us that connected the scalar IQ distribution to a line .. I've been aware of the central limit theorem for 45+ years now. The geometric analogy is that mapping people by intelligence to a line is a poor fit, to a plane or higher space would make more sense. As evidenced by this exchange.
        butter999 2y ago
        You probably meant that there doesn't exist a total order for comparing intelligence and/or that it isn't a scalar quantity like height, but "linear" didn't convey that meaning.
        defrost 2y ago
        Intelligence clearly isn't a scalar quantity like height, the implication is that a faux scalar quantity like IQ or other ordinal scale doesn't well describe intelligence.
jjmarr 2y ago
In all honesty I just thought I was getting stupider over time. Glad to hear I'm just bouncing around the margin of error.
MisterKent 2y ago
No mention of standard deviation? Just by the fact the IQ is your place on a normal curve, with a 15 point standard deviation, there are at least 100K+ people in the world with an IQ of 160. The smartest 0.0032% of the population.
- nradov 2y ago
  Does intelligence follow the standard distribution?
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Does intelligence follow the standard distribution? Intelligence may or may not. IQ, by definition, does.
    - ks2048 2y ago
      So IQ can be negative? (Normal distribution has non zero probability mass for all real numbers)
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > IQ can be negative? Theoretically, yes. We chose 100 as a midpoint for convenience. (Practically, there is a lower bound beyond which we cannot meaningfully interpret test results.)
    - lifthrasiir 2y ago
      IQ as an intelligence rank does indeed follow the standard distribution, but in practice IQ is estimated by tests. I believe the GP wanted to ask about a distribution of such "estimated" IQs.
      - wavemode 2y ago
        Your score on an IQ test is reflective of your percentile amongst all IQ test takers. That is, if 50% of takers did better than you and 50% did worse than you, then you score a 100 (regardless of the actual number of questions you got right or wrong). So, yes, IQ scores always necessarily follow a normal distribution - because that's how the scores are determined in the first place.
kordlessagain 2y ago
I’ve often wondered how IQ correlates with the ability to visualize or recall audio of certain things. For example, my neighbor in California - he had an ability to look at an equation and actually visualize the plot of it like a graphing calculator. That is certainly intelligence. I got into asking people how they visualized for a while because I myself don’t. But then I’m apparently good at knowing if I’ve seen somebody or not, no matter how short of time it was I’ve seen them. I’m sorta the same way with having been a place, usually knowing how to get back there, without actually seeing it. Sometimes I wonder if I do that “similar” thing with everything, including ideas. My stepdad once said he met Clinton briefly once and then Clinton saw him many years later at a Razorback game and he instantly remembered my dad’s name. That’s a level of intelligence. And if somebody has perfect pitch, or can listen to a song and play it back in the piano, then that’s also intelligence of a certain type, maybe. So what makes an IQ test be able to measure such variety when some have totally different modes of thinking?
- emseetech 2y ago
  I've become convinced of the idea that everything on some level is a matter of practice, and that effortless practice comes from enjoyment. Maybe your neighbor can visualize graphs because he practiced visualizing graphs a lot. And he did that because he found an odd joy in it that others didn't. Bill Clinton knew he wanted to be in politics at a very early age by all accounts. And considering he didn't exactly come from a powerful political family with a clear path forward, it's likely he decided to practice remembering people and by the time anyone could comment on it, he'd had decades of practice. But honestly maybe he just had fun seeing what he could remember about the people he met and that turned it into a fun game for him that paid off big. When I was young, I played a game where I would count the letters in the words people were saying to determine whether the total sentence was divisible by three. So for a time in my life I was unusually good at doing modulo division on people's conversation. I've since lost that ability (not much use to it), but I wasn't some savant. My mother worked early shifts at the hospital and would drive me and my siblings to my grandmother's house, and the fog and dew would cling to the windshield regardless of whether it was raining so the windshield wipers would be on. And I would sync the voices on the AM radio to the three positions of the wipers, left, middle, right, left, middle, right. It was a game to pass the time because I couldn't fall back asleep after being woken up. By the time I could do it as a party trick, I'd had hundred of hours of practice.
zem 2y ago
can we put the "your" back in the title? it's currently unfairly ungrammatical.
- raldi 2y ago
  I’m curious what could be the intent behind that rewrite rule.
modeless 2y ago
When I first started using OTPs from Google Authenticator I found it difficult to remember random 6 digit numbers in one glance. Today after doing it almost daily for years and years I find it easy. Almost anything can be improved with training, including IQ test tasks, contrary to what test makers say. But I don't believe that such training improves general intelligence.
- throwawayk7h 2y ago
  I read that studying for an IQ test generally causes a gain of about 6 points at most. (Which is quite a bit.)
- skirmish 2y ago
  I still find it hard to remember 8 digit OTPs, and work around that by repeatedly "singing" them in my mind while I type them. I can easily repeat those 8 meaningless words in my mind, and then decipher only the next digit I need to type.
magicalhippo 2y ago
When I was a teen I took a IQ test that was supposed to measure up to 160. It had quite a few questions but due to the scaling, just getting one question correct made it declare you had like 120 IQ or so. Turned out I did indeed get one of the questions right, a fairly straight forward math question. Decided the test was probably bogus, just seemed dumb to conclude IQ based on a single correct answer. Growing up some more I realized intelligence is complicated and multifaceted. That I can solve some puzzles and usually think things through doesn't preclude me from being dumb as a brick in other situations.
- wongarsu 2y ago
  When I did a psychologist-administered IQ test it took like 3 hours and resulted in four scores on different metrics. For example I had a pretty average 103 IQ on language, but about 120 IQ on logical thinking. In the end you get a total score from the average of the subcategories. All IQ tests are pretty incomplete and a bit stupid, but some are less stupid than others
- singularity2001 2y ago
  on an old computer I got an IQ score of 210 just by memorizing all the results still felt pretty good
  - milesrout 2y ago
    That isn't an IQ test. You can't do them on computers. They are assessed in person by professionals. You can't practice because the test aren't publicly available.
    - magicalhippo 2y ago
      That does not preclude a lot of them to claim they're IQ tests...
- Viliam1234 2y ago
  Most IQ tests are fake, especially all online tests. You often get IQ 120 just by answering randomly.
jason-phillips 2y ago
look dear, the hoi polloi are seething again
- fsckboy 2y ago
  > look dear, the hoi polloi are seething again "hoi" means "the" in greek. So, if you want to set yourself off from hoi polloi, don't include the "the"
  - kstenerud 2y ago
    Except that's not how we do it when borrowing phrases from other languages as glorified nouns. We say "The [thing]", thus "the hoi polloi".
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      The normal thing to do in that case is to ignore the parts that are just artifacts of the other language, so you'd say "the polloi". (Or, really, you'd say "the many"; it's not an esoteric concept.) If you read older translations of mythology, you'll see that inflectional endings for foreign nouns are just left off, so you have e.g. Jormungand instead of Jormungandr and Thor instead of Thorr. (It's true for history too, where we prefer Virgil to Vergilius and Ovid to Ovidius.) Recently there's been some kind of fetish for including foreign artifacts in borrowed words, even when those words are already well established without them. I kind of get the sense that this kind of thing is driven by people who think that learning a foreign alphabet is the same thing as learning a foreign language.
      - milesrout 2y ago
        "The hoi polloi" is a fixed phrase in English. Its etymology is irrelevant. We don't pronounce it "properly" either. Thay is because it isn't Greek! It is English. It has Greek origins but it was long ago borrowed into English and now follows English rules. ~Everyone knows "hoi" means "the" in Greek. But the phrase in English is "the hoi polloi". It is never found except as "the hoi polloi". If you said "Hoi polloi are upset" in real life people would look at you funny. There are loads of other examples of this happening. For example there are various verbs and adjectives from Latin that have been borrowed as nouns into English. If you go "uhm actually that is a verb in Latin actually" you are annoying and wrong. Language evolves.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
etempleton 2y ago
What people typically refer to as an IQ test was not designed nor is it considered to be an accurate test of genius. It is not meant to mean anything if someone scores particularly well. The reason these tests are administered is to understand if there is perhaps a learning disability. If you score low overall, or low in a particular area that is then used as a diagnostic tool. For example, a normal score overall with a markedly low working memory score might point to a number of diagnoses. Yes, scoring high is impressive, but is pretty meaningless in terms of outcomes beyond a point. Most IQ test scores are just made up. And there are plenty of self proclaimed genius IQ people who seem to be completely unremarkable beyond being a good test taker.
- elcritch 2y ago
  > The reason these tests are administered is to understand if there is perhaps a learning disability. If you score low overall, or low in a particular area that is then used as a diagnostic tool. For example, a normal score overall with a markedly low working memory score might point to a number of diagnoses. That's how I discovered my learning disability. Sort of ironic given that I'm a voracious learner and have become quite proficient in a couple of fields. However I'm a relatively slow learner, sometimes have quite dumb moments, and struggle with tests or being put on the spot. Usually when I do grasp a topic it's at a deep intuitive level. Still a psychologist gave me a proper IQ exam after I emailed him saying I felt something was off in my brain. Testing took half a day. When I went back for results my score was close to the average for college graduates. Yet the phycologist asked me when I was going to get a PhD. That confused me as my core didn't seem impressive. Then he said I probably had ADHD. Like many 80's kids I'd always sorta thought ADHD was mostly made up. Well he explained the results to me, in particular my low working memory compared to the rest of my scores on other subtests. My IQ dropped 40-50 points on some particular subscores which correlates very highly with ADHD. By the end of that meeting I'd begun to realize, that it made a lot of sense with my struggles over the years. So yes, IQ tests are very helpful for diagnosis. I later got an official diagnosis at university. I'm glad the psychologist offered me that IQ test. I hope others consider IQ testing if you're "smart but stuck".
  - deleted 2y ago
Perenti 2y ago
IQ measures how good you are at IQ tests. I'm brilliant at those tests, I consistently score 5+ SD above 100. I'm also an idiot, and pretty much an asshole. IQ itself puts no beans on the table, and has little to no relationship to how good a human being you are.
- Judgmentality 2y ago
  > I consistently score 5+ SD above 100 You consistently score 175+ on IQ tests?
  - Perenti 2y ago
    Yes. IQ tests are easy. Life, now that's a real challenge.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - farresito 2y ago
      Do you have any other family members with very high IQs?
      - Perenti 2y ago
        Yes, there is a pattern. Most of my relatives are very quick, those tested all come out 120+. Two of my sons have absurd IQs like me. My second is about my level (170+), and my youngest is some kind of megamind mutant. His brain scares me. He's very very clever.
        farresito 2y ago
        What was your experience like in school and university? Have you come across people who you thought were at a similar level intelectually as you?
  - Viliam1234 2y ago
Ferret7446 2y ago
The elephant in the room is that whatever IQ is measuring, it is strongly correlated with all of the things people would generally agree correlates with intelligence. It is a strong predictor for what is generally considered success: financial, health, achievements, career. It is a strong predictor for how fast people learn things or become competent in roles generally associated with intelligence. You can nitpick it, you can be right, but you are also preaching to the rocks and trees. The fact is people with low IQs are going to struggle more and people with high IQs do not need to struggle as much, in all areas of life. The exact number, or accuracy, or whether it is really intelligence does not change the reality.
- Arthanos 2y ago
  The ZIP code you're born in is a stronger predictor of all those things than IQ.
  - oidar 2y ago
    Do you have a citation for that?
    - regularjack 2y ago
      Do you even need one?
  - singularity2001 2y ago
    smart people love to stick together
    - kavouras 2y ago
      rich*
  - threatofrain 2y ago
    And there are other people living in the same zip code as you. A single family may even have more than one child living under the same roof. Naturally the question will arise anyway as to why there are differences in learning speed or fluency.
mod50ack 2y ago
As an aside — intelligence is not the same thing as accomplishment. A lot of people do well in school (and do well on IQ tests) and do not achieve anything of note. The people we remember are those who achieve great things, not those who do well on puzzle-solving tests. Those aren't the same thing, and this is probably why Stephen Hawking said that caring about IQ is for losers. Hawking was undoubtedly a smart guy, but that fact alone did not make his career. He did a lot of hard work in a field he was passionate about. Why would you tell Stephen Hawking how good you are at solving puzzles — why would he care about that? I'm sure he would have found news of some finding relevant to his research interests much more compelling. Now, are IQ-type tests useful? Yes. They are quite good to administer in school to gauge people's reasoning abilities — to a certain point. The point of the tests was never to rank the smartest people, and to think about these edge cases — the ones tests are worst at measuring — is pointless. There are better things to concern yourself with; life is not an IQ leaderboard.
- lifthrasiir 2y ago
  The first ever intelligence test (Binet-Simon) was designed partly in order to identify children who have intellectual disability and give a better treatment for them. The test itself was crude, but I believe that should be the only meaningful use of IQ tests because overly low or high IQ does predict certain kinds of complications. Otherwise they are easy to game, they only measure a particular slice of human intelligence, and their error bar is large enough that even a unit difference in SD can be not meaningful [1]. IQ is just a meaningless number that whoever have a higher one tends to have unjustified superiority over others. [1] Depends on the particular test of course, but I can safely guess that +2 SD and +2.5 SD are not statistically distinguished by most tests.
  - mod50ack 2y ago
    Caring too much about IQ is not exempt from Goodhart's law.
etchalon 2y ago
Basically, whatever IQ measures, its only meaningful at the extremes.
jimjimjim 2y ago
"People who boast about their IQ are losers." I actually LOL'd at that but then I generally have a dislike of boastful people. and I could imagine that the type of person that would boast about IQ would probably dismiss Hawking as somehow not "really" intelligent.
joe_the_user 2y ago
I think this is relevant to ideas about AI explosions. There's a standard argument that's something like "once the machine reach 150 IQ, we've reached AGI and humans are done". Not that the AI isn't making leaps but this much too simplistic. Human capacities are much more than what's measured on an IQ test. Just as starter for considering , look at Moravec's paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
- scotty79 2y ago
  > Human capacities are much more than what's measured on an IQ test. Sure but IQ test result correlates with many of them. Even something as strange as athletic performance: https://www.scitepress.org/Papers/2017/70672/70672.pdf https://www.scitepress.org/Papers/2017/70672/70672.pdf
zzo38computer 2y ago
I will define "IQ" as what your score will be on a ideal IQ test (rather than an actual IQ test, although then you will have to define how the "ideal IQ test" is working, which is presumably like an actual IQ test if made and administered in the ideal way, however that might be). It is correlated with intelligence (which cannot be measured by a single number), but is not the same thing as intelligence. (I think it also not the same thing as genius, although that is also correlated with high intelligence, since intelligence is one of the things to be genius but is not the only part of it.)
renewiltord 2y ago
One thing I have found funny is that people want to have a high IQ after they've gotten wherever they've gotten (often they are failures) but it actually highlights something else. Conditional on one getting somewhere, a high IQ actually means they suck at life. They were given a racecar and all they did is drive into a ditch. On the other hand, with my 100 IQ I have had a successful time running engineering in ad-tech and HFT. Where does that put me? I'm the driver of a VW Polo that beats other drivers in F1 cars. Whatever gifts nature has given others in intelligence, I am handily superior in whatever else matters. Fascinating.
- scotty79 2y ago
  IQ is just the ability to think faster. If you have incentive and time to think longer there's really very little benefit to having high IQ. Using your car analogy. It doesn't really matter how fast is the car you drive it you get to where you wanted to get to because you weren't distracted or bored along the way. Pretty much any car can do that.
- captainbland 2y ago
  This is pretty much the exact way I think about it. IQ tests roughly measure the output of the engine but don't say anything about the driver. Metacognition and executive function for instance are cognitive domains which IQ tests don't really capture but are nevertheless essential for many real world cognitive activities.
iLoveOncall 2y ago
I think the article misses another crucial point: the fact that IQ numbers are frequently redefined to have the average remain at 100. This means that if you say that Einstein had an IQ of 160, he actually would have had an IQ of 250+ back in his days. Voltaire ? Probably in the thousands. This highlights how ridiculous those claims are, given how nobody tests at 250, 400, 1,000 and above nowadays.
anonzzzies 2y ago
IQ numbers for some current well known figures are also made up. I have found an inverse correlation between people who keep repeating that they are very smart and their high IQ number and their actual intelligence.
superposeur 2y ago
In any field, what it even means to be good morphs as you go up in skill level. Non mathematicians know only about arithmetic so they often imagine that mathematicians must be really really good at arithmetic. But this isn't so. Likewise, non musicians think what must make a great musician is perfect pitch. But some of the greatest musicians in history didn’t have it while many mediocre ones do. Similarly, non chess players think GMs must be good at calculating zillions of moves in advance, but apparently they only calculate a small set of moves, which somehow are the right ones. To take an example cited in the article, Einstein was so far up there that it’s nearly impossible for a non physicist to even understand what he was so good at — crude measures like high school grades or “IQ” barely scratch the surface of the skill that he was a genius at. Now, perfect pitch does modestly correlate with musical ability, mathematicians are better than average at arithmetic, GMs do calculate more moves than the average shmo, and Einstein got much better than average grades (after all he was accepted at ETH). But that’s all, modest correlations. There is such a thing as talent in music, mathematics, etc. but it isn’t something a psychologist standing outside these domains would ever be able to devise a test for.
crocowhile 2y ago
I've joined Mensa a few months ago and I've never met so many idiots in my entire life. It's a small percentage of the members overall but they take over the online communities compulsively and make the environment miserable. Ant they all have the same political profile (won't say which one).
- scotty79 2y ago
  I joined about 15 years ago and never interacted with any Mensa member since then. Being top 1 in 50 on thinking speed is a very lax filter.
- Viliam1234 2y ago
  Mensa is sadly a combination of positive and negative selection. Positive: by IQ. Negative: by having nothing more important to do than become a Mensa member. If instead you took random people on the street and gave them IQ tests, and invited those who passed the IQ 130 bar to a meetup, it would be much more interesting than a typical Mensa meetup.
Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
Some of the comments here remind me of Malcolm Galdwell's spaghetti sauce talk or similar about how the air force discovered you can't average pilot characteristics to develop a cockpit. Both are examples where you can't use a single metric for something that varies on multiple independent axes. That's what IQ is trying to do. It doesn't work. You can develop different IQ systems for IQs on different axes (logic, memory, visual acuity, etc. etc. etc.) but trying to have a single number that represents all of them will never work.
rahimnathwani 2y ago
On the other hand, I’ve also been lucky enough to be able to meet, and occasionally work alongside, people I would consider scientific geniuses. Yet never once did I feel that an IQ test would capture these people operating at the highest level of intellectual output (who I will avoid the embarrassment of name dropping). Why does Erik think he can predict the outcome of an IQ test, based on information gleaned solely from 'working alongside' people?

113 points by paulpauper 2y ago

Not only is IQ a poor measure that's perhaps best at capturing near average performance, "intelligence" is an attribute that's not readily ranked in a linear manner as height can be.

trts 2y ago
generally intelligent people tend to perform well on intelligence tests people who perform well on intelligence tests may not present as generally intelligent
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> "intelligence" is an attribute that's not readily ranked in a linear manner as height can be IQ isn't a linear scale [1][2]. (It is ordinal.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superposition_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superposition_principle
- defrost 2y ago
  Who said that it was?
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Who said that it was? You said "'intelligence' is an attribute that's not readily ranked in a linear manner" while complaining about IQ. IQ doesn't rank intelligence linearly.
    - defrost 2y ago
      I'll assume you understand the difference between a 1D line, a 2D plane, a 3D space and grasp basic english. What is your issue here?
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > I'll assume you understand the difference between a 1D line, a 2D plane IQ isn't linear because it is not superposable. A 100 IQ person isn't twice as clever, within the definition of cleverness IQ measures, as someone with a 50 IQ. (An 8' man is twice as tall as a 4' child.) If you need to force it into a geometric analogy, the distribution IQ rests on cannot be described by a line.
        defrost 2y ago
        > IQ isn't linear because it is not superposable. A 100 IQ person isn't twice as clever, within the definition of cleverness IQ measures, as someone with a 50 IQ. You appear to be thinking of a uniform distribution as compared to a normal distribution. Nominally both height and IQ approximate a normal distribution (sans the infinite tails, leaving aside discrete ordinal bucketing). "Linear" (see the O.E.D. for example) is a word with many meanings, mostly pertaining to lines and things resembling a line. You can line up people by height or by IQ score, you cannot line up people by "intelligence", it's a partial order at best. > the distribution IQ rests on cannot be described by a line. You're the only one of us that connected the scalar IQ distribution to a line .. I've been aware of the central limit theorem for 45+ years now. The geometric analogy is that mapping people by intelligence to a line is a poor fit, to a plane or higher space would make more sense. As evidenced by this exchange.
      - butter999 2y ago
        You probably meant that there doesn't exist a total order for comparing intelligence and/or that it isn't a scalar quantity like height, but "linear" didn't convey that meaning.
        defrost 2y ago
        Intelligence clearly isn't a scalar quantity like height, the implication is that a faux scalar quantity like IQ or other ordinal scale doesn't well describe intelligence.

jjmarr 2y ago

In all honesty I just thought I was getting stupider over time. Glad to hear I'm just bouncing around the margin of error.

MisterKent 2y ago

No mention of standard deviation? Just by the fact the IQ is your place on a normal curve, with a 15 point standard deviation, there are at least 100K+ people in the world with an IQ of 160. The smartest 0.0032% of the population.

nradov 2y ago
Does intelligence follow the standard distribution?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Does intelligence follow the standard distribution? Intelligence may or may not. IQ, by definition, does.
  - ks2048 2y ago
    So IQ can be negative? (Normal distribution has non zero probability mass for all real numbers)
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > IQ can be negative? Theoretically, yes. We chose 100 as a midpoint for convenience. (Practically, there is a lower bound beyond which we cannot meaningfully interpret test results.)
  - lifthrasiir 2y ago
    IQ as an intelligence rank does indeed follow the standard distribution, but in practice IQ is estimated by tests. I believe the GP wanted to ask about a distribution of such "estimated" IQs.
    - wavemode 2y ago
      Your score on an IQ test is reflective of your percentile amongst all IQ test takers. That is, if 50% of takers did better than you and 50% did worse than you, then you score a 100 (regardless of the actual number of questions you got right or wrong). So, yes, IQ scores always necessarily follow a normal distribution - because that's how the scores are determined in the first place.

kordlessagain 2y ago

I’ve often wondered how IQ correlates with the ability to visualize or recall audio of certain things. For example, my neighbor in California - he had an ability to look at an equation and actually visualize the plot of it like a graphing calculator. That is certainly intelligence. I got into asking people how they visualized for a while because I myself don’t. But then I’m apparently good at knowing if I’ve seen somebody or not, no matter how short of time it was I’ve seen them. I’m sorta the same way with having been a place, usually knowing how to get back there, without actually seeing it. Sometimes I wonder if I do that “similar” thing with everything, including ideas. My stepdad once said he met Clinton briefly once and then Clinton saw him many years later at a Razorback game and he instantly remembered my dad’s name. That’s a level of intelligence. And if somebody has perfect pitch, or can listen to a song and play it back in the piano, then that’s also intelligence of a certain type, maybe. So what makes an IQ test be able to measure such variety when some have totally different modes of thinking?

emseetech 2y ago
I've become convinced of the idea that everything on some level is a matter of practice, and that effortless practice comes from enjoyment. Maybe your neighbor can visualize graphs because he practiced visualizing graphs a lot. And he did that because he found an odd joy in it that others didn't. Bill Clinton knew he wanted to be in politics at a very early age by all accounts. And considering he didn't exactly come from a powerful political family with a clear path forward, it's likely he decided to practice remembering people and by the time anyone could comment on it, he'd had decades of practice. But honestly maybe he just had fun seeing what he could remember about the people he met and that turned it into a fun game for him that paid off big. When I was young, I played a game where I would count the letters in the words people were saying to determine whether the total sentence was divisible by three. So for a time in my life I was unusually good at doing modulo division on people's conversation. I've since lost that ability (not much use to it), but I wasn't some savant. My mother worked early shifts at the hospital and would drive me and my siblings to my grandmother's house, and the fog and dew would cling to the windshield regardless of whether it was raining so the windshield wipers would be on. And I would sync the voices on the AM radio to the three positions of the wipers, left, middle, right, left, middle, right. It was a game to pass the time because I couldn't fall back asleep after being woken up. By the time I could do it as a party trick, I'd had hundred of hours of practice.

zem 2y ago

can we put the "your" back in the title? it's currently unfairly ungrammatical.

raldi 2y ago
I’m curious what could be the intent behind that rewrite rule.

modeless 2y ago

When I first started using OTPs from Google Authenticator I found it difficult to remember random 6 digit numbers in one glance. Today after doing it almost daily for years and years I find it easy. Almost anything can be improved with training, including IQ test tasks, contrary to what test makers say. But I don't believe that such training improves general intelligence.

throwawayk7h 2y ago
I read that studying for an IQ test generally causes a gain of about 6 points at most. (Which is quite a bit.)
skirmish 2y ago
I still find it hard to remember 8 digit OTPs, and work around that by repeatedly "singing" them in my mind while I type them. I can easily repeat those 8 meaningless words in my mind, and then decipher only the next digit I need to type.

magicalhippo 2y ago

When I was a teen I took a IQ test that was supposed to measure up to 160. It had quite a few questions but due to the scaling, just getting one question correct made it declare you had like 120 IQ or so. Turned out I did indeed get one of the questions right, a fairly straight forward math question. Decided the test was probably bogus, just seemed dumb to conclude IQ based on a single correct answer. Growing up some more I realized intelligence is complicated and multifaceted. That I can solve some puzzles and usually think things through doesn't preclude me from being dumb as a brick in other situations.

wongarsu 2y ago
When I did a psychologist-administered IQ test it took like 3 hours and resulted in four scores on different metrics. For example I had a pretty average 103 IQ on language, but about 120 IQ on logical thinking. In the end you get a total score from the average of the subcategories. All IQ tests are pretty incomplete and a bit stupid, but some are less stupid than others
singularity2001 2y ago
on an old computer I got an IQ score of 210 just by memorizing all the results still felt pretty good
- milesrout 2y ago
  That isn't an IQ test. You can't do them on computers. They are assessed in person by professionals. You can't practice because the test aren't publicly available.
  - magicalhippo 2y ago
    That does not preclude a lot of them to claim they're IQ tests...
Viliam1234 2y ago
Most IQ tests are fake, especially all online tests. You often get IQ 120 just by answering randomly.

jason-phillips 2y ago

look dear, the hoi polloi are seething again

fsckboy 2y ago
> look dear, the hoi polloi are seething again "hoi" means "the" in greek. So, if you want to set yourself off from hoi polloi, don't include the "the"
- kstenerud 2y ago
  Except that's not how we do it when borrowing phrases from other languages as glorified nouns. We say "The [thing]", thus "the hoi polloi".
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    The normal thing to do in that case is to ignore the parts that are just artifacts of the other language, so you'd say "the polloi". (Or, really, you'd say "the many"; it's not an esoteric concept.) If you read older translations of mythology, you'll see that inflectional endings for foreign nouns are just left off, so you have e.g. Jormungand instead of Jormungandr and Thor instead of Thorr. (It's true for history too, where we prefer Virgil to Vergilius and Ovid to Ovidius.) Recently there's been some kind of fetish for including foreign artifacts in borrowed words, even when those words are already well established without them. I kind of get the sense that this kind of thing is driven by people who think that learning a foreign alphabet is the same thing as learning a foreign language.
    - milesrout 2y ago
      "The hoi polloi" is a fixed phrase in English. Its etymology is irrelevant. We don't pronounce it "properly" either. Thay is because it isn't Greek! It is English. It has Greek origins but it was long ago borrowed into English and now follows English rules. ~Everyone knows "hoi" means "the" in Greek. But the phrase in English is "the hoi polloi". It is never found except as "the hoi polloi". If you said "Hoi polloi are upset" in real life people would look at you funny. There are loads of other examples of this happening. For example there are various verbs and adjectives from Latin that have been borrowed as nouns into English. If you go "uhm actually that is a verb in Latin actually" you are annoying and wrong. Language evolves.

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etempleton 2y ago

What people typically refer to as an IQ test was not designed nor is it considered to be an accurate test of genius. It is not meant to mean anything if someone scores particularly well. The reason these tests are administered is to understand if there is perhaps a learning disability. If you score low overall, or low in a particular area that is then used as a diagnostic tool. For example, a normal score overall with a markedly low working memory score might point to a number of diagnoses. Yes, scoring high is impressive, but is pretty meaningless in terms of outcomes beyond a point. Most IQ test scores are just made up. And there are plenty of self proclaimed genius IQ people who seem to be completely unremarkable beyond being a good test taker.

elcritch 2y ago
> The reason these tests are administered is to understand if there is perhaps a learning disability. If you score low overall, or low in a particular area that is then used as a diagnostic tool. For example, a normal score overall with a markedly low working memory score might point to a number of diagnoses. That's how I discovered my learning disability. Sort of ironic given that I'm a voracious learner and have become quite proficient in a couple of fields. However I'm a relatively slow learner, sometimes have quite dumb moments, and struggle with tests or being put on the spot. Usually when I do grasp a topic it's at a deep intuitive level. Still a psychologist gave me a proper IQ exam after I emailed him saying I felt something was off in my brain. Testing took half a day. When I went back for results my score was close to the average for college graduates. Yet the phycologist asked me when I was going to get a PhD. That confused me as my core didn't seem impressive. Then he said I probably had ADHD. Like many 80's kids I'd always sorta thought ADHD was mostly made up. Well he explained the results to me, in particular my low working memory compared to the rest of my scores on other subtests. My IQ dropped 40-50 points on some particular subscores which correlates very highly with ADHD. By the end of that meeting I'd begun to realize, that it made a lot of sense with my struggles over the years. So yes, IQ tests are very helpful for diagnosis. I later got an official diagnosis at university. I'm glad the psychologist offered me that IQ test. I hope others consider IQ testing if you're "smart but stuck".
- deleted 2y ago

Perenti 2y ago

IQ measures how good you are at IQ tests. I'm brilliant at those tests, I consistently score 5+ SD above 100. I'm also an idiot, and pretty much an asshole. IQ itself puts no beans on the table, and has little to no relationship to how good a human being you are.

Judgmentality 2y ago
> I consistently score 5+ SD above 100 You consistently score 175+ on IQ tests?
- Perenti 2y ago
  Yes. IQ tests are easy. Life, now that's a real challenge.
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  - farresito 2y ago
    Do you have any other family members with very high IQs?
    - Perenti 2y ago
      Yes, there is a pattern. Most of my relatives are very quick, those tested all come out 120+. Two of my sons have absurd IQs like me. My second is about my level (170+), and my youngest is some kind of megamind mutant. His brain scares me. He's very very clever.
      - farresito 2y ago
        What was your experience like in school and university? Have you come across people who you thought were at a similar level intelectually as you?
- Viliam1234 2y ago

Ferret7446 2y ago

The elephant in the room is that whatever IQ is measuring, it is strongly correlated with all of the things people would generally agree correlates with intelligence. It is a strong predictor for what is generally considered success: financial, health, achievements, career. It is a strong predictor for how fast people learn things or become competent in roles generally associated with intelligence. You can nitpick it, you can be right, but you are also preaching to the rocks and trees. The fact is people with low IQs are going to struggle more and people with high IQs do not need to struggle as much, in all areas of life. The exact number, or accuracy, or whether it is really intelligence does not change the reality.

Arthanos 2y ago
The ZIP code you're born in is a stronger predictor of all those things than IQ.
- oidar 2y ago
  Do you have a citation for that?
  - regularjack 2y ago
    Do you even need one?
- singularity2001 2y ago
  smart people love to stick together
  - kavouras 2y ago
    rich*
- threatofrain 2y ago
  And there are other people living in the same zip code as you. A single family may even have more than one child living under the same roof. Naturally the question will arise anyway as to why there are differences in learning speed or fluency.

mod50ack 2y ago

As an aside — intelligence is not the same thing as accomplishment. A lot of people do well in school (and do well on IQ tests) and do not achieve anything of note. The people we remember are those who achieve great things, not those who do well on puzzle-solving tests. Those aren't the same thing, and this is probably why Stephen Hawking said that caring about IQ is for losers. Hawking was undoubtedly a smart guy, but that fact alone did not make his career. He did a lot of hard work in a field he was passionate about. Why would you tell Stephen Hawking how good you are at solving puzzles — why would he care about that? I'm sure he would have found news of some finding relevant to his research interests much more compelling. Now, are IQ-type tests useful? Yes. They are quite good to administer in school to gauge people's reasoning abilities — to a certain point. The point of the tests was never to rank the smartest people, and to think about these edge cases — the ones tests are worst at measuring — is pointless. There are better things to concern yourself with; life is not an IQ leaderboard.

lifthrasiir 2y ago
The first ever intelligence test (Binet-Simon) was designed partly in order to identify children who have intellectual disability and give a better treatment for them. The test itself was crude, but I believe that should be the only meaningful use of IQ tests because overly low or high IQ does predict certain kinds of complications. Otherwise they are easy to game, they only measure a particular slice of human intelligence, and their error bar is large enough that even a unit difference in SD can be not meaningful [1]. IQ is just a meaningless number that whoever have a higher one tends to have unjustified superiority over others. [1] Depends on the particular test of course, but I can safely guess that +2 SD and +2.5 SD are not statistically distinguished by most tests.
- mod50ack 2y ago
  Caring too much about IQ is not exempt from Goodhart's law.

etchalon 2y ago

Basically, whatever IQ measures, its only meaningful at the extremes.

jimjimjim 2y ago

"People who boast about their IQ are losers." I actually LOL'd at that but then I generally have a dislike of boastful people. and I could imagine that the type of person that would boast about IQ would probably dismiss Hawking as somehow not "really" intelligent.

joe_the_user 2y ago

I think this is relevant to ideas about AI explosions. There's a standard argument that's something like "once the machine reach 150 IQ, we've reached AGI and humans are done". Not that the AI isn't making leaps but this much too simplistic. Human capacities are much more than what's measured on an IQ test. Just as starter for considering , look at Moravec's paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

scotty79 2y ago
> Human capacities are much more than what's measured on an IQ test. Sure but IQ test result correlates with many of them. Even something as strange as athletic performance: https://www.scitepress.org/Papers/2017/70672/70672.pdf https://www.scitepress.org/Papers/2017/70672/70672.pdf

zzo38computer 2y ago

I will define "IQ" as what your score will be on a ideal IQ test (rather than an actual IQ test, although then you will have to define how the "ideal IQ test" is working, which is presumably like an actual IQ test if made and administered in the ideal way, however that might be). It is correlated with intelligence (which cannot be measured by a single number), but is not the same thing as intelligence. (I think it also not the same thing as genius, although that is also correlated with high intelligence, since intelligence is one of the things to be genius but is not the only part of it.)

renewiltord 2y ago

One thing I have found funny is that people want to have a high IQ after they've gotten wherever they've gotten (often they are failures) but it actually highlights something else. Conditional on one getting somewhere, a high IQ actually means they suck at life. They were given a racecar and all they did is drive into a ditch. On the other hand, with my 100 IQ I have had a successful time running engineering in ad-tech and HFT. Where does that put me? I'm the driver of a VW Polo that beats other drivers in F1 cars. Whatever gifts nature has given others in intelligence, I am handily superior in whatever else matters. Fascinating.

scotty79 2y ago
IQ is just the ability to think faster. If you have incentive and time to think longer there's really very little benefit to having high IQ. Using your car analogy. It doesn't really matter how fast is the car you drive it you get to where you wanted to get to because you weren't distracted or bored along the way. Pretty much any car can do that.
captainbland 2y ago
This is pretty much the exact way I think about it. IQ tests roughly measure the output of the engine but don't say anything about the driver. Metacognition and executive function for instance are cognitive domains which IQ tests don't really capture but are nevertheless essential for many real world cognitive activities.

iLoveOncall 2y ago

I think the article misses another crucial point: the fact that IQ numbers are frequently redefined to have the average remain at 100. This means that if you say that Einstein had an IQ of 160, he actually would have had an IQ of 250+ back in his days. Voltaire ? Probably in the thousands. This highlights how ridiculous those claims are, given how nobody tests at 250, 400, 1,000 and above nowadays.

anonzzzies 2y ago

IQ numbers for some current well known figures are also made up. I have found an inverse correlation between people who keep repeating that they are very smart and their high IQ number and their actual intelligence.

superposeur 2y ago

In any field, what it even means to be good morphs as you go up in skill level. Non mathematicians know only about arithmetic so they often imagine that mathematicians must be really really good at arithmetic. But this isn't so. Likewise, non musicians think what must make a great musician is perfect pitch. But some of the greatest musicians in history didn’t have it while many mediocre ones do. Similarly, non chess players think GMs must be good at calculating zillions of moves in advance, but apparently they only calculate a small set of moves, which somehow are the right ones. To take an example cited in the article, Einstein was so far up there that it’s nearly impossible for a non physicist to even understand what he was so good at — crude measures like high school grades or “IQ” barely scratch the surface of the skill that he was a genius at. Now, perfect pitch does modestly correlate with musical ability, mathematicians are better than average at arithmetic, GMs do calculate more moves than the average shmo, and Einstein got much better than average grades (after all he was accepted at ETH). But that’s all, modest correlations. There is such a thing as talent in music, mathematics, etc. but it isn’t something a psychologist standing outside these domains would ever be able to devise a test for.

crocowhile 2y ago

I've joined Mensa a few months ago and I've never met so many idiots in my entire life. It's a small percentage of the members overall but they take over the online communities compulsively and make the environment miserable. Ant they all have the same political profile (won't say which one).

scotty79 2y ago
I joined about 15 years ago and never interacted with any Mensa member since then. Being top 1 in 50 on thinking speed is a very lax filter.
Viliam1234 2y ago
Mensa is sadly a combination of positive and negative selection. Positive: by IQ. Negative: by having nothing more important to do than become a Mensa member. If instead you took random people on the street and gave them IQ tests, and invited those who passed the IQ 130 bar to a meetup, it would be much more interesting than a typical Mensa meetup.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago

Some of the comments here remind me of Malcolm Galdwell's spaghetti sauce talk or similar about how the air force discovered you can't average pilot characteristics to develop a cockpit. Both are examples where you can't use a single metric for something that varies on multiple independent axes. That's what IQ is trying to do. It doesn't work. You can develop different IQ systems for IQs on different axes (logic, memory, visual acuity, etc. etc. etc.) but trying to have a single number that represents all of them will never work.

rahimnathwani 2y ago

On the other hand, I’ve also been lucky enough to be able to meet, and occasionally work alongside, people I would consider scientific geniuses. Yet never once did I feel that an IQ test would capture these people operating at the highest level of intellectual output (who I will avoid the embarrassment of name dropping). Why does Erik think he can predict the outcome of an IQ test, based on information gleaned solely from 'working alongside' people?