Earlier quoted context omitted.
Achieving excellence has a personal cost. Imagine that. The other thing is that the first test that gave rise to the concept of IQ tests was not intended to measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness for rural French children who often did not have birth certificates, so age could not be used as an indicator of school readiness. The problem was complicated by the fact that rural kids and city k…
>>British or Canadian IQ test Google Raven Progressive Matrices, there are accurate IQ tests are not associated with any culture
Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests
161–170 of 232 posts
Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Richard Feynman, one of the most respected geniuses of our era, tested as only having an IQ of 125. IQ tests are far from perfect, to say the least. This means our concept of IQ is likely inherently flawed. Feynman seemed to take glee in sharing his "low" IQ of only a 125. He was one of the smartest men on the planet in the last 100 years. Surely, we should defer to his opinion that the concept IQ is sort of a joke.…
> This means our concept of IQ is likely inherently flawed I'm not sure I'd say flawed so much as I'd say myopic. Which is absolutely still a flaw, but a very specific one that allows you to contextualize the results of an IQ test rather than discard them as worthless. IQ measures a subset of human intelligence pretty effectively, but misses the bigger picture. There's large parts of human intelligence that can't be…
It's like predicting an NFL player's performance based on stats--40 time，bench press, etc. They do these rather arbitrary tests, and over a lot of players there is some limited positive correlation with performance, but individually it does not mean very much. There are people with amazing stats that do not succeed.
Then for baseball players, everyhing changes.
Intelligence or smart are low-information, high-emotional-signalling terms. It means more about social status than anything else. Everyone has a mix of abilities. Some of the best engineers are terrible writers. Some are incompetent fathers (Steve Jobs). Some people are great at consuming and regurgitating a lot of info, but bad at original/critical thought. Some who would thrive in one life circumstance may struggle in another.
Academically, IQ is supposed to correlate with g, general intelligence. In other words，we're just creatures making up nonsense terms to, at face value, signal about ability, but it's often more of a social construct.
Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
How good you are at Go (or chess for that matter) has no correlation with your IQ. There are plenty of examples of people extremely good at chess that struggle, seriously, with academics (e.g. world champion Jose Raul Capablanca, and the youtuber and grandmaster Eric Hansen). Kasparov doesn't have 180+ IQ, which is a common myth. At some point he took the test and it turned out he had a respectable but definitely sub…
Richard Feynman, one of the most respected geniuses of our era, tested as only having an IQ of 125. IQ tests are far from perfect, to say the least. This means our concept of IQ is likely inherently flawed. Feynman seemed to take glee in sharing his "low" IQ of only a 125. He was one of the smartest men on the planet in the last 100 years. Surely, we should defer to his opinion that the concept IQ is sort of a joke.…
125 is still in the top 5% of the population. Anyway Feynman gave the results of a childhood IQ test, and one that was taken before IQ tests were standardized. Feynman reported being exceptionally good at puzzle solving and math even at a very young age, so I am very skeptical of that.
IQ definitely matters. The average IQ of physics majors is like 2 standard deviations above average for instance. Suggesting some fields are very selective of IQ and low IQ people are much less likely to be able to do them.
Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Richard Feynman, one of the most respected geniuses of our era, tested as only having an IQ of 125. IQ tests are far from perfect, to say the least. This means our concept of IQ is likely inherently flawed. Feynman seemed to take glee in sharing his "low" IQ of only a 125. He was one of the smartest men on the planet in the last 100 years. Surely, we should defer to his opinion that the concept IQ is sort of a joke.…
> This means our concept of IQ is likely inherently flawed I'm not sure I'd say flawed so much as I'd say myopic. Which is absolutely still a flaw, but a very specific one that allows you to contextualize the results of an IQ test rather than discard them as worthless. IQ measures a subset of human intelligence pretty effectively, but misses the bigger picture. There's large parts of human intelligence that can't be…
>Among other things, it can't measure long-term recall or the ability to rehearse/learn information and skills over time
The vocabulary battery would seem to measure long term memorization ability. It actually correlates with IQ better than any other test. Also SAT tests are often used as a proxy for IQ because they correlate so well with it.
>It's our need to have a single spectrum from mental retardation to genius-level that's led us to try to create a test which assigns a number to intelligence. But intelligence is multidimensional and an IQ test just fills in some of those dimensions.
No, it's not. Please learn what you are talking about. It was once believed that intelligence was multidimensional. But then scientists realized all those different dimensions correlated amazingly well. E.g. people with better memory were much more likely to be better at puzzle solving. And a single factor, g, could explain most of the variance. IQ tests try to measure g, which is very predictive of general cognitive ability.
Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Richard Feynman, one of the most respected geniuses of our era, tested as only having an IQ of 125. IQ tests are far from perfect, to say the least. This means our concept of IQ is likely inherently flawed. Feynman seemed to take glee in sharing his "low" IQ of only a 125. He was one of the smartest men on the planet in the last 100 years. Surely, we should defer to his opinion that the concept IQ is sort of a joke.…
125 is still in the top 5% of the population. Anyway Feynman gave the results of a childhood IQ test , and one that was taken before IQ tests were standardized. Feynman reported being exceptionally good at puzzle solving and math even at a very young age, so I am very skeptical of that. IQ definitely matters. The average IQ of physics majors is like 2 standard deviations above average for instance. Suggesting some fi…
When there's an HN thread on IQ, you can count on two things:
1. There will be a number of comments saying IQ is outright meaningless.
2. There will be a comment saying Feynman only had an IQ of whatever it was.
Never fails.
Anyway, as I've said here before, Feynman's books are primarily collections of stories. What's presented in them was selected to maximize the impact and entertainment value of the story. And Feynman was very, very good at storytelling.
Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your greater disagreement with Hsu seems to be clouding your view on narrow point that you actually agree with him on.
That feels to me a little like someone telling me "We both agree that this person is currently a slave, so let's not allow your heartfelt belief that slavery is immoral interfere with our use of this slave. Moving on." And I imagine I will regret saying that, but I can't see letting that stand and saying nothing.
No. It is actually one person saying, that's a slave, and you responding, no you are wrong, that's a slave, and you are wrong because we disagree about slavery.
Hsu said there was a ceiling on the test, you said he was wrong, there was a ceiling on the test, and IQ is flawed.
Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests
#167So, is this "scientifiamerican" a serious publication, or what? I mean, it says that high IQ leads to various good outcomes (a fact that is obvious, well-known and easily explained) and then basically says the opposite because of a...Mensa survey. Like, uh, that's not how you do science. At all. Not at all.
You're saying that survey results that are contrary to an obvious truth isn't science? I don't think I understand your concept of science. Moving past that, the bad outcome found and your obvious good outcomes aren't incompatible. They could be more likely to be successful and suffer from disorders.
I'm saying the survey results measure facts related to Mensa members, not people with high IQ overall. The top comments in this same thread point out the exact same problem, but what-the-fuck-ever.
Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Yet, also, IQ tests are strongly influenced by cultural knowledge Raven Progressive Matrices, I believe the most used IQ test today is not influenced by cultural knowledge. IQ has an amazingly high correlation with academic success and work success, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSo5v5t4OQM it is worthwhile
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matric... Wikipedia says that people with autism and asperger's outperform other people on Raven's tests. Most people view ASD individuals as seriously cognitively impaired and they are often seen as low IQ, so I have trouble with your assertion. It suggests that people the world sees as highly impaired whose lives typically are harder than average are smarter tha…
>Most people view ASD individuals as seriously cognitively impaired and they are often seen as low IQ, so I have trouble with your assertion.
Popular culture stereotypes autists as being highly intelligent.
Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
125 is still in the top 5% of the population. Anyway Feynman gave the results of a childhood IQ test , and one that was taken before IQ tests were standardized. Feynman reported being exceptionally good at puzzle solving and math even at a very young age, so I am very skeptical of that. IQ definitely matters. The average IQ of physics majors is like 2 standard deviations above average for instance. Suggesting some fi…
When there's an HN thread on IQ, you can count on two things: 1. There will be a number of comments saying IQ is outright meaningless. 2. There will be a comment saying Feynman only had an IQ of whatever it was. Never fails. Anyway, as I've said here before, Feynman's books are primarily collections of stories. What's presented in them was selected to maximize the impact and entertainment value of the story. And Feyn…
To be perfectly clear, I am not saying IQ scores are completely meaningless. I am saying they probably do not measure some sort of objective, DNA-based trait of "smarts". You cannot separate these scores from a very long list of environmental factors and I am very leery of the mental model we have that people who test well are some sort of innately superior beings rather than people who have benefited more than average from an accumulation of societal and parental investment of various sorts.
I am very leery of the power of IQ tests to justify entrenching The Haves and Have Nots. Our mental models have scary amounts of power to shape outcomes and this mental model seems to justify classism as a kind of manifest destiny.
One of the videos linked here in reply to me has some smart authority figure type asserting that university students all have IQs above average. That seems pretty well tautological to me. One would hope that those getting more schooling would do better on tests. But that fails to genuinely prove that what these tests measure is some fundamental personal trait unrelated to the fabric of your life experience.
I was homeless for nearly six years. A lot of people wanted to see me as stupid and incompetent during that time. Those classist perceptions helped deny me opportunities which helped keep me poor which helped deny me opportunities. I can never seem to get that across to well off people that their tautologies simply entrench class based outcomes and really say nothing about personal competence.
When we design a world that closes doors to people arbitrarily, we design a world that actively wastes human potential. This makes all of us the poorer.
Re: Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're saying that survey results that are contrary to an obvious truth isn't science? I don't think I understand your concept of science. Moving past that, the bad outcome found and your obvious good outcomes aren't incompatible. They could be more likely to be successful and suffer from disorders.
I'm saying the survey results measure facts related to Mensa members, not people with high IQ overall. The top comments in this same thread point out the exact same problem, but what-the-fuck-ever.
Both the article and the study note that this may be exclusive to Mensa. Spelling out how you chose the participants and acknowledging a potential bias is how you do science.