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My IQ

blog.tanyakhovanova.com

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Re: My IQ

#251

Post by dave1010uk »

Gormo wrote: post #112
jhuckestein wrote: post #51

My dad made me take one when I was a kid and I did really well, but even then I thought it was stupid. The first issue is addressed in this blog post. The questions just aren't good enough. This is nobody's fault really, because it is very difficult to come up with a set of hard questions that measure your intellect and don't require lots of domain specific knowledge. It's either within a certain domain. If everyone…

Does it make more sense to say that intelligence is 'multi-dimensional' or to say that it's 'adimensional'? After all, IQ is a metric, not a direct measurement, as intelligence isn't itself directly observable. If we're defining 'intelligence' as being a quality of the human mind that's conducive to success at achieving one's goals, then it becomes something of a tautology to simply ascribe that quality to people who…

I've always thought of intelligence as the ability to learn, which you could say is the maximum speed you can gain knowledge and understanding. A person may be able to learn in some areas very well, but not so well in others. Also, someone who has devoted much time to gaining knowledge and understanding may be much less intelligent as someone who could learn quickly but never puts their mind to it.

An analogy for this view of intelligence and knowledge is like a car's acceleration and speed. Some cars may be able to go very fast but they may take a while to accelerate.

As others have mentioned in this thread, what obviously matters more is how you apply intelligence, knowledge and understanding.

Re: My IQ

#252

Post by kahawe »

paisawalla wrote: post #2

Great insight. Regarding Mensa itself, or any claims to intellectual superiority: one of the big lessons of my life has been that being intelligent has no intrinsic value. If you are unable to manifest your intelligence in a way that can substantially (disproportionate to your effort) improve your life or the lives of others, then your mind doesn't matter. It has no impact in the world, and I am not the first person…

To further your excellent point:

IQ, "intellectual superiority" and improving-life-for-the-better or "happiness" are generally three separate things; or at least much more separate than we like to see them as clearly correlating if not causations.

And the people you meet at Mensa spread surprisingly many/all levels of society...

Re: My IQ

#253

Post by kahawe »

gnosis wrote: post #69
paisawalla wrote: post #2

Great insight. Regarding Mensa itself, or any claims to intellectual superiority: one of the big lessons of my life has been that being intelligent has no intrinsic value. If you are unable to manifest your intelligence in a way that can substantially (disproportionate to your effort) improve your life or the lives of others, then your mind doesn't matter. It has no impact in the world, and I am not the first person…

"And what did the genius do when not teaching LSAT prep courses? Why, he worked at Target." Kafka was a clerk at an insurance company. Einstein was an assistant patent examiner. Wittgenstein was a gardener at a monastery and then a primary school teacher. Van Gogh only ever sold one painting during his life, and that was to his brother. There are hordes of other people widely regarded as "geniuses", who lived and die…

I think a far more revealing point about Kafka is his self-view and the fact that in his will he wanted all of his works burned. I don't think Kafka was ever a very happy man in his life, so you really got to wonder how much good did the "being a genius" do for HIM regardless of how much he contributed to the world and humanity and our culture.

Re: My IQ

#254

Post by cobrophy »

tokenadult wrote: post #85

AFTER EDIT: Thanks to all who have replied for the interesting comments. I discovered this link while digesting replies I received on three different email lists to a request to name experts on mathematically precocious young people. (That was for work.) Tanya Khovanova, the author of the blog post submitted here, was one name suggested to me as an expert on precocious mathematics learners. When I saw her personal we…

All an IQ tests, is your ability to do well on an IQ test.

It's not a particularly great measure of intelligence. The fact that you can often improve your IQ by 20 points (or more) just by practicing the types of questions that turn up should be evidence of this. Did you just become massively more intelligent relative to the population in the 2 days you spent practicing the questions?

Re: My IQ

#255

Post by lifeformed »

FaceKicker wrote: post #141

> But the biggest problem was that the idea of crossing the odd object out seems very strange to me in general. What is the odd object out in this list? > Cow, hen, pig, sheep. > The standard answer is supposed to be hen, as it is the only bird. But that is not the only possible correct answer. For example, pig is the only one whose meat is not kosher. And, look, sheep has five letters while the rest have three. Thes…

My first thought to that question was: "All but the hen have 4 legs, the hen only has 2". I'd have gotten the right answer, but only serendipitously.

Re: My IQ

#256

Post by jonnathanson »

Great article. I experienced a similar frustration with the Stanford-Binet, and even more so in high school with the good ol' SAT (which Mensa also considers an admissable 'IQ' test).

It seems to me that a true "intelligence" test would also throw some generative problems at you: i.e., test you for as many correct answers to a pattern or sequence problem as you could come up with. I wouldn't advocate for generative problems to the absolute exclusion of deductive problems -- but the reverse is currently the case on most IQ tests, and it shouldn't be.

As for the broader point: there's been a scientific debate, for about as long as IQ tests have existed, over exactly what IQ tests are measuring, and exactly what IQ means. Most standard IQ tests are now regarded as measuring "g" ("general factor," sometimes called "general intelligence"). It may indeed be the most highly significant factor in intelligence, but even if it is (which, again, is debatable), it is just one factor of many. There are other factors, some of which are statistically significant. So simply isolating for the strongest factor is dumbing down the entire equation.

At any rate, "g" ends up being highly correlated with our concept of intelligence, but it is by no means a perfect or complete metric. And it does tend to favor a very specific type of intelligence, given that it is a narrow band on a broader spectrum. And vice versa: it excludes many whose minds we would probably consider genius caliber.

Re: My IQ

#258

Post by JoeAltmaier »

cobrophy wrote: post #254
tokenadult wrote: post #85

AFTER EDIT: Thanks to all who have replied for the interesting comments. I discovered this link while digesting replies I received on three different email lists to a request to name experts on mathematically precocious young people. (That was for work.) Tanya Khovanova, the author of the blog post submitted here, was one name suggested to me as an expert on precocious mathematics learners. When I saw her personal we…

All an IQ tests, is your ability to do well on an IQ test. It's not a particularly great measure of intelligence. The fact that you can often improve your IQ by 20 points (or more) just by practicing the types of questions that turn up should be evidence of this. Did you just become massively more intelligent relative to the population in the 2 days you spent practicing the questions?

Be fair; this is a correct comment, in line with the OP. Terman admited that IQ tests are only good at testing what is covered in the IQ test. A circular definition of IQ if there ever was one.

Re: My IQ

#259

Post by matthewowen »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #126

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Years ago in our 20s my wife and I took an IQ test. I think she got in the 150s and I scored in the upper 140s. But I felt I had done much better. When we looked at the scores, for several answers I had results that were clearly consistent with an internal model I could build of the problem, but it just wasn't the model the tester wanted. So in a geometric progression, I noticed that e…

Did any of the other word questions have answers based upon the linguistic properties of the words (rather than on the meanings of the words)? If not, then you evidently did fail at that portion of pattern recognition.

Re: My IQ

#260

Post by JoeAltmaier »

matthewowen wrote: post #259
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #126

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Years ago in our 20s my wife and I took an IQ test. I think she got in the 150s and I scored in the upper 140s. But I felt I had done much better. When we looked at the scores, for several answers I had results that were clearly consistent with an internal model I could build of the problem, but it just wasn't the model the tester wanted. So in a geometric progression, I noticed that e…

Did any of the other word questions have answers based upon the linguistic properties of the words (rather than on the meanings of the words)? If not, then you evidently did fail at that portion of pattern recognition.

Be fair - for math patterns you're expected to choose the simplest fit. For language, the highest-order fit (e.g. meaning, not letter count). Why? Its cultural - thats how IQ tests are done.
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