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My IQ

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Re: My IQ

#261

Post by mgkimsal »

illuminate wrote: post #228
mgkimsal wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed it's redundant, but there's something else about it too. IQ is biological. You may just as well have a club for left-handed people, or people with green eyes. You'll have about as much in common with them. Not entirely true, but the few Mensa meetings I went to were all 'social' ones (met at a restaurant), and I had nothing demonstrable in common with the people there other than having the same biological brai…

"IQ is biological" And you believe this because?

sweeping statement, I understand. at core is my position as a materialist - I think everything is physical / material / biological. 'Intelligence' is simply an expression of that, and IQ as a measure of that is measuring something that's biological, like left-handedness or height.

My evidence... I've not seen any evidence to the contrary. We do see evidence that physically messing with brains causing changes in brain function. Brain damage can cause impairment to memory - short term memory is one of the elements of IQ that gets measured in tests that I've taken.

If you have evidence to the contrary that what we measure as IQ is somehow not rooted in biology, please share it.

Re: My IQ

#262

Post by georgefox »

nickzoic wrote: post #149
nacker wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The context that has to be taken into account includes the social context, ie. 'I am sitting in a room taking a test, I cannot request clarification of the question, the person who wrote this test may be far less intelligent than me, etc'. By making an effort to choose the possible answer that I perceive as the most boring and conformist, rather than one I might find brilliant, funny, novel, and suggestive of fu…

My 6yo daughter was upset because she couldn't understand the first clue in one of those kids' word puzzle books. "My first letter is in TOAST but not in ROAST". Sometimes, dear daughter, you're just smarter than the guy who wrote the book.

Is there any reason that in this case and in the case of the parent comment, there's a tendency to jump to conclusions about the intelligence level of the test/puzzle writer? Do truly intelligent people never write lousy questions?

Re: My IQ

#263

Post by matthewowen »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #260
matthewowen wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's true, but I don't see why it is a problem. You typically get example questions in these sorts of tests - it should be trivial to understand the types of fit that the test is requesting.

To be frank, I have very little time for people who claim to have overthought a test. Typically, they've thought enough to complicate the simple answer, but haven't thought enough to realise why the simple answer is correct.

Re: My IQ

#264

Post by JoeAltmaier »

matthewowen wrote: post #263
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's true, but I don't see why it is a problem. You typically get example questions in these sorts of tests - it should be trivial to understand the types of fit that the test is requesting. To be frank, I have very little time for people who claim to have overthought a test. Typically, they've thought enough to complicate the simple answer, but haven't thought enough to realise why the simple answer is correct.

Its not always possible to know which kind of question you're answering. What is the odd one in this set? Is that a math question, or language? How far along you are in the test can change the desired outcome; I'm certain the strategy being tested switches mode as the test advances to cover more capable subjects.

Short answer: you have to be familiar with the culture of testing to do well. Anecdote: I got 95+ on the GRE entering graduate school; I took advanced subject tests in subjects I had never studied. All it took was a knowledge of how the test worked.

Re: My IQ

#265

Post by hackinthebochs »

btilly wrote: post #226
hackinthebochs wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with these arguments is that we waffle on the definition of intelligence. Feynman was admittedly no genius. There's no reason to claim he was obviously highly intelligent (and therefore IQ is meaningless). He had many gifts, a .1% intellect wasn't one of them. This doesn't take away from his accomplishments nor the impact he's had on society. There's no reason to redefine intelligence just to make sure it…

Defining intelligence is complicated, and probably a wrongheaded way to look at things. See http://masi.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html for more on that. But with that said, any definition that says that Feynman wasn't a genius is obviously wrong. In every environment that he was in, he was given the genius label because he obviously was one compared to (usually quite intelligent) peers. If a test says…

Perhaps Feynman was a poor example. I was going by his claim that his own IQ was 125 (or something to that effect). I suspect that there is more to that number and that we shouldn't take it at face value. I see no reason why he wouldn't score much higher.

Re: My IQ

#266

Post by hackinthebochs »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #246
hackinthebochs wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Should we feel bad for smart people because society tricks them into financial services rather than less-paid cancer research? No, we should feel ashamed that we've created a society where the brightest are funneled into financial services. We should feel utterly devastated that we let genius wallow in menial jobs. It is a failing of the system at every level that these people fall through the cracks and end up doin…

> It is a failing of the system at every level that these people fall through the cracks and end up doing nothing with their gifts. Are we speaking of different groups of people? I agree that young geniuses should be treasured and given all the freedom they need to grow. But as adults, if they take on a job in HFT and stay there, it is not falling through the cracks anymore. They're irresponsible by choice, not becau…

I was attempting to comment on those on both sides of the spectrum, the finance gurus, and who fall through the cracks or otherwise don't thrive in our educational system. But I don't think laying the blame solely on those who choose a lucrative path is being completely honest with ourselves. People as a whole respond to incentives, and when we give a genius every incentive possible to buck science and research in favor of finance, we as a society bear a large amount of responsibility for this choice. We must change what we value as a society first, then we'll see this trend reverse itself. Admittedly, I haven't the slightest clue how to accomplish this.

Re: My IQ

#267

Post by Evbn »

777466 wrote: post #216
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…

> if nobody is forced to contend with your mind, nobody knows it exists. I'm sure this has already been explored somewhere, but I've always wondered what it says about us as humans that we consider our lives in isolation to be meaningless, but put a bunch of meaningless people together into a society, and impacting them becomes very meaningful. What's going on here, synergy?

Genetic predisposition to pack living and altruism in service of sexual reproduction of genes.

Re: My IQ

#268

Post by debacle »

jeffdavis wrote: post #27
Shenglong wrote: post #15

|Cow, hen, pig, sheep The standard answer is supposed to be hen, as it is the only bird. I believe the standard answer is a "hen" because it's the only one that is gender-specific. In fact, it is distinctly the odd-one out because it doesn't even refer to a specific genus (or even family) of animal. I'm all for creativity (I have the same complaint often) but there needs to be some sort of standardization in communic…

Strangely, the first reaction I had was that a pig is the only thing that you need to kill to get something from. You can get milk, eggs, and wool from the other animals without killing them. Not sure why I went in that direction, but I could imagine a lot of farmers and ranchers might think along similar lines.

Maybe you play too much Minecraft.

Re: My IQ

#269

Post by grecy »

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…

> I would say that if you truly can't come up with the answer to that question that they "want" (barring any possible cultural reasons for not being able to do so), your intuition for pattern recognition could probably use some work.

So it measures how good you are at blending in with other people, while being the entrance exam for a society of people claiming to be vastly different than other people. Hmm.

Re: My IQ

#270

Post by btilly »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #265
btilly wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defining intelligence is complicated, and probably a wrongheaded way to look at things. See http://masi.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html for more on that. But with that said, any definition that says that Feynman wasn't a genius is obviously wrong. In every environment that he was in, he was given the genius label because he obviously was one compared to (usually quite intelligent) peers. If a test says…

Perhaps Feynman was a poor example. I was going by his claim that his own IQ was 125 (or something to that effect). I suspect that there is more to that number and that we shouldn't take it at face value. I see no reason why he wouldn't score much higher.

You are so wedded to your theory that you are unable to accept facts at face value. Presented with evidence that Feynman's IQ was not exceptional, you conclude that he was not a genius. Presented with evidence that he was a genius, you conclude that there must be an external reason that he did not do better on the IQ test, and the test result can be thrown out.

The conclusion that you seem to think impossible is that someone can clearly be a genius and yet that genius would not be reflected on IQ tests.

Let me offer you two alternate hypotheses.

The first fits the criticism in the above post. Many questions on IQ tests are ambiguous - there are multiple logically possible answers, and to find the "right" one you have to figure out what line of reasoning the test maker was most likely to have followed. This is a question about conventions, and Feynman clearly was extremely unconventional. He therefore is an example of someone who was literally too creative to do well on the test.

A second possibility is that Feynman's gifts were overwhelmingly mathematical, not verbal. His graduate entrance exams stand as evidence of this, as do comments from people who have examined his work. See http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einstei... for an example. Since an IQ test has a large verbal component, on which Feynman would have only been somewhat above average, he did not score exceptionally well.

I like the first theory better, but there is significantly more evidence for the second. But either way there is no evidence from anyone who knew him, including Feynman, that the IQ score he got is not what he should have been expected to get based on what an IQ test measures.

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