61–68 of 68 posts
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Right, IQ measures some abstract mental capacity, not knowledge. It's not very useful on its own.
It's probably more accurate to say that IQ is a useful indicator of many specific cognitive deficits, and basically unuseful within or above 2SD of the center.
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It's probably more accurate to say that IQ is a useful indicator of many specific cognitive deficits, and basically unuseful within or above 2SD of the center.
No. even within 1SD there are huge qualitative differences in what people are capable of.
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No. even within 1SD there are huge qualitative differences in what people are capable of.
There are huge qualitative differences between cognitive ability between pairs of people within that range, but IQ stops accurately selecting the more capable of the two. It gets worse as the scores get higher. IQ is not a ranking of cognitive ability.
Yeah when you get into the upper tail it starts to get hard to find things to differentiate people.
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Interesting take! But don't you think that smartness would be something that would work across all/many domains?
Decades of research on the g factor seem to imply that most cognitive tasks are indeed heavily correlated.
But this is something most people prefer to ignore because the implications are pretty big and we already had a war around that...
It's interesting how people always try to find some kind of number to race against. Here's a simple theoretical situation. A brilliant mathematician with very high IQ crashes in the jungle, but is unhurt. Not far from the crash site, there's a tribesman who lived in the jungle all his life. He doesn't know how to read or write. The jungle is filled with predators, spiders and snakes. The sun is setting, the night sta…
You're confusing 'adaptation', 'knowledge', and 'intelligence'. The scientific comparison would be to put the mathematician and (lower IQ for the example) tribesman in the same situation from birth and see which performs better. Now it's still not a given in that situation that the high IQ individual would be better adapted to the environment as physical traits may matter more, but it is probable that the high IQ ind…
Plenty of people are working very hard to redefine "intelligence" because reality hurts their egos. There is still nonsensical debate about being able to measure it and whatnot even though the research has constantly shown the truth for quite a while now.
I guess that at the start of formalized measures like the meter there were plenty of people to contest how "stupid" it was because it made them shorter than they liked to pretend.
I prefer to think of "smart" as a vector, I'm more interested in the dot-product with the situation at hand.
Same, but smarts is a tensor and I do a situational cross product for the hypervolume
At best - and it’s a stretch - IQ correlates with intelligence sometimes. It’s far from a reliable measure though.
The problems in testing are obvious. You can depress someone’s results simply by changing the language used in the questions. I.e. you can make Americans score worse by using British English. That’s nothing to do with innate intelligence.