therefore…
WTF??? No, you see, the posts that say “Dale The Bold” are mine. The one that said that must have been written by someone else.
Dale The Bold wrote (unless his cat got to the keyboard ;0 )
Memory is the prime thing we measure. Even math skills
require the memorization of formulas. I do have to wonder about measuring the
application of knowledge beyond memorization.
Now me:
Can you expand on this? If memorisation of formulas is not acquired knowledge, what is it? Arithmetic is only one subtest BTW.
I haven’t read the whole thread but thought I’d throw in my two cents. I joined Mensa a little while ago, and the people do seem pretty smart, even a little more than average. But, the idea that these guys are the top two percent is kinda funny. I’ve met MUCH smarter people in my life and don’t consider myself very intelligent.
I need to have things explained to me over and over, and have trouble sometimes with putting information into an overall context. Maybe I’m too open and ready to admit ignorance to hear what the other person has to say to take much of a stand on a given topic before hearing another side.
I think attitude and work are MUCH more important in success than how well you do on an IQ test. Actually, being intelligent doesn’t seem to have much of a bearing on success to me. I’ve failed miserably at plenty of things, and figure my failure was based mostly on work ethic. My successes were largely based on work ethic. Intelligence really doesn’t seem to have much to do with it.
Scientologist:
But can you really give a person lock-jaw by opening and closing your hand in the manner of a clam’s shell?
Even if Mensa members really were the intellectual top 2% of the world’s population (as opposed to the top 2% of IQ test takers), there’d still be plenty of people smarter than the average Mensa member. One in fifty people are going to be in the top two percent. That’s a lot of people. You’ve probably met thousands of people in your life, so it’s unsurprising that some of them would be members of a higher percentage group, like the top .1% of the population.
Thanks for correcting my mispelling - embarrasing enough I’ve always mispelled it Aspberger, even in patient records :o Fortunately, I’ve seldom had the need to write that particular d’x…
I live in Sweden, so now you know a country where the Weschler tests are routinely used as screening for neuropsychiatric conditions. In adults, WAIS R or R-NI is widely used as screening tools for both neurologic, neuropsychiatric, psychiatric and other conditions that might affect cognitive functioning. In children, WISC III and sometimes NEPSY is routinely used as soon as a child shows problems in school or parents suspect learning problems.
I’m not an expert in children, but it seems a general screening like WISC III is useful for most conditions in the child neuropsychiatry spectrum like autism, Asperger, ADHD, etc. The results give a hint of where to focus the cognitive part of the assessment. Of course it’s not used as the only tool of - just one in a larger battery.
Oh, and about Asperger scales - here, the specialist children neuropsychiatrists and neuropsychologists use Gillberg’s scale of Autism - Asperger. It’s supposed to be well validated, but I haven’t actually checked it myself. Prof Gillberg is a Swedish specialist in the area of child neuropsychiatry. He has been publishing in the international peer-reviewed press about Aspberger for over 15 years, and he’s also very active in general media, since he’s very devoted to the idea of school support to children with this type of conditions. He alone is probably the main reason why Asperger was well known to Swedish professionals in the area long before the DSM IV listed it.
Regret to say that no public library in my county owns this book, so I cannot conveniently obtain a copy.
When it comes to memorization of a formula and applying it to a given problem, someone with very little knowledge of how the formula worked could still get the right answer simply by applying the formula. I think intelligence is evident when a person can write their own formula to solve a problem.
Allow me to use car engines as a metaphor. I remember knowing how to add gas and change oil and little else. The car was available to me, and I could apply it to my needs, but I didn’t know how it did what it did. I couldn’t explain how the engine worked, but I could still use it. Then I learned how interal combustion works and the intricacies of an engine, making me a much more valuable person to have around when something breaks down. Now, that’s just one thing that I know that makes someone “car smart,” but also not enough to make a person considered “intelligent.” So it’s got to go beyond memorization and becoem applied knowledge. Some people just never get it, they will apply the equation, but never tear it apart and understand why the equation works.
Memorization is acquired knowledge, but applying it and understanding it are much more important.
That’s convenie–errr, unfortunate.