My earlier reply seems to have been lost when the boards went down. Ah well.
No, I’m not a fighter pilot, but if it makes any difference my late father was one, as was my godfather. I am not, however, speaking as someone who knows about fighter pilots, but rather as someone who knows about IQ tests.
Possibly, but that has little to do with their IQ scores. You do not need a high IQ to be a fighter pilot, unless the military has made IQ scores one of their criteria (which I believe would be illegal). There is not a job on earth that only people with high IQ scores are truly qualified for. There are some jobs that only intelligent people are truly qualified for, but that is a seperate issue from IQ scores because IQ tests do not, never have, and never will accurately measure intelligence.
Unlike your guy. Have you seen the infamous “Adjusting the sling on my M16 while looking down the muzzle” pic? Geez. Just the guy to tell me what to do with my guns.
They utilize a number of “IQ” and psychological profiles to determine suitability for certain jobs. It may be a question of semantics whether you want to call the tests they give “IQ” but they certainly don’t want idiots in the cockpit. Do you? Is this is some sort of PC sophistry being “taught” in our schools these days?
Or do you just hate the tests themselves as “eurocentric” or something? How do you propose to test the intelligence of people? Anyway, sorry for hijacking the OP.
While an unintelligent person is unlikely to do well on an IQ test, the inverse is not true. It is possible for a very bright individual to make a merely average, or even below average, score on an IQ test. There have been Nobel prize winning scientists with unimpressive IQ scores.
My prefered response to this question is not suitable for GQ, so I will just say that I fail to see how recognizing that “intelligence” is not equal to “the ability to recite strings of numbers backwards” is PC sophistry.
I don’t hate IQ tests. They do an adequate job of serving their intended purpose, which is to identify people with mental handicaps.
How do you propose to test the beauty of people? How about their morality? There doesn’t need to be (and in fact cannot be) a test for every human quality.
I think you’re going too far in discrediting IQ tests. You seem to think that they are indicative of nothing other than the ability to take the test.
That position ignores reams of data correlating high IQ scores to academic success, job success, etc.
IQ tests are not perfect, but that doesn’t mean they are completely irrelevant. Interpreted properly, they are a pretty good indicator of a person’s ability to learn and think logically.
And the fact remains that George Bush almost certainly has an IQ in at least the 120’s, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s higher than that, since his SAT score places him in that range, and he was known as a slacker in his youth, so the SAT might not be indicative of his true potential.
But almost certainly 120-ish is the lower bounds of his possible IQ. Anyone arguing that he’s dumb or even just average is doing so in spite of the facts.