“Be aware that intelligence (IQ) only has a small correlation with things like career success and happiness. So, you may also be interested to read “Why Intelligent People Fail”.”
Assume that the IQ test has 100 questions. If this is intended to test from two standard deviations beloe to two standard deviations above, then only 2.5% of people will have IQs above 130, 0.5% over 140. Interpolating one might guess that maybe 5% have IQs of over 124. The differentiation between an IQ of 124 and 140 plus can only be decided by a few of the available 100 questions. There will be some randomness in the number of questions answered correctly on each occasion. The IQ test is very good at differentiating between people within the two sd each way area of the bell curve, but not at all relaible at differentiating between 125 and 150, except with repeated and in depth testing. Additionally, one blind spot in one area of the tests will stop an IQ of above about 120 being registered, even if the person is at genius level in all other areas. Many people have major difficulties with understanding numbers, and yet are no less ‘intelligent’ than numerate people. However, they stand no chance of showing this on an IQ measure that involves completing numeric series.
Pjen, my dear chap, you are stating the obvious. (Ponderously so.) No one is quibbling with the bulk of your truisms. I’m on my way to the airport, so I don’t have time to continue this discussion but, rest assured, no one is arguing about predictivity, design flaws/limitations, bogus correlations, etc. Go back and read the posts. These pointless side discussions are doing a disservice to the OP.
Very true. My Uncle in England was considered slow because they didn’t find out until later that he had a growth in his ear that made him quite hard-of-hearing.
This reminds me of Daniel Tammet, who has Asperger’s, and recited pi to its 22514th digit March 14th 2004. He is, however, a high-functioning autistic, and probably has a reasonable IQ.
Someone who was a politician, nevertheless I admire them to a great extent:
Winston Churchill - apparently he performed very badly at school, though some of that could have been due to loneliness and homesickness (boarding school, neglected by family, etc.)
And, you know, WC achieved kind of a lot.
And I agree with whomever said that I.Q. tells you nothing about how a person will function in the real world, and in dealing with other human beings.
I come across more and more evidence of this all the time.
By the way, the entire purpose of IQ tests was not to measure intelligence. It was to see which children in school were behind their classmates and thus needed extra help. Those developing the original tests were concerned with those below 100 and it wasn’t until later that people started interpreting the tests as a way to determine genius.
A score above 100 originally meant that you did a little bit better than average; it was not dealing with innate intelligence. It could just mean that you had picked up a few concepts on your own that hadn’t been taught in class.
That’s exactly right in terms of the mean and standard deviation for IQ tests. I don’t think you could exactly call the normal curve a logarithmic scale, but it does follow the properties that 68.3% of samples fall within one standard deviation of the mean, and 95.4% fall with two standard deviations, 99.7% within three, and so on. That means there are a lot more people with IQ 100 than with IQ 120 or 80. Less than 2.5% of people should have IQs 130 or higher.
Hold up. Was the numbers fellow somewhere on the autism spectrum? Having personally witnessed how very difficult it is to administer an IQ test to a child with autism, I don’t put a lot of faith in the accuracy of the test for such an individual. The team tried very hard to get my little friend to take the test, breaking it into small chunks over several days to try to catch him when he was the most focused, but at some point you have to stop when he’s just not cooperating because it can’t go on forever. The standard test format just didn’t work very well for him, and I’m sure there are a lot of other kids just not capable of giving accurate results. It’s theorized that about 50% of kids with autism have IQs in the normal range, but it’s just a theory because testing is so difficult.
