How Smart Are You, Anyway?

In My Humble Opinion
81

Another thing about GRE results is that they are variable, while traditional IQ tests mostly are not. No cite*, but I’ve read that on standardized tests one’s score changes very little through life, barring brain damage or dementia. I’ve taken the test twice, the first time scoring about 20 fewer points on the verbal part and over 100 fewer points on the quantitative part. I was able to achieve the increase on the quantitatve just by studying an old algebra book for about a week before the test. So…which GRE result would be a more accurate demonstration of my intelligence? Was I not performing up to my full ability the first time, or did the second test give an inflated result? I did get solicited by Mensa after the first one, but I definitely would have been a squeaker…the dullest tool in that shed for sure!

*No cite, sorry. I’m not foolish enough to attempt to research IQ tests on the internet and be flooded with popups for online tests.

82

I’m smart enough that when I read something, on the SDMB or otherwise, that I don’t understand, I assume that it’s because it doesn’t make sense, or was badly written, because goodness knows I’m smart enough that I’d understand it otherwise.

I’m also (barely) smart enough to realize that I’m sometimes wrong in the above assumption.

83

When I was younger, I thought I was pretty smart. As I have gotten older, I realize most of that was just hubris. Experience has shown me that most people are pretty smart, but in different ways.

The tea boy in my office speaks three languages from three language-groups.

I no longer believe in the concept of ‘intelligence.’ Too many smart people I know cannot cook or paint a room.

84

I wouldn’t ban anyone for stupidity, but I keep petitioning to have “willful ignorance” added to the definition of “being a jerk.”

85

Apparently I’m pretty good at taking tests; I’ve consistently scored well above average on just about every test throughout my academic career. Yes, I was in the “gifted” program at school. Scored in the top 5% of the nation in the SATs, whatever that is supposed to mean. Won a spelling bee in 7th grade. Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts in 11th grade. Won this award, that award, scholarships yadda yadda yadda. I probably know far more about dinosaurs and basic evolutionary history than most people, since dinosaur art is my freelance specialty. I’ve taken a variety of so-called IQ tests and tend to score between 120 and 160, depending on how much math is involved…So forth and so on…

But I can’t for the life of me do any math right now beyond the basics of figuring out how much of a tip to leave or how much change I should be getting back from my $20. I know there’s something called the “FOIL” method of figuring out something which might be a “quadratic equation” (if that even exists; it may very well have been something I dreamed about once) and it goes “First, Outside, Inside, Last” in reference to the order that you work out the equation…but I could not in a million years recall how or why I would actually apply it. I honestly would not recognize a quadratic equation if it bit me on the ass. I wouldn’t be able to figure one out even if I was offered my heart’s desire as a reward. I can barely remember how to figure out the area of basic geometric shapes, never mind the volume of solids. I think that acceleration due to gravity is something like 32ft/second/second or something like that, until terminal velocity is reached, but I have no idea how to figure that out. On a good day I can remember how to work with fractions properly. If someone put a gun to my head right now and demanded that I define what sine, cosine, tangent, cotangent, and whatever other weird terms I’m forgetting here are, I’d be dead. Amazingly, I somehow scored well enough on the PSATs and SATs to have very good scores despite my poor retention of mathematical knowledge. I must have purged all of that math for the sake of memorizing song lyrics or something.

I absolutely fucking despise those logic problems that go: “Shaggy is taller than Velma. Velma is shorter than Fred and Daphne, but taller than Scooby. If Fred is taller than Daphne, then what is Scrappy?” (Answer: a horrific goddamn annoyance)

I can remember the basic order that certain periods of art history occurred, but right now off the top of my head I couldn’t give you even a close approximation of the years that Leonardo da Vinci lived in or if he was a contemporary of Caravaggio, even though I am a huge fan of both artists.

I do well with letter substitution cyphers, crossword puzzles, and creative endeavors like art, music, practical problem solving, and writing…well, creative writing, anyway. My attempts at essays tend to meander about on various side quests and follow something of a stream of consciousness style of organization.

I don’t think I’m stupid at all; it’s just that I have somewhat specialized knowledge and skills. Depending on what categories there are, I can either run the board at Jeopardy! or sit there like one of the poor saps that Jay Leno interviews for his “JayWalking” segments.

All of that being said, I think I may, in fact, be a genius in the most impressive sense of the word. Or perhaps a prophet of God. I’ll let you know if that turns out to be true. It might just be the beer talking now…

86

Sausage Creature, I feel the same way about Great Debates. I don’t like to go in there unless I really know what I’m talking about; therefore, I never go in there. :wink:

I don’t believe the IQ test online because I scored a 157, and I’m just not that smart. I bombed on the LSAT last year after a month’s preparation, have only a clue how the stock market works, and, though I’m 41, the rules of football continue to elude me. :eek:

87

Oh, I love those! Does that mean I’m smart? Does it? Does it? Huh?

88

I was pretty much like that too, in school. I was good at all the non-math stuff, and even science in the earlier grades, where math is not usually used. Not being good at math hurt my GPA and kept me out of CSF. Which was kind of a drag, because I loved learning anything and everything about rockets and airplanes, and a better understanding of math might have led me in quite a different direction from where I actually went.

I’m significantly better at it now, but it’s still difficult.

89

It might, if you can also make a killer spaghetti sauce, parent a child, maintain a satisfactory social life and keep credit card debt at a reasonable level.

:wink:

90

I can do that, more or less. Woo-hoo! :slight_smile:

91

Here’s an example of me being smart. I’m talking to the paralegal of the city where I used to work. For no reason I change the subject:

ME: What if Superman had a blocked colon, how would they treat it?

HER: Roto-Rooter

ME: They can’t operate! Are they going to use kryptonite scapels?

HER: Roto-Rooter

ME: I wonder if anasthetics would work on him

HER: Roto-Rooter

ME: His bowels would get impacted until he exploded

HER: Roto-Rooter

ME: ::dumb silence::

HER: :dubious:

ME: Oh! Yeah! I get it. They can just snake him out.

HER: ::rolling her eyes:: Yeah.

92

Okay. I’ve made the killer child and a satisfactory spaghetti sauce…um…what was the rest?

93

I am very smrt. I mean , I am very smart.

94

In fourth grade I tested in the 160s, so, I was an under-achiever. I remained “an under-achiever” through high-school.

In college I tested off their chart, so I was a freak. I was an over-achiever in college. (Well, 3.8 GPA, not perfect, that darn beginning piano class…)

Their test was stupid. It only measured memory. I have (or had, I’m old now.) a great memory. That doesn’t, in itself, make me smart.

I’ve done on-line I-Q tests that put me between 127 and 168. I just don’t buy it.
We all have strengths and weaknesses. Do we need to label them?

95

That phenomenon is probably for several reasons:

  1. A measure like the IQ score is supposed to be distributed in a bell curve across the entire population. However, the entire population is unlikely to be represented in the readers and participants of this message board. The responses are a non-random self-selecting sample, particularly if you take into account the slogan of the column and the board:

*Fighting Ignorance Since 1973 *

As such we can assume that as IQ scores diminish below 100, the “average” or “mean” score (I like to think of it as the score at which people feel that they can be mean to you if it is your score which is why we don’t see them reported) it is less and less likely that someone will have the skills and interest needed to access the message board, read and comprehend the contents and make a meaningful response.

For example, someone with a true score of 6, not an accidental score, or a mis-scoring through testing error, is extremely unlikely to be reporting his/her score on this thread.

If I am incorrect on that, please feel free to identify yourself.
2) Next, participating in activities like this message board requires a certain amount of free time. This can come from being a student, unemployed, working a normal schedule but not two jobs, unless the one or more of the two jobs “allow” participation licitly or not and the interest in doing so. That is, those scrambling for survival are not going to waste time here. Or, invest it shall we say.

  1. Then you have to have the interest in participating in the forum, let alone finding and responding to this particular thread. This is where the argument for high intelligence really biases the sample. Many of the authors here are clearly very intelligent, with the exception of a few in the BBQ pit, this is a place where people mostly talk about ideas. Strange ideas true, but ideas nonetheless. This being true, it tends to attract smarter people than a board that attracts people that only talk about other people.

There’s an old saw that goes, the least intelligent people talk about things, most people talk about other people, but really smart people talk about ideas. I have also heard it with the bottom two reversed. Now this can be challenged directly as idea smarts snobbishness by those with social smarts and mechanical smarts under the multiple intelligences theory and I think that there is a lot to be said for that, however, in terms of raw IQ score and literacy, it seems clear that higher IQ scores are very well represented, precisely because it is the kind of place that people with advanced IQ’s would like to gather and chat. To me, this seems obvious.

  1. As far as participating in this thread goes and actually reporting your IQ or intelligence, as I mentioned parenthetically above, we tend to put a premium on intelligence in society: why would someone with an average or below average IQ who has been a long-term participant in the board single themselves out by so identifying themselves when it might come back to haunt them in the BBQ pit, or in any other place, forums like this essentially lasting forever in terms of our working lives? (If not forever, than for a pretty darn long time.) Who knows when it might come out if our employer, say, noticed that we were posting as “Xyz” from work then happened to check all our posts and discovered that we had admitted to an IQ of 98? What do YOU think would happen on the next performance review (aside fromthe whole posting from work issue)?

Well, I wouldn’t want to count on a completely unbiased assesment anyway.

  1. At the same time, the sample could be biased at the top end of the scale too. Some people with really stratospheric scores might not be willing to admit it here either for fear of the kind of alienation you can get in the real world that comes with being identified as superintelligent. Not only do some people not like it, they can be quite petty and mean to someone that they consider to be above normal intelligence. I’m not just talking about the geek stereotype here, I am talking about otherwise normal looking people with reasonably good athletic skills being given a really hard time because/when they do well in classes because the others in school feel threatened by them.

Whether you call this anti-achievement bias or the work equivelent “hey new guy, stop working so hard, you’re making us all look bad” it amounts to just about the same thing, a bias against anyone too far outside of the norm.

Which is why I am not surprised that the norm appears to be around 140 which is right at the border of genius.

  1. Another biasing factor is that most people who are smart, love being smart but get penalized socially for talking about it in any other forum. But here, with some anonymity, more may feel comfortable revealing their numbers to strangers, and in fact may delighted to have a safe place to do so. :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool: :cool:
    This might well tend to increase the higher number of high scores.

  2. However, those with REALLY high scores might want to keep them private out of embarrassment, so we cannot assume that failure to reveal a score indicates a low score, just as we cannot assume that the score revealed is a reflection of the true intelligence of the person in question.

  3. More to the point: we as humans, are so much more intelligent, even at an IQ score of 20, perhaps even at 5, than most other life forms that the question of how intelligent one is compared to another almost seems moot. Yet we compare because that is how our brains are wired, how we learn and how we come to know things from the moment, and in reality well before the moment we are born (we can hear sounds and experience touch etc, in utero). That being the case, perhaps a better question is, what have we done with our intelligence lately?

96

Anybody know if IQ tests have been updated to the point where this is actually true, or are we using the same basic test as 40 years ago?

Seems that the number of folks with advanced degrees may have gone up over time which might impact IQ scores.

97

In case anyone’s still interested in Mensa’s acknowledgement of GRE results for eligibility, I found this from their website. IIRC they used to not accept results after 5/94, but now evidently they’ve come up with a threshold score that satisfies them.

From [url=“http://www.us.mensa.org/join_mensa/testscores.php3”]here:

GRE prior to 5/94 (math + verbal) 1250
scored from 5/94 to 9/01 (math + verbal + analytic) 1875
effective 10/01 N/A

98

I never took an official I.Q. test.

I don’t really care.

I don’t really think the I.Q. itself means anything useful at all.

Mostly I think people’s notions as to what intelligence means are woefully limited. No test can adequately approximate the vast range of activities, ideas, and experiences that can be affected by human intelligence. At best these tests measure a very, very small and narrowly defined subset of how intelligence can applied; the tester’s own biases are paramount in the intelligence testing process. So the question becomes: are the tester’s implicit biases of any real value to society, other than helpful for narcissistic preening? I submit that, by and large, they are not.

So far this thread proves my point about the preening.
:wink:

We may as usefully discuss penis size.

99

“Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration.”
– Thomas Edison

“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.”
– Albert Einstein

“I’m very creative, all I need to do is develop some talent.”
– Anon., from some movie I saw …

100

That would embiggen us all!

I’ll take the plunge. I don’t know my IQ, but I’d guess in the mid-to low 120s. Not cripplingly intelligent, but able to understand Frasier.

For a while, I thought I was really bright, but the higher I went in formal education, my peer group’s average intelligence obviously increased.

Every step along the way would weed out some of the paint sniffers, and I’d have to re-evaluate my place in the world.

I’m good with 120-125.

I’m just glad I wasn’t born with an 85.

[sub] Hell, I’m just glad that I wasn’t one of those guys that got a tiny, teenie weenie![/sub]