# "IQ measures how good you are at taking IQ tests" **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 11, 2010, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997 "2010-08-11T23:44:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 9
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2010, 2:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997/161 "2010-08-17T14:14:50Z")
> [@Hentor the barbarian](#): > > Follow along, please. > > If the statement: “People may find a (mentally) unchallenging task boring” is true, then the statement " People may not find a (mentally) unchallenging task boring" is equally true. > > Do you understand that? > > If the statement “People may not find a (mentally) unchallenging task boring” is in fact also true, then explain how this statement supports a conclusion that being mentally unchallenged causes boredom. > > You are either playing games or are unable to grasp simple logic. In either event, it’s clearly not something I can help you with. > > . Follow along, please. If the statement: “_People may cry when chopping onions_” is true, then the statement " _People may **not** cry when chopping onions_" is equally true. Do you understand that? If the statement “_People may not cry when chopping onions_” is in fact also true, then explain how this statement supports a conclusion that chopping onions causes people to cry. You are either playing games or are unable to grasp simple logic. In either event, it’s clearly not something I can help you with. . ---
**Author:** ![Hentor\_the\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/8edcca/32.png) [@Hentor\_the\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hentor_the_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2010, 3:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997/162 "2010-08-17T15:14:12Z")
Exactly. Now I think you might get it! Congrats! It isn’t the onion per se, that causes people to cry, but the individual’s personal level of sensitivity to irritants, of which the sulphuric acid in onions is one example. Of course it would be stupid of us to say that cutting up onions is the only way that people’s eyes would be irritated - we know that lots of different types of activities cause irritation of the eyes. If we spent all of our time going on about onions as the cause of tearfulness without understanding individual differences in responsiveness to irritants in any context, people would rightly point and laugh at us, and we wouldn’t want that. What a breakthrough we’ve achieved. ---
**Author:** ![snoopygal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b487fb/32.png) [@snoopygal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snoopygal)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2010, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997/163 "2010-08-17T15:22:51Z")
People may die when their head is blown off with a sawn-off shotgun. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2010, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997/164 "2010-08-17T15:41:04Z")
> [@Hentor\_the\_Barbarian](#): > > Exactly. Now I think you might get it! Congrats! It isn’t the onion per se, that causes people to cry, but the individual’s personal level of sensitivity to irritants, of which the sulphuric acid in onions is one example. Of course it would be stupid of us to say that cutting up onions is the only way that people’s eyes would be irritated - we know that lots of different types of activities cause irritation of the eyes. > > If we spent all of our time going on about onions as the cause of tearfulness without understanding individual differences in responsiveness to irritants in any context, people would rightly point and laugh at us, and we wouldn’t want that. > > What a breakthrough we’ve achieved. Yep, and as per Assertion 3 we agreed that the level of “sensitivity” is the same among people with high and people with average IQs. This was part of the argument, remember? In any case nice dodge of the fact that your logic didn’t hold up. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2010, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997/165 "2010-08-17T16:20:22Z")
Actually, what am I doing? I’m as tired of this as no doubt everyone else is. **Hentor** , you win. My original post way back at #90 was obviously based on faulty premises, and contained logical errors which you have brilliantly exposed. Well done. ---
**Author:** ![Hentor\_the\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/8edcca/32.png) [@Hentor\_the\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hentor_the_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2010, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997/166 "2010-08-17T17:11:36Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > Actually, what am I doing? I’m as tired of this as no doubt everyone else is. Well, don’t forget that proneness to boredom varies across individuals. Perhaps I’m at the lower end of the distribution. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![SyuRi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9e8a1a/32.png) [@SyuRi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SyuRi)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2010, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997/167 "2010-08-17T18:42:07Z")
> [@The\_Hamster\_King](#): > > It’s not that IQ tests don’t measure _anything_, but that what they measure is a really narrow slice of human mental capability. > > For example, if I’m trying to hire a salesman for my imaginary company I’m going to care a lot more about his people skills than his ability to solve word problems. Can he meet a group of strangers and immediately have them like and trust him? That sort of thing is really important in a sales position, but is completely not reflected in an IQ test. > > Sure, all things being equal, you’d rather hiring someone with a high IQ than a low IQ for almost any position. But, all things being equal, you’d rather someone who is a friendly extrovert over a sullen introvert. Or hire someone who is strongly self-motivated over someone who is passive and lazy. That’s more a subject for EQ i believe. Btw, [http://www.mwilliams.info/archive/2007/12/jobs-by-iq-distribution.php](http://www.mwilliams.info/archive/2007/12/jobs-by-iq-distribution.php) Showing how IQ varies with jobs. > [@rhubarbarin](#): > > Do you have cites for the stability of IQ over the life span? > > I admit I don’t know much about it, but I’ve heard that IQ has not been found to be very stable in children. And I was tested 3 times as a child with a nearly 30-point difference between my highest and lowest score. I have never been tested as an adult. There’s a documentary about IQ named “Baltle of Brains”, they speak about an IQ test that was done to school children many years ago and then repeated to th same persons when they were old and their IQ was the same. ---
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2010, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997/168 "2010-08-17T21:23:07Z")
> [@SyuRi](#): > > [Showing how IQ varies with jobs. Very interesting chart. On one hand it shows what seems like common sense: In general, people with high IQs have more of tendency to be professionals that require thinking, such as scientists, physicians, engineers, accountants, etc. People with low IQs tend to be janitors, truck drivers, etc. But if you look at the distributions, each occupation has a very wide range of IQs. Some electrical engineers have IQ below 100. Many janitors have IQ above 100. So you couldn’t tell, just from someone’s IQ, what kind of job he’d end up with. I think it’s in that sense that IQ tests don’t give much information about one’s future prospects. ---
**Author:** ![Kelby](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/a587f6/32.png) [@Kelby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kelby)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2010, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997/169 "2010-08-17T22:42:51Z")
> [@suranyi](#): > > > [@SyuRi](#): > > > > [Showing how IQ varies with jobs. > > Very interesting chart. > > On one hand it shows what seems like common sense: In general, people with high IQs have more of tendency to be professionals that require thinking, such as scientists, physicians, engineers, accountants, etc. People with low IQs tend to be janitors, truck drivers, etc. > > But if you look at the distributions, each occupation has a very wide range of IQs. Some electrical engineers have IQ below 100. Many janitors have IQ above 100. So you couldn’t tell, just from someone’s IQ, what kind of job he’d end up with. I think it’s in that sense that IQ tests don’t give much information about one’s future prospects. Interesting, or maybe more disturbing, that the fellow fixing your vehicle could have an IQ in the Forest Gump range. Hopefully he’s committed and/or creative. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2010, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997/170 "2010-08-17T23:51:53Z")
> [@Kelby](#): > > Interesting, or maybe more disturbing, that the fellow fixing your vehicle could have an IQ in the Forest Gump range. Hopefully he’s committed and/or creative. Or just experienced. I wouldn’t have thought that vehicle repair was a role that frequently required thinking outside the box. Of course some faults are hard to diagnose, but I’d be willing to wager that the best approach for such faults is to be systematic and methodical, rather than relying on a flash of insight. ---
**Author:** ![MaxTheVool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2010, 12:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997/171 "2010-08-18T00:24:13Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > While I am still curious as to where you’ve heard someone claiming that IQ test results had no correlation with any other skill set or outcome other than performance on that test, Honestly I can’t swear I’ve ever heard that claim made in precisely exactly that many words. But an attitude basically along those lines is one I’ve encountered enough to have started this thread. Certainly I’m not saying “hey, you and you and you, Mr. SDMB posters bob and joe, you were guilty of this hyperbolic claim, now my clever thread has bested you”. > [@](#): > > Now _that_ is an interesting question. I do _not_ expect that there would be any one to one correspondence between that which was viewed as “clever” in the aboriginal culture and that which is considered “intelligent” in the Western society. Of course, I didn’t ask about a one-to-one correspondence, I asked about a correlation. It’s easy to construct singular examples of people who either are or are not viewed as clever by their society for some very specific reasons which wouldn’t apply outside that society, but isolated examples (which are, of course, purely hypothetical) do not a correlation disprove. > [@](#): > > Intelligence is always relative to what the salient problems are. Are there correlations between a student’s SAT math and verbal score? (Obviously that doesn’t prove anything, because students who go to better schools will better educations in all areas, yada yada yada. But it ought to be possible to correct for all of that…) And more generally, even if we were to assume that there were 5 or 10 totally independent types of intelligence (and I tend to fall somewhere in the middle… I think there are various types of intelligence, but I don’t think they’re completely distinct, and I also think there are correlations between how strongly people have at least some of them… certainly there are people (even excluding idiot savants) who are math geniuses but can’t write poetry at all and vice versa, but I don’t think they’re independent variables), I think that many of them would be helpful in a wide variety of situations in a wide variety of cultures. But we’ve kind of wandered off into the land of pure supposition here. > [@](#): > > Honestly I do not even need to go outside of our own society for examples of that. Consider the case of the boy who has no interest in sports at all, can’t memorize batting averages or who’s traded to where to save his life, who is shy, who is gifted at math and logic, and who lives in a very redneck town. His peer group never experiences his math and logic giftedness - that intelligence is not salient to that which is considered salient to them. Well, that’s a bit of an contrived example, primarily because it involves kids. However much we might like to make fun of rednecks or whatnot, do you think that adult members of that culture are unable to recognize that quiet old Bob who lives down by the river and doesn’t watch sports, might be smart? In general, I think a kid who would, if he went through the modern educational system, have a talent for Math and Science, is likely to have some kind of talent for SOMETHING comparable, depending on what culture we’re talking about. Fixing cars? I mean, I’m not saying your example is impossible, but you’re kind of stacking every last variable possible and you still might well end up with someone who grows up to be the town schoolteacher or something. And again, say Bob there does fall through the cracks and his peers never realize he’s smart. That still doesn’t mean that the popular kids still can’t have an idea among themselves of which of them is smarter, even if they exclude poor Bob, and that could still easily lead to the correlation I’m hypothesizing. > [@](#): > > And I’ll speak of many in my field: physicians held in high esteem by their peers and by society at large - but if you put them in an aboriginal setting, I don’t think they’d be highly respected or necessarily have the sort of intelligence needed to excel. Sure, you rip them out of their lives and drop them, unexpectedly, into an aboriginal setting, and they’ll do terribly. As will 99% of modern people. That’s not saying much. The real question is either, if they had been born into that society in the first place (assuming IQ is at least partly hereditary), or if they become acclimatized into that society over a long period so that they learn the general way of life etc (note that I specified that for my initial posing of this thought experiment), would they eventually seem more clever, on average, to people in that tribe than other similarly acclimatized moderners? (Let’s also give the tribesmen credit for being sophisticated enough to distinguish between knowledge and intelligence. Someone with working practical knowledge of weaving, or blacksmithing, or mineralogy, or something like that, might be SUPER-valuable to the tribe… doesn’t mean they’d automatically assume that person was a genius. ---
**Author:** ![MaxTheVool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2010, 12:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997/172 "2010-08-18T00:33:57Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > That’s not my claim. Jane’s possible pool might have one or two high creatives. But the actual pool of people with \>135 IQs in a population of one million is small. But from a pool of a million, Bob has a greater chance of netting more high creatives than Jane. OK, I understand your point now, and it’s certainly not prima facie ridiculous. Although for Bob’s company to do better than Jane’s company, a few things have to all be true at once: (1) Creativity is WAY more important than intelligence in a company’s success, so much so that a few key Bob individuals being creative more than compensates for every single Jane individual being far more intelligent than their Bob counterparts (2) The correlation between IQ and creativity has to be weak enough, and the standard distribution of creativity has to be high enough, that the most creative members of Bob’s group are significantly more creative than the most creative members of Jane’s group, despite Jane’s group having a higher average creativity. (And of course at least one article someone linked to here claims that the IQ-creativity correlation goes up to the mid 160’s in IQ…) In any case, though, I assume that if I modified my thought experiment as follows: We take a starting population of one million. We find all the people with IQ 135-145. Jane can hire from that group. We then count Jane’s group and randomly choose an exactly equally sized group of people with IQ 95-105. Bob can hire from that group. Which company does better? Then you would guess that Jane’s company would do better? ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2010, 8:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997/173 "2010-08-18T08:02:11Z")
> [@Hentor\_the\_Barbarian](#): > > > [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > > > No. > > > > Say that I partition everyone in the world into two groups. Group A has everyone of an IQ of 99 and below. Group B has everyone of IQ 100 and above. Now, I take everyone in group B and start sticking forks and needles into them wantonly until they’re crying out in pain and bleeding all over the place. Group A, meanwhile, gets to swim in the pool and drink Margaritas. > > > > In this scenario, regardless of whether I have determined beforehand that there’s no link between IQ and pain tolerance, everyone in group B will certainly be in more pain than everyone in group A, because I’ve specifically targeted them as the recipients of pain. > > > > Mijin’s point is that, tolerance aside, there are more tasks in the world that will be found tedious to people of higher intelligence. He’s wrong for not attempting to prove that, but it is unrelated to tolerance. Two people can have the same tolerance for boredom, but if one of them is given a far more boring task, he’s still going to get bored before the other guy. > > I agree with what you’ve said here. I thought we were talking about two equal sets of tasks here, between Bob and Jane’s equivalent companies, not the universe of possible tasks. Sorry for being slow responding to this. More tasks in the world is equivalent to more tasks in the businesses. If we have two widget manufacturers, they’re both going to need X number of janitors, Y number of factory drones, Z number of data entry people, W number of customer support representatives, etc. If you have a room full of Einstein clones, and you’re forcing Einstein to mop floors and take out trash, instead of being in the R&D department, it’s fairly likely that he’s going to be bored by the task. His tolerance for tedium isn’t less than someone of a lower IQ, but there are more tasks in a real-world company that are too simple to provide sufficient interest. Point in fact, it’s a decently good bet that we’ve evolved to be that way. A tribe of monkeys doesn’t need 30 leaders. It needs 1 leader, 1 wise man, and 28 grunts. Making the grunts smarter is probably good, but only up to the point where they and everyone is fully aware that they’re wasted on the task. Of course, in the real world, it seems likely that the group would change its dynamic. The widget manufacturer populated by Einstein clones would give up factory work and become a total R&D company, with people taking turns doing the boring jobs. There’s no need to maintain the evolutionarily accepted pyramid hierarchy of work if you have a non-representative selection of humanity. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2010, 1:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997/174 "2010-08-18T13:09:29Z")
> [@MaxTheVool](#): > > OK, I understand your point now, and it’s certainly not prima facie ridiculous. Although for Bob’s company to do better than Jane’s company, a few things have to all be true at once: > (1) Creativity is WAY more important than intelligence in a company’s success, so much so that a few key Bob individuals being creative more than compensates for every single Jane individual being far more intelligent than their Bob counterparts Only for those positions where creativity really is going to matter. But yes, I think it matters more, and no, I think Bob’s going to net more than a few. And that’s just creativity. There’s also stuff like EQ etc. > [@](#): > > (2) The correlation between IQ and creativity has to be weak enough, and the standard distribution of creativity has to be high enough, that the most creative members of Bob’s group are significantly more creative than the most creative members of Jane’s group, despite Jane’s group having a higher average creativity. Why would they have a higher average creativity (unless Jane is selecting for it)? Her people are all over in the “no correlation” section - we can’t say _anything_ about their creativity as a group. It could be all over the map. > [@](#): > > (And of course at least one article someone linked to here claims that the IQ-creativity correlation goes up to the mid 160’s in IQ…) I already addressed the flawed 1953 study that number’s based on. I prefer Torrance’s number of around 120, considering he made this his life’s work from the 60s till he died recently. > [@](#): > > In any case, though, I assume that if I modified my thought experiment as follows: > > We take a starting population of one million. We find all the people with IQ 135-145. Jane can hire from that group. We then count Jane’s group and randomly choose an exactly equally sized group of people with IQ 95-105. Bob can hire from that group. Which company does better? > > Then you would guess that Jane’s company would do better? I’d say it’s more likely (but not certain - I still think the high IQ \*tend \*to lack social skills and be more prone to mental disorders like Asperger’s) to do better, because you’d have eliminated the one advantage the average IQ people have (a larger pool of varied other abilities) - essentially handicapping Bob’s choices. ---
**Author:** ![MaxTheVool](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@MaxTheVool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaxTheVool)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2010, 5:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997/175 "2010-08-18T17:19:06Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > Why would they have a higher average creativity (unless Jane is selecting for it)? Her people are all over in the “no correlation” section - we can’t say _anything_ about their creativity as a group. I thought the implication was that there was a positive correlation between IQ and creativity up to 120, but the correlation stopped at that point, ie, people with an IQ of 140 have the same creativity, on average, as people with an IQ of 120. Or is that not the case? The only link I followed and read was the one about the “twisted pear” diagram and it certainly didn’t seem to be saying that creativity then decreased after 120. A super-quick check on Wikipedia seems to indicate that it’s all controversial: > [@](#): > > A very popular model is what has come to be known as “the threshold hypothesis,” proposed by Ellis Paul Torrance, which holds that a high degree of intelligence appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for high creativity.[12] This implies that, in a general sample, there will be a positive correlation between creativity and intelligence, but this correlation will not be found if only a sample of the most highly intelligent people are assessed. Research into the threshold hypothesis, however, has produced mixed results ranging from enthusiastic support to refutation and rejection.[29] ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2010, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997/176 "2010-08-19T14:06:53Z")
> [@MaxTheVool](#): > > I thought the implication was that there was a positive correlation between IQ and creativity up to 120, but the correlation stopped at that point, ie, people with an IQ of 140 have the same creativity, on average, as people with an IQ of 120. Or is that not the case? The only link I followed and read was the one about the “twisted pear” diagram and it certainly didn’t seem to be saying that creativity then decreased after 120. It doesn’t \*necessarily \*decrease. But that doesn’t mean you can say it’ll be the same on average, either. No correlation is just that, “\*no \*correlation”. > [@](#): > > A super-quick check on Wikipedia seems to indicate that it’s all controversial: Yeah, I noted that before. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/iq-measures-how-good-you-are-at-taking-iq-tests/549997.md?page=8)