You need to do more interesting crossword puzzles. Modern ones deal with wordplay, not just obscure words, and you should give cryptics a try.
I am good at crossword puzzles because I have an excellent verbal memory, and so can pull up words very easily. You of course get better with time, but it is not correlated with time. My dear departed mother-in-law did puzzles for more years than I was alive, but still was nowhere as good as me. So crosswords measure a very specific skill.
So, MIT professors are impossible to manage? I worked at Bell Labs for quite a while, and for 10 years as a manager, and had no problems. If the style of a manager is to treat reports as moronic children, then there would be a problem, but it isn’t the fault of the employees.
Depends on the job. Sales, no doubt. But above a certain minimal level, we here in Silicon Valley don’t hire on the quality of your suits. Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun, said “the purpose of a tie is to keep soup off your buttons.” I think he did pretty well for himself.
I could walk through the entire Noyce building at Intel and see a couple of suits - and they’d be visiting salesmen. Success there has nothing to do with dress.
As far as sales jobs go, assuming roughly equal people skills, would you buy from a person who when asked about how their product solves a problem you have more or less reads from marketing material and says he will get back to you, or one who suggests a clever solution, and understands your problem well enough so you know that when she discusses it with the tech guys will get it right?
Jane’s company would absolutely do better. IQ tests do, for the most part, measure how smart you are. They are all rather well-correlated with each other and they all assess mental functioning in fairly straightforward ways. And the “some people are better at test-taking than others” thing is mostly irrelevant as well, because test-taking skill is largely rooted in intelligence.
I don’t think anybody claims that test scores can be raised by 50-100 points.
[QUOTE=Voyager;12794417I am good at crossword puzzles because I have an excellent verbal memory, and so can pull up words very easily. You of course get better with time, but it is not correlated with time. My dear departed mother-in-law did puzzles for more years than I was alive, but still was nowhere as good as me. So crosswords measure a very specific skill.[/QUOTE]
And IQ tests measure a set of specific skills that can’t be shown to equate with an overall measure of intelligence. The IQ proponents fail to provide a coherent definition of intelligence aside from circular reasoning that intelligence is a high IQ score.
I do crosswords daily, and my most common technique is get a word based on the clue, then find all connecting words based on possible letter combinations and backtracking to the clue. I know others who rely primarily on the clues. There is more than one way to skin a cat, and crossword proficiency and high IQ scores don’t indicate the methodology used.
I realize that but I why can’t it be a valid benchmark?
We are constantly reminded of the incredible plasticity of the brain, and some also claim that the IQ test can be “coached.” This criticism is part of the ammunition that IQ tests are worthless.
Ok, proof to me of the above points would be a clear recipe that shows how to gain 50 to 100 points. Why not?
I very much appreciate that you actually took the effort to look at the actual literature on the topic. You know what? I’ll go ahead and buy into the hypothesis that if you administered the WAIS to someone, and then you them the test materials, and told them what all the vocabulary words meant, and told them what the answers were to the comprehension and similarities subscales, and let them practice digit span. block design and digit symbol, they would be able to achieve a greater score when the test was administered the second time.
My problem with your analogy is that the Minesweeper would be just one subscale, and that in practice, the test materials are well-guarded, and as you alluded to, the typical person will not be administered the test at all, let alone more than once and only very rarely multiple times in a short span.
You know what - I wouldn’t be surprised if you did see maybe a few points improvement if you did administer the test in short succession to someone.
Nevertheless, my point would remain that the typical IQ test administration is not something that you can teach to and which wouldn’t be invalidated due to some kind of practice or exposure effect.
You clearly have issues with people making general statements about “IQ tests”, fair enough. Maybe if you used the actual name of a test, or set of tests, we could distinguish what you are talking about from the many, many, many test that claim to measure intelligence. Not that that would satisfy the question in the OP but it would make your point clearer.
There have been a lot of IQ tests over the years making a whole lot of extraordinary claims. What claims am I spitballing bullshit about? The claim that we can correlate race and IQ? The claim that work ability and IQ are related? Maybe there are nuggets of gold to be found in the study of IQ but it’s buried in a mountain of crap.
Gee, we have your supposition that IQ scores are not stable, versus many, many empirical studies. See, the thing is, when you conduct a study of the stability of IQ, you don’t just use one person. That helps to reduce the effects of individual differences, like motivation and intentionally screwing with the assessment. So, when a large number of researchers examining data from an even larger number of people find consistent results that IQ measured at one time point very reliably allows you to predict IQ at another time point, you kind of get more confidence of the stability of IQ over time than one guy on the internet supposing that he could intentionally perform poorer in order to prove his point. But go ahead and keep surmising and supposing. It’s just as good as empirical testing.
Gee, how about you support your assertion regarding IQ scores instead. That would be a novelty.
What point are you trying to make?
What point are you trying to make?
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I’ve never seen IQ tests strongly correlated to anything except academic performance and income. And income is strongly tied to academic performance. In addition, correlation does necessitate a cause and effect.
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You cannot have looked, then. Try looking first, and then thinking, and then speaking. It’s most handy. Or just continue to spitball blindly about what you think is true. Be sure to continue to preface everything you say with “Well, I don’t have the facts, but…” or “I don’t have the details, but…” Why let little things like facts and details stop you from proclaiming the invalidity of IQ?
Please link to any of the “other evidence” that you refer to.
Physician, heal thyself.
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See, that’s the problem here. I do know the literature and history of IQ testing. I know many of the tests. I know how to administer and score them. I know their utility and their limitations. If I were to “heal myself” in the manner you seem to be suggesting, I would have to unlearn all of the “facts” and “details.” Perhaps I would feel more blissful then.
You don’t seem to get that you undermine your point. If there is no relationship between IQ and creativity, then you are equally likely to find creative people with low IQ and creative people with high IQ, by definition.
Thus, opting for the high IQ group will give you an equal number of people who are creative in comparison to the low IQ group, but they’ll all be smarter, too.
I’m pretty sure you aren’t claiming that hiring in Silicon Valley is done strictly via IQ tests, the topic at hand. You can claim that Silicon Valley jobs are based on intelligence in a general sort of way, sure. If your going to assume that all successful people must have high IQs then whatever company in the OP does the best must then have the high IQs. Success itself is the best IQ test in that case.
I also pretty sure that, all other things being exactly equal, you folks in Silicon Valley don’t automatically hire the worst dressed interviewees because they must be the smartest.
Boy do I have no idea what point you’re trying to make.
You’re protesting your ignorance on the subject because you attend to the whole range of nonsense? Isn’t that a bit like saying that medicine is an invalid discipline because homeopathy or chirology exist? I think I’ve made very clear that I’m not talking about Facebook’s IQ test, but about standard IQ measures. I have in fact even listed them. In several threads I’ve provided evidence from the literature. It makes no fucking difference, because in about a month, I can almost guarantee that I’ll read a post from you saying “You’d think that people making wild claims about IQ would ever back up those claims with some evidence!!!”
Note that I was intending to write “homeopathy or chelation therapy or chiropractics exist”, not chirology.
How analogous to IQ testing are standardized competence tests such as the LSAT?
I remember much similar discussion about how one could not train for the LSAT because it measures pure ability - this is directly contrary to my personal experience. Certain simple tricks that you could teach a monkey to do (or, at least, an undergraduate 
), can significantly improve LSAT scores - for example, simple question - pacing discipline.
If, on the contrary, the LSAT is not comparable to IQ tests, and IQ tests are better measures of actual ability than tests such as the LSAT in that they cannot be ‘gamed’, why are IQ tests not used instead?
Been there, done that… cryptics, ciphers, swedish style grids… I tend to learn the tricks fairly quickly. I might have to look for some English language ones to see if they keep better. Oh right… I’m finnish.
Oh, do tell… what kind of research? Where can I read it?
…also would you happen to know where I could find a 100-type person… it might be interesting to see if they could be improved upon.
I’m working on a “hardware-assisted” type of method for boosting IQ. It was my own research into what others have done with IQ performance that guided what I did. It’s not something for publication. I did want to know ahead of time if I was inadvertently trying to build a “perpetual motion machine.” If others had done exactly what I had in mind and it didn’t work, I knew not to waste time on it. I found nothing in the literature so I proceeded.
The sliver of hope that even keeps me working on this at all is the “brain plasticity” mantra.
Unless you live in a place like Japan where that sort of teaching to the test occurs fairly commonly. While I would trust that people, in Japan, who scored higher had on average a higher real IQ than people who scored lower, I wouldn’t trust that the national average of testing higher was because Japanese people were smarter. Rather, it’s likely that before taking IQ tests, the kids took classes that went over IQ test puzzle variants that had been used through the years and taught techniques for doing them fast and accurately.
I’ve done one or two Spanish puzzles, but the grids for Romance languages are different because of the letter distribution. This type of grid appears in some American puzzles, but only on baby ones in specialized magazines.
Are there Finnish cryptics?