Like I said, success has nothing to do with dress - and that includes negative correlations.
Clearly no one gives intelligence tests - but school attended (in terms of quality of engineering department) and company worked for do count a lot, and many interviewers give technical quizzes. So people do their best to test for relevant intelligence. If the companies in the example were here, not only would Jane’s company do better, Bob’s would be a laughingstock, getting the reputation of only attracting dumb applicants.
My daughter and son-in-law both taught LSAT classes for a major company, and they saw improvement in the scores of their students after they got some basic test taking skills, so their experience matches yours.
I did my ‘research’ the old-fasioned way - with a big stack of practice exams and a stopwatch. 
After a week or so of doing that as a job, four-five hours a day, I was pretty damn good at it. Certainly a lot better than I was before that week. Take an average person, and make them study the test as their job, and pretty well anyone could do reasonably well, I think - all depending on how dedicated they were to doing the same boring test over and over ad nauseum.
The real key to doing well on the LSAT, above all others, was time discipline (that may well be different from IQ testing, I dunno how they work). Time was really tight, so if a problem stumped you, you had to make a best guess and move on - flagging it to come back to if time permitted at the end.
Also the logic type problems were all variations on a few basic themes (‘if A sits next to B and is wearing red’ sort of thing). Once you had puzzled through them once, it was really easy to solve the same basic problem if it was guests sitting next to each other at a wedding or cars parked next to each other in a lot, or whatever.
[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian;12793842On a second point, what is your evidence that “people skills” are inversely correlated with IQ? Sure, I can think of …[/QUOTE]
I make no such claim. I merely ask if IQ, above some particular threshold for the particular task, is as predictive, or less predictive, of performance success as other skill sets are. I don’t even know my IQ, let alone others. My WAG though is that I am likely not far off knowing who is much brighter than me and who isn’t and if I assume I am in the middle for my profession I can judge from that.
[quote=“DSeid, post:64, topic:549997”]
But the thought experiment is not “can you come up with a way to split up these million people which will lead to a GREATER disparity between the performance of the two companies”, it’s simply “will one company do meaningfully better than the other”. No one is claiming that IQ is the single greatest way to rank people’s abilities or anything.
[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian;12794736
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.[/QUOTE]
Interesting that you mention it, I have had the opportunity to witness practice effects first hand recently while participating in a research study (renorming) of one of the most widely administered ability/achievement tests currently in use. The 60-some subtests have been separated into 4 blocks. I’d given the first three to a number of participants, but never the fourth. Since the company was eager to obtain as much data as possible from school-aged children during the summer months, they offered an incentive to give multiple blocks to the same subjects. I’d given Block C to a teenager, but I wasn’t able to fit his demographics into any of the other two blocks of tests I was familiar with, so I gave the fourth, which actually had several of the previous day’s tests included.
The individual did not improve on any of the verbal tests (I think he obtained the exact same score) but did gain several raw score points on several performance subtests, despite expressing some boredom about having to do them again.
It happened there was a web conference with the testing company the next day, where the issue was discussed. We’re prohibited from this practice now.
On the subject of reliability, IQ scores are generally very stable over time, based on my first-hand experience giving them in the schools. For example, I remember a case of a Down’s Syndrome girl whom I tested twice in high school, whose scores hadn’t varied more than a few points over the course of 4-5 evaluations, which was over a 12-year period.
And my point in proposing the different thought experiment was that no one, I think, is claiming that IQ has no predictive value of anything other than performance on the test. How you perform on that test does correlate with some aspects of problem solving skills that are salient to success in school and in professional life. And of course if everything else is equal then any test that has any predictive value* at all* of improved performance will lead to better results if applied in a robust manner across the populations. Honestly, the thought experiment, as described, is trivial.
The issue is whether the belief of Otara is or is not accurate: is IQ “the best predictor”? And again, my belief is that thresholds of having whatever sorts of intelligence that the IQ measures exist for different sorts of jobs, and that once that task specific minimal level is met additional IQ superiority is less predictive of “success” than many other factors
Perhaps it is selection bias, but I every person I have met with an over 130 IQ has been a bit of a wild child after high school. Sure, they eventually settle down and do well, but since the OP is hiring them right out of high school, this can be a severe problem.
I know that a significant reason I wound up dropping out at my first college was because I put myself for the first time into classes that I could not just slack off and still do well in. I don’t know about my IQ, but my ACT was a 32 on the first try (unless you count seventh grade when I got a 26), and that was so high that I got a schollarship even after they were officially out of them. When I came back home, I found there were a lot of other people like me in the same situation.
Yes, it’s actually a pretty common type, the language happens to suit the style. You do mean one of these, right?
“No relation” wasn’t my point. I said they’re not “tied” - and they’re not. They’re correlative* up to a point*. But that point is well below the OP’s 135-145.
No, it won’t, that’s the point of the Twisted Pear graph. If you want the *most *creative people, you’ll stick to the sub-genius group (not the SubGenius group). High IQ types are no more creative than average IQ types as a group. Conversely, highly creative types are no more intelligent than average as a group. So selecting for high IQ is not going to select for high creativity as well. You’re implying creativity is something you either have or not, and a higher IQ person is just as likely to have it, but that’s not the case. There’s a scale of creativity, and at higher levels, it doesn’t correlate with IQ. Only selecting the highest IQ outliers will not net you the *most *creative inventors, the *most *artistic advertising gurus, the *most *innovative engineers. How can we then say Jane’s company will *definitely *outstrip Bob’s, when Bob’s company is just as likely to have more inventive widgets, more excitingly marketed and with more radical production techniques. Also, receptionists and support staff who aren’t bored out of their hypersmart skulls.
That’s a pretty interesting theory, although it is a bit convoluted. It would be pretty unusual for individual characteristics to behave that way. Any evidence for it whatsoever?
As he’s suggesting a negative, would it not be more appropriate for you to provide evidence that there was a link?
Certainly from my experience at school there was no noticeable correlation between creativity in visual arts or English and intelligence even though the more intelligent might well have demonstrated superior abilities in the technical aspects of these endeavours.
Check that again. I don’t know that there is any relationship. The Tao’s Revenge offered some evidence for a linear positive relationship. Mr. Dibble is in fact making a positive assertion. If I understand it right, he’s suggesting that high creativity is somehow clustered in the range of average to high average IQ. It’s not clear to me how, in his model, creativity is distributed outside of those ranges.
Nevertheless, he is in fact making an assertion, and it would be helpful to see what evidence he has for it.
Cool. They look like those (except British ones and our ones have colored in squares instead of dots) but my Finnish is a bit rusty.
I should start a thread in Games about cryptics and punning in other languages than English, but I’ve hijacked this one enough.
Regarding practicing for IQ tests and getting whatever amount better doing it.
Yeah, you probably don’t won’t to compare Bobs first IQ test score with Bill’s test score if Bill’s been practicing like a mofo and the scores are similiar.
OTOH, I’d imagine if not so smart Bob and a bit smarter Bill either both practice like heck or don’t, the IQ scores still mean “something”. Or, in other words, I don’t think practicing/improvement, even if true to a decent amount, does not negate the value of the test, unless you can practice enough get nearly perfect scores.
First of all, I’m not certain I believe this claim. But, are they in fact LESS creative? Even if there is no difference, then Jane’s group will be just as creative as Bob’s group and will be more intelligent (or at least, better at the tasks that IQ correlates with). But you seem to be making a stronger claim of some sort…
I feel like there’s an underlying unspoken egalitarian belief of some sort in Harrison-Bergeron-esque human equality, which states that any time someone has a strength they must have an accompanying weakness. So sure, Jane’s group has higher IQs, but that just proves that Bob’s group MUST be more creative, or nicer, or easier to work with, or have better people skills, because, um, because they MUST.
Very well put. I think that’s exactly what goes on in these threads. I think it comes from some kind of perhaps well-intentioned humanistic philosophy that every snowflake has an equal potential to shine.
I don’t mean that as dismissively as it might sound, but it’s one thing to wish that might be true and another thing to have empirical evidence of it. I’m a very liberal person, but I’m very much driven by empiricism in my decision-making, and the evidence overwhelmingly indicates clearly that IQ measures something meaningful, that it is stable over time, and that it is a strong predictor - not the only predictor, but arguably the best individual predictor - of job performance, as well as academic performance. It also appears to be inversely related to antisocial behavior, and thus is helpful in making predictions in that area as well.
Well, when it comes to the brain, if you push its capabilities to the extremes something apparently has to give. Idiot sevants arent good at everything. And some pretty creative/artisitic folks seem to be pretty dim bulbs when it comes to everything else besides their particular talent. Note this is just my pop culture impression and not a rigerous review of the lit.
But I agree, that for the large group in the middle, its probably not a 1 to 1 ratio of if you have this, you don’t have that sorta thing.
Being an artist doesn’t mean you are creative. Someone who is creative can come up with something new and interesting. If artists were creative, there wouldn’t be periods/groups of art like The Impressionist Era or the Modern Art Movement. Each person would be doing his own thing, rather than joining and imitating a style.
Artists are people who have an enjoyment of aesthetics, not who are creative, regardless of what the layperson thinks.
You know what I meant. And if you didnt you do now.
So according to you, I am a great Chef because I love watching Top Chef and enjoy good food even though my main meals are usually run of the mill premade crap.