No. Sorry. I thought by using “moran” I was being obvious.
It was aimed at both the geniuses.
Kayaker
with a three digit IQ!!
No, there is no debate in the scientific community that IQ tests work, that they measure intelligence, and that they are useful for predicting what sort of tasks people will be able to accomplish. The debate exists only as a part of the Liberal “Let’s Pretend We Are All The Same & We Are All Unique and Special & We Can All Grow Up To Be President” agenda.
Since this is GQ and all, cite?
There’s certainly debate, at least, even in the scientific community.
ETA: And even without the “controversy”, IQs claimed above 160 are still not meaningful, as per the posts above.
Moderator Note
Let’s keep political jabs out of GQ. No warning issued, but let’s leave supposed political agendas to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Not meant as a political jab. Please disregard the word “Liberal” in my post.
Replace it with “tabula rasa”. It was a consensus of social scientists in mid 20th century, and was associated with Liberal politics of the time. It’s pretty much a non-starter today, thanks to excellent research in the latter part of the 20th century.
One thing we know about IQ tests is that they’re objective, meaning that given an individual, any number of testers can apply the test to that individual and get the same answer, within reasonable tolerances (within a 5-point range, I believe.)
Another thing we know about them is that they measure something we usually associate with being “smart”, and they correlate well to performance at intellectual tasks.
What we don’t know is “what is intelligence”. Given we don’t have a definition, it’s definitely debatable whether the test measures it. We also know that IQ tests can have cultural biases (which can also correlate to the ability to perform well at various intellectual tasks).
This is from Human Natures by Paul Erlich and The Blank State by Stephen Pinker.