What's the straight dope on IQ and intelligence?

[MaxTheVool]

@Mr.Nylock

To answer your first question we would have to have an agreed upon, measurable definition of intellectual pursuit. And to compound problems, you have to tie it into the IQ measurement. As you can see in this thread, IQ means many things to many people and is constantly conflated with other things and states of being and then some people want to sterilize other people because their score isn’t high enough, and other people think they’re better than the unwashed low IQ masses and others just want to take the damn thing and throw it into a sewage filled lake. Now I’m just getting depressed, I think I’ll sit here a while and meditate on the subject.

Have you ever seen the champion wrestler that had no legs?

I’m not sure what point you’re making. Or what point you think I was making. The fact that some people in the world have said “we should sterilize people with IQs below 60” or “I’m using IQ scores to prove the superiority of one race over another” doesn’t mean that the concept is meaningless. Heck, those people are probably using scientific-sounding arguments. Should we now stop using scientific-sounding arguments because they are sometimes misused?
In any case, I came up with what I think is a very good analogy that explains how I feel about IQ. There are two parts to this analogy.

Part A: So, you’re the administrator of a infantry training base during war time. You are overseeing 10,000 scared kids who are going through boot camp, and your country needs to get them trained up as fast as possible, and you’re super busy trying to keep everything running, organizing all sorts of crap, etc. You’ve hardly spoken to any of the actual recruits themselves, and certainly haven’t gotten a chance to get to know any of them.

Then one day you get an order from up the chain of command saying that you need to pick 1000 of your recruits who will be sent to another location to receive training in the brand new internet radios that will be issued to 1 soldier in 10. This will be a month-long cram session covering the operation, maintenance and repair of the physical radio itself, along with quick surveys of cryptography, meteorology, physics, networking, and a variety of other topics that will let the radio operators deal with unexpected situations. Due to a fuckup above your pay grade, the train to this other camp leaves in two hours, and given how long it will take to actually gather up the selected recruits, get them to the train station, etc., you quickly calculate that you have about 15 minutes to actually choose which 1000 out of the 10,000 recruits to select for this advanced training. You certainly do NOT have time to gather together all of the sergeants who have been actually working with the recruits to chat about the strength and weaknesses of each of 10,000 possibilities. For a moment you consider doing it at random… but then, you remember that in the intake documents you got for each recruit is the result of an IQ test. So… you could just pick the 1000 recruits with the highest measured IQ scores.

Should you?
Part B: You’re a sergeant in a situation similar to the above. You’ve been working with a squad of 20 recruits for several months, getting to know their strengths and weaknesses, and you’ve also had time to learn about their background, get a feel for what areas of expertise they might have, etc. Then one day, an order comes down from above saying “we need 2 of your recruits to be selected for special radio operator training. Recruits Jones and Smith have the highest IQs among your recruits, so please give them their orders. The train will be leaving in 24 hours”. However, you happen to know that while Jones is in fact very smart, Smith is a serious slacker who screws off all the time and arrogantly refuses to learn new things. And you also know that Miller is an electronics/computer whiz, who spends all his free time looking for devices to tinker with, but is miserable as a grunt-in-training. Also, Kowalski is nearly as smart as Jones, but only a decent soldier, while you’ve already marked Jones as someone who will make a great leader, so his leadership skills would be wasted as a radio operator. You suspect that your higher-ups are reasonable enough that if you go suggest that they should definitely take Miller over Smith, and should arguably take Kowalski over Jones, they might well listen to you.

Should you?
To me, in both cases, the answer is yes. If you’re in a somewhat contrived situation where the only thing you have to go on is tested IQ scores, well, that’s better than nothing. So in option A, you won’t get the perfect 1000 potential radio operators, and the cohort of 1000 might have an overrepresentation of affluent kids who didn’t speak a second language growing up, so had advantages on IQ tests, and there are plenty of pieces of information that ought to be taken into account that are being ignored… but you’re still going to have MUCH more success overall, with far more able radio operators, if you grab recruits based on IQ rather than totally at random. (Of course, hopefully going forward the army will sort things out such that there’s a more sensible and comprehensive testing/selection process in the future.) And in the second example, you DO have both the time and the information needed to make a more informed decision… so you make it.

[Mr.Nylock]

@MaxTheVool

I’m not sure what point you’re making. Or what point you think I was making. The fact that some people in the world have said “we should sterilize people with IQs below 60” or “I’m using IQ scores to prove the superiority of one race over another” doesn’t mean that the concept is meaningless. Heck, those people are probably using scientific-sounding arguments. Should we now stop using scientific-sounding arguments because they are sometimes misused?
In any case, I came up with what I think is a very good analogy that explains how I feel about IQ. There are two parts to this analogy.

You are not seeing the point I’m making. Your scenarios above are a reasonable use of the information gathered in an IQ test, but in the real world, and as you can see in this thread, that information shapes the attitudes of people in the real world in much different and more far reaching ways. Your scenarios also doesn’t really define the scope of intelligence as a whole - which is part of what the OP is about. A lot of the science behind IQ is fairly unknown, there just is not a lot of data to back up any any of these assertions in a very solid way. I believe the void of reliable scientific data on the subject ends up getting overenthusiastically filled with simplistic assumptions which may or may not be accurate. Until there is more reliable data on the subject, I believe the many various scenarios I previously laid out and where I used sports as an analogy are all plausible.

[tomndebb]

@MaxTheVool

Part A: . . .

Should you?

meh. Probably. Knowing, however, that recruiting 1,000 people will result in a certain number of screw-ups, (see Part B), and that after the first wave of people selected, the military will have time to provide a better process for selection further down the line.
In other words, in the particular imagined scenario, picking a broad group of people for a one-time short-duration objective based on IQ will not destroy the desired goal and it has the potential to provide a relatively capable population for that first pass. It will not provide a guarantee of success: too many bright slackers, too many bright people uninterested computer skills, too many people who test well but cannot figure out real life situations, (in other words, not really all that bright), etc.

[Voyager]

@Mr.Nylock

You are not seeing the point I’m making. Your scenarios above are a reasonable use of the information gathered in an IQ test, but in the real world, and as you can see in this thread, that information shapes the attitudes of people in the real world in much different and more far reaching ways.

I’m not sure IQ has a lot of relevance in the real world - or the score, at least. I know my junior high school teachers had my score. I’m not sure about high school, and I know for sure no one in my college did. Does the military have IQ scores, or the scores from their own tests? And no job I ever had had my IQ score, or anyone else’s.

[thelurkinghorror]

@Voyager

I’m not sure IQ has a lot of relevance in the real world - or the score, at least. I know my junior high school teachers had my score. I’m not sure about high school, and I know for sure no one in my college did. Does the military have IQ scores, or the scores from their own tests? And no job I ever had had my IQ score, or anyone else’s.

The US military has ASVAB/AFQT, which can be correlated to IQ, with similar practical caveats.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Budget_Player_Cadet

So in another thread (since removed), there was some discussion about IQ. Without wanting to tread too close to that mess, another poster, who seems to know what they’re talking about on the subject, said something along the lines of “IQ represents test-taking ability, not intelligence”.

This confuses me. I was under the impression that there was quite a lot of scientific literature on IQ, and that there was a general consensus among researchers studying intelligence that:

• IQ correlates quite strongly with a great many personal traits,
• IQ correlates extremely well with the general intelligence factor g, and
• modern IQ tests such as WAIS are at least to some degree reliable

Where am I going wrong here?

I think measuring intelligence used to be like measuring someone’s body fat by their height and weight. now its like measuring body fat by height weight, running speed and how much you can bench press, squat and dead lift. You still might get it wrong. Maybe even by a lot but it will usually be close.

I also think that IQ is just one trait out of many that can lead to positive life outcomes.

[Voyager]

@thelurkinghorror

The US military has ASVAB/AFQT, which can be correlated to IQ, with similar practical caveats.

That was my understanding (never having had the privilege of taking one.) It is kind of like SATs. I’d hope it would be tuned to be of use to the military, and so would be more helpful than a raw IQ score.