I’m not aware of any context outside of mental health or disability services that would use an IQ test. My IQ was tested as part of vocational rehabilitation (hey, they were offering to pay for my textbooks for an ADHD diagnosis, what could I say …); it’s literally never come up in any other scenario and no one has ever requested it. I’d be surprised to hear otherwise for anyone else.
Gee. Generally, smart people do well on tests for smartness. Your first sentence would more accurately read “IQ is a relatively good predictor of economic success in countries that follow the Western European approach to training and employment.”
We do not need to show a better predictor, because that presumes that we have to have a predictor. (Begging the question is a fallacy, by the way, something of which smart people should be aware.)
If IQ was simply used to predict economic success, then it might have a value, (although I am not sure for what and not as the misnamed “intelligence” quotient). But given the large number of ways in which it is misapplied, dismissing it as inappropriate until psychometricists get a handle on what they want to do with it and get the bugs worked out is the only rational approach to the issue.
You’ve obviously never been within shouting distance of a foremost academic institution, have you? I know this because this post is garbage.
People have already corrected your incorrect statement about IQ being used as part of the admissions process. Grades, SATs, interviews, essays yes, IQ no.
Second you seem to think that everyone in such a place comes from rich parents. In my class at MIT there was a Dupont and a princess of Thailand. But there were also the children of carpenters and house painters. And my dad was hardly rich or influential.
You also seem to think student spend all their time writing essays, as if learning how to think and express yourself clearly is useless. However people do a lot of other stuff. You should have seen the lab I worked in. I think a Mechanical Engineering major could fix an engine as well or better than someone with the benefit of not being polluted by a good education. Look up Scav Hunt at the University of Chicago, where student do all sorts of amazing things. My daughter transformed her laptop into a pinball machine, and she had one of the easier tasks.
Many of us, by the way, have had experience with bullies - who might be the cohort you respect.
Fighting a war? If people could do that right off the bat, why have basic training?
I’ve noted that while lots of IQ haters accuse people who believe in the concept of intelligence of elitism, they actually suffer from a reverse elitism, where those who know something beyond them get scorn.
The current Administration is an excellent example, where morons think they know more than people with deep knowledge of an area.
People always think of IQ so linearly, as if more is always better. Maybe more isn’t always qualitatively better, maybe its just different. I think of sports as an example - it’s good to be much taller than average if you want to play basketball, but after a point, being too tall has its disadvantages. And if you go a little further, being tall is disadvantageous if you want to, say, be a jockey or a coxswain. I feel sometimes people try to hard to make intelligence fit into some sort of categorical hierarchy and it just doesn’t fit neatly or correlate enough to predictive performance. It would be like trying to say that there is an ideal athletic body type, and sure, someone who was slghtly taller than average with a well proportioned build and natural muscularity would have and advantage in many athletic endeavors; however, it may not by the ideal for any particular sport or might be ideal for a few but not many others. Of course, if you compared this person to someone who was excessively short or lame in some way then they would have a tremendous advantage. There are people who are limited mentally who are incapable of many things that a high IQ person is capable of and the differences are obvious. On the other hand, the difference in ability and potential between a person with a 120 IQ and a 140 IQ becomes more opaque. Also bear in ming the IQ test was not originally intended as a way to measure high functioning individuals, but instead was used to test for mental retardation.
Mmm, soup.
So this is an affirmation of the value of the IQ test? It measures exactly what it is meant to.
A combo of reasoning, creativity and emotional maturity.
I disagree with the last one, “intellectually taxing job” isn’t a very specific category, but OK, say it does. Concentration isn’t a part of intellect to me, most of the clever people I know are a bit flighty. So really, it’s a measure of problem solving. So it’s a PSQ, not an IQ.
I’m an “IQ hater”, and I very much believe in the concept of intelligence, I just don’t think it’s well-encapsulated by g or well-measured by IQ tests.
This might be a good time to point out that grades and SAT scores correlate really well with IQ.
Not at all. What is “general intelligence”?
Is there a one-to-one correspondence between IQ and making money? Is there a one-to-one correspondence between the IQ and the ability to survive in the wilderness? Is there a one-to-one correspondence between IQ and the ability to find a good life partner? Does it predict the ability of painters, sculptors, composers, poets, novelists, machinists, heavy equipment operators?
IQ does a reasonable (hardly perfect and without a direct correspondence) job of predicting whether a person will be economically successful in a society that places high values on the traits for which the tests are designed. That is not “general intelligence”; it is has a quite narrow focus. And, as its (mis)application to other cultures demonstrates, it does not even work well predicting similar qualities outside the culture in which it is designed.
Mean Mr. Nylock? 
IQ tests correlate well with school performance, but mostly with scores on the low end of the curve. As it should be. The test was originally designed to identify children who need extra help, not to pick out highly intelligent people, and it is good at the first, not so good at the second.
I worked with disabled people for a number of years, and people who had IQ scores from school that were below 100 were very informative. We needed other information too, especially right around the 70 mark in deciding who could safely be alone for periods of time, and who could not, but it was a helpful piece of information to have.
OTOH, my IQ tells you nothing about me. My IQ that was scored in intermediate school-- the only one I ever saw-- was 142. It’s the reason I was always put in advanced programs, but I often got removed from them after a few weeks, because my school performance was not great. I read several grade levels above my actual grade, but aside from that, I didn’t do well in school at all. I was terrible at math, but I could pass portions of a math test with multiple choice answers with no problem. I scored 640 on my math portion of my SAT, and I took it when I was 15, after only a freshman algebra course, that I had not done well in.
My 142 is meaningless. It’s not a measure of anything other than my ability to take tests, except possibly slightly a measure of precocious reading ability, but nothing else. And that precocious reading ability equally affected the reading and math portions of the test.
Also, FWIW, the most commonly used IQ test in schools does not score above 150. Anyone who scores higher does not get a score or “187” or something, they just get a notation that they score “beyond the range of the test.” So TV geniuses with IQs above 150-- that’s total BS.
Not to hijack the thread too much, but did it ever piss you off? It’s refreshing to read a post by someone in a similar situation as me. I sometimes wish I never even knew what an IQ test was, given that the only thing it ever did for me was lead me down a long fruitless path of thinking it mattered - and even worse, lead me to not appreciate mental discipline and effort, among other bad things. My parents really drank the cool-aid too, which only exaserbated matters. I can’t spell exacerbate right, oh - I just did, its a C.
I should have added another m.
Regards,
Nylock
But apparently, you can’t spell Kool-Aid right.
So you think there is no correlation? That someone with an IQ of 140 isn’t more intelligent than someone with an IQ of 100?
Which correlate reasonably well with performance in college - I’d guess from colleges using them.
No doubt that high IQs do not necessarily correlate to grades. Our district school psychologist said that very high IQ kids have different learning strategies, such as intense focus on one subject while ignoring others. That doesn’t lead to great GPAs.
Plus, not everyone is good in every subject.
They should have put that on the test. I’m a terrible speller, and it only seems to get worse as I get older.
There’s a correlation, but it’s fairly loose. A person with 140 isn’t *always *more intelligent than a person with 100, no. Unless you’re defining “intelligence” as “able to do the tasks in this kind of test”
It’s my belief that therein lies the confusion when analyzing the results of these tests. People always want to fit them into a hierarchical framework. I believe that the results of the test are more qualitative than quantitative; although there is a relevant quantitative aspect involved. The interpretations of the results by laymen go way beyond anything approaching settled science and lead to the equivalent of judging a fish by its ability to swim. As mentioned previously, the test was originally designed to measure deficiency, not ability. It would be like judging someone’s ability to swim based on how fast they run the 50 yard dash. Sure some things can be gleaned from those results - for example, someone without legs would be not be able to run or swim at a high level. However, barring any underlying physical anomalies, the test would be far less able to tell much about one’s relative swimming abilities from peers with similar results on the running test.
People are scum.