No. Not by any means. The scores on this test have a lot to do with reading ability, and that has a lot to do with reading readiness, which has to to with many things, including home environment, and lack of a reading disability.
A very bright child whose parents happened to get divorced when he was 3 might have missed out on a lot of reading readiness skills, even if the parents were the kind of educated people who usually have children very prepared to read. In the second grade, their child could still be doing at or slightly below grade level in reading, and score low on an IQ test. Or he could be reading below grade level for an unknown reason. A kid in my religious school class last year was reading well enough that teachers were reluctant to refer him for dyslexia, but in the third grade, he was below grade level. I know from talking to him that he was bright, though. The gap wasn’t very wide, because in the third grade, there wasn’t room for it to be terribly wide. However, if it grew wider, he was probably going to be referred for dyslexia. His parents were on the fence as to whether to wait and see, or whether to get on top of it, and hire a tutor for him. They didn’t want to mask a disability that should be diagnosed, but they didn’t want him to get lost and frustrated with school, to the point that he hated it.
OTOH, a child who is an exceptional reader, and facile enough to write quickly, which is a motor skill, not an intelligence skill, is going to finish the whole test. I always did. Even when we were told that we would probably not finish a section of a test, I always finished it. I finished tests even when the kids in the class who made the best grades did not. It was more prescient of my later ability to juggle than any native intelligence.
I hear you, brother.
I passed my Mensa test at a point in my life where I could have realized how much more important focus and discipline were, and learned to get outside my own head and actually listen to people.
Instead I spent many more years thinking I was already better intellectually than everyone around me, despite not achieving anything.
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I can personally attest that IQ and intelligence are very different.
When young I scored above 99.99 percentile on several tests. Even recently, with my mental powers waning, I found a combinatorial efficiency at a prestigious puzzle site that no one else found.
Yet I have extremely poor business skill, social skill, ambition and even common sense. :eek: Were it not that I found work as a circuit designer or programmer to be easy and fun, I’m sure I’d have ended up institutionalized one way or another.
Not if the person getting 100 was very sick the day he took the test. And these are statistical measures. But you can say with a high degree of confidence that if all other things are even the person with 140 is more intelligent than the person with 100 - and I chose values several standard deviations away to be sure.
100 and 105, though, no.
I don’t think anyone is claiming that IQ is correlated with emotional intelligence. Negatively correlated is more likely.
And don’t sell yourself short. I am similar in a lot of ways, and I’ve always figured that if I weren’t smart I’d be sleeping under a bridge somewhere. IQ-like intelligence covers for a lot of other flaws.
Outliers should get special treatment when taking the test. But if reading ability was that crucial, there should be a shift in IQ scores from second grade to higher grades. IQ tests are not that reading intensive, IIRC.
There seem to have been many studies done on this, with widely varying results.
One interesting one is here. It seems that from early childhood to teenage years, an increase in reading ability is correlated with an increase in Verbal IQ. (VIQ). But there are also changes in brain structure correlated with this increase. The Discussion section says that this result may be due to different reading trajectories. But the change in brain structure seems to indicate that something fundamental is going on here, and that reading ability is correlated with VIQ once a stable reading state is reached.
BTW I am not saying that intelligence, whatever it means, is purely genetic. Bad early environments are going to hurt. I think Charles Murray is as full of shit as you probably do.
IQ tests can, to some degree, assess problem-solving and knowledge, though it’s probably biased to test for constructs that are considered important in the eyes of test developers. An IQ test might predict success in a developed society but it might be less effective at predicting how well someone might function as a survivalist in the woods. Beyond that, IQ as a construct is probably less effective in testing for things like resilience in the face of failure.
Lots of people dislike the idea of intelligence because it refutes egalitarianism. Intelligence is not a skill you can hone (but you can hone other skills that do the same thing as intelligence like working memory, self discipline, hard work etc) because it is genetically determined. Some people don’t like admitting part of how you end up in life comes down to something determined by genetics that you cannot personally control. A the racial component of iq and it gets worse.
But yes, iq is real. The fact that it doesn’t uphold social egalitarianism doesn’t negate it.
Overall outcomes for high iq children are better. Far more end up in cognitively demanding vocations like law, medicine, academia, etc. There are obviously outliers, but in a group of 1000 high iq people selected at random you’ll get far more physicians, scientists, professors, lawyers, judges, journalists, dentists, etc than you’d get in a random sampling of low iq people.
It’s true but I still think its importance is overstated. Are there other cognitive attributes that if we had the means to measure would also be correlated with some forms of success? Undoubtedly.
Also, what IQ is actually required for those kinds of roles? Always in this context people throw around “So a doctor needs to be at least 130…” or whatever, and it’s absolute bull IME. I think an average IQ, access to the right learning materials, and hard work is sufficient to do just about any job well.
Depends on the test. The one I took in 10th grade was all reading; the one I took for Mensa was all pictures. The SAT is not an IQ test but high results have been accepted by Mensa as showing high IQ: that’s another one that’s very reading-intensive.
I took the GRE, not the SAT, but the GRE is supposed to be the SAT’s grown-up version: I found it very test-taking intensive, many of the questions could be reduced to half the options or even to a single one by test-taking strategies; also, while your English evidently needed to be good enough, coming from a Romance language provided a ridiculous advantage on the parts that are officially language-oriented.
and yet in dicussions here the only people who raise some kind of idea about ‘egalitarianism’ are those fixated upon the tests necessary validity, and they ignore the actual content of the responses indicating nothing about an egalitarianism but much about an incomplete science and shakey data.
I don’t think that’s correct. I think that IQ tests can in general assess how well someone is doing in school, and you more or less have to do well in school to go on to the professions you listed, as they all require advanced degrees.
Now, you will get a number of high IQ people who are not successful in professions that require education, or successful at all, but what you won’t get are bright people who scored low on IQ tests and went on to careers that required a lot of post-secondary education.
For example, I know two different people who own chains of car dealerships, who have nothing beyond high school degrees. They are both very wealthy, though, and no one would argue they are not successful. As it happens, they have both been successful in their personal lives, with long marriages, and children who did well. Now, I have no idea what their scored IQs are: for all I know, they may be high; however, the fact that they never went further in their educations even though they were clearly tenacious, and had some kind of smarts, suggests that school was not their thing.
I could name several more people who are social and financial successes without post-secondary schooling, but I think I made my point.
Just because IQ does not explain everything does not mean it is either wrong or useless. People with high IQs have bigger brains. People with high IQs also havefaster brains.
People with higher IQs are better studentsand better workers.
However, the correlations are not perfect. There are lots of high IQ people who would make bad students or bad workers. But if the only science that was useful was science that had perfect correlations than that would mean discarding every social science as a discipline.
I did very well on the SATs, back before there were classes and before the renormalized the scores. I’d say that the ability to eliminate answers (no secret - it was in the little book they gave you with a few practice questions) is a mark of intelligence. We often have to sort through excessive amounts of data or choices, and quickly pruning bad ones lets you devote more attention to the good ones. Chess playing programs do this also.
Half the SATs are math, which rewards pruning but which are not heavy reading.
Why not? The only place I know of where IQ scores influences education is the placement of kids in GATE programs. And even then there are ways for kids who show brightness in class to get in, and kids with high scores who don’t to get kicked out. I’m unaware of any college who even sees an IQ score.
If the bright people with low-IQ scores don’t get into good colleges, maybe it is because their academic record shows that they are not as bright as they think they are. 10 years of grades (16 for grad school) is going to count a lot more than one test, and should.
You seem to be confusing exclusively represented with more represented. There are tons of other examples - actors, sports stars, writers of bestsellers. So? There are plenty of ways of making money in this world using no-IQ measured intelligence.
the bald assertion is the perfect illustration of the Pop Sci assertions and not the real science.
In fact the science has doubts on the correlations which are imperfect, there is the fuzzy relationship with great variation, not a direct relationship at all. We can take the summary from the Wikipedia:
It is a different story than the bald and bold assertion that People with High IQs have bigger brains…** which is the distortion of the actual science so far that it is in fact a falsehood based on true fact**. (also SciAm, and this ásk the neuroscientists’ discussion.
The other links are of the same Pop Sci quality (the bad assertions of the business insider article by the non scientist journalist is a nice example of what is to be despised in the pop psy of the management studies writers that is not much better than the ancient phrenology)
The lesson from reading the science is not that there is no relationships, but the exaggerated confidence and the exagerrated direct statements as quoted are not really supported by a science that remains cloudy. The long history of the bad public policy and even evil public policy based on badly exagerrated conclusions on the incomplete (and even incorrect) science is a good reason to not simply nod the head at these statements.
Yes, there are outliers. But I stand by my statement, in a random group of high IQ people you will find far more successful people than in a random sampling of low IQ people.
IQ isn’t everything, if it were then the women would have had the same career outcomes as the men. But this study was done when there were fewer career opportunities for women.
However IQ does matter. It isn’t the only thing that matters in life, but it does matter. In the group of 15 men with an IQ of 150 you ended up with as they said "Two professors, two engineers, two accountants, a physician, a lawyer, an army colonel, several executives, an electronics teacher, a winery owner, and a lemon grower
The odds of having people who manage to achieve that in a random sampling are not good. But in a random sampling of men with an IQ 150 that is what you ended up with.
A falsehood based on a true fact? Is that another way of saying a truth you don’t like?
Your link says what I said, brain size is correlated with higher IQ. Not perfectly and with a few caveats but from Wikipedia "In healthy adults, the correlation of total brain volume and IQ is ~ 0.4 ". For comparison the correlation between parents height and childrens height is .4-.6. So people with higher IQ have bigger brains is as true as tall people have tall children.