I think IQ is much like capitalism. It’s the worth system we’ve got, except for all the others.
But what could we as society even do about it? We can’t change people’s genetics.
But we can provide better teaching and a culture that fosters intellectual achievement, both of which, as I say, I think are much better correlated with good STEM graduates and performance anyway.
The reason I personally want to de-emphasize the importance of IQ is because:
- A lot of the reason it gets talked about so much is because some want to take differences in the perceived averages between “races”, genders etc to justify bigotry about whole groups.
- As I said upthread, on an individual level, it wrongly makes us feel we’ve achieved something if we get a high score, or as if we are incapable of achieving something if we get a low score.
- On a social level it also takes our eye off much more important balls (so to speak).
No, although your response appears to be that other way of avoiding a truth you do not like by the hand waiving.
A falsehood based on truth is just that. The bald assertion of a direct relationship when in fact there is not a direct relationship is a falsehood based on an exageration based on the poor or weak understanding.
Many caveats in fact which you appear not to have noticed or understood at all.
But since there is the preset belief, no point in discussion of science.
The attitude toward IQ in this country is strange in that we both fetishize intelligence and deny its existence. For example Neil de Grasse Tyson has 10 million twitter followers despite his opinion on anything beside astrophysics being no more valid than anyone else’s. At the same time many school systems are trying to cram everyone into a college bound program.
On an individual level IQ is potential and having a high IQ is not an accomplishment and should not be regarded as one. There are plenty of high IQ dopes and failures and low IQ successes and wise people.
On a societal level IQ denial leads people to develop IQ proxies to sort people by intelligence. College is one of the few times in a person’s life they are overtly sorted by IQ so college has become more important in a career. Many jobs have college degree requirements that should not require a degree just to sort out the wrong kind of people. College is almost all signalling and from a societal standpoint all resources spent on escalating signalling is wasted. The costs of college have skyrocketed and marginal students are spending huge amounts of money for little or no gain. If that sorting was done earlier there would be huge savings of time, money, and trouble.
Sure, but as noted before (and many times before I may add and in this thread) the test will miss a lot of items that can lead many to dismiss someone that can become a big asset later in life. Indeed, ‘A mind is terrible thing to waste’.
We already do know how limited someone like Ben Carson is now, but he became a big name in brain surgery. Point here is that I do think that the sorting you are talking about would had meant that Dr Carson would never had a chance as he did. (IIUC if he had made an IQ test in 5th grade he would had been declared a dunce, but his family did help in his amazing turnaround later) And while I disagree with his politics and the other ignorant ideas he has (something that could had tripped him in a test also), nevertheless he was hailed as a great neurosurgeon.
I agree with many of your random thoughts but not the conclusion.
A much better predictor of achievement is education quality and learning environment / culture. I see it very clearly here in China, where “geniuses” are ten a penny in the posh Shanghai suburbs, but rare in villages or small towns.
And while a lot of college is signalling, it’s not just about raw intelligence. It’s a test of your self-discipline, persistence, ability to work independently or collaborate, research problems etc, all useful skills for just about any employment*.
I agree in some ways that it’s quite a costly way now to measure those skills (particularly in places like the US, where costs have spiralled out of control), but no, it’s not just a long-winded IQ test.
- And I think it’s important for students to recognize this. Many people (e.g. younger me) are of the mindset that if you’re bright, you should get a high grade and you just need to not screw up to get it.
Instead it’s better to realize college is a test of a lot more than just your smarts, and you may need to confront your weaknesses to achieve the best you can.
If a tall person feels he has achieved something as a basketball player and a short person feels he is incapable of being a basketball player, do we reject the concept of a ruler?
The thing is, IQ isn’t a system.
What, exactly, are IQ tests valuable for?
This has a staggering number of assumptions built into it, though, which boil down to a simple question: what are the institutions that IQ predicts success in worth? Are the educational institutions that IQ predicts success in teaching and grading properly? Are the high-pay jobs that IQ predicts success in really worth as much as they pay?
Further, do we even have enough data about certain correlations between IQ and success in certain fields? It’s sort of self-evident that people who do well on grades and placement starting in high school (which IQ will probably pick up on) often go on to do well in, say, research at high-profile institutions. But how often do we pluck someone who was plagued by mental illness for years, washed out of school, but now can manage it, give them training, and see how well they fare in a research position?
It’s not surprising that IQ measures success in many avenues in our society. Not to get too postmodern about it, but the fact remains that there’s a very, very fundamental set of assumptions about the soundness of our entire society and economic system built into it that I’m not sure can be ignored (or even adequately answered).
My argument is more or less that any test designed or correlated with success in our society is, by its very nature, built on a house of cards revolving around assuming that succeeding in our society reflects how we should be measuring or encouraging success.
Someone who has recovered and went back and got a good PhD would probably have no trouble getting a research position. How many are like that?
I’d bet that someone with high intelligence would do well in any society you propose to replace ours. Intelligence is not jumping through rigid hoops, intelligence is adaptive.
One exception - Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron society would not be a good match.
Firstly, you’re presuming the question of the thread; that IQ measures intelligence correctly. It’s entirely possible it’s heavily biased by relying on certain factors required to succeed in Western society that aren’t related to whatever abstract concept we think of as “intelligence”.
Secondly, part of my point is that people may have heavy learning disabilities or extreme depression (which can cause mental fog and inability to focus and work) or other mental factors that inhibit their abilities to get good scores on IQ tests, or get good grades, or whatever, but are otherwise capable of intellectual work given a different environment or some accommodations. How much data do we have of whether there are people that can do that?
Basically, the phrase “IQ corresponds with success quite well” is more verbosely saying “people with a high IQ are most equipped to navigate the exact series of obstacles and challenges to achieving success in our society” which means they’re probably intelligent, yes, but the fact remains that we don’t exactly have much data on whether IQ measures the potential to be successful at work requiring a great degree of intelligence. We don’t exactly pluck random people with middling IQs and put them through the meat grinder to see if they could succeed just as well as nuclear physicists as the high IQ people who navigate the system.
“IQ measures intelligence” is an unverifiable statement, because while we know IQ and success in certain intellectual fields are linked, we can’t be sure that the common paths to these intellectual fields require strictly intelligence or intelligence AND other factors that IQ tests are silently and unknowingly relying on as well.
Being able to retain knowledge is not IQ. Being able to use knowledge you possess to do things other than you are taught to use them for is intelligence. The more a person with a high IQ learns, the more that they can properly interpret and utilize things out of the box.
If you have a nail that you have to pound in and can’t find a hammer, what else do you possess that can hammer that nail in. Next, is there an alternative to putting in that nail, and also is it really necessary to put that nail in to hang a picture on the wall that you hate?
People with higher intelligence tend to think in array thinking patterns, they are always evaluating things, they have a curse called ADD, they crave to learn things and are not satisfied till they can find an answer that makes sense instead of accepting consensus of the time and what society thinks is right. Intelligence is Wisdom.
A person who can memorize things utilizes molecules that are like prions or antigens to create a memory, the way the protein is folded and the position of the antigen determines what is stored. People with intelligence utilize white matter more and the energy goes in different directions in the brain, sort of like memorizing the pattern of a phone number instead of the number itself. There are two types of inteligence, IQ is one and the other is Knowledgeable. You can have both, but the more you learn, the more your own knowledge restricts you from solving something, your belief in what you already know can keep you from searching for the truth or reality of something.
The more I learn, the more I find I have to learn. That is my curse.
I haven’t denied the existence of IQ (has anyone)?
But in a way, it’s good you throw in this analogy, as we can frame the discussion in those terms. As in, having a high IQ is an advantage, but how much of an advantage?
My view is that it’s like a couple inches difference max for anyone within 2 standard deviations: it matters, but is just one of many factors, some of which matter more.
It’s nothing like being in Mensa = being 8-foot tall.
Supposedly the marshmallow test found that self discipline is more important to success (not sure if just academic, or other forms of succeess) than IQ. However I don’t know if that study is as reliable as it was once thought. Either way, as I posted above, in groups of high IQ people (150 and 180 IQ) the men did far better than the women. Most of the women with IQs in the 150s or 180s ended up as homemakers due to social and cultural reasons while the men became professors, lawyers, and other professionals.
However, the real power of IQ seems to be in groups. Yes, an individual with an IQ of 140 may end up in a bad situation. But if you look at 10,000 people with an IQ of 140+, they will collectively accomplish far more than a group of 10,000 people with an IQ of 90. There will be outliers, but overall there will be a clear trend in regards to education, income, (street) criminality, innovation, vocation, etc.
Comparing a large group of high IQ people will have totally different results than a large group of low IQ people. The contributions to society of the former group will be far higher across the board even if there are individual outliers.
If we decide that Ted Cassidy (6’ 9") or Richard Kiel (7’ 1") are better basketball players that Michael Jordan (6’ 6") or LeBron James (6’ 8"), we might consider not presuming that the ruler tells us much about basketball skills.
It appears that you are saying that people with higher intelligence (tend to) have ADD.
That is silly.
One might believe that people with ADD (tend to) have higher intelligence, but that is not the same statement. (It is also a statement that I suspect is wrong. ADD sufferers tend to demonstrate higher potential incertain situations, but aside from certain individuals, they are not “more intelligent” per se.
This.
I have my IQ test results from elementary school in the 50s and 60s. My scores were embarrassingly high (>140). I did pretty well in school, pretty much aced the SATs, and attended an Ivy League college.
Now I’m retired and I can be realistic about the whole issue. I did not work hard and I did not have any personal discipline. I was clever when I needed to be, but basically lazy as I could be. Am I intelligent? Yeah, I guess so. Did I put it to good use, either for myself or for my fellow human beings? No.
IQ by itself is just like new tires on a shitty car.
Well 10,000 people all over 140 IQ vs 10,000 all below 90 is quite an extreme scenario, not like we see in the real world.
In the real world, I doubt there is any university where the average IQ, let alone every IQ is above 140. However there are plenty of highly regarded Unis where the majority of students are from an upper-middle class or higher family background.
Like I say: quality of education and culture of intellectualism (or lack of it) are much more important factors. And as you allude there may be other important factors that we can’t yet measure that also may be more important.
I agree that IQ is a thing, and it has some effect, I just think society can overweight it at times, for the reasons I have listed a couple of times already.
I dispute the premise anyhow. In my experience high IQ people feel pressured to do more, not entitled. My point was that granting the premise does not make the IQ measurement worthless.
After all, I live in the Bay Area where we have the not very tall Steph Curry.
Ohio State/Michigan game?
