We should consider it, as long as we don’t wind up presuming that the ruler tells us nothing about basketball success.
Regards,
Shodan
I’ve never said it isn’t one of many factors. High IQ will not help a person with poor social skills be a good salesperson - it might hurt. It won’t help a tone deaf person be a good musician. But other things being roughly equal, it will help.
I don’t know what the entry criterion for Mensa is. My SAT scores are way good enough, but I’d never join a club which would have me as a member. But I am sure they are not at the 8 foot level. 6’ 6" maybe? I don’t feel like looking up the height distribution.
Anyhow articles about Mensa in the late '60s always mentioned the stripper who was a member, so even being a member does not mean great achievements.
My point has not been that IQ is determinative, but that IQ tests measure more than test taking ability.
Imagine separating those two groups out and leaving them to their own devices in the wild.
The 90 group will build a functional - if rather barbaric - society with minimal fuss, whereas the 140+ group will wipe itself out within a year or two.
Without, however, giving it any actual value.
The idea is not that everyone gets an IQ test at 12 and the top third goes on to college, the middle third to vocational school and the bottom third to jail. The idea is that if we admit IQ is a thing then we create alternatives for people with lower IQs so the alternatives are not college or failure. That would better serve the majority of people who test poorly,and if the others want to try the academic route then that can be open to them.
Currently many policies seem crafted under the presumption that since highly educated people are good citizens we make make everyone a good citizen through more education. Thus more pre-school and more student loans are needed. Acknowledging IQ means that there is a limit to what education can and we need to try other things.
The ruler only tells us something about the extremes; It provides no indications that Manute Bol (7’ 7") is better or worse than Michael Jordan.
(Beyond that, the ruler actually indicates something. Regardless whether one uses an engineer’s carefully scored straightedge or the plastic ruler from the local drugstore, there will be only the tiniest difference in their measurements. The various IQ tests can give fairly wide variances even when given to the same individual in a short time frame. We can even agree on what the ruler measures, while such has not been the case with IQ tests.)
Out of curiosity, did you breeze through high school or was it competitive? My smarter friends who didn’t do that much in their careers seemed to have been revered as geniuses in high school and never had to work all that hard. They were successful, but not to the level I would have expected.
The value lies in what you do with it. Differences of five points, say, are well within the noise and have no value. Differences of two standard deviations are not.
If you had limited resources for advanced basketball coaching, would you pick the 5’ 5’’ kid or the 6’ 5" kid? IQ - along with measured class performance and teacher evaluations - can be useful in identifying kids for enrichment. Sure, in an ideal world every kid would get enriched, but we don’t live in such a world. We all agree that kids on the bottom of the scale need extra help, so why not kids on the top?
The benefit of IQ for younger kids is kind of like the benefit of SATs for college age kids - it is a way of measuring without taking into account the variance of grades. That is a real value.
Barbaric? Why? 90 is average IQ, as is 110.
As for the second part, who knows? The “dumbest” Nazi at Nuremberg had a 106. The smartest 143, though he was acquitted and not a Nazi. Granted, a now obsolete IQ test with different methods.
You are correct that IQ measurement is not nearly as precise as physical measurement. However -
Cite. IQ isn’t an absolute measure; it compares you with everyone else. That’s why an IQ of 100 is average by definition.
Thus, if you measure two people at age 25 and find that Joe Blow is taller than average and Jim Smith is shorter than average, and then measure them both at age 45 and find they both grew an inch, Joe would still be taller than Jim. And Jim would still be at a disadvantage against Joe in areas where relative height is an advantage.
I’m not sure what you are saying here. Relative height is an important factor in predicting success in basketball. Not the only factor, an important factor.
High IQ is an important factor in predicting success in a number of fields. Not the only factor. Statistically significant differences are statistically significant. Not “absolutely probative”, nor completely controlling.
If all other things were equal, Manute Bol would be better than Michael Jordan. They aren’t, obviously, but that is very far from concluding that finding out that someone is 7’7" doesn’t tell us much about his ability to play basketball.
Regards,
Shodan
I meant that any functional society under those conditions would have to be rather barbaric to survive.
My hypothesis about the 140+ society is less about evil (or madness) than about intellectual vanity and the capacity for self-delusion. The Nazis wouldn’t have stuck together long enough to achieve power if they’d all been high-IQ types.
I can’t shake the feeling that if I asserted that the 140+ society would have substantially better outcomes, people would be asking for a cite. So… Citation needed. Can you actually back any of this up?
Numbers required to properly measure:
Pants - two
The most complicated object in the universe - one
So? My point was not that IQ would change over time, but that the results of the Stanford/Binet, the Wechsler, and all the other different tests give different results, even if given within a few days of each other. That the same flawed test gives the same flawed results decades apart does not affect my observation.
And in the real world, factors outside purported IQs are also never equal. When applied to individuals, they fail to measure attitude, preparation, enjoyment of tasks, motivation, and numerous other pro- and con- issues relating to life. When applied to groups, those outside factors make the scores irrelevant.
The thing I don’t like about Termites, or rather the study analyzing them, is that the test failed to predict highly exceptional achievement. Luis Alavarez and William Shockley both had test scores that were below the minimum required for inclusion in the study of gifted children; yet not a singly person includes in the study went on to win a Nobel or a Pulitzer prize. And Shockley even took the test twice I believe.
I hope my use of the semi-colon in the second to last sentence was syntactically correct.
But you’re still working on this assumption that IQ is basically the only factor affecting whether someone is successful at college. If that were true then yes by all means let’s do IQ tests and separate out kids’ fates on that basis.
In reality there are many factors affecting whether a given person is successful at college, and in their career. I don’t see any reason to think that someone with an IQ of 90, say, couldn’t be a fantastic physician. So even if we did have a perfect IQ test, where we could say “This boy’s IQ is 90,” with certainty, what use is it?
And none of these factors are by themselves predictive of anything. So, by your logic, none of them are relevant.
Given Shockley’s racist later days, probably accurate. And Bardeen did all the work anyhow. 
Some Nobel Prizes have a factor of luck. Look at Penzias and Wilson. I’ve given talks to Penzias in meetings - he was not all that impressive.
If not noble prizes in hard science subjects, then what, according to you, is a better judge of superior intelligence? Or do you feel there is no better measure of intellectual ability than obtaining a high score on an IQ test?