IQ: Yea or Nay?

How do you view IQ tests?

  • They are accurately measuring something enough to be a predictor of success.

  • They are culturally and educationally biased bullshit.

  • IQ more or less measures intelligence (which is greatly influenced by early environment).


Results are only viewable after voting.
Dochter is one I think. Very strong thinker.

Dochter/Upa was great, but I think he's more of a retired former regular than an occasional poster. Not trying to argue here. Just curious.
 
Or crippling anxiety and depression.
No, those are par for the course for high IQ types. Ironically incredibly high IQ types tend to be happy go lucky. Personality stratification by IQ is actually pretty interesting. Honestly I think your problem is you are to emotional, you clearly have trouble separating yourself from the discussion.
 
I think a lot of how you evaluate IQ as a construct comes down to what exactly you're trying to do with it.

Unfortunately it has a history of being used quite thoughtlessly.
 
I've been tested twice over the years.
First was 128
Second was 11.

Nah, the second was 123. So that means i'm getting less and less intelligent as i type.
 
I had an IQ test done by our school psychologist back in 7th grade. I scored a 139 which part me of thinks is the reason I play both the guitar and keyboard exceptionally well or the IQ thing is all total bullshit.
 
Hmm that opinion surprises me, though I do have a tendency to conflate raw intelligence with literacy.

How about Cold Front or Workers United?

Two people I mostly avoid. Just not interested in going around on either Marxism or "HBD" stuff. Both have these fanatical fans who are very coached in their arguments, and someone who isn't as interested just can't keep up without a lot of work. Some might say the same about Austrianism, but that's somewhat more enjoyable for me.
 
Two people I mostly avoid. Just not interested in going around on either Marxism or "HBD" stuff. Both have these fanatical fans who are very coached in their arguments, and someone who isn't as interested just can't keep up without a lot of work. Some might say the same about Austrianism, but that's somewhat more enjoyable for me.
Gotcha, I know the feeling.

Hence my respect for posters who are able to support a conceivable position on a wide variety of issues.
 
- Good predictor of success? Somewhat, yes.
- Good test of intelligence? Somewhat, yes.
- Culturally biased? Somewhat, yes.
 
IQ is fairly good at measuring what it's supposed to measure. And when you're dealing with individuals who have avoided detrimental early years environments, it's highly predictive of later years success.

There are some new questions out about how much IQ tests measure intelligence vs how much they measure motivation. Doesn't change the predictive element but does influence what we're really evaluating. Meaning that a high IQ score could be heavily influenced by the test taker's motivation to do well on the task itself. High motivation to perform on a task is predictive of success but it doesn't necessarily mean that the highly motivated are also the highly intelligent. Now that's fine, you might want the highly motivated pretty smart employee over the lazy but insanely brilliant one.

My opinion on IQ exams, formed from a significant amount of reading on the subject, is that they're very useful when you're sure that you're making an apples to apples comparison, regarding early developmental environments. Less so when you start factoring in negative environments because the negative impact on IQ can be significant and it is often irreversible if it happens before 5 years old. IQ scores are worthless when you're estimating the scores from anything other than actual test taking.

What do you do with low IQ people in your population? Not my biggest concern.

My biggest concern is that the speed at which our technology and economy are advancing means that a higher and higher IQ number is incapable of contributing meaningfully to our society. I suspect that by the time my kid graduates from college, anyone with an IQ under 115 will be relegated to low skill tasks because they just won't be smart enough for anything better and tech will be doing what they used to do.

What do you do when 60% of your population is only smart enough for low level work? There are no 21st century farming job equivalents.
 
My biggest concern is that the speed at which our technology and economy are advancing means that a higher and higher IQ number is incapable of contributing meaningfully to our society. I suspect that by the time my kid graduates from college, anyone with an IQ under 115 will be relegated to low skill tasks because they just won't be smart enough for anything better and tech will be doing what they used to do.

What do you do when 60% of your population is only smart enough for low level work? There are no 21st century farming job equivalents.

Define "low skill task". I'm willing to bet anyone with an IQ of 100 can learn to program (especially considering how garbage most programmers are) and languages are getting simpler and simpler. Likewise, ID software is becoming more resilient to horrible design while 3d printers are more accessible (and better materials). At some point they will become low skill jobs (programming is kind of already there), but will require human interaction.
 
Define "low skill task". I'm willing to bet anyone with an IQ of 100 can learn to program (especially considering how garbage most programmers are) and languages are getting simpler and simpler. Likewise, ID software is becoming more resilient to horrible design while 3d printers are more accessible (and better materials). At some point they will become low skill jobs (programming is kind of already there), but will require human interaction.

Languages are getting simpler and simpler but the tasks we're coding for are not. Back when IBM coded Deep Blue it was incredible as far as coding is concerned. By the time I got to college, we were coding chess programs as freshman. The stuff that's being coded these days is orders of magnitudes greater than what was considered complex 2 decades ago. And the programmers need to be smarter to envision it, code it and debug it. So while coding languages are simpler than they were, the tasks for which we are coding are far more complicated.

And what's a "low skill task", an ever evolving term unfortunately. As a lawyer, let me use a personal example.

20 years ago preparing an LLC formation was a complicated task requiring many steps and intricate knowledge of the state corporate law. Nowadays, anyone with a computer can form a basic LLC in 10 minutes on LegalZoom or some other website. Drafting basic wills is the same - I've had computer illiterate grandmoms present me with perfectly viable documents they produced in 20 minutes at home for evaluation (true story actually and more than once).

So, what was a moderately skilled task 20 years ago has become a low skill task today. In 20 years, a plethora of today's moderately skilled tasks will be low skill tasks thanks to technology and automation. The people aren't getting dumber, the personal skill required to complete the task is getting lower. That means the need to hire a professional to do it is also getting lower.
 
Languages are getting simpler and simpler but the tasks we're coding for are not. Back when IBM coded Deep Blue it was incredible as far as coding is concerned. By the time I got to college, we were coding chess programs as freshman. The stuff that's being coded these days is orders of magnitudes greater than what was considered complex 2 decades ago. And the programmers need to be smarter to envision it, code it and debug it. So while coding languages are simpler than they were, the tasks for which we are coding are far more complicated.

The "envision it" part is wrong. Most of the professional programmers in this world are told what tasks to work on. It's why India can be such a player in the contracting game despite having such poor fundamentals.

You don't need to be able to develop Hadoop to be able to utilize it.
 
Define "low skill task". I'm willing to bet anyone with an IQ of 100 can learn to program
Man, I've been taking some programming classes, and it was bleak in there. I don't know about this one...
 
I think you have a cartoonishly inaccurate view of what normal people think.

Your side is not normal at all. So yes, my view is by default cartoonish when discussing the likes of you guys.
 
The IQ red pill is becoming more and more openly discussed.
 
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