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What Does IQ Really Measure?
sciencehabit writes "Kids who score higher on IQ tests will, on average, go on to do better in conventional measures of success in life: academic achievement, economic success, even greater health, and longevity. Is that because they are more intelligent? Not necessarily. New research concludes that IQ scores are partly a measure of how motivated a child is to do well on the test. And harnessing that motivation might be as important to later success as so-called native intelligence."
I always thought it mainly measured the ability to solve problems.
I recommend Steven Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" for a thorough look at IQ tests over the ages and how that 99% of the time they are bogus.
...and my scores have varied by 40 IQ. I know it's slightly off topic, but I have a hard time trusting something that can't decide if my IQ should be "quite smart" or "genius".
I've always felt that the score from an IQ test was actually the real test. Reason being is that some people get a big score, think they're all that and a bag of chips, and let life beat them into the ground because they thought success was predestined. Other people get a low score, think they are stupid, and let life beat them into the ground because they thought failure was predestined. The most successful people, in my experience, see the score from an IQ test, say, "hmm, that's interesting," and then continue to try to do their best at whatever it is they want to do with their lives.
In other words, I feel that IQ tests are largely curiosities that are frequently harmful and only rarely actually useful.
Lets not even get started on the blatant testing demographic bias (target vs actual demographic/etc) that makes the scores skewed against people based on background.
This is a subject I've studied before. IQ means different things to different people. Looking over some major tests, I found several schools of thought:
1) Mental quickness and flexibility
2) Factual knowledge
3) Ability to do problem solving
4) Spatial recognition.
IQ is *supposed* to be a general measure of how "smart" someone is (general intelligence), but while it does seem true that general intelligence does exist (doctors can pick up new knowledge in unrelated fields faster than people in some low-level fields), generally the tests just measure specific intelligence.
For example, when trying to test for mental quickness, they might give a kid a jigsaw puzzle to solve (this is what they did on my test in 2nd grade, actually - I spent half my time trying to put it together in unusual ways). But a kid can be "smart" and still be bad at jigsaw puzzles. Since its a timed event, there's also a certain amount of luck involved in how well a kid scores. The difference between "gifted" and "normal" might just be the time span it takes an unlucky kid to try the wrong pieces before he randomly pulls the right piece.
Factual knowledge is also a very difficult to assess subject. I looked over the Titan test (http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/), which is supposed to identify the top 0.0000....01% most intelligent people on the planet. Ok, cool. But one of the answers was an analogy involving Kuru, the prion brain disease contracted by cannibals in Papua New Guinea. I think the test only allowed you to miss a few questions (out of 45) before it ruled you out of the cool kids club. But my objection is, how does knowing what Kuru is make you a smart person? You might just be a trivia buff. And how can you rule someone out for not knowing it? The potential knowledge space for humanity is so impossibly large, that the probability of knowing individual random tidbits of knowledge like that is correspondingly low. How do you differentiate between smart, super-smart, and super-duper-smart? I don't think that any IQ test can provide that level of resolution, really.
More unanswered questions:
Another problem is, of the four categories above, and others people have thought of, which do you assess on an IQ test, and how do you average them together?
Why do we assume that IQ follows a Gaussian distribution?
What role does linguistic fluency and creativity play into the assessment?
I'm not saying that IQ tests are bullshit, but I think people assign them too much value. When you can have the same person take five different IQ tests and get scored between 150 and 230 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant#Rise_to_fame_and_IQ_score), I think we could agree the person is "smart", but beyond that, I don't think tests really mean that much.
Well excuse me for being bored! While the other kids were tinkering with their Chevy I was playing chess, and while they were struggling with basic math I was reprogramming the JHS PC lab to be a smart ass when you input the wrong data. why? Because I was B.O.R.E.D that's why!
I just got lucky that after my bike wreck I was given a tutor that accepted me as I was (Thanks Ms Edwards!) and finally got the school to accept that "integrating me with the other kids" was a BAD idea. The final straw came when the math class they made me set in on had a real asshole teacher that accused me of cheating simply because I had a calculator watch (which what geek in the 80s DIDN'T have that Casio?) which ticked Ms Edwards off so she drug in the principal and said "watch" and put a question up for both me and the math teacher while taking away my watch. while he was still struggling I blew threw it in a few moments and was leaning against the wall with my usual smirk.
When the principal asked how I was able to do that without showing the work and doing the steps I was like "Isn't it obvious? Its just basic math." and MS Edwards checked the numbers on my watch and showed them 100% correct. So what does the teacher do? Accuses me of hiding ANOTHER calc and wants to have me stripped searched! The principal just rolled his eyes and said "I think Ms Edwards is right, he is doing wonderful with his tutor and should remain there if he doesn't want to be here"
So yes it is completely possible to be smart and bored shitless at the cookie cutter crap they try to call testing nowadays. So instead of forcing me to waste time with useless crap Ms Edwards would have me grab a book from my mom's excellent Sci Fi collection and then explain to her the concepts and what I thought of them. Black holes, the grandfather paradox, she actually had me THINK instead of just regurgitate crap, and the history teacher she brought in was fricking brilliant, instead of trying to get me to spit out useless dates he challenged me to a game of "6 degrees" because he thought EVERYTHING could be connected to Woodstock. Never did manage to stump him, and it got me to really tear into every funky old history book I could get my hands on trying to beat him.
Sadly most likely now that we are broke thanks to two pointless wars and 2/3rds of the top 500 corps paying ZERO taxes for the last decade we will probably see funding for the best and brightest cut, so more cookie cutter crap that will simply bore the piss out of those with brains. Most schools simply don't know what to do with the really smart, so they just sit in the back and vegetate.
They finally forced me to go my last 2 years of HS, did they give me a challenging class? Nope the football coach took one look at the science heavy books I was reading and talked my teachers into signing off to give me straight As for the two years without me actually coming to class. Instead he sat me up in my own classroom and I taught the jocks on their study periods how to pass the tests so Johnny could keep throwing TDs for the team. At least it beat being bored or being accused of cheating if I was good at anything.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.