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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 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.
Certainly there's a correlation between IQ and real intellect, but there's no causation between one and another one.
So, it's safe to say that IQ tests ... measure "IQ" (exactly these two letters) and nothing more.
Created by another monkey to rate you on a monkey scale.
What it really measures is pointless. Its only a made up monkey test.
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.
TFA mentions that intelligence is connected to dedication and how interested you are in a subject. Well duh.
Anyone can learn something if they really want to.
Intelligence is, I think, about how quickly and how easy it is to understand something. I believe that the ability to understand something without (much) effort is the sign of intelligence.
In other words, I am stupid.
- "If one man can create that much hate, you can only imagine how much love we as a togetherness can create."
Lemme be an iconoclast here for a moment.
So IQ doesn't measure intelligence. So what? If IQ score is, as claimed, highly correlated with success in life, and if it's measuring motivation and determination rather than intelligence, and if it's motivation that determines success in life, doesn't that make the IQ test pretty damned useful?
Who even knows what "native intelligence" means, anyway? If I've got a test that tells me whether someone understands problems, can find solutions to them, and is motivated enough to carry through, isn't that as useful a definition of "intelligence" as any?
Or to put it bluntly: of what use to anyone is a brilliant mind who doesn't give a shit?
Couldn't it also be that higher intelligence makes you more motivated? After all, we all like to go in and show something we do well in. If you suspect you're not really all that bright, you're not very motivated to have it confirmed. "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." and all that.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't think IQ tests do that, or at least, I haven't seen any that do. I seem to remember logic questions, pattern recognition, sequence continuation, etc, but no general knowledge.
It's a measure of your propensity and stupidity to buy into another form of elitism and exclusivity. Like the world doesn't have enough of those social partitioning devices already!
Granted this distinction may be useful, since the remedies (if any) for lack of motivation vs. lack "native intelligence" may be different - or maybe not. I suppose the assumption is that native intelligence is more genetically determined, whereas motivation is more determined by environment, but I find that questionable. Some people have exceptional drive and energy throughout life, even despite circumstances, and most of us don't.
I also take issue with the article:
Why? If IQ scores measure motivation as well as intelligence, then admissions based on IQ already do favor those who want to do the work.
On the upside, you got to post on Slashdot how really smart you are.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
he may have taken some internet survey pretending to be an IQ test. The online tests that can be taken for free are wildly different in quality.
And whether or not you are bored. I scored a 156 but was bored out of my mind and piddled around more than anything for the last hour or so. The problem with those kinds of tests is they are designed to aim straight for the middle of the bell curve so that one on the low end will be frustrated and give up, those on the high end will be bored shitless.
Perhaps we should have a very basic preliminary test, and then give one more designed around which part of the bell curve you appear to be on? After all if someone on the low end slaughters the test you could always give them the next one up and continue until you found the correct IQ, but as it is now frankly it is just irritating for those of us with brains and frustrating for those that are sucky at word problems.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
What, exactly, is the scientific definition of "human intelligence"?
Here ya' go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence
IQ tests are supposed to measure the aspects of intelligence which aren't related to culture, experience or knowledge (i.e "abstract thought", "reasoning" and "problem solving") ... and how fast you are at those sort of tasks. Sudoku is a good example of this.
Yes you can (and should!) practice IQ tests to get better. When you plateau, that's your final score.
No sig today...
The problem with those kinds of tests is they are designed to aim straight for the middle of the bell curve
That's why if you're really smart, they make you take further IQ tests that are aimed progressively higher up. Answering interesting questions can eventually become an exercise in tedium though, so they have to spread it out.
Hah, I got 100.
Perfect score, bitches.
Yes, I'm sure you only scored a paltry 156 because the test was so easy that you got bored.
Ugh, the indignity of taking something designed for normals.
I didn't realize how smart I am. I took an IQ test and scored 100 percent!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Well, Wyatt - I don't know what to say about being docked points for having cancer. But, you've got more to look forward to. You'll also be docked points for age, sooner or later.
I think one of the most closely held secrets among older people is the fact that we don't solve new problems as quickly as we could when we were young. We make up for it by applying old solutions to new problems, and hoping they work.
Hey - I wonder if I've stumbled over the real problem with politics? Let's get all the old bastards out of Washington!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
What about the people who first solved it? What about those who do it blind folded? There are people who did just figure it out.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
I had a different issue on an online one a few years back. One of the questions I missed involved whether a rectangle was square or not. I went back afterwards with a ruler and an image editor. Counting the pixels, it was square, but measured with a ruler, it wasn't due to my monitor's rectangular (non-square) pixels.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Of course, you need to be suitably motivated to actually complete the test as best you can. And there are fairly large groups of students that don't have that motivation, if they are even bothering to go to school.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." — Albert Einstein IQ doesnt measure much.
Well if I show you a drawing depicting a house, and the house is green, and the question asks "how many sides of the house are green?" and you answer 4 (assuming a box shaped house insofar as you can see), and you learn on a test exam that your answer is wrong, and you should have answered "at least three", you learn something about the nature of the test (i.e. make no assumptions). That knowledge will teach you to take IQ tests smarter, and you'd have done better than someone who went in without that learning. Certainly you can say this is a bad question, but in practice, your score depends on your answer to good and bad questions (just like any exam). The more practiced you are and the more you have learned how to think about common problems, the better you are likely going to do.
I think it's probably pretty hard to develop a test with excellent questions, which are also original and have been verified to be "good" by the standards of the IQ judging process. And thus you end up with a test that doesn't measure what we think we want it to measure. That in itself isn't really a bad thing, you can easily argue that the results speak for themselves (those who score high achieve high on other metrics), but you have to be careful. People who do less well all get lumped together, and some of those people may not have been achievers at that point in their life but might change later for a number of reasons. But they're grouped in with people that have ACTUAL mental, emotional or other disorders, as well as people who are brought up poorly and have no actual hope for a variety of reasons. The net result confirms itself: those who were once good performers, on average perform better than the group of people who were not.
For that reason IQ tests should stay as they are, an academic attempt to measure something we can't really define very well in an effort to understand ourselves. They should not be used for any other purpose, particularly education or employment.
IQagregate=1/(1/IQ1 + 1/IQ2 + ... + 1/IQn)
http://michaelsmith.id.au
IQ tests measure modernity. The degree to which your thinking aligns with modern thought. Google " IQ modernity " to see articles on the topic. A New Yorker article some time ago gave a remarkable example of how things associate to us (knife goes with fork) whereas to a more primitive people knife goes with potato (something one cuts). Given the limited choices in a multiple choice test.
Another good reason to doubt whether IQ is meaningful is the Flynn effect, which is a long-term upward trend in IQ scores (which is swept under the rug by curving the tests downward). Nobody is really sure what the Flynn effect means, or what causes it, but it's such a huge effect that based on their IQ scores, average people from 1930 would be classified as dull or borderline retarded today. What it really suggests is that IQ testing is pseudoscience -- and that is exactly what a lot of psychometricians consider it to be.
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IQ is highly correlated to conventional measures of success in life. My father's a psychologist and he says that IQ tests are instrumental in identifying learning problems (e.g. if you score high on an IQ test, but have poor grades, this can be an indicator that there's a deficiency that needs to be investigated) among other things.
I think the main problem is what it's called. "Intelligence Quotient" is an unfortunate vestige of the bygone era in which its standard testing methodology was devised. The average Joe (like the AC above) assumes that IQ is treated as a comprehensive, innate label of the inner workings of your brain and that's just not how it's treated today.
I bet you're a real treat at parties, so full of bonhomie and fraternal good will towards your fellow man.
The Prometheus Society has a great article, The Outsiders, on two important studies of IQ, one by Lewis M. Terman, who provided the "Stanford" half of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, and the other by Leta S. Hollingworth, whose book on her findings is Children Above 180 IQ. Both studies were longitudinal and long-term, drawn from very large pools of subjects.
Conclusion? The smarter you are, the more likely you are to be maladjusted.
It's often like this. Especially if you're from a country where "being normal" matters more than "being efficient". I can feel his pain, I was in the same shoes. I was bored in elementary school, to the point where I was constantly in trouble because, well, try to keep an 8 year old quiet when he's bored out of his mind while the rest of the class is still struggling and trying to solve those horribly difficult three digit multiplications...
My moment of pain was "multiplication tables between 10 and 20". You know, where they want you to learn the multiplication results of two digits 10a20 by heart. I realized that I'm faster (and have to do far less boring rote learning) if I just learn the primes and factor the rest to more sensible digits. 14*16 is after all just 2*2*2*2*2*7, and yes, it's faster (for me) to just hop down the doubles of 7 than to multiply 14 by 16. 7, 14, 28, 56, 112, 224, done. I'm sure a lot of people, here at least, will agree. Yes, I can duplicate most numbers with very little effort quickly (and no, I didn't calculate in base2 back then, it just came naturally).
You have NO idea what a lesson in frustration it was for me to get told that this is wrong and inefficient. I have a very hard time accepting to use a less efficient way to solve a problem.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Actually, it is quite correct. But it's also inefficient. Better is:
14 * 16 is (15 - 1) * (15 + 1) is 15^2 - 1^2 and since you probably have all the square numbers memorized anyway (yes, those tables ARE useful), so 15^2 - 1 = 225 - 1 = 224 comes easy :-)