Slashdot Mirror
IQ 'a Myth,' Study Says
An anonymous reader send this quote from The Star:
"The idea that intelligence can be measured by a single number — your IQ — is wrong, according to a recent study led by researchers at the University of Western Ontario (abstract). The study, published in the journal Neuron on Wednesday, involved 100,000 participants around the world taking 12 cognitive tests, with a smaller sample of the group undergoing simultaneous brain-scan testing. 'When we looked at the data, the bottom line is the whole concept of IQ — or of you having a higher IQ than me — is a myth,' said Dr. Adrian Owen, the study’s senior investigator... 'There is no such thing as a single measure of IQ or a measure of general intelligence.'"
"If there is something in the brain that is IQ, we should be able to find it by scanning."
The test group consisted entirely of politicians and the control group was Slashdot readers?
dreaded scurrilous bit-twiddler from Oklahoma
I have an IQ of 150, am a member of a 3 sigma IQ society. But I cannot remember names, and if I had to do manual skilled labor, I would starve to death. There are people with a much lower IQ who I admire greatly for their skill sets and abilities that I will never have
-- MyLongNickName
... there are obvious trends that some people learn more and learn faster then others and I'm certain this can be measured at a gross level. I bet there are methodological flaws with the study that will be debunked soon.
You would have to have a high IQ to come up with this study!
> Rather, the study determined three factors — reasoning, short-term memory and verbal ability — that combined to create human intelligence or “cognitive profile.”
And IQ tests test 2 of those factors... reasoning (through math), and verbal (through written). They've just discovered that "memory" is important to "cognitive ability."
Saying that IQ is a myth is hyperbole. They've identified that it exists and that it has 3 (instead of 2) components.
Yeah, again. Seems every five years or so there's a book, article, or study saying that IQ is not a single thing.
Yawn.
The professor in my "introduction to psychology and brain science" course said "IQ is defined as what is measured by IQ tests." So it's not that it doesn't exist. The question is, what is it, and does it matter?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
I thought this was common knowledge. IQ tests pretty much only measure your ability to do simple math and recognize patterns. It says nothing about how creative you are, whether you can critically analyze a painting or Goethe play, or if you can recognize historical catalysts. It was always just a forced number that seemed to correlate well with intelligent people.
Raters gon' rate.
I give the study a score of 65.
Well never having scored a 160 on an iq test their parents & teachers would say that !
This is not new 'science' that was just discovered. It has been known and taught in Childhood Psychology classes for decades. It is always amazing how these psychology professors venture out into studying a little bit of mathematics and statistics and decide to publish papers on the obvious, padding their resumes and shuffling papers around. You never hear about something really new and groundbreaking from University of Western Ontario, and this is not an exception.
When I was a child, I was diagnosed with having a really high IQ. As a result people have been telling me I'm a "genius" for most my life and always pushing me to "achieve my full potential" and crap like that.
It's nonsense. Maybe I'm smart, maybe I'm not. I think trying to measure that is crazy and impracticable. I'd rather be judged by what I do, not what some test says about me.
And frankly I don't really want to be judged at all. I think I'm doing OK with my life, and that's really all that matters. All this unnecessary categorising of people... it's all kind of pointless.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
Instead, it's complex, a quaternion, or something of a higher order.
The IQ test was not designed to be an absolute measure. It was developed by Alfred Binet as a way to rank between a group of children in a special education context. It gives only a relative measure between that group and does not give any absolute measurement of intelligence nor is it valid to compare IQs between different groups. The IQs assigned are only valid within the tested group.
The transition to it being an absolute measurement was pushed by the US military to test and measure recruits. This was a colossal screw up.
Google it. It's all there.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I am a MENSA member but I hardly consider myself very smart. I mean, I'm kinda smart but I see lots of people that blow me away when it comes to various mental abilities. And none of them are MENSA members.
Let's start with something easy: cats vs. dogs.
Dogs can be trained to do a lot of things, and therefore can be very "useful". So people feed them.
Cats almost can't be trained, they sleep or play around the whole day. An yet people feed them as well.
Which is more intelligent, cats or dogs?
It's somewhat nonsensical to say that 1 factor is a "myth" because there are "actually" 3! (Which is what they are doing). Every factor you add will explain more and more of the variance in the large suite of tests you are administering, but there is a diminishing return in the predictive accuracy. The choice of how many factors to identify is therefore somewhat arbitrary. I wish the paper wasn't behind a paywall, so we could all see how independent are the factors they selected.
I once taught a mixture of kids from so called "3rd world environments", who also had very low IQ scores compared to the typical "exposed" American kids.
In my 11 years of teaching, not once did our American kids score better than the "3rd world" kids at all! This was despite the fact that these poor kids had to learn English grammar. Heck, one of them even reminded me of a few math tricks that I employed myself while in school.
I once escorted one such kid to her parent, and it was a shock to hear her switch to some foreign tongue before switching to English in order to introduce me. This particular kid is now at BP in Texas, and still writes to me. Incredible!
by a single metric, what use is doing to the human brain, other than to have another pointless number to have people boast about. (Nearly every person I met who bought up their IQ almost always claims to have 130+ points.... and I'm too polite to say it to them, but apparently underapplying themselves like crazy).
I almost never see a car rated just by it's mpg nor do I ever see CPUs rated just by their GHz.
I think one of the highest designated IQs belonged to Goethe and couldn't do math beyond some trig iirc for shit. Great writing though. Obviously a different type of intelligence than Einstein.
"Can the entire distribution of scholastic aptitude be accounted for by just one general factor?"
Seriously? I mean: seriously? Are we really debating indexes (as in "statistics") and whether they are meaningful? Whoa. Way to go, folks. Words fail me. And here I thought, at least scientists would get the idea of abstracting a complex construct into a single metric.
Modern tests don't actually present single-measure IQs anymore, for the most part. Even the old Stanford Binet test is using multiple scales these days, and any more modern test such as the Wechsler scale will use many different measures. Anyone with a moderately reasonable IQ (/sarcasm), would realize that intelligence can't be quantified with a single number.
There was a good point made that only people who aren't thought of as smart have anything to gain by joining MENSA. For example, if you found out Stephen Hawking was a member of MENSA you might just about manage a "well, figures" but if you found out Sarah Palin was in it you'd go "wow, never expected that".
I've always looked at it like processor speed. I've taken a few "IQ tests" in the distant past, and I've come out to around 130 to 140ish. But that's really subjective and I understand why people think IQ is bullshit. I could be just average, who knows.
But when dealing with most people it just feels like I'm thinking faster. Like they are able to reach much the same conclusions, it just takes them longer to formulate thoughts and ideas. I get impatient that conversations are taking so long when I can already predict where we're going to end up. I sort of feel "overclocked" if you will. When I find someone who seems to think at my speed, it's awesome. We usually have a great conversation - that happens relatively quickly.
tak3 that book smartz LOL!
Im off 2 by lottary ticks now cuz I CANT LOOSE!!!!!!
IP > IQ
rewriting history since 2109
..a big bunch of dummies for thinking IQ was a measure of intelligence.
It's a self-proving statement, I guess.
“If there is something in the brain that is IQ, we should be able to find it by scanning. But it turns out there is no one area in the brain that accounts for people’s so-called IQ."
Wow, the study's senior investigator said something this mind-numbingly dumb? Just because you can't find it using a machine that measures blood flow does not mean it isn't a meaningful concept. IQ definitely exists - it is a measurement. The question is whether it measures anything meaningful. But we wouldn't necessarily expect to be able to confirm that by sticking people in a magnet; it's a statistical question, not a question of blood flow in the brain...
So, wait. You mean we can't reduce a person's $VAR down to a single number? Color me surprised...
The scientists also used brain-scanning (fMRIs) on some of the subjects. “If there is something in the brain that is IQ, we should be able to find it by scanning."
That's like saying talent doesn't exist because your brain activity looked like Michael Bolton's. Or watching a traffic jam from space and concluding that the inhabitants of that city are unproductive.
That said, I don't think you can quantify intelligence, because you can't quantify a lack of intelligence. Every time someone tries, we find a new depth we didn't know existed.
I was a member for a while. I had the same experience that you had with really smart people who told me they couldn't get into Mensa. Additionally, I met many members that I thought were lacking in what I thought of as intelligence. I concluded a long time ago that there is no legitimate way to quantify intelligence. About half the Mensa members I knew agreed with that. The other half were insulted by it.
Even the people that "invented" IQ didn't believe in it. It was designed to be a simple and useful measure of relative "intelligence" between people. Intelligence wasn't fully defined at the time, and the test was rigged to try to be fair, even when it was found to not be. Just by changing questions, I can change the relative performance of identified groups (woman and minorities two common groups to target). That was always known, and there are other limitations. This isn't a new position, and I didn't see anything interesting in the article.
Might as well be saying that shoe size is a myth because people have different widths for a particular size. That doesn't make the size a myth.
Learn to love Alaska
I've always suspected this, at least to some extent. I've tried taking several IQ tests over the years. They seem to vary widely in the kinds of questions they ask. On IQ tests that focus on mathematical skills, I do not do as well. But on tests that focus more on language skills, I do really well. My scores vary a great deal depending on the test.
Nevertheless, I think IQ tests are good at indicating a general range of intelligence. It is just important to realize that different people excel at different mental aptitudes.
Proverbs 21:19
Of course there's a "'a single measure of IQ or a measure of general intelligence". Take however many measures YOU think are needed to model intelligence. Now form a linear combination of them. Evaluate. Congratulations, single measure. Now, what it MEANS is another matter, but it can be calculated, and thus exists.
intelligence is hard to measure and certainly subjective. that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. one might as well say beauty doesn't exist. you could certainly make the argument. and yet for something that doesn't exist, it sure does correlate extraordinarily well with certain types of success.
i could live a little longer in this prison
IQ is in fact the sole measure of not only one's intelligence, but of social superiority and we have the number sequences and visual diagrams to prove it!
There's a simple way to identify people of high intelligence: ask them if they think IQ tests are a meaningful measure of it. If they do... they aren't very intelligent.
And I say this as someone who's scored 150, so it isn't sour grapes. Standardized tests just don't tell you very much... at least nothing useful.
I also scored in the 99th percentile on all my college entrance tests (missed three questions on the SAT), scored 92nd-98th percentile on the four GRE tests I took, and I signed up for the LSAT on a whim with no prep whatsoever and scored 90th percentile. None of those scores proved to be a good predictor of my professional success. :/
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
There is no such thing as a single measure of IQ or a measure of general intelligence.
Anyone with a high-enough IQ could have told you that!
IQ was for finding children with learning disabilities.
That's all.
The US Army are the ones who took it and turned it into a measuring stick and subsequently the US educational system followed suit.
See The Mismeasure of Man for a concise history.
Then there is the fact that there is 0 correlation between success in life and IQ
Tell that to an intellectual disabled permos (defined as IQ 75 in Australia).
It is a long way from a perfect correlation, but to claim there is 0 correlation is rubbish unless you are choosing some fairly bizzare measures of 'success'.
*permos = person
.to everyone who's pride was hurt when MENSA rejected them.
Did they refuse you for confusing "who's" and "whose"? ;)
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
I found this book in a trashbin. If nothing else, it's got lots of cool black and white photos, some by Weegie. From page 365:
"We can give the following practical definition of intelligence: Intelligence is that which such an intelligence test measures. The statement sounds empty but isn't, for it implies all the careful steps that have gone into the construction of the tests. The tests constructed by different workers all lead to scores with high intercorrelations; therefore they are measuring something in common. What they measure in common defines intelligence."
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
... the bottom line is the whole concept of IQ — or of you having a higher IQ than me — is a myth,' said Dr. Adrian Owen, the study’s senior investigator.
You sound a little bitter there Dr. Owen - if that's your real title! :-) ]
[ Many people probably have a higher IQ than you; get over it.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
for a while.
What I've come up with is: "The ability to understand complex systems, and have simultaneous different incompatible explanations for a given system". Which was shot down in a number of ways by friends, one stating it is "the ability to adapt".
There several dimension to intelligence: understanding vs doing, logical vs intuitive, mathematical vs verbal... no wonder a single number can't capture all dimensoins of intelligence.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
None of them ARE, or none of them QUALIFIED?
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
They should just call it Pattern Matching and Spatial Reasoning Quotient. "Intelligence" is too ambiguous a term.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
The paper doesn't mention IQ anywhere. It's about intelligence. IQ is just a (very bad) way of measuring intelligence. The paper makes the claim that there is not generic problem-solving ability (intelligence), but different people excel at different tasks. It's a much stronger claim than saying that IQ is bullshit.
There is an IQ and I have a full 180 of them. So I know better than the researchers and that's that.
http://slashdot.org/submission/1062723/Cheap-mobile-data-plan?art_pos=2
Apart from the regularity of this revalation who ever believed the single-number metric anyway?
MFG, omb
I was a MENSA member for a very short while. They told me I had an IQ of 158. I didn't know what it meant, so maybe I wasn't that smart. I was smart enough to work out within the first 12 months that the overpriced annual subscription bought me nothing but a mag full of spam, and the opportunity to associate with a bunch of people who like to feel smart.
I have an IQ of 134 (I keep hitting that score on numerous tests), but I fk up on a regular basis, and can barely keep up with the learning curve at work. It's a great bragging tool, but that's about the only use I seem to have found for it.
I have been telling people that for years.
And on the Eighth Day, Man created God.
http://www.uwo.ca/its/brain/iqmyth/Hampshire%20Owen%20IQ%20Neuron.pdf
Understand how little they know, how much there is to know, and how much more there is to discover!
It was a pretty good deal when they had a student rate - like $15/year or something. Then they wanted a lot more - like $120/year - and I figured I had better things to do with my time. I never did anything more than read the newsletters anyway. Reading between the lines there were a lot of byzantine political battles. It sounded like the sort of organization I had no interest in supporting.
How do you know someone is a MENSA Member? Do worry they will tell you.
[quote]
Rather, the study determined three factors — reasoning, short-term memory and verbal ability — that combined to create human intelligence or “cognitive profile.”
[/quote]
Now the important question is: Did they find any correlation between the 3 different areas?
safety school
And none of them are MENSA members.
That is a strange argument.
Do you mean that they taken the test and failed?
Or maybe they are just not interested in measuring their IQ, although they would pass if they did.
A high number on an IQ test correlates to someone with a more agile and efficient mind. That is all. Would you hire someone as a programmer who had an measured IQ of 100 over someone who had an IQ of 120? We have no absolute measure for intelligence. If we did we would be able to identify intelligence in other animals as well as in humans. We just have a few tests whose results are correlated to something resembling intelligence. I would think those with higher IQ have already figured out that once money is given to do a study a paper has to be written and it better be a good one.
When we looked at the data, the bottom line is the whole concept of X — or of you having a higher X than me — is a myth,” said Dr. Adrian Owen, the study’s senior investigator and the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging at the university’s Brain and Mind Institute. “There is no such thing as a single measure of X.”
Let X = Reasoning, short-term memory, or verbal ability.
Functional decomposition does not mean the higher level functions cease to exist.
“If there is something in the brain that is IQ, we should be able to find it by scanning. But it turns out there is no one area in the brain that accounts for people’s so-called IQ. "
That is so inconceivably stupid. Yes, if IQ is real, there will be a little IQ cell in the brain. Didn't find one? Guess IQ is a big fraud.
Grown ups who say such things shouldn't be allowed out in public without an adult chaperone. And these guys are researchers? I hope someone competent gains access to their data.
Measures aside, you don't have to spend much time around people to understand that some of them are pretty stupid and others are much smarter.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
We all know it when we see it, which would imply there is a way to measure it.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
MENSA has plusses and minuses.
For me it was a chance to solicalized, to be long to group that was like me. Think, what others did in high school, I did post college.
I meet many different poeple, from guys to could not tie their shoes but could talk about Choas Theory for hours, to wonderful people who open their homes and their lifes to stranges that only had a card or newsletter annoucing an event.
Myself, I hosted a monthly movie "night" in my apartment. It started on first Friday of month and lasted until the last person left or Monday. Via that meet many people, including one that became my wife. My freinds in Mensa found out of our weddings plans when we both changed our addresses and my wfie to be changed her name on month newsletter. It was nice receive a hand written note congratlating us in each of our newsletters.
I left Mensa after I figured out that I out grew the it. I gradulate from that part of my life.
On a side note - since I also was at one time part of the management of the local group, membership was broken down to about 5-10-85 split.
5% wanted the membership to prove themselfs. They did want the newsletter or any assocation, just a proof of making it.
10% as active. The came to events, helped with fund raising and other programs.
85% getting the newsletter and reading it and filling it aaway. These were the ones we kept trying to join in with 10% - it took me almost 5 years to start going to events and meeting people and become found I liked being with the 10%.
I found the time enjoyable. I was traveling alot, and found events in other parts of world that I drop in on while killing a weekend in a city that I did not know. Oh, and in Slashdot fashion - my mom, while I as living at home, found the test weekend and suggested that I take it.
I am a MENSA member but I hardly consider myself very smart. I mean, I'm kinda smart but I see lots of people that blow me away when it comes to various mental abilities. And none of them are MENSA members.
As a Mensan, you should know that it's not an acronym and should not by typed in all caps.
Trying to outsmart eachother.
XKCD has ways to deal with that....
Sounds like something someone with a low IQ would claim.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This is not a dig, but several of the people relating their experiences with MENSA seem to have some real difficulties with spelling, context, syntax, and the lot.
I really mean it when I say that I'm not fucking with you. It's just interesting.
And by the way, maybe this might make some of you self-appointed geniuses understand that many of the people portrayed by the media as idiots - aren't.
That is simply propaganda; and of course some public figures make it easier than others to stick them with that tag. But anyone with a track record of success has intelligence. Denying it because you don't agree with them politically is simply being completely intellectually dishonest.
And while you cannot control what people think or do - you can control your own actions. So, maybe not repeating or reinforcing obviously incorrect things might be something you can do to move public discourse forward.
Because if you are one of the ones out there that like to hold on to the fiction that George W. Bush or Sarah Palin are unintelligent; that is just stupid on the face of it. Arguing that they're stupid because it's an easy way to propagandize people is not helping *anything*.
I remember when W. was running the first time and I had a very intelligent friend (and actual former MENSA member) who believed this hook, line, and sinker.
All it took for me to completely convince him how intellectually dishonest he (and the media) was being was for two weeks to point out every time he misspoke. That's all it takes. Speaking like Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan in public is a inborn talent that VERY few people have. It is NOT simply a function of high intelligence.
And if you are being completely fair about it; for a national level politician, George W. Bush is at least a better than average speaker.
And before you knee-jerk your reply - how many "smart" people do YOU know that could do as well as he did, under the kind of scrutiny and digging for flaws that was going on?
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
Fascinating story. But weirdly, my "take home" from this is that Mensans aren't necessarily good proofreaders...
I've noticed that people who are underachievers in school often compensate with high social intelligence, seeming to know every trick in the book.
I cannot remember name
Is that why you are an anonymous coward?
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Did we all just get smarter, or did we all just get dumber? Obviously, intellect is impossible to quantify, just as strength is. Oh wait, we can measure how much weight an individual can lift, and that weight varies by genetic, developmental, training and health factors. Obviously, neurons are nothing like muscle cells and physical ability is nothing like intellectual ability. According to this buffoon.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
"Rather, the study determined three factors â" reasoning, short-term memory and verbal ability â" that combined to create human intelligence or âoecognitive profile.â
Uh... pardon me, researcher guys, but WTF do you think IQ tests typically MEASURE??? Hint: short-term memory, reasoning, and verbal ability!!!
The idea that IQ is bullshit, is bullshit. There is a very long and well estblished, very strong statistical correlation between high IQ and all three of these factors.
From what I read of TFA, whoever did the study doesn't know squat about prior research into IQ.
Granted: no one number can measure everything. And IQ doesn't pretend to. There is still a great deal of debate about what IQ actually means, in regard to a person's overall intelligence. But what is known is that the statistical correlation is very real, and no single, shoddy study, no matter how many participants, will make that go away.
Here's the holy grail of arguments against IQ, the single most convincing evidence is that you can TRAIN to get a higher IQ score, without actually becoming what anyone would call smarter. The first time I took an IQ test, I got little above average (110ish); I didn't know what kind of thing they were looking for, specially on those "what comes next?" (which are really dumb questions, btw). I studied for it and on my last one I got 148. I didn't feel any smarter from the first to the last, just better at answering those specific tests... On the other hand, that was a few years ago, but I'm sure if I took one today I would get a lot less than 148, but I AM smarter than what I was those many years ago. I'm obviously slower, sure, and probably my memory isn't as good, but I understand the world much better. Isn't that what smarter means? I know many people who are way smarter than me but who are SLOWER thinking (but deeper), and so don't do very well on all sorts of tests... I'm fast, so I usually do well.
Nerd sniping? (xkcd #356)
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Why is my brother such a fucking idiot?
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The only consistent correlation of intelligence to IQ has always been that only idiots believe that intelligence can be measured by a single number.
Lie detectors don't work either.
Did anyone outside of the USA really believe that IQ was an accurate way of describing how well people can apply reasoning skills to any situation?
maybe they're just so smart that they encode messages in all of their posts and the misspellings and bad grammar are a way to decipher the key.
The original idea wasn't vacuous. The researchers who coined the term, particularly Spearman, honestly thought they had found statistical evidence for a single common factor that could be called "intelligence." But I thought that had all been thoroughly exploded by the 1950s.
There was a guy way back in the 1960s who worked out a sort of abstract block diagram, 6 by 6 by 6, of 216 different "thingies" that represented some aspect of intellectual performance. What was it called? "Structure of Intellect." Google, click click, J. P. Guilford. So he spent a chunk of his career devising psychological tests that ought to detect each of those 216 intellectual abilities and then doing the correlations to show that each of the tests was really, truly measuring something different from the others. When I encountered his stuff, he had successfully demonstrated the existence of about 150 of those 216 skill or talents. In other words, intelligence isn't one thing, it's at least 150 different, independent, things.
And that was in the 1960s. I'd have hoped that by now IQ was lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Spearman. Whatever was keeping it alive? Racism? The standardized testing industry?
I don't quite see how this goes much beyond what was known a half-century ago, though it's helpful to see it confirmed. But if the officials want to test intelligence, they will just go on testing intelligence, whatever the science says.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Maybe Rushton was misunderstood. I thought that he was pimping that old racist crap to payback his benefactors (Pioneer Fund, or something like that).
Could it have been a diabolical stroke of genius to associate the discredited IQ value with that steaming pile of poo? Either way, well done!
just like tests you can ace by cramming people who are good at that are all not good at being able to use what the test covers. And some who get's a much lower score on a test can know a lot more about how to work with what the test covers.
It is an undeniably obvious fact that some people are smarter than other people. So any study that says intelligence differences between people are a myth is obviously flawed and contrary to obvious everyday data.
IQ is raw processor speed. The Voodoo visual accelerator is our imagination. Most people are still running integrated graphics, making their imagination IQ bound. Shared visual memory is efficient in low passion environments but useless for any creative work. It also helps to have sensitive inputs. Most people would not doubt the efficacy of Cherry MX switches, but are so jaded by personal experience they would not realize their thin membrane inputs have been worn to death. That's the hardware, but equally important is the software layer. You can have the greatest hardware in the world but if you run proprietary software it is of no use. Note I do not refer to the licensing scheme but rather the software's capacity for interaction.
"In the absence of the ability to establish the attribute of truth they tried to establish the noble attributes."
I do not have a degree in English. My wfie does, but does not try proof my writing any more, too many fights. I also have a hardtime with the language becuase I do not hear the differences in sounds of words like most people would have a hard time spelling to, too and two without "use" contect. But for me, I have that same problem many words like specific and Pacific. I use to leave on the west coast and if some says "go to Pacific." I would ask "Specific what?"
About proof reading, I proofed that first post for over 10 minutes. But I can not read what is written, my head fills in and fixes to what I "wrote". My wife as a "love" card/note from me, that say "Wish remain your face". I know I wrote more than that!
My favorite saying "English is my second language, I am still looking for a first." Made my college professor in English just crack up.
how would we measure height anyway
Take an engineering approach ... allow me to illustrate.
One day in the academic common room at my university an engineering academic and a mathematics professor were dissing each other. "You engineers, you just don't care that the "mathematics" you apply is an inaccurate bastardisation, it's a wonder your bridges even stand up!" "You mathematicians, you are so impractical, you spend your whole life fiddling with meaningless symbols."
A philosophy professor intervened. "Gentlemen, gentlemen ... no need to argue, I'll devise a way to resolve your dispute. Meet me at the oval at three this afternoon."
When the mathematician and the engineer turned up at the oval that afternoon, they discovered that the philosopher had placed, at the other end, a comely and rather buxom young PhD candidate in Zoology. "Gentlemen, what I want you do to is to measure out in your mind's eye half the distance between you and the young lady on the other side of the oval. When I say "now" walk to that point, measure out the half way mark from there and so on ..."
After a time the philosopher called out "now!" The engineer proceeded to walk to the spot, while the mathematician stayed frozen to the starting point. Again the philosopher called out "now!" and again the engineer moved forward leaving the mathematician right where he started. After the third turn the mathematician finally lost his patience. "You stupid engineer! Don't you realise that you can never arrive at the final point!"
"Oh I know that," replied the engineer, his face breaking out in a large grin, "but I can get close enough for all practical purposes."
As it happens, we do have the technology to measure height to at least within the closest cm, in almost any frame of reference where determining height as a datum (or 'data-point' if you prefer) of a multi-factorial prediction of basketball performance might want to be undertaken.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Yes, the idea of multiple intelligences which cannot be captured or conveyed by a single numerical result has been brought up before. I just last year read a book called Frames of Mind by Howard Gardner which talks about the Theory of multiple intelligences.
.
In fact, I believe that Gardner came up with the idea of multple intelligences in 1983 when he published that book. Gardner broke down the "intelligences" into:
-- 1.1 Logical-mathematical
-- 1.2 Spatial
-- 1.3 Linguistic
-- 1.4 Bodily-kinesthetic
-- 1.5 Musical
-- 1.6 Interpersonal
-- 1.7 Intrapersonal
-- 1.8 Naturalistic
-- 1.9 Existential
I am assuming that a "score" can be generated in each of these categories, and thus your "IQ" according to Howard Gardner would actually be a point in 9-dimensional space rather than distributed along just a one-dimensional axis. I've skimmed through the entire book and read the first 5 sections almost thoroughly. I highly recommend it.
I have another post in this thread with a few related links if you're interested: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3328079&cid=42342845
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I don't know what is worse. The fact that they don't understand intelligence testing or that they think that unless there is a center for it in the brain, then it doesn't exist.
Modern IQ tests consist of multiple sub tests - 15 for the WAIS IV. General intelligence "g" or a combines score is a weighted sum of the abilites in all these sub tests. A competent psychologist will look at the sub test scores for a richer interpretation, but that doesn't mean that the combined score is useless. General intelligence is based on the observation that people who are smart in one area tend to be smart in other areas (unfair though this may seem). Of course, this isn't always the case and sometimes people who are smart in one are are not smart in other areas. It is more accurate to think of modern IQ tests as a combined measure than as a single measure.
Think of it like CPUs. A combined benchmark like specmark or passmark can not fully characterise CPU performance, and sure, if I want a precise comparison, I need to define exactly what my load will be, yet you will be hard pressed to find a work load which a Pentium 3 performs better than an I7. So it IS useful to have aggregate measures of performance - so long as they are no over interpreted.
Some people don't like IQ tests because they see them as discriminating against socially disadvantaged groups, or racial groups. It is true that there is an issue of cultural bias in IQ tests, which people try an eliminate but can never do so completely. However, used properly, IQ tests can actually help people from disadvantaged backgrounds by identifying those with academic ability which may not be manifesting itself as academic performance for other reasons.
- is not so much about the existence of intelligence, but the idea that we have understood it well enough to have pinned it down some 100 years ago, or that it would be a feature that could easily be seen in a brain scan. I didn't bother to read the article - it hardly seemed worth the effort - but I somehow doubt that any serious study of intelligence or brain funtionality would be as superficial as this; it is probably an artifact of whoever popularised the results.
What one has to understand is, that the concept of intelligence is an abstraction - a measure of 'ability'. But the human brain has a large number of abilities, most of which we don't know, and we don't have any clear picture of which ones are 'fundamental' and which ones are derived from a combination of fundamental abilities.
If I were to guess at what the study actually looked at, I would say that it highlighted the fact that our current IQ concept is useless because it does not produce consistent results. The right way forward, if we want to define IQ, is to first understand what we mean by 'ability', which ones are fundamental and how we can measure them. Once that is in place, we can start defining any number of reliable IQ measures.
there's a shit-ton of stupid people out there, the dumbest of whom enter the Darwin Awards contest; the non-qualifiers usually end up in the "news of the weird. or in my home state, Indiana.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
IQ is an old measure. It's not surprising that you could develop a better measure.
But is IQ useful? Last I checked, it correlated well to things like years of completed education, unemployment rate, lifetime earnings, etc.
Part of the problem with our government policies is that they don't account for the fact that 1/2 the people are dumbasses, by definition. Or, as George Carlin said, "Imagine how smart the average person is. Now realize that half the people are stupider than him."
-- Knowledge is power. -- Francis Bacon
One sentence paragraphs, starting sentences with conjunction, and splitting a subject between paragraphs are all signs of an imperfect grasp of English grammar, just as you are suggesting. By any chance are you a member of MENSA? ~
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
These are the correct measures.
some people:
age 30 but smell like 90
age 40 behave like 5
...
now someone please come up with a valid formular to calculate peoples age.
I signed up, then decided I was wasting my time when it got to the True/False verbal test. I've spent decades training myself not to think this way. In my version, the choices would contain active verbs.
+-+
|o|
+-+
(A) Circle Contains Square -or- (B) Square Contains Circle
When you're writing complex code, and you invert the logic once as you mentally transform it the desired symbolic transliteration, and then you transform it again (now it's a double negative), etc. you're soon relying on your brain to maintain an abstract parity calculation, which the human brain does not reliably do in my experience; and worse, the portion of your attention span devoted to walking on water is not available to cross-check your work on other levels.
I felt like a mental pygmy trying to hold the not-ness of the question in mind while assessing the geometrical relationship. It's the same for me reading text on a screen where anything blinks or flashes or crawls in any way at all. My comprehension plummets. I have smart friends who say they don't even notice the surrounding blink. I'm not the fastest reader, but I'm a deep reader, and I have supremely good long term retention of the core ideas. I have a bit of the intelligence that made Christopher Hitchens famous among his own set: the ability to seemingly recall anything he'd ever read at any point in any debate. For me its not so much eidetic, but a life long practice of weaving a dense idea graph. What for another person is three degrees of separation for me is usually only two, which spares me an extra activation of short term memory in the heat of the moment.
It would take me about fifteen minutes to activate a reliable mental video game circuit to delegate the "not" out of band as a reversal of my final decision. The task felt too repugnant to even begin.
I just wanted to click the box labeled "This is a bad way to think" then get on with the next question.
.
.
.
Note to Slashdot: fuck off with the
when I press preview to check that markup is properly supported. I wouldn't bitch so harshly if it had also displayed my preview, which it didn't. Save the snark for when I press submit on a subjectless comment.
Unlike some people content with endlessly rehashing their favorite party line, my subject line emerges in the process of engaging what I have to say.
I guess I lied in my last post. This time I wrote the subject line first.
One of the worst forms of cognitive prejudice is the premature closing of the mind to the possibility that's there is more than one way to get from point A to point B. For example, a top-down thinker might routinely fill in the subject line before composing. So too would an ideological hack, as this would be so easy to do. A bottom-up thinker might wish to back-fill something evocative of where the screed ultimately comes to rest.
I pressed "preview" to get a preview, and what I got instead (which I've seen before but wish to forget) was a chiding over my work flow and not what I reasonably requested (the preview).
I tend to lump these things in a mental category I've labeled "work flow blindness". Work flow blindness is extremely corrosive. I'm sure everyone has been in a relationship setting where one person goes "What are you doing that for?" observing an intermediate step of some completely reasonable improvisation.
If this becomes normative and there's no pushback, you end up with a compliance-oriented culture with no improvisation or common sense.
In my opinion, if profanity has a valid use case, this must be it. If you're challenged in a sharp tone of voice in the middle of a completely reasonable improvisation the correct response is to say "Fuck off" and continue with your business. It's the snarky person who ought to be feeling the stinging rebuke over the presumption that another person was too damn stupid to sensibly improvise.
I understand the motivation. Policing conformity is easy. Policing improvisation requires actual thought.
In my online personae, I've decided not to reign in the profanity bursting inside whenever I encounter a system which bakes in something that smells anything like this kind of use-case blindness. It's about establishing a base-line permission for people to bark back at the implied insult. I've decided that even those who stumble into this by innocent mistake deserve rebuke for providing a cover story to those who innately prefer to take this stance.
I'm also fairly harsh with innocent racism. Certain forms of innocence are inexcusible.
Slashcode has also completely fucked Unicode handling. We're a geek culture in deep violation of a core geek principle:
Postel's law
If you paste text into the Slashdot edit box containing a Unicode rendered apostrophe mark (among others), you get broken European ASCII charcters and no apostrophe. That does not meet the principle of being liberal in what you accept.
All they need to do is add a tick box "normalize Unicode" whereby any Unicode code point which maps directly onto an ASCII equivalent character is so replaced. If you intended to write "someoneÃs" so be it, don't click the tick box.
This is a persistent insult to a core cultural value. To paraphrase Primo Levi concerning the appropriate use of profanity: If not now, when?
Innocent? Who fucking cares. Fix it.
Well duh! What a surprise - people with hi IQ scores are good at getting high IQ scores. David Beckham is good at football, and scores highly on the income and glamorous family score. A friend of mine is a great illustrator, so scores highly on the AQ (Artistry Quotient). The only that that's a myth is that the "I" in IQ really means "intelligence" - it doesn't, it means "good at passing the test".
So which is more intelligent? The German Shepard police dog or the talking Basset?
Which German Shepard Dog and which Basset Hound specifically are we talking about? You cannot compare a specific dog of one breed to the general tendencies of another. If you are talking about the breeds in general then you are going to find each to *generally* be fairly good at specific tasks and *generally* struggle with others. GSDs are regarded as "intelligent" due to a proven ability to problem solve and to some degree because of their ability to absorb training. Basset Hounds are know to *in general* be more difficult to train and do not seem to pick up concepts as easily. They can be trained but it is usually more work to get the same results and hence they are considered less intelligent. There are exceptions - some GSDs aren't so easily trained and I've met a handful of Basset Hounds that are shockingly easy to train.
Most dogs are smarter than people give them credit for. Usually people are just quite bad at training and very very lazy about it. I work with a rescue group and we see dogs all the time that simply were ignored. If no one ever attempted to seriously communicate with you then you would probably be regarded as not so bright. I've seen very smart deaf people often treated like they are stupid because other's cannot be bothered to learn to communicate with them.
I have a higher than average IQ, 137. It helps in many technical areas as I have the ability to break something down into smaller pieces and work up from there instead of being overwhelmed by the big picture. I do however suffer greatly from a lack of motivation. At work I take breaks and do a little research, could be anything electronics, computer, mechanical related and get a great idea to build something. Then I get home and I just want to plop my ass in front of the TV until bed time.
The last little project I was working on was a three phase DC-AC inverter that used an analog control section which generated a 60Hz sine wave from a square wave-triangle oscillator which then fed through a phase shift network which fed three comparator sections (PWM) each controlling a half bridge of MOSFET's and finally a filter section. I did the research, laid out diagrams and schematics. When it came time to actually build the damn thing? I got as far as the sine wave oscillator section before I became bored and gave up. I tried to get myself motivated again by switching from a somewhat complex analog front end (fun to design but time consuming) to a micro-controller based system that would generate the PWM signals through software which would be far easier. Again I got to the point where I had a some half decent PWM code running and began working on the MOSFET half bridge when I lost interest and gave up.
I get a burst of energy to do the mental portion, the research, math and diagrams. But fall flat when it comes to the hands on part. Or I hit an obstacle which isn't hard to solve but none the less an obstacle that pisses me off and I just give up. Its frustrating to know you can build cool shit, solve problems and fix stuff but you cant keep your mind focused on the task or project at hand. I do electronic, industrial control, software and IT at work. But thankfully I have just enough motivation and discipline to get the projects completed in a timely manner. Then again I take breaks throughout the day. I am posting this on one of my own mental breaks as we speak. Then its back to work.
I find that some hands on projects work out better for me such as doing some electrical work around the house, working on my car (I save so much money doing my own work). Those are often simple and dont require a lot of mental gymnastics to complete.
Yes, the idea of multiple intelligences which cannot be captured or conveyed by a single numerical result has been brought up before. I just last year read a book called Frames of Mind by Howard Gardner which talks about the Theory of multiple intelligences.
In fact, I believe that Gardner came up with the idea of multple intelligences in 1983 when he published that book. Gardner broke down the "intelligences" into:
Which without a doubt are build as sums or averages of several tests used to measure even finer sub aspects of each of the named aspects. And what keeps me from creating an average score for all those aspects? I would get a Gardner-Quotient - a scientific sound number with no practical implications besides bragging rights. Exactly as the IQ.
And now take the GQ and leave out all those aspects that aren't commonly seen as part of "intelligence" (in that brainiac-kind sense): Musical, Bodily, or "psychological" stuff. This pretty much leaves you with exactly the fields IQ tests measure.
bickerdyke
Heh, needlessly modded to oblivion. You must have touched a Groupthink nerve.
Your writing reads like you're having a conversation with the reader. Unless you're doing technical writing, I don't think it's much of an issue; Your point comes across clearly enough. It's just odd to write sentences starting with "And" or "Because" despite doing exactly that, in response to another person's question or statement, in day-to-day conversation.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Seriously, the fact that we still acknowledge ANYTHING that came out of the psychology of two centuries ago is only a testament to the idiocracy we have become.
I think anyone with a triple digit IQ already knew this.
Interesting. Without reading up on it, I can definitely identify categories from that list where I know I'm good or I know I struggle, and lines up pretty well with the way I've categorized my own abilities. Spatial in particular jumps out at me, because that's often lumped in with math by a lot of people. While I'm good at and enjoy math, I've always struggled when it comes to spatial analysis and puzzles. Always thought it was a weird blind spot in my mathematical ability, and it makes a lot more sense to me as separate category.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Then you could define a 9D volume with those scores and start up the "brain size" war, brilliant Pinky.
There is no such thing as intelligence, only interest. - Richard Feynman
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"you having a higher IQ than me — is a myth,' said Dr. Adrian Owen"
In other news, the same Dr. Adrian Owen claims to have discovered that penis size doesn't matter.
The more I think about so-called "objective" scales that pigeon-hole people, the more I think these are there to protect the elite, whatever the ostensible function. Johnny takes a test and now he is certifiably dumb/smart/average. The rest of Johnny's future income and influence could now be determined by a self-fulfilling prophesy.
When I was very small, a shrink told my mother I was a "genius" but (a) this was not a boon because people like me had difficult lives, and (b) I would not perform until work was sufficiently challenging to engage me. While there was some truth in both a and b, what a stupid label to place on the shoulders of a 3yo! My mother did not have the education or skills to challenge him for a better label, such as something less prejudicial. A plain "he's very intelligent" without the editorializing would have done. These days they'd say "gifted" but that still carries expectations like "genius" did. Absurd. Just encourage and help kids be who they are while avoiding stupid labels as far as possible.
What about Asia Carrera?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I've known IQ tests are BS ever since I did a report on IQ testing in 5th grade. I wrote that being compared to the results gotten from some french kids nearly 80 something years ago was not a good way to show intelligence. Needless to say the teacher did not agree.
FWIW I've always consistently scored around 167 on any IQ test, from the standardized ones to newer more abstract ones. Which means only that I'm good at taking these tests, relative to whatever baseline was used to score by. Its a nice ego boost. But I know people who score lower and who are clearly (IMHO) smarter than me.
IQ tests are about as accurate as trying to make a test for how much you love somebody, and despite my wife's best efforts to that effect, it doesn't work either. :)
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
"Winning a Nobel Prize is no big deal, but winning it with an IQ of 124 is really something." -- Feynman
... is that bringing up the subject of intelligence on a forum for nerds basically just turns into a huge fucking circle-jerk, and a whole lot of falsely-humble anecdotes...
Yeah, English is a bitch. I can spell and grammarize well enough to know what rules I'm breaking and why, but I am lousy at literary criticism. Whenever I encountered a question such as "Why did Jonathon leave his family", I would get about as far as "I really don't know for sure. But seriously, why are we even discussing the motivations and sympathies of a talking seagull?". Which is why I failed high school English.
My wife (who passed) asks me to spell.
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/inmotiv.htm
Casteism
No, YOU'RE stupid.
Changing the world... one research project at a time.
Actually, as a scientist, I do see the value in testing the "obvious," because the obvious is often wrong, and what's right is often counter-intuitive (consider quantum physics). So let's not completely laugh this off.
That being said, the only people I know who put a huge amount of weight on IQ are those who think they're smart but haven't really accomplished much in life, so they fall back on this number to prop themselves up.
The fact is, IQ is a rough measure of SOME aspects of intelligence (some innate, some learned). If two people are apart by 20 points, one is VERY LIKELY smarter than the other in the areas tested and maybe some others. But there are loads of things that IQ doesn't test for that are certainly a function of intellectual capacity, like social ability.
While Gardner's theories are interesting, they are subjective and not empirically based - thus, not real science. They have however influenced subsequent theories, such as those related to emotional intelligence.
Interesting. I hadn't considered that the concept was subjectively created and he did not have an experimental basis for his ideas. I'll have to continue reading the book with that criticism in mind and look for any evidence he produces for this theory of his. I had been wondering why he'd considered "kinesthetic/bodily" as an "intelligence" rather than as a talent or as an ability. My worry was the same as your criticism: including "bodily/kinesthetic intelligence" as a category of "intelligence" rather than of athletic or bodily prowess is just a way to be inclusive of the sportsmen/dancers/athletes as being smart in their own way.
.
This over-inclusiveness tends to go along with people who like to give out awards and certificates for participation and just for showing up and devalue the concept of competition or actual work efforts leading to success. They are too caught up in making sure that no-one's feelings get hurt for being left out of awards or ceremonies. Blech.