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Comment by Sharlin | Hacker News Reader

Proper well-designed IQ tests have nothing to do with language; they are purely visual pattern recognition challenges. These tests are highly culture-independent and correlate highly with practically any other reasonable measure of intelligence.

Being able to tell where the game is situated is not intelligence. It's a domain-specific skill. Intelligence is a general ability that makes one better at learning any domain-specific skill that utilizes cognitive capabilities.

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What I do find puzzling is why people seem so emotionally attached to the idea of general intelligence measured as a single number. Is there some political/educational aspect that I'm missing out on - I'm from the UK where IQ tests seem to be generally regarded with a high degree of healthy scepticism.

No, it's just the opposite. There is emotional attachment to the idea that intelligence cannot be measured with a single number - the idea that everybody is "good at something" with regard to cognitive skills; that there are different kinds of intelligence that are mostly orthogonal or even mutually exclusive. A mathematically highly skilled individual must be socially awkward or have poor language skills and so on. It would be unfair otherwise, after all.

On the other hand, the idea that there is a single number that correlates highly with most other definitions or aspects of "intelligence" has strong experimental backing, like it or not.

So what do you do with this number? I'm genuinely puzzled as I've never encountered a situation where IQ was used for anything.

If you are talking about the same 'general' tests that I have seen, I think the idea of a synthesized problem with abstract concepts is already a strong cultural filter. They may seem very general and obvious to you, but someone not used to such a premise might well be completely thrown off, without necessarily being less 'intelligent' as it were (powers of deduction and reasoning, problem solving, etc.).

These tests are highly culture-independent

While that is certainly the goal and ambition of the people creating the tests, there still seems to be much debate as to what extent they are succeeding.

Wait until you are expected to complete an IQ test compiled using Swahili or some other language you can hardly communicate with.

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