Comment by curun1r | Hacker News Reader

Comment by curun1r | Hacker News Reader

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> This means our concept of IQ is likely inherently flawed

I'm not sure I'd say flawed so much as I'd say myopic. Which is absolutely still a flaw, but a very specific one that allows you to contextualize the results of an IQ test rather than discard them as worthless. IQ measures a subset of human intelligence pretty effectively, but misses the bigger picture. There's large parts of human intelligence that can't be measured using a test like that. A test can only provide stimuli for the mind and measure its reaction over the short period of time while taking the test. Among other things, it can't measure long-term recall or the ability to rehearse/learn information and skills over time, both qualities people would naturally associate with intelligence.

It's our need to have a single spectrum from mental retardation to genius-level that's led us to try to create a test which assigns a number to intelligence. But intelligence is multidimensional and an IQ test just fills in some of those dimensions.

>Among other things, it can't measure long-term recall or the ability to rehearse/learn information and skills over time

The vocabulary battery would seem to measure long term memorization ability. It actually correlates with IQ better than any other test. Also SAT tests are often used as a proxy for IQ because they correlate so well with it.

>It's our need to have a single spectrum from mental retardation to genius-level that's led us to try to create a test which assigns a number to intelligence. But intelligence is multidimensional and an IQ test just fills in some of those dimensions.

No, it's not. Please learn what you are talking about. It was once believed that intelligence was multidimensional. But then scientists realized all those different dimensions correlated amazingly well. E.g. people with better memory were much more likely to be better at puzzle solving. And a single factor, g, could explain most of the variance. IQ tests try to measure g, which is very predictive of general cognitive ability.

> Also SAT tests are often used as a proxy for IQ because they correlate so well with it.

That understates it. The SAT is an IQ test, strenuously as the College Board May deny it. The test was originally the scholastic aptitude test and results from it correlate with other IQ tests just as well as results from IQ tests correlate with each other.

If anybody reading wants to know more about the broad field of which IQ is a small part the Wikipedia article on psychometrics is quite good.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics

It's like predicting an NFL player's performance based on stats--40 time，bench press, etc. They do these rather arbitrary tests, and over a lot of players there is some limited positive correlation with performance, but individually it does not mean very much. There are people with amazing stats that do not succeed.

Then for baseball players, everyhing changes.

Intelligence or smart are low-information, high-emotional-signalling terms. It means more about social status than anything else. Everyone has a mix of abilities. Some of the best engineers are terrible writers. Some are incompetent fathers (Steve Jobs). Some people are great at consuming and regurgitating a lot of info, but bad at original/critical thought. Some who would thrive in one life circumstance may struggle in another.

Academically, IQ is supposed to correlate with g, general intelligence. In other words，we're just creatures making up nonsense terms to, at face value, signal about ability, but it's often more of a social construct.

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