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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

I must admit that from perspective of the someone from the UK I've never really understood the US obsession with the desire to represent intelligence as a single number.

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“Obsession” is not the right word. I don’t think most Americans have an opinion on it (and they generally shouldn’t unless they’re psychologists or willing to do a lot of personal research on the subject).

I’m also pretty skeptical that there’s a meaningful difference between what the modal person in the UK and US (respectively) believes about IQ. I could probably be persuaded, but I don’t see any reason to think your opinion has anything to do with your country or nationality.

About the only place I encounter references to IQ regularly is here on HN - I've never heard of it in an educational or employment context in the UK.

I live in America and I still never see IQ mentioned in an educational or employment context. Only on the internet.

HN is basically the furthest thing I can imagine from an accurate representation of mainstream American culture.

If you draw any conclusions about what Americans are obsessed with from HN comments, you will almost always be wrong.

Yes, I realised I was over generalising as soon as I made that comment - I was mostly (over)reacting to the parent comment that did imply that it was a part of American culture.

It's an interesting phenomenon, perhaps worthy of study by propagandists or advertisers. If you tried to claim that a person's physical strength could be measured with a single number people would think you're mad, and probably most people in the world would think the concept of "IQ" is mad, and yet, in some countries, so many people believe in it.

Eh...

> If you tried to claim that a person's physical strength could be measured with a single number people would think you're mad

I wouldn’t think you’re mad. Many others wouldn’t either. Powerlifting competitions are already close to this. Take your performance across the four major lifts (benchpress, squat, shoulder press, deadlift) and devise a formula to combine it into a total number measuring the “general” strength of a person. You can compete on individual lifts, and if you break out that score some will be better than others at individual lifts, but the larger number remains indicative of well-rounded achievement in orthogonal areas.

That being said, I don’t think physical strength is comparable in any case.

> probably most people in the world would think the concept of "IQ" is mad, and yet, in some countries, so many people believe in it.

I think most people either “believe” in IQ or don’t think about it often enough to have an opinion. In fact skepticism about IQ is, in my experience, a distinct phenomeon on message boards and not at all representative of society in general.

"If you tried to claim that a person's physical strength could be measured with a single number"

Its consistently measured as a single number by the US military - it's just a combination of your performance on several exercises - traditionally pull ups, distance run times, swim times, number of crunches, etc.

So, again, fitness is consistently measured as a single number by one of the world's largest organizations. Don't postulate it's absurd. The same aggregation can be done for intelligence.

Yes, you can do that: you aggregate the results from some arbitrary tests, using some arbitrary weights, and out comes an arbitrary number. The trick must be to give that number a catchy name, so that people think it's something highly meaningful, almost akin to mass, distance or time.

Fluid and crystallized intelligence (which is what IQ test measure) are the most robust ways of measuring intelligence, and IQ is the single most reliable metric ever discovered in psychology, in terms of making predictions. If you're interesting in measuring how smart somebody is, there's no better way of doing it than with that single number.

I assume it’s exactly for this same reason there’s an archetype of an incredibly intelligent person, who ends up with a cocaine addiction, because he was never understood...

I can't understand and I would like to. Could you explain yourself?

I assume that the parent poster is referring to Sherlock Holmes.

... as long as you're limiting yourself to measurements that result in a single number?

Which IQ test? IQ as a number alone mean nothing, as you can't make a standardized test for it. And IQ number is a comparison (you calculate the standard deviation). Also, even in clinical tests, multiple scales can be used, and this mesure evolve. And there is no "single number", multple subjects are tested, and now we have another limitation: those tests don't mesure everything, or mesure thing that can evolve. I "scored" 123 on the weshler when i was 8 (or 9) with a really bad spatial visualisation score of 90 (89?). Since i'm now able to play blindchess or to chart a course on a marine map, either my spatial visualisation skills have improved, either people i know hide a lot. And i'm sure i would score way less on the other subjects too, looking back i was a pretty interesting kid, while now i'm an average adult.

I'm not saying it's useless, but to me it is way overvaluated by some people. Maybe you can approximate intelligence with an IQ test, but the number itself is meaningless imho. The classification can be used though.

The hypothetical g which IQ tests are trying to find is the extent to which every test of mental abilities that anyone has ever devised plus some things like reflex speed all seem to be fairly strongly correlated with each other and all seem to be correlated via a common factor. You can certainly be more skilled at one test than another. These tests are also fairly noisy when applied to individuals.

For individuals the results of IQ tests probably are oversold as you say given their noisiness. But for public health problems like air pollution where the results are averaged over populations they're probably undervalued if anything.

>IQ as a number alone mean nothing, as you can't make a standardized test for it

You don't need standardisation for IQ tests, because 100 will always be the mean. Get people to do your test, set the mean at 100 and you've got an IQ test.

>And IQ number is a comparison (you calculate the standard deviation). Also, even in clinical tests, multiple scales can be used

It measures deviation from the mean, and 15 points is used to show a standard deviation. This is how any clinical test will be administered.

>those tests don't mesure everything

Fantastic point. They ONLY measure intelligence.

>I'm not saying it's useless, but to me it is way overvaluated by some people. Maybe you can approximate intelligence with an IQ test, but the number itself is meaningless imho.

The problem with saying this is that IQ tests are far and away the best way of measuring intelligence. They do a pretty good job of it, as shown by their relative success in predicting outcomes. If you don't put any weight in IQ tests, then there's really nothing else you could rationally give any value to when it comes to measuring intelligence.

>but to me it is way overvaluated by some people

Personally, I think they're overvalued to the extent that intelligence in general is.

IQ is a single number for a very good reason. If you take all the questions psychology researchers have come up with to try to measure intelligence, take the pass/fail statistics of test-takers on them, and run a principle component analysis on it, you wind up with a single dimension.

There's no forcing the data to be single-dimensional regardless of the underlying truth about intelligence. People genuinely made an attempt to measure intelligence, and the measures people came up with happened to measure something best described as a single number.

Psychology researchers have tried to do the same with personality, and the principle component analysis spit out five dimensions rather than one. That's why the "Big 5" personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) are a thing.

I find the unwillingness to accept that general intelligence could be measurable (especially at the macro level) similarly perplexing.

It's definitely useful but with caveats. Your measurable iq isn't constant, people can have impairments that lower it temporarily and there are also certain drugs that can raise test scores.

> It's definitely useful but with caveats. Your measurable iq isn't constant, people can have impairments that lower it temporarily and there are also certain drugs that can raise test scores.

What!? Where can I get a hold of those drugs? :-)

I don't recommend naively swallowing pill cocktails in pursuit of IQ test scores, but informally people have taken stimulants and anti-narcolepsy drugs and gotten better scores, doing a reasonable job controlling for other factors.

Actually, I have no problem with measuring it - just that the idea of commonly representing it as a single value that I'm a bit sceptical about.

It's typically referred to as "general intelligence," or "g," and the reason this single value is significant is because of the strong correlations it has with other life outcomes. I don't think anyone claims it represents all intelligence, and presumably we could come up for numbers regarding other aspects of intelligence. It's just the best number we've got so far for what people are trying to measure.

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