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Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

Why is it that people are so fixated on IQ? We already know that things like whether the child can wait 20 minutes on a marshmallow at age 4 is a better indicator of scholastic success than IQ.

I fear people use IQ as an excuse for a (lack of) their success rather than face up to it and improve (or just accept and move on).

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Setting aside the possibility that the delayed-marshmallow-gratification thing has been exaggerated by people wanting to downplay IQ, and taking it at face value: the fact that IQ is not the single most important predictor of scholastic and/or life success does not make it unimportant. It warrants discussion, especially if it can be improved.

For example, eliminating childhood malnutrition can improve IQ significantly across whole populations. Isn't that something to be excited about?

  eliminating childhood malnutrition 
  can improve IQ significantly

I suspect it can improve the marshmallow-related behavior as well. But I could just be excited about the elimination of malnutrition.

Humans love to classify and compare. Most of us compete to demonstrate we are better and the intelligence is not different. Having a way to measure this human parameter precisely is a normal consequence.

Plus, from a more useful perspective, we need to have some way of measure a parameter if we want to study it. If we were trying to compare the results of two different strategies to improve the intelligence, we would need a precise method to measure the intelligence of every individual.

"Why is it that people are so fixated on IQ?"

I suspect that people who ask about IQs say more about themselves than an IQ number says about any particular individual.

Because it is something we can measure, and science can only deal with things we can measure.

Not quite. Popular culture "can only deal with" things that can be put on a simple number line, because they collectively like to be able to say definitively "this person is smarter than that other person", when the reality is (of course) far more complicated than that.

As far as I know, the scientific community agrees that IQ is not a strong predictor of true "intelligence"...

As far as I know, the scientific community agrees that IQ is not a strong predictor of true "intelligence"...

And yet the start of this thread is a scientific study that looks at variations in IQ.

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