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Comment by thrown_22 | Hacker News Reader

IQ tests show the ability to sit down and do pointless tasks which an authority figure has told you are meaningful and you must guess what that authority figure wants you to do.

Extremely valuable skills for white collar drones.

Completely meaningless as a measure of actual intelligence though.

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IQ is the most reliable and most valid measure of general intelligence we have been able to come up with. It is good enough for many clinical purposes, eg assessing brain damage, and also just so happens to correlate very strongly with just about every "life outcome" you can think of. Does it measure everything imaginable about human intelligence? No. But it measures what we actually know about very well. To call it completely meaningless is absurd.

You should reread what I said.

Be specific.

The ability to do boring arbitrary tasks is much more strongly correlated with the measures that IQ proponents cite as proof it's a meaningful measure than with whatever they mean by intelligence.

We could get the same results by forcing people to complete white noise patterns and seeing how long it takes them to quit.

That's an interesting idea, and while I doubt that it is true it seems like something you could determine experimentally. Has anyone done that or are you just asserting it?

I’m not sure what IQ tests you mean but that doesn’t sound like any I’ve used.

The intent is to gauge general mental ability, not rule following.

Take spatial in tests [0]. They aren’t about rule following so much as problem solving and lateral thinking.

Also iq tests are standardized and normalized. They have flaws, certainly, and are no way meaningless. It’s the best that we have until we get something better and there’s lots of correlations between iq and positive life outcomes. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_intelligence_(psycholo... [1] “ IQ correlates positively with family income, socioeconomic status, school and occupational performance, military training assignments, law-abidingness, healthful habits, illness, and morality. In contrast, IQ is negatively correlated with welfare, psychopathology, crime, inattentiveness, boredom, delinquency, and poverty.” https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/iq-and-...

>The intent is to gauge general mental ability, not rule following.

General mental ability as defined by sitting down and doing an arbitrary boring task, viz. following a rule that you don't see much point in but someone important told you to do.

The ability to do well on those tasks correlates much more strongly with:

>family income, socioeconomic status, school and occupational performance, military training assignments, law-abidingness, healthful habits, illness, and morality. In contrast, IQ is negatively correlated with welfare, psychopathology, crime, inattentiveness, boredom, delinquency, and poverty

than whatever intelligence is.

In short: IQ is a great tool to measure your ability to be a white collar drone.

The task isn’t arbitrary. It’s designed to measure mental ability. And it’s not boring as it can be quite short. And the rules should be quite easy to understand as they involve things like “which shapes fit together.”

The test is not designed to be confusing or hard to understand.

I expect IQ is also correlated with being a white collar drone (pretty awesome) but it’s also correlated with whatever intelligence is, as imperfectly as we’ve defined it.

The tasks which can be reduced to finite integer sequences are absolutely arbitrary.

E.g. you're given a finite set of pictures and expected to guess what the next picture is from a few possibilities. The answer is that it's all of them since any finite sequence has an infinite number of generating functions. The only way to get it right is to try and read the mind of whoever wrote the test and guess what they meant. An invaluable skill to have in the white collar workforce when guessing what your boss actually wants from you. But white collar empathy is not intelligence.

From the IQ test listed here: https://www.mensa.org/public/mensa-iq-challenge literally all of them are reducible to questions about integer sequences.

> short: IQ is a great tool to measure your ability to be a white collar drone.

But why so snarky?

I’m not a fan of ad hominem but the most reasonable guess to me is that someone did poorly on IQ tests and is working to justify why they are bad. Or they have a super high score and are trying to ultimately justify their argument with “well I scored 179 and even I think they are bad.”

I don’t think we’ll have closure.

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