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Comment by ergonaught | Hacker News Reader

It's hardly "scientific evidence", but my personal assessments of "how intelligent someone is" appear to correlate quite well into various "IQ bands" if a score is revealed at some point. That may be a coincidence, or they may be dependent upon some other unknown factor(s), but it does work out in practice.

People who criticize IQ scores as a proxy for intelligence should publish their own IQ score, no? If the author did so, I missed it, which is certainly possible. The not-intentionally-snarky point is that perhaps the author is not "smart enough" to assess this reliably.

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Are you sure you're not confusing cause and effect? Like maybe your view of "intelligence" is limited to the definition used by IQ tests. That would be kind of unfortunate because it selects for a certain type of test taking ability, mostly related to logic puzzles and spatial manipulation and vocabulary. Those skills might be useful in academic and some professional contexts, but they don't really benchmark the entirety of human potential.

Human intellect has the capacity for creativity, empathy, wisdom, self awareness, diplomacy, etc., and those aren't as easily measured on an IQ quiz.

Just my 2c as someone who's not professionally trained to apply IQ tests but have studied them as a side interest, and scored highly on them (probably like many others here). It's just one biased facet of our minds, and we shouldn't give it undue weight or rule people out because their minds work differently.

I did notice it's pretty easy to be perceived intelligent if you just happen to have a bunch of knowledge in the subject you talk about, and shut up in subjects you have no idea

>People who criticize IQ scores as a proxy for intelligence should publish their own IQ score, no? If the author did so, I missed it, which is certainly possible. The not-intentionally-snarky point is that perhaps the author is not "smart enough" to assess this reliably.

From the article:

>I did try an IQ test in the past a few times. [..] I will not disclose the results, because I do not want this text to be skewed by a number I am criticizing. If the number was low, skeptics would say I am not smart enough to appreciate the value of IQ or that my claim is just sour grapes.

Okay, I'll bite.

IQ scores are utterly *worthless* as a measure of intelligence because they only measure one's ability to solve a small set of carefully-chosen puzzles under carefully-controlled conditions. They cannot possibly measure anything realistic about intelligence.

Since you want people who criticise IQ scores to publish theirs, I'll tell you mine. Measured at various points across my education and out of five or six scores, they range from 72 to 160. They can't all possibly be right.

Are we talking actual vetted IQ tests or some random webpage/gazette offering "IQ test" ? From what I remember "proper" ones generally don't have that much variance per person

Yes, actual proper IQ tests, intended to find out some parameter or another of my education.

You need to know percentile, not score.

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