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max_

Is there any real world test where higher IQ people do better than anyone else deterministically?

I am not talking about correlations.

I am talking about people with higher IQ can solve X problem that people with lower IQs can't.

Not the ability to spot back & white patterns on a screen.

The riches people are not the highest IQ people

The Noble Prize Winners are not the highest IQ people

The best sports players are not the highest IQ people

The best mathematicians are not the highest IQ people

The best musicians are not the highest IQ people.

None of the these have excellence that can be deterministically determined by IQ. So what exactly is it good for?

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this is just a guess but I'm betting that if you take the best Nobel Prize Winners, and the best Mathematicians and give them IQ tests their average will be higher than the average of the general population (or the mean if you will)

the best sports players and best musicians I would also suppose were higher IQ on average than normal sports players (I suppose this term means professional athletes) and normal musicians (professional musicians)

In the musicians category I wouldn't be surprised if the best musicians were also smarter than the general population.

In short I think IQ tests are a lousy metric, sure, but it is not a completely useless measure - just nearly useless.

On edit: clarification, fixed wrong capitalization.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/05/fact-check-b...

The funny thing about specialists is that they can easily embarrass themselves when outside their field.

Watching your average politician talk about technology is a pretty great example of people speaking with zero context. Some of them clearly aren't dumb but they can get in over their heads with ease.

The funny thing about this conversation here though is I was talking about means and averages and you gave me an example of a single guy, also I said outliers in their fields might have higher than average general ability - I don't know why anyone would assume that higher than average general ability would equal expertise in unstudied specialties?

>In the musicians category I wouldn't be surprised if the best musicians were also smarter than the general population.

I seriously doubt that, actually. Are they more musically gifted? Sure. Smarter overall? I'm not so sure. It would be an interesting study.

I imagine the ones who are both successful musicians and businesspeople (i.e., they run the business themselves mostly, in addition to being musicians) probably are very intelligent, because that requires a broad range of skills. The ones who are just good at playing an instrument or singing some lyrics that someone else wrote? Not so much.

This is like saying that since the tallest people are not the best basketball players, height in basketball doesn't matter.

Bingo.

I doubt such a test is possible because IQ is trying to be a single number. Intelligence isn’t really generalized like that.

My question is. What is this Number measuring?

Why don't you crack open Wikipedia and start from there?

IQ as measured seems to be intended to be a "mental maturity index".

It's best administered to children to understand where they are relative to other children and makes little sense in adults.

That's why IQ is age dependent. A 12 year old with a 140 IQ should have the mental pattern matching recognition as a normal 14 year old with 100 IQ.

The standard deviation is based on the next year ups mean IQ and so on.

It doesn't necessarily measure intelligence, but in children it can be used as a proxy for intelligence since usually brain maturity is directly linked to intelligence.

>The riches people are not the highest IQ people The Noble Prize Winners are not the highest IQ people The best sports players are not the highest IQ people The best mathematicians are not the highest IQ people The best musicians are not the highest IQ people.

These may not be the highest IQ people, but very few are low IQ (below 90).

It's supposed to measure general intelligence (supposing there is such a thing, which I doubt). Correlation is the only thing it's trying to do.

If you had a specific test like you're after... that would be by definition not general intelligence, but rather some specific intelligence.

Because it matters in aggregate. Also, most of those individual categories you listed are, in fact, high IQ outliers, especially when it comes to Fields medalists and Nobel laureates. And you made it evident by your post that you are, in fact, low IQ.

IQ tests being useful and IQ bragging or judgement being stupid are not mutually exclusive

This makes sense. Making any sort of judgment based on IQ scores is stupid but IQ test scores are useful because

IQ doesn’t seem to be an ideal metric for macro level civilisation intelligence. A lot of what it optimises for is replaced by technology. If we’re measuring intelligence at that level I’d hope for something like theory of mind/spiral dynamics, testing how wide someone’s perspective is.

Is their world model limited to themselves, their family, their village, their country, their race, their world, their species, their system? Combined with their understanding of social dynamics at each level.

I think the average GenZ in the US is at beginning of global scale, which is great for acceptance of different cultures; but without understanding the social dynamics yet. Giving us “woke” because they understand different cultures have different contexts, this is good but incomplete. E.g. some cultures aren’t aligned with the entire species, like controlling women in a way that leads to bad outcomes as technology adds complexity to our social dynamics.

Measuring this perspective level would help us understand which cultural models work best in adapting with growth and are more likely to be sustainable post-scarcity.

Here in western europe IQ tests are unheard of. I never met anyone (people at work, family members, close friends, acquaintances, etc.) who has taken such a test.

You have to take an IQ test as part of an ADHD diagnosis.

I genuinely don't know why, but you do have to.

This is not correct. At least not in the U.S. as a whole.

It may of course be true where you are.

The DSM does not even suggest an IQ test as part of the diagnostic.

Knowing 6+ people in several states with ADHD diagnoses (some as children, some as adults) none have had anything beyond questions with their physician… or diagnoses by a psychiatrist after starting therapy for a different issue.

https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519712/table/ch3.t3/

https://add.org/adhd-dsm-5-criteria/

Erh, where in the world?

Evidently I am an outlier? I was asked to do it twice as part of ADHD diagnosis.

Once in the UK as a pre/early teen (2003~), and once in Sweden to be rediagnosed via a private company named Modigo (so, now I am not sure if it's standard as part of the healthcare system here).

Since I was 2/2 and that was 100% of my experiences throughout two countries, I thought it was the standard.

I got diagnosed for ADHD in 2021 and nobody asked me to do an IQ test. In fact, no one has ever asked me to do one in my entire life.

Your anecdote is not data.

Also makes no sense whatsoever as ADHD does not affect IQ in any form. It's a form of dopamine dysregulation, not a learning disability. Let's stop perpetuating this stupid myth.

It does affect concentration and if an IQ test goes on for long enough and is not interesting enough to warrant some kind of hyperfocus, I get distracted. And so my IQ score will be worse. Or not? I have ADHD and it doesn't make me dumber, but since focus is a critical part of thinking, it does make it harder if I'm not interested. I'd rather say that IQ tests are designed for neurotypical people.

IQ is not concentration. In fact, IQ or intelligence in general does not have a single accepted definition†. You are not "stupider" because you have no patience to sit down to concentrate to do a silly test. Nor you are "smarter" because you found it so engaging you hyperfocused and did it in one sitting.

IQ tests are designed by people that want to create automatons easy to quantify and categorize.

† My definition of intelligence is "ability to solve novel problems." With this definition, an uncontacted tribesperson can be as intelligent as a Nobel prize winner. The difference is education, and the type of problems they're facing, which is just a matter of context.

I have ADHD and I do great on IQ tests, each question is a little thing to answer, I move quickly through them and get a quick dopamine hit. If there is something difficult then I can get stuck there and thrown off my rhythm, but this seldom happens.

(Czech Republic) I took one in high school, it was optional and paid, but sort of organized by the school. I think we took it instead of some morning classes. I got an official-looking Mensa application form attached to the results, so I think it was pretty legit. (never applied though)

Western Europe is a big place. I guess it also depends on whether you only count tests conducted in a professional setting. Here in Germany, i guess at least 20% of people between 20 and 40 have taken some kind of IQ test, e.g. online. Not everyone might admit it because it could come of as a little "vain", but there are even IQ test shows on popular TV channels (Sat 1, RTL 2) where the viewers do the test. They run them at primetime every few years.

Pretty much every adult male in Austria did an IQ test during draft inspection.

Try the British Army Cognitive Test https://www.google.com/search?q=british+army+cognitive+test , the Danish draft board's Børge Priens Prøve (BPP), and any other european country with an induction test for military recruits.

These "facts" pulled out of your ass are demonstrably false.

A typical IQ score for a mathematics PhD graduate is a couple of standard deviations above the mean.

IQ is correlated with intelligence, and higher intelligence enables greater achievements.

Maintaining a high level of civilization

So when civilizations collapse like a Ancient Egyptian, Rome, Ancient China & Ancient Greece.

What it the IQ that also dropped to cause the civilization collapse?

They probably got covid.

The inability to recognise how an intelligence trait that correlates with pattern recognition might have an effect on being able to predict the long-term outcome of one's actions and provides the ability to work well with others in a very large group, which a civilization is, and instead defaulting to an ad absurdum argument shows where you might fall on the IQ spectrum.

I think I read that most ancient civilizations collapsed because of environmental factors. The environment changed, and they couldn't cope with it for some reason (lack of technology was probably a big part).

As for China, I don't think that one ever "collapsed". It withdrew, but I don't think you can call it a "collapse" the way many other ancient civilizations did. Even Rome is a bit hard to call a full collapse: it degraded over the course of centuries, and eventually Europe turned to feudalism. The Roman Empire itself split apart, with the eastern part (in Constantinople) continuing for another 1000 years after the western side fell apart.

I think civilizations like the Assyrians and Hittites are better examples of civilizations that truly "collapsed": there's basically nothing left of them today, except some ruins.

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