University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test
planning.e-psychometrics.com
planning.e-psychometrics.com
Oh no, I'm retarded
>This means that you are 88.68% higher than 13391 participants who have completed the test.
Hmm
But this makes no sense doesn't it? It looks like the intention is
"You're score is higher than 88.68% of 13391 participants who have completed the test."
What it's literally saying is that 13391 participants got a score 88.68% lower than yours
Doesn't that skew things? That is a lot of time a lot of people don't have.
I’m going to guess you’re obsessed with the plight of those you perceive to be “under” you. I mean, they’re poor - there’s NO WAY they’re doing well on the test right!?
Such an obnoxious point of view. Of COURSE your job has no causative effect on your natural cognitive ability. What a ridiculous way to try and look down on the poor.
The irony of making such a big mistake while discussing cognitive ability...
"Test your fitness with this 1 hour workout! ... Hmm our totally unbiased test shows that everyone is really fit."
See? Unbiased sampling is really hard but an hour long test means you're not even trying. (Which tbf they might not be.)
And an hour is a pretty reasonable ask of most people. How long do you think studies usually take?
lol no. Most people are not going to spend an hour doing an IQ test. 5 minutes? Sure. Look at how many people here are commenting about it - and HN has a very high concentration of people that love IQ tests.
> That’s true of every test, right?
You can reduce this bias by either making the test a lot shorter (5 minutes) or paying or forcing people to take it (e.g. tests in school don't suffer from this bias).
Anyways, asking for an hour of someone's time is fine. I really don't believe that dumb people would, for some reason, be particularly short on time. Maybe you're right that we won't get a fantastic sample of people working 4 jobs at once with 8 children at home.
Depends what you're trying to learn, but yeah it would be difficult. That's not really relevant to whether hour-long tests are biased due to their length though.
> I have no idea why you'd think HN has a high concentration of people that like IQ tests?
Because it's full of programmers and geeks who value intelligence and generally think of themselves as more intelligent than the average person. This is really obvious IMO.
> I really don't believe that dumb people would, for some reason, be particularly short on time.
I never said they would. I said that they would be unlikely to invest that free time in an hour long IQ test.
But it seems from what's written at the start that what they're looking for is correlations between the different types of questions, rather than scores across people
It seems like ICAR is spending a-lot of effort to remain scientific, and i feel like a website like this goes against that by spoiling the test utility for future potential participants.
what do you mean "a website like this", HN? or the destination of the link at the top of this discussion?
The link for this discussion goes to the test on the same site that you link to.
Are you saying people need to make their way to that test from the front page of the site following particular breadcrumbs? that people from HN shouldn't go there till they're ready to participate in a scientific manner? i just don't understand your point...
Psychologists are scientists and the replicability of IQ testing is extremely high and repeatedly confirmed. And despite how much psychosocially challenged nerds here like to complain about psychology, they are in good company: psychology itself is not normie opressors, psychologists are also psychosocially challenged nerds.
before you say anything else, the statistical methods we use today across medical testing were first applied and developed to psychometric testing, so if you are going to attack that, you are attacking all of medical science.
I never said they're not scientific. They're invaluable statistical tools. I'm saying their use outside of academia for hiring (among other things) is a fundamental missuse of both the tests and statistics.
Online versions of ICAR tests like these serve little purpose for anyone, and at worst encourage people to abuse ICAR in a similar way.
I think you could have written a reasonably strong argument that the parent commenter overstated their case, but you didn't do that: you just overstated the opposite pole of the argument and then declared the discussion off limits due to politics.
ordinality of any sample from a Gaussian process breaks down as the thin part of the population density is approached, but that will only affect those at least three sigmas above or below, so it's an edge case that doesn't matter for the fat part of the curve.
you are cherry picking pieces of arguments that might threaten your "nobody is better than anybody else" anti-merit ideology. "From those who have the ability to those who have the need" is a merit-based sickle, comrade, and IQ is its hammer, is my argument.
>I think you could have written a reasonably strong argument that the parent commenter overstated their case, but you didn't do that: you just overstated the opposite pole of the argument and then declared the discussion off limits due to politics
I don't think you really think any of that. You are disingenuous if you claim that your (collective (in more than one sense of the word)) side wants to actually discuss the science of IQ; you simply want it removed from the discussion because it does not support your politics. If the economy rewards high IQs, and people have social mobility, you will see an economic sorting from top to bottom, and you don't like that. If IQ has genetic factors (which it seems to) that's a bigger disaster because once the economic sorting takes place, social mobility goes away (the latter half of the 20th century) A true scientific socialist would not try to imagine/censor these problems away in a central committee, but would admit them and try to figure out better ways.
I talked about the science of IQ in my comment something that you did not actually engage with. the correct wording would have been for you to say "g does not exist" and provide some basis for that belief
(you edited your comment and added a paragraph to it after I wrote this)
If you actually want to test people for hiring, using domain specific interview questions and tests is a-lot more reasonable and usefully correlated with real-world job performance.
Isn't IQ one of the best predictors of job training success, across both civilian and military, blue collar and white collar?
It's also one of, if not the single most generalizable predictors that we know of right now, even more so than nationality, race, gender, SES (socioeconomic status), parental SES, you name it. It predicts just about everything - from hard biological measures like reaction time and brain mass to lifetime odds of being in a car accident (distinct from causing a car accident - higher IQ people are statistically less likely to be hit by another driver), divorce rates, lifetime income, longevity, the list goes on and on. IQ is not the strongest predictor for every one of these, but every stronger predictor for any one of those fails to predict as many things as IQ does. Parental SES, controlling for IQ, provides no predictive power for your reaction time, for instance, despite predicting educational attainment better than IQ does.
The critique that IQ is an imperfect proxy for g is totally valid.
The self-assuaging fantasy that g itself doesn't exist is a classic example of a psychological defensive mechanism of rejection, one rooted in a need to defend a worldview that holds all people as inherently equal, when we're measurably, biologically not.
> socioeconomic status
No. A real IQ test tries to cancel out educational level from the score by comparing people in buckets of age, education and a few other importance factors.
A systematic deviation of education quality in the same "level" is not possible to cancel out, making IQ indirectly measure socioeconomic status. Hence why the us governments banned IQ on the basis or racism for government hiring.
You cannot measure two prople with 1/4th of a IQ test (logic puzzle is only one part of a full test) and make any useful statistical conclusions. A domain specific interview question or aptitude test a much clearer value to hiring prococess.
From where did you get the idea that IQ was meant for population statistics?
I think this statement conflates two different senses of the word “equality”. Equality of abilities is different from moral equality. It is perfectly coherent to accept that people aren’t equal in terms of their abilities but are still morally equal. For example, just because Person A is smarter than Person B it does not follow that the interests of Person A matter more than those of Person B, or that the suffering of Person A matters more than the like suffering of Person B, etc. So the view that g is real and people have different IQ scores is consistent with the idea that all people are inherently equal. Because in most contexts the concept of inherent equality is not a biological or psychological concept but a moral concept.
The fact of the matter, relating back to the original discussion, is that sex/race/gender/ethnicity/nationality/religion/culture-blind IQ testing is not only a strong predictor of job performance, it is perhaps one of the best tools we have for eliminating discrimination based on sex/race/gender/ethnicity/nationality/religion/culture in hiring, as it explicitly controls for differences along these lines by exclusively targeting an assessment of g in abstract ways that are explicitly stripped of cultural, religious, racial, and gendered biases.
Pseudonymized hiring that relied exclusively on IQ tests, with zero indications of race/sex/gender (e.g. legal name), stripped of proxies for SES and/or parental SES (e.g. which university was attended, if any) would be significantly less biased than current hiring practices. Throw in job-specific pseudonymized skill evaluations (so, no voice calls, no video calls, just direct assessments to candidates) and you've got a system to dramatically reduce hiring discrimination along protected classes.
I don't know what the "self-assuaging fantasy" is supposed to mean, but you can read Cosma Shalizi to see how any set of tests structured like IQ tests are necessarily give rise to a "g" fact, even if you randomly generate them. I feel like I don't have to assuage myself too much that math works.
Focus on the 3 pronged shape. It is unique in all 4 orientations. You can use this to filter out bad rotations. Then use adjacencies to filer out the rest.
Not sure this was worth 65 minutes of my time. Would have liked to see whether whatever this version of the ICAR60 is is pegged to a standardized (IQ) test score. I'm assuming the 13,000 people who have also taken this are not representative of the wider pop.
> not so intelligent people
They generally won't ever know that the test exists.
No idea what that means but I no longer want to see another cube for at least a few weeks :P
It's worth considering who the other participants are, has this been mostly shared just among University of Cambridge students / staff (and HN readers now)?
For the dice questions, which rotation on the is being performed? I think that's part of the riddle, most rotations are impossible given the initial position.
Either am an idiot or the solution to the riddles is something taught in school, which is something I've never been taught.
I’m now 43 and other day I was looking up test papers for the 11+ (school entrance exams for 11 year olds) and thinking - damn this is HARD!
Anyone else feel like they used to be so much quicker?
I’m in my early 30s and I definitely feel less sharp than in my 20s, but I also feel like my priorities have changed and I have more responsibilities at work and at home, so I have much less ability to just be able to do very long periods of focused studying/thinking like I used to in my 20s
I asked my parents about this as they are both accomplished people and work in STEM/academia.
They both mentioned feeling less sharp when they hit their mid-to-late 30s, which corresponds to… when they had kids. I know correlation isn’t causation, but seeing all of my coworkers who have young children now all mention they’ve had a marked decrease in mental acuity for work due to sleep deprivation (and having to prioritize their kids), I’m going to guess this is it.
I also wonder if you just had a month to focus on refreshing what you learned in school how quickly it would all come back.
(my 2¢: avoid sugar, fast food& other carbs, nitrite meats)
Just the lack of sleep must have an large effect.
Now, you can be strategic about staying sharp about topics that interest you.
As intended by whom?
One just becomes hyper-specialized with age if you aren't careful, and don't explore new technology or hobbies. One Phd physicist I knew often said he was only an expert in Spoons, and while that probably wasn't really true... it did allude to the irrational competitiveness of the insecure. =3
Are you me? I've been helping my daughter study for the 11+, and some of the questions I really struggle with (I'm 44). However if you look up the answers and see how the answer is calculated/resolved, it does seem like it's a case of just learning the method.
This does make me think that to pass the 11+ you basically need to pay for private tuition. We'll see how well my daughter does in a few weeks time (when the 11+ test is conducted).
Likewise with a lot of these cognitive IQ tests, if you know the method or tricks you can basically pass no problem... but I'm not 100% sure it means you're "smarter" than everyone else.
Some cognitive abilities diminish more slowly with age (so-called crystallized intelligence), but unfortunately, fluid intelligence drops noticeably much earlier in life than most people would care to realize.
You just need to lean into what you know instead of solving novel problems. Or be comfortable knowing that it'll take longer than it used to. Typically, you can still arrive at a solution if you could have before, but you'll need to put more work into it. Sometimes, a lot more work.
- A homeschooling father helping with SAT prep
Were we supposed to have scratch paper? I didn't use any.
I got 50, I guess that's good, especially because I'm ready for bed.
After over a century of psychometric research in cognitive abilities and intelligence, what do we have to show for it? Whose life has actually improved for the better? Have the benefits from such research, if any, outweighed the amount of harm that has already been caused?
Last time I passed a job interview, on several rounds of interview not one was about general intelligence, or general knowledge, or general anything. It was about my ability to solve the kind of problems they were solving and I had some experience solving. Last time I failed a job interview it was because of a bad culture fit.
I have not looked at the numbers, but I would suspect Ivy league admissions to be more correlated with wealth / geography than possibly anything else, but you probably square that with a belief that intelligence is hereditary as wealth is.
IQ tests measure the ability to solve quickly some abstract problems in an exam-like situation. There is certainly a use case for that, but thinking it captures the whole of "cognitive ability" is like thinking that duolingo captures the whole of litterary.
By the way, anytime one can't understand why $DEBATED_TOPIC is debatable should be an indication that one should switch to a slower though process.
This is actually like one of the primary tricks of the IQ perverts. They'll take literally any test, run the results through a transformation function to get it into their bell curve, and start making claims about how IQ correlate with This-Or-That based on it.
So: the people that developed intelligence tests were not psychologists; lies, damned lies and statistics; "pioneering" the idea of using math doesn't mean that people using math today are doing the same thing; whatever the definition of IQ might be is irrelevant because "IQ tests" are not rigorously defined; however precisely IQ is defined is also irrelevant because it's supposedly just a proxy for "g"; psychology is not psychometry and so discarding IQ does nothing to the field of psychology.
I am of the opinion that, although there is some generality in IQ tests, they measure only one specific aspect of cognitive ability defined by: abstract + quick.
My intuition is that cognitive abilities encompass much more than that. Anyone who have ever argued at length with that smart but obtuse engineer who can't tell the forest for the tree will know what I'm refering to. To me, a better test for "cognitive abilities" would also measure how someone is able of nuance, of humor, of seeing things from different perspectives, of introspection, etc, not just solving puzzles that can be described in a couple of sentences.
And I'm not talking about "emotional intelligence" here. To me, E-I is just the other side of that same flawed model that smells too much like modern day phrenology.
> The touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.
Any kind of skill-based testing is obviously racist. Thanks for teaching me.
You're welcome for me educating you.
The Duke Power Company had as many black people in management as the NBA has short players.
Your argument is not even internally consistent.
This heavily implies the opposite:
> If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes CAN be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is NOT prohibited.
The problem is you’ve got an indicator that appears to favour white people, and a lack of evidence that the indicator shows anything of relevance to the actual position or job content.
Hypothetically, let’s say you were a racist, a nice easy way to do racist things like “disproportionately hire white people” would be to find some metric which disproportionately favours white people, and then evaluate everyone against that.
If you can prove it’s important for the job, you can discriminate still. For example, a Chinese restaurant can require knowledge of Mandarin, a metric which very likely favours people of Chinese descent. They just have to be able to explain why (e.g.: internal communication is in Mandarin, most of our customers speak Mandarin, etc).
Maybe we should implement IQ testing before people are allowed to post on HN.
full: https://www.talytica.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Schmidt-...
proof provided. what's the next pivot now? can't wait to see the mental gymnastics d1sxeyes does to respond.
It doesn’t even touch the question of whether IQ tests are good measures of cognitive ability, nor does it only include IQ tests as measures of cognitive ability.
In this thread, you have been nothing but rude, condescending, and snarky to your fellow YC users. So, what gives?
That's up to you, homie. Where do you want to take this?
Why is this myth so pernicious? It comes up a lot here!
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...
Oooh, to be sure they don't call them IQ tests explicitly, but the psychometric capabilities and performance tests they've gotten me to do (mathematical, logical, verbal, reasoning etc) are pretty obviously IQ proxies.
"arbitrarily defined concepts like cognitive ability or intelligence" correlate very well with objective metrics like educational attainment and income.
>the amount of harm that has already been caused?
Like what?
“Because it stratifies people, which has the effect of saying some people are better than others in some way”.
I’m not being sarcastic towards you, I’m being sarcastic towards people who think this is truly harmful. I apologize - I should’ve made that more clear.
If that were true, then why are they not administered to every child? IQ tests appear to only to the potentially disabled and potential precocious. If a child is already showing signs of precociousness, then what would an IQ test present that was not already observed?
> It could help point out adults in your own company that have some type of potential.
I highly doubt adults at a company have hidden potential that is unknown. Underused? Sure. It's not like the companies have some sort of hidden genius that no one knows about. If one were a genius, it would have likely been apparent far earlier in their life.
> It could be used for scholarship purposes.
Do you really believe we should be awarding scholarships for meritless human attributes? Why not offer scholarships to other human attributes like height, weight, and beauty while we are at it?
That's thing about IQ, according to the research, it's like eye color, skin color, etc.. There isn't a damn thing one can do to change it (positively). So, I am not certain I am comfortable offering scholarships on raw IQ alone. In fact, isn't the entire purpose behind grades, standardized testing, etc.?
(Yes, I am aware the early SAT was a psuedo-IQ test, but that ended in the 80s or 90s, I believe. ACT was never truly comparable to my understanding.)
We've never had a good understanding of what intelligence is, let alone a good test for it. We didn't even realize that until recently.
>I highly doubt adults at a company have hidden potential that is unknown
I think you'd be surprised how economic status can take a brilliant mind and squash it, or a rigid society can take a uniquely thoughtful mind and squash it
>Do you really believe we should be awarding scholarships for meritless human attributes?
You should see how easy it is to get a basketball scholarship if you're over 7 feet tall. And for good reason.
>it's like eye color, skin color, etc.. There isn't a damn thing one can do to change it (positively)
Can't make tall people grow more either. 7' people still have a much easier time with the sport than anyone else.
I guess I don't understand why you think we shouldn't be able to discriminate based on the brain? Should we just waste this wonderful natural gift in the name of fairness? Sounds like more of that "it's more important to do no harm than to do good" garbage.
How recent? IQ tests have been around for over 100 years.
> I think you'd be surprised how economic status can take a brilliant mind and squash it, or a rigid society can take a uniquely thoughtful mind and squash it
I do not disagree with this premise, but how would knowing an IQ score materially affect this? People aren't awarded medical degrees, doctorates of law, etc. by IQ alone. One still needs to put forth the effort and motivation to succeed. One's IQ has little predictability when it comes to stress tolerance, motivation, conscientiousness, etc..
> You should see how easy it is to get a basketball scholarship if you're over 7 feet tall. And for good reason.
How easy is it? How many people are even over 7ft to begin with? I'm not certain the number is large enough to truly make a difference. Also, I believe academic scholarships should not be awarded for athletics in the first place, but that is a different discussion.
> Can't make tall people grow more either.
Lionel Messi would disagree. There are also other methods like limb lengthening surgery, which I would strongly not recommend lol.
> much easier time with the sport
True, but easier != better. In some cases, it may though.
> Should we just waste this wonderful natural gift in the name of fairness?
Not putting people on a pedestal does not equate to wasting their gift. I believe we should treat the exceptional as normal until they are able to self-actualize. History presents us with a graveyard of childhood prodigies that never amounted to anything in adulthood. After all, the candle that burns twice as bright burns twice as fast.
I have asked this throughout this thread, and no one has given me an answer. When people mention 'gifts' people tend to talk about proclivities in typically one domain.
Take Von Neumann, for example. He was a mathematical god-like being, but he was not exceptional in musical abilities, art, athletics, etc.. He was allegedly able to multiple/divide two eight-digit numbers in his head at the age of 6. I will ask my question once again: what could IQ test tell us about Von Neumann (which he never took) that we did not already know? Terrance Tao, Einstein, etc.. didn't either. Do you believe they turned out alright?
What about Feynman that allegedly scored worse than his sister (125 vs. 128)? Most gifted programs that require an IQ assessment usually require an IQ >= 130. That would mean Feynman would have passed over. Which is precisely my point -- there are a lot of people that do not fit the mold that would be passed over because of some arbitrary point of datum.
Lewis Terman also tried this same experiment which took place over decades. None of his "Termites" (his group of 1000s of +130 IQ children) became anything remotely noteworthy. Two children excluded for being too unintelligent won Nobel Prizes in separate fields.
No matter what IQ is, one thing is clear -- it ain't everything.
And hell, maybe it’ll have the opposite effect. Maybe we’ll find that absolute raw horsepower is a worthless metric, because intelligence is simply too complex multifaceted, or maybe it’ll simply turn out to be like BMI, where it’s only applicable to populations of sufficient size. Who knows?
For all I know, true horsepower is the rate at which you form new connections, or the amount of working memory you have, or the efficiency of your brain (less activity for similar tasks).
But that being said, the brain is just the engine. I don’t disagree that the driver makes or breaks it. Of course things like grit and training and emotional stability and socioeconomic status and… matter just as much in terms of how well we can use that engine/brain.
Edit: oh, and to answer your question, I think it was a study in 2012 in Neuron(?) that was considered the death knell for the IQ test as we see it today.
I should also mention that in a perfect world, this test would be more physical than mental - brain scans and metabolic charts or something like that.
Entirely possible, and if that is all you want to use the metric for, then I have no qualms with that. I just get very leery about using the metrics for policy. In my state, for example, IQ <= 69 immune from death penalty and an IQ >= 70 makes one eligible (assuming a 1st degree murder conviction). I know there has to be a cut-off somewhere, but I do not think the tests are accurate enough to demonstrate a large difference between scores in that range (same on the other tail end too).
> Scientists aren’t inherently trying to answer the most useful questions, just the ones they find interesting enough to research.
Fair enough.
> intelligence is simply too complex multifaceted, or maybe it’ll simply turn out to be like BMI, where it’s only applicable to populations of sufficient size.
I still hold such views despite reading plenty of the research. IQ certainly measures something, but I am not entirely certain we fully understand what we are looking it. Plenty of low/moderate correlates. From what I can honestly tell, it appears that IQ is a great predictor at the speed of which one learns, but coincidentally, that does not predict domain mastery.
For example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... (Though, I do not agree the finds are "significant" -- those r^2 are brutal)
> Of course things like grit and training and emotional stability and socioeconomic status and… matter just as much in terms of how well we can use that engine/brain.
Well, thank you for being rational. It's quite rare these days.
> I think it was a study in 2012 in Neuron(?) that was considered the death knell for the IQ test as we see it today.
Ah! I know which one your talking about. Yes, that was a blow, but I think the field is chugging along just fine.
> this test would be more physical than mental
I have once considered how awesome this would be too. I think Sternberg, a field-famous psychologist, is working on something physical, albeit not in this realm. I believe he wants to create some kind obstacle course/escape room like measurement, if I am not mistaken. I was pay-walled a while back, so I couldn't quite tell what the paper was fully about.
I.e. if you have an IQ below 85 you can't even sweep up the floor for the army
Putin uses such people as cannon fodder, meat wave attacks
we won ww2 with an army a solid SD below today's 100.
Do you have a counter-point? You think the army is stupid and you know better? What is your point?
Would you prefer your child have an IQ of 120 or 80? If you have a preference, then you're morally inconsistent and don't even realize it? That must be a frustrating condition to go through life with? At least try to have a nice day in spite of your limitations. It's not your fault, we're all equal in God's eyes.
I am "arguing" (not arguing, simply stating basic facts) that neither Russia nor the USA were giving "IQ tests" to soldiers. Also neither Russia nor the USA are currently giving "IQ tests" to soldiers.
To Wit: I do not think the Army not accepting people who score too low on their entrance exam has anything to do with "IQ".
Also neither I nor my hypothetical child will be taking an "IQ test" (again not actually a defined thing) so having a preference is not a sensible idea.
That is a perversion of the purpose and origin of these tests, and a core reason why ICAR tries to replace IQ tests with a wider set of different logic puzzles without any established "aggregate score" metric for people to abuse.
In a cruel and inhumane manner virtually devoid of all empathy and compassion for our planet, the life our planet supports, and for each other? I honestly wish I didn't understand how the world actually functions.
I'm not certain I agree. If anything, cognitive tests can be used as a single point of datum, but to my knowledge, no condition can be diagnosed via a cognitive test alone. Of course, I could be mistaken. I wish administered the WAIS-IV on top of many other tests for an ADHD diagnosis.
> They are important to determine exactly what sort of ongoing care and support the person needs in order to thrive.
Interesting, upon my receiving my diagnosis, I was not provided any support nor would I declare I have thrived. Obviously, n = 1. I was merely given the social approval to take pharma-grade speed and thrown back to the wolves.
> It's also not arbitrary—a good cognitive test will give insight into the ability to perform everyday cognitive tasks.
That's the part I believe I am clearly missing. These tests provide insight into the ability to perform everyday cognitive tasks better than one's history of already performing various tasks? It's not as if someone with a perfect SAT score takes an IQ tests and then is met with the sudden reality that they are mentally disabled nor vice versa.
What do these tests tell us that we already do not know? If I want to find someone with high mathematical abilities, then I would administer a math exam. Reading? Reading exam. Chess? Chess tournament. And so on...
The sub-sections of things like the WAIS can be of some value for identifying specific abnormalities or deficiencies, but as you said, is probably of more value clinically to split them out into separate tests/activities rather than to group them all together into an aggregate score. It's a bit like judging athletic ability and skill by BMI and fat percentage rather than just playing an opponent in tennis to find out if they're a good tennis player.
I did not read the comment you're replying to as saying otherwise.
United States? It's not quite like that everywhere.
Growing up in the South East, USA, there were no such things as Autism, ADHD, etc.. Things have gotten better, I suppose, but I'm in my early 30s, so this wasn't exactly a long time ago either. You know how schools have 'gifted and talented' programs? I was in the 'cursed and talentless' program.
There are studies that empirically measure drop change cognitive ability from lead poising, oxygen deprivation, sleep deprecation, post-burnout, environment distraction, noise pollution, temperature, aging, drug and alcohol use during puberty, smoking, school teaching style, etc. etc.
Notable is that these are either population metrics or compare each individual with themselves. This is what IQ and other similar tests were meant for. Comparing one person with another is nonsensical and a flawed use of these metrics.
This is where where IQ has fallen and become a rather bad metric. People are familiar with the problems scewing results. IQ test performance and education level is highly correlated, which is supposed to be compensated for in the final score. But poor education quality in certain regions make the statistics easily used to argue quite unsavory ideas.
I'm pretty sure if I asked a group of people to invent their own questions I'd get a load of general knowledge questions about music, sports, and popular culture.
In practice, intelligence tests don’t depend on the specific questions asked. If you let a group of people generate their own items, pool them together, sample randomly, and then rank scores, the same individuals would tend to rise to the top. The high IQ people would cluster toward the top with a correlation of 0.9. This is because people with higher general cognitive ability perform better across virtually any cognitive task, a phenomenon first documented by Spearman (1904) and repeatedly confirmed in psychometrics research (e.g., Jensen 1998; Deary 2012).
Yes, for the purposes of that research. Why would a comparison between two people be a flawed use case? Do you just mean the colloquial use and understanding of IQ is flawed?
Over two different people, so many factors affect the score that making the claim "one person is more intelligent than the other" is statistically unsound without a massive score difference. This is even ignoring that a full IQ test involves FAR more than the usual online logic puzzles people tend to know, yet still have these flaws.
so yes; > colloquial use and understanding of IQ is flawed.
Isn't this what IQ tests literally do, given that they transform raw scores to a normal distribution for comparability?
As far as I can tell, their only real purpose in the UK is to try to convince "intelligent" people to give money to MENSA.
Then again, the same psychologist told me that the discrepancy between my scores was so large that a true FSIQ cannot be used. In a sense, he told me that based on that test, I didn't actually have an IQ that could be accurate measured based on that given test. Apparently, it’s not normal to have almost two SD between some scores...
Being a smart idiot isn't easy work, but someone has to do it.
Regardless, I am still skeptical of a lot of neuroscience research, as well.
I feel that neuroscience often suffers from the same issues that psychology does —- where correlation apparently equates to causation.
A great part of science breakthroughs is mostly made by people who just want to know more, for the sake of knowing more.
Who is more likely to have more time and the means to develop patents? The high income/high intelligence person who pays for others to do various chores, labors, and services for them so that they may focus on their work, or the people deemed unworthy by society who spend their time performing the chores, labors, and services for the high income/high intelligence person?
I believe intelligence alone is worthless, if not dangerous, without altruism and empathy. As I type this very message, somewhere in the world, there are people being torn to shreds, families destroyed, etc. by various contraptions designed by some of the most intelligent people on the planet. While unintelligent people may have less potential to change the world in a positive manner, it is apparent that those same individuals have less potential to change the world in a negative manner, as well.
Whatever potential these children have, I believe it's imperative that we are damn certain those children have the moral and ethical composition deserving of their potential, at least, that is my starry-eyed opinion.
High-IQ children in low income families. In so far as they are targeted by social programs that give them better educational opportunities.
I'd be leery of anyone that claims that the only reason they were able to become a doctor, lawyer, etc. was because of being in a gifted program or something similar.
As far as I am concerned, I firmly believe the truly talented will create their own environment within reason. Take Von Neumann, for example. He was god-like in abilities. I am certain someone of his caliber did not need better educational opportunities in order to be exceptional. The man was, by all accounts, born exceptional.
Also, I am not certain that giving better educational opportunities to the bright is better than giving better educational opportunities to the disadvantaged, but I will admit I am likely too ignorant on this topic to have an informed opinion.
Without this educational opportunities would primarily be given to the obviously/observably bright and advantaged children since their parents can afford it.
(I am being sarcastic, of course.)
> Without this educational opportunities would primarily be given to the obviously/observably bright and advantaged children since their parents can afford it.
Hell, for any highly intelligent child, I say drop their asses off the public library. The truly smart ones will find their way, and the environmentally gifted will not. We do not need special programs for these kids. Special programs equate to more busy, bullshit work. A high IQ earns one more worksheets and homework. Education, at least in the USA, is rotten to the core. I am not convinced more of it is better. Do not mistake me though, I do not believe more knowledge and wisdom are worthless. I am just saying the education system rarely provides either.
I feel like people miss the echelons of IQ. IQ might have predictability, but the more narrow one focuses, the worse it gets. For example, let's taking programming. Something near and dear to my heart and to many others on this site. If one is capable of learning how to program, then their IQ is clearly sufficient enough to be a programmer. Past that point, I would not be willing to bet that a higher IQ would necessarily translate into a better programmer. It's like being in tall and playing basketball. Being 6'5 is better than being 5'5 in the NBA. However, being 6'7 vs. 6'5 much less advantageous.
If anything, I think we should start highly selecting for more altruistic and empathic children. Intelligence is not exactly uncommon. An IQ of 130 puts one in the 98th percentile. With a world population of 8.142 billion people, that means there are roughly 162.84 million people at or above the 98th percentile. I am not certain there are 162.84 million people out in the world making a big difference.
But hey if you don't like it we could have it my way and bulldoze the public schools since personally I think they're a huge waste of money.
It wouldn't be impossible. The extra resources might not go as far, which makes the program more likely to look like a waste.
> how much evidence supports that better educational opportunities truly manifests into the outcomes we socially desire?
The rate of technological progress we can make as a species is largely dictated by the area under the +2 sigma -> infinity region of the IQ curve. Further adjusted by the amount of those people that we can find and motivate to participate in the economy. As for evidence, the US poaches high IQ people from around the world. You can chalk that up to coincidence if you want.
That was precisely my point. If little Johnny or Sally need a special education program to properly challenge and educate them, then I hate to break the news to their families, but whatever "it" is, those children don't have "it."
I also find it interesting how "gifted" programs and the like are predominately a Western intervention. To my knowledge, countries like Japan and China do not have "gifted" programs. I am not saying there are not academic and social discrepancies between highly intelligent and the normies, but Western culture does tend to be less community driven than cultures of the two countries I previously mentioned.
> You can chalk that up to coincidence if you want.
I cannot comment about modern times, but I know a certain group of people that I am half descendant from were commonly denied entry into the US during the 1920s - 1950s. However, those same people allegedly had the highest IQ scores on average. At least, historically.
The benefits have been huge. The Chinese realized this a thousand years ago when they invented civil service exams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination.
Also, your Vox link was pay-walled, but nevertheless, I am fairly well versed in some of the data. I have my own archive of research on this topic for what it is worth (not likely much).
Any hoot, the correlations, while positive, are nothing to write home about in my opinion. Sure, IQ might have more breadth of predictably, but it definitely lacks depth of predictably compared to more granular models depending on the domain.
For example, IQ is not a better predictor of chess performance than say a chess tournament.
So we should determine who to give chess lessons to with chess tournaments? That seems pretty dumb.
There are many times where we don't want to select for current ability but for potential ability, and then a direct test like you suggest is a much worse predictor than IQ is.
By your logic, we could even declare grandmasters based on IQ scores alone without anyone needing to play. Clearly that misses the point of skill assessment.
History also doesn’t support the claim of potential ability all that well, in my opinion. Lewis Terman’s study tracked high-IQ children across several decades. Many of the children went on to lead ordinary lives and did not reach noteworthy achievements. However, two lower-IQ children that were excluded went on to become Nobel Prize winners. IQ alone does not seem to be a robust predictor of domain mastery.
Also, IQ predicts chess performance as well: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160913124722.h...
"The study found that intelligence was linked to chess skill for the overall sample, but particularly among young chess players and those at lower levels of skill."
We might have different definitions of the word well.
Edit: Upon reading the linked study in the article, it's even worse than I thought:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
"Effect sizes were small-to-medium in magnitude; variance in chess skill explained by cognitive ability was similar in magnitude for Gf (6%), Gsm (6%), Gs (6%), and Gc (5%), with an average of 6%. Full-scale IQ explained < 1% of the variance in chess skill."
Never have we seen a result so relatable to most users. =3
A Cognitive test struggling under load is ironic/amusing.
https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/intelligence.shtml
https://kaiwenwang.com/writing/hypothetical-foldy-ears-as-an...
>Imagine that you know that you aren’t so smart. It’s difficult to do well in class. Then you hear of this theory, go check your ears in the mirror, and find that your ears are not so foldy. Maybe they’d feel relief at understanding why things are the way they are. They could then endeavor to do better for their kids and the next generation armed with the knowledge of prenatal nutrition and its benefits
What kind of crackpottery is this?
>My personal opinion is that only people with these biologies are not Aristotle’s natural slaves, only able to live in the worlds of others.
This is the kind of fatalist intelligence eugenics that makes me recoil.
To say that everyone has the same level of skill and talent is harmful for people can clearly see their own ability yet cannot meet the expectations of society. If we believe everyone is the same, then it puts the culpability onto the individual to do well rather than society and government.
Aristotle reflected that king does not beget king, nor does slave beget slave. He thought some to be worthy and capable despite their lowly position in society. It comes from the book Politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...