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Comment by herval | Hacker News Reader

> IQ probably doesn't mean much of anything. But it is one of only a handful of ways we have to benchmark intelligence.

IQ means a lot of things (higher IQ people are measurably better at making associations and generating original ideas, are more perceptive, learn faster, have better spatial awareness).

It doesn't give them the power to predict the future.

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It is less meaningful than that. It identifies who does well at tests for those things. That is not the same thing as being "better" at such things, it often just means "faster". IQ tests are also notorious for cultural bias. In particular with the word associations, they often just test for "I'm a white American kid who grew up in private schools."

And I say this as one of the white amercian kids who did great on those tests. My scores are high, but they are not meaningful.

When I was a young kid my eldest sister (who was 17 years older than me) was an educational psychologist and used to give me loads of intelligence tests - so I got pretty good at doing those kinds of tests. I actually think they are pretty silly, mostly because I generally come out very well in them...

It somewhat indicates better pattern recognition so I might give them advantage on predicting things in general. Not that it will make them prophets or oracles. But Prediction from higher IQ person is more likely to be correct. Not that world cannot be illogical and go against those predictions.

Pattern matching is completely irrelevant when dealing with something that doesn’t follow patterns, such as stock prices

How would you measure these?

- making associations

- generating original ideas

- more perceptive

...

"spatial awareness" I can see though

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