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Comment by jkimmel | Hacker News Reader

IQ tests have long been criticized by a variety of groups. At the end of the day, it merely measures your ability to perform well on tests that are similar to an IQ test. Traditionally, this set was populated with academic tests, so the IQ could be used to predict your performance in schools (it was actually designed to predict the performance of French schoolchildren.)

However, as the school based subjects have broadened out from traditional liberal arts conceptualizations to include more serious discussion of alternative conceptualizations (CompSci being one example), the IQ test may be decreasing in efficacy of prediction even with regards to academic tests. I have no evidence for this, just an opinion. The issue you ran into seems to be a result of these differing conceptualization paradigms.

At the end of the day, it's an assessment of performance in a very limited subfield of life. I try not to take it too seriously.

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That's not really true. IQ doesn't predict well on the high end, but it's useful for predicting the outcomes of middle intellect people. And it works better for groups than for individuals.

For instance, IQ scores are bad at predicting wealth but are the best predictor of adult poverty we have.

And the US military uses them extensively. They generally don't allow anyone in with an IQ score below 90.

Yes, every time the subject comes up, this whole crowd of relatively intelligent people go into a moral dance about how stupid IQ tests are.

They were never meant to predict genius. The point is to organize people efficiently when you're slotting them for guard duty or heavy equipment operation or officer candidate school. Someone who points out BS about non-Kosher pigs and obscure integer sequences is being clever for the sake of it. IE, "Look how smart I am."

And, as you say, the military considers about 100 million Americans dangerously too stupid for the army. They didn't do this out of arrogance.

This is a most underrated point - IQ is more important in a demographic sense than in mensa-style braggatry.

This is constantly overlooked in debates over IQ, SAT, etc.

In most cases where these tests are used, it is far more mportant to separate the above median from below median, or +2 STDDEV from median, etc, and not to pick winners in the Krelboyne Super Bowl.

Even assuming there is a total ordering of intelligence, how would a single 300-question test rank 300 million people? Why fill half the test with questions that 99% of takers will get wrong, just to differentiate among the top 1% of scorers?

Some online tests change the difficulty of the questions depending on currently estimated intelligence. Valid point for paper tests though.

Funny, the police in Police State USA prefer low IQ's ' on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training'

Or perhaps that being smart doesn't make you an enthusiastic state thug?

http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/sto...

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