Comment by jhuckestein | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhuckestein | Hacker News Reader

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My dad made me take one when I was a kid and I did really well, but even then I thought it was stupid. The first issue is addressed in this blog post. The questions just aren't good enough. This is nobody's fault really, because it is very difficult to come up with a set of hard questions that measure your intellect and don't require lots of domain specific knowledge. It's either within a certain domain. If everyone taking the test was a Mathematician for example, the questions could be more clearly defined.

The second issue is that intelligence is multi-dimensional yet people try to measure it on a one dimensional scale. What's worse, the dimensions of intellect are somewhat elusive as well, so you can't just say something like IQ is the sum of values on each axis. Personally, I think that people that are high achievers in any field (business, arts, athletics, leadership, politics, science) are intelligent in some way. But when you look at all those people, there's no common denominator, no discernable pattern for intelligence.

Does it make more sense to say that intelligence is 'multi-dimensional' or to say that it's 'adimensional'? After all, IQ is a metric, not a direct measurement, as intelligence isn't itself directly observable. If we're defining 'intelligence' as being a quality of the human mind that's conducive to success at achieving one's goals, then it becomes something of a tautology to simply ascribe that quality to people who have observably achieved their goals.

If the IQ metric is intended to correlate success on certain types of tests with success in other contexts, then it may be reliable in certain regards - e.g. people with higher IQs do tend to hive higher incomes, as 3pt14159 pointed out below - but the actual nature of that common causality is still something that may not itself be understood sufficiently to describe it in terms of dimensionality.

I've always thought of intelligence as the ability to learn, which you could say is the maximum speed you can gain knowledge and understanding. A person may be able to learn in some areas very well, but not so well in others. Also, someone who has devoted much time to gaining knowledge and understanding may be much less intelligent as someone who could learn quickly but never puts their mind to it.

An analogy for this view of intelligence and knowledge is like a car's acceleration and speed. Some cars may be able to go very fast but they may take a while to accelerate.

As others have mentioned in this thread, what obviously matters more is how you apply intelligence, knowledge and understanding.

Studies show high correlation between iq and a host of personal outcomes (divorce, income, etc).

Many iq tests actually measure multiple types of intelligences then combine them.

I picked your first example and googled it. The first result is a study demonstrating a positive correlation between divorce likelihood and IQ for people born in the 1940s in the Netherlands, a negative correlation between divorce likelihood and IQ for people born in the 1950s in the Netherlands, and a positive correlation again for people born in the USA in the 60s. The authors conclude that social factors (the difficulty of divorce and the negative social consequences) are important for this correlation.

It doesn't change that there's a correlation, but anybody using divorce rates as an argument for the effectiveness of IQ tests would have to be quite subtle.

(Link: http://www.eui.eu/Personal/Dronkers/English/echtscheidingint...)

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