Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

"Perhaps give an actual, real IQ test to use a site. There are several 10- or 20-question tests that have a .85 or higher correlation to full-length tests, and that is probably good enough for internet work."

Suggesting a short-form IQ test as a way to cure the problem of site degradation suggests the author hasn't read many sites populated by people who have scored high on IQ tests. They can be appalling too. Rationality and IQ are orthogonal

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/reviews.asp?isbn=97803001...

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/papers/aij-cnt.pdf

and there are plenty of people with high IQ scores who don't know how to behave themselves in online discussion. For some really pathetic examples of IQ tests identifying high-scoring ne'er-do-wells, see

http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/

and especially

http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/history.html

for what really happens when high-IQ people get together. (Sometimes those unusual IQ tests are not validated, but then again validation is just another problem with IQ tests. )

To light a candle rather than curse the darkness, I would suggest that the way to keep an online forum on-task, civil, and useful is simply (difficultly) to moderate it well. As I recall, Reddit's "no censorship" policy has been manifested with very minimal moderation. Deal with the user's overt behavior on the site, and don't worry about the user's IQ score. Smart is as smart does.

Wow, fascinating links.

I've never understood people older than, say, 15 who still insist on things like IQ tests. I've never noticed a correlation between IQ and observable intelligence: in many cases, quite the opposite. Many bright people don't apply their intelligence and learn to use it, and then their insistence on their mind belies their ignorance, much to the irritation of everybody else. There's more to intelligence than testing.

Raw natural ability can be pretty crippling to development in most fields. But people with raw natural ability who also develop discipline, humility, a willingness to fail/endure/persevere come out to some of the most amazing people of all time.

Yep! Last week on my blog I wrote something that went like this: "Technique without personality is craft. Personality without technique is shit. Together you get art." And it's the same for intelligence: you can be disciplined without being that bright and still bring your focus towards doing something. You can be bright and unfocused and fascinate people without ever getting big things done. It's when you bring the two together that you get incredible things.

Mensa forums are actually notoriously trollish, so your point is good.

I was about to mention them but you beat me to it. I was subscribed to the GenXMs Yahoo group for a while and always found myself thinking, "A lot of these people are total idiots". The group seemed to be dominated by right wing trolls. I unsubscribed in disgust and rarely attend any Mensa events. I thought the high IQ requirement thing would keep the riff raff out, but I learned by experience that stupidity knows no bounds.

In any case, scoring high on an IQ test really only means that you can score high on a test designed for you. Ever read Isaac Asimov's essay 'What is Intelligence, Anyway'?

http://talentdevelop.com/articles/WIIA.html

That's one of my favorite Asimov pieces - of all his literal thousands of articles, that's one of the creams of the crop.

What are Mensa forums? Are there any links? Not surprising that it's right-wing based: any hierarchical system will be pervaded by the sorts of people who think they deserve something great because of their natural talents, and while I'm of a similar mindset in some ways, a lot of people like that are boring and fanatic about it. (Fun times joining an Objectivist forum as a kid - goes to show that any good idea portrayed simply will attract a lot of misinterpreters.)

But that piece is completely wrong. Asimov claims that the talented craftsmen that he's known throughout his life would have scored poorly on IQ tests. His evidence is entirely anecdotal.

In fact, when people have studied this, they've found strong correlations between IQ and all sorts of job performance: Hunter, J. E. and Hunter, R. F. (1984). Validity and utility of alternative predictors of job performance. Psychological Bulletin, 96, 72–98.

Please don't confuse armchair reasoning about IQ with actual science about IQ.

This isn't a craftsman. This is a mechanic. You don't need a high IQ to do manual labor. At the same time, it requires a great deal of efficiency at a single task, both physically and mentally.

Obviously, IQ isn't going to be wholly useless. Somebody who's bright at something won't be entirely dull everywhere else, so yeah, IQ is going to give some measure of mental capacity. Asimov's argument is that IQ isn't everything, and that it's not a good way to justify "intelligence" per se, and with that I wholly agree.

But your agreement or non-agreement doesn't matter, since it's based on armchair reasoning. There is real research on this subject, and numbers trump whatever you'd like to be true.

Did you just willingly ignore what I said? I just said that yes, there's no surprise that IQ and overall intelligence correlate. It's like how if an auto mechanic made an intelligence test, Asimov would do better than a retarded person. IQ isn't wholly random. At the same time, it still is not an overall measure of intelligence.

Your fun little snide numbers comment is great and all, but numbers mean nothing on their own. Interpretation is also important, and interpretation is almost always subjective. It's why there are so many tests that say the exact opposite thing. So unless you cite specific examples of that paper you cited, don't just throw it up and assume that's the end of your case. That's snotty, arrogant, and allows for no counterresponse because the rest of us don't all read the exact same journals as you.

Yes, I willingly ignored your armchair reasoning. You are saying crazy things directly contradicted by the science and citing no sources. What do you expect me to do?

Never mind. It's not worth debating if you're going to ignore what the other guy is saying.

"Rationality and IQ are orthogonal"

I'm pretty sure Hans Reiser and the Ted Kazcynski would have aced any such tests.

At the same time there are plenty of people that are not of a high 'IQ' that have plenty to contribute.

So, what you should not measure is some consumer index of intelligence but objective contribution. Tough problem!

I'm pretty sure Hans Reiser and the Ted Kazcynski would have aced any such tests.

Incidentally, yesterday I managed to stumble upon another such example:

"Nathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. and Richard A. Loeb were two wealthy University of Chicago students who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924, and were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Leopold, age 19 at the time of the murder, and Loeb, 18, believed themselves to be Nietzschean supermen who could commit a "perfect crime".

The friends were exceptionally intelligent. Nathan Leopold was an intellectual prodigy who spoke his first words at the age of four months, and tested with an I.Q. of 210.

Leopold had already completed college, graduating Phi beta Kappa and was attending law school at the University of Chicago. He claimed to have studied 15 languages but in reality spoke four. He was an expert ornithologist, while Loeb, with an I.Q. in the 160s, was the youngest graduate in the history of the University of Michigan."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_and_Loeb

Not only that, but where there is an IQ test with questions, there's a Google with answers.

The first hacking of the Stanford-Binet L-M IQ test (the one I took as a kid) documented in published reports was by Robert Sternberg, who discovered in childhood in the 1960s that the answers could be looked up in a library. Sternberg has gone on to become quite a well informed critic of IQ tests, although he still attempts to develop easy to administer mental tests to measure intelligence according to his triarchic theory of intelligence. A very notorious example of cheating on that same brand of IQ test came much later when a little boy's mother looked up the answers for the Stanford-Binet L-M before having her son tested at a supposed specialty center on highly gifted children.

http://positivedisintegration.com/justinfu.pdf

Somehow the psychologist who administered the test was unable to tell that the boy was simply providing answers he had previously learned from the test manual. That (and her articles on IQ testing) has shot her credibility with me.

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