Intelligence Question (IQ)

meowzician said:

@Fruiteloop

The objections to IQ test were heating up way back in the 70s when I was in high school. Sadly, the argument has not yet been resolved. The truth is, every standard IQ test out there completely eliminates the dimension of understanding stories. This strikes me as incredibly odd--the whole original idea of an IQ test was to predict success in college, and every liberal arts college includes literature as part of its core of classes. There is something rotten in Denmark, and I put my money on two things:

1. Laziness. You can't measure a person's analysis and appreciation of fiction and poetry with a bubble sheet test, or at least you can't measure it very effectively. This is because unlike a multiplication problem, story analysis can have more than one right answer.

2. Bias. When IQ testing was first conceived and designed, it was done so by men. Very few women worked. As we all realize, while there are certainly male feelers and female thinkers, F skews towards women and T skews towards men. Current reading theory tells us there are two kinds of readers:
A. An efferent reader focuses on extracting information, analyzing themes, structure, and meaning.
B. An aesthetic reader immerses themselves in the experience of the story, emotionally and imaginatively living through it.
Do you know which type gives the best analysis of a story? The aesthetic reader, NOT the efferent reader. Now, I don't actually have the research to back this so take it with a grain of salt. But my spidey sense is certainly connecting aesthetic reading to the feeling function, if not a full on NF. If I'm right about that, it means that IQ tests are biased against feeling women and feeling men, because the majority of men designing the tests simply didn't think this skill was important.

There ARE tests out there that try to address in different ways the big, gaping holes in IQ tests, but they don't get grouped together with standard IQ tests. You might want to look into:

• The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) – Verbal Battery
• The Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) – Comprehension Focus
• The MSCEIT (Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test)

You probably noticed that there was no Gardner Test (Gardner is the guy who posited multiple intelligences). This is because he refused to create a standardized test for his framework. He argued that putting a "Linguistic-Literary Intelligence" or "Interpersonal Intelligence" into a standardized test would ruin the concept by turning it back into a cold, clinical data set.

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It is an interesting perspective.

Language is hard to evaluate in a quantitative way because it has too much qualitative nature to it. IQ is supposed to be produciable in numbers. of the relative comparison people have with other people. But that mean you need to understand language enough to judge it.

Most academics cannot read every essay every a kid makes for quality and so it cannot be mass produced on tests to keep it simple.

So what they did was make the tests more about what they could measure in numbers. Spatial relations, short term memory, speed.

When people think of intelligence they think of book learning nerds or something but then it is more about some kind of goal achievement. Like if you had tools and could make anything you wish what would you make and what would you use it for.

But is a more abstract sense Intelligence if it is about quantities then it makes sense that you would need to have in consideration everything you need to do as those who have a plan in the head first and not just trial and error can get things done faster.

And yet I could make some technology things but not draw a comic book because my vision is low resolution, others can draw better than me. This require knowing about vision systems that tests do not make explicitly clear. I'd even have to make up a story I am not good at doing that. Others are. Meaning tests don't know about language even more because comic books exist requiring story intelligence.

In that case differences in what people can do is not or cannot be standardized accept on only a very small scale.

This is why tying your shoes is on baby IQ tests but not adult IQ tests.

No test can measure everything and if it did it be too large and makes no sense if we already know half of people are in the middle. To accurately measure IQ instead of just looking at what kids can do has issues because teaches are not trusted to make objective evaluations. The kids who draw good already go to art class and the kids who do sports already are in sports so why have IQ tests? The reason is to some degree to have gifted classes but then the narrowness of the tests means you cannot put kids in the right kind of gifted class. Many gifted kids need special classes not just one class and its not economical to make 10 different kinds of gifted classes so they all go in there same class when tested on IQ.

I still think intelligence is quantifiable it just is not measurable without some huge effort that is not going to happen.

Brain scanners might be possible but you cannot scan every kid. IQ tests were made for economics of scale.

In language we could maybe make it cheaper to judge language by using computers:

IQ is not a test but tests for IQ exist (they are not that good at determining the real value outside a subskill and range)

Like what does it mean to be top 10 percent (120) or top 1% (135) not much, it only means greater than or less than the mean percentage (100 < 135)

Does IQ then tell you what a person can do? not so much, it's not like money, with money we know what a person at 1% wealth has in dollars.

With IQ we do not know what quantity of intelligence is because its relative.
100 IQ is the middle by default but does not mean you have 100 neurons or anything like that.
It does not even say how much brain volume you have (average is 1300 cc)

the average number of numbers a person can remember in short term memory is 7

that is well defined

but other things likely have no well defined marker we can tell people on the street about.

if I tell people I got 130 IQ on figure weights subtest as an adult no one understands what that means, I don't know what that means.

I remember I had to keep in mind what was going on
(these shapes represent an amount compared to other shapes)
But this tells me nothing about what it means to do what I did

So I cannot know how smart I am in absolute terms, age 12 - I got 125 but what can a kid do if they are 125? I don't know what the numbers mean. At best I can make lists of what smart people can do and rank them but will it be accurate, perhaps not. even asking google is no help.

All google tells me is that a bell curve exists, that is meaningless unless we know what a person can do point by point or so.

And that require a whole lot of sophistication on the part of people constructing IQ tests - they may have it but not share it?

So the basic question is, if I know your IQ can I determine what you can do?

No answer seems to exist I am aware of

aeon said:

I’m not sure why you are seeking to attach this to IQ. An IQ score is an abstracted measure of fluid and crystallized intelligence.

That score says nothing about agency, ability, or action potential.

In that way, yes, a score is meaningless beyond its defined context.

Cheers,
Ian

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I had too look into it because I was not certain what its all about.

(I study things to death till I get at what they are)

Before I had the notion that IQ was relevant I had the idea that intelligence exists in the brain.

Since IQ is just a relative thing I just had to understand if that meant anything when it comes to actual intelliegence.

Actual intelligence has all those things you say but people do not define it truely or write much about it that I can find to study on.

I know its not much help to look at it beyond what its for but its might come up later if people ask me what I am doing.

Today I looked at the hippocampus and how memories work by chemical neuronal loops. That has more relevance to me now than IQ

I have always wanted to create inventions.

I got discouraged often as a kid because I failed allot.

Either because I had no help or had not clue what to do.

Knowing how the brain does what it does helps me get at why cognition does what it does but only somewhat.

Really it took me a long to to figure out I just need to buy the right books on the subjects I have problems with.

Thinking too much is a hobby of mine.

Costs nothing but time which I had after graduation.

I wanted to know what thinking was.

Since I read those books at age 12

Only I needed to put more effort into knowing what to do next. kinda flopped for two decades. yet still on track.

meowzician said:

@Fruiteloop

Did you try that Writing IQ estimator? Any thoughts?

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Yes

Several times it told me I was about 144 (not everything but some)

But this is based on college level materials so I am not sure because I am 20 years older than a college student writing an SAT essay.

By that I mean I have had a long time to practice so my score may be inflated? I was not as good at writing then as I am now.

People can make anything the want on the internet as long as it is not objectionable is a radical sense.

If the website did not rate his speech as high in IQ then the reason would be that it is not measuring social intelligence which would need a whole nother kind of rating system. People say things all the time that has nothing to do with ideas or concepts that we see in academics because people do not think that way normally but then again it would be nice to get a rating system that understands emotions.

Social intelligence is based on judgment calls. So the rating system has no idea what is happening in the context of what his speech was about. It has no understanding of the time or place or the reactions he was trying to elicit from the people he was talking to.

All it can do is know that the structure of the words is complex or simple. That is not a bad rating system because it's not meant to judge human social intelligence. Not everyone is famous or has influence so not all simple words structures will impact society the same anyway.

In one of my essays I wrote about an Anime character love story and was rated at 105 - love is a profound thing that has depth and meaning but is not structurally complex unless you know who the characters are and why they do what they do. So I was surprised but not really.