To map the raw score out of 60 to a population (normalize) you would need to control for biases like free time. For example, with the cooperation of institutions, it could officially replace an hour of school or work. You can look up such normalization tables for this test.
There's no time limit on the test either, so people could take arbitrarily long.
But it seems from what's written at the start that what they're looking for is correlations between the different types of questions, rather than scores across people
No, not in any way. Ability to be present for a test does not have any bearing whatsoever on cognitive ability, nor does any test on the planet account for whether or not the taker is present.
I think the suggestion is that people who have less free time might be in more of a rush to complete the test, and that surely affects test results without indicating cognitive ability.
I'd bet they don't consider incomplete tests, and most people I think would just peace out in ten or less questions vs continuing on either uninterested or rushed for time
Why would they rush when they have a specified time limit to complete it that everyone else suffers from? Does having less free time make you stupid? Is Jeff Bezos a brain-dented man as a result of being busy?
I’m going to guess this is an economically comfortable person with lots of free time imagining that people less well off have none. To an approximation, that trend is surely true - poor people have less free time - but almost everyone can find time to do things they want to do. Would it skew results? Hard to say.
Nope, I’m not thinking about their test in any way. I’m explaining that it’s explicitly unrelated to your cognitive ability. Getting a more convenient job does not boost your brain.
I’m going to guess you’re obsessed with the plight of those you perceive to be “under” you. I mean, they’re poor - there’s NO WAY they’re doing well on the test right!?
Such an obnoxious point of view. Of COURSE your job has no causative effect on your natural cognitive ability. What a ridiculous way to try and look down on the poor.
It doesn't. The fact that the IQ test takes a lot of time means that generally only people who want validation of their high IQ will be motivated enough to take the test.
"Test your fitness with this 1 hour workout! ... Hmm our totally unbiased test shows that everyone is really fit."
See? Unbiased sampling is really hard but an hour long test means you're not even trying. (Which tbf they might not be.)
> And an hour is a pretty reasonable ask of most people.
lol no. Most people are not going to spend an hour doing an IQ test. 5 minutes? Sure. Look at how many people here are commenting about it - and HN has a very high concentration of people that love IQ tests.
> That’s true of every test, right?
You can reduce this bias by either making the test a lot shorter (5 minutes) or paying or forcing people to take it (e.g. tests in school don't suffer from this bias).
I don't think you're ever going to get anything that isn't totally useless out of a 5 minute IQ test, and I have no idea why you'd think HN has a high concentration of people that like IQ tests? I mean, maybe conceptually?
Anyways, asking for an hour of someone's time is fine. I really don't believe that dumb people would, for some reason, be particularly short on time. Maybe you're right that we won't get a fantastic sample of people working 4 jobs at once with 8 children at home.
> I don't think you're ever going to get anything that isn't totally useless out of a 5 minute IQ test
Depends what you're trying to learn, but yeah it would be difficult. That's not really relevant to whether hour-long tests are biased due to their length though.
> I have no idea why you'd think HN has a high concentration of people that like IQ tests?
Because it's full of programmers and geeks who value intelligence and generally think of themselves as more intelligent than the average person. This is really obvious IMO.
> I really don't believe that dumb people would, for some reason, be particularly short on time.
I never said they would. I said that they would be unlikely to invest that free time in an hour long IQ test.
Its an modern open-source and collaborative resource of IQ style questions for research studies. IQ has a lot of flaws, not the least of which is its usage outside of academic research, as a measure of job aptitude and hiring potential (spoiling its utility as a metric since the questions can be trained... setting aside its dubious usefulness as a hiring tool anyway).
It seems like ICAR is spending a-lot of effort to remain scientific, and i feel like a website like this goes against that by spoiling the test utility for future potential participants.
>i feel like a website like this goes against that
what do you mean "a website like this", HN? or the destination of the link at the top of this discussion?
The link for this discussion goes to the test on the same site that you link to.
Are you saying people need to make their way to that test from the front page of the site following particular breadcrumbs? that people from HN shouldn't go there till they're ready to participate in a scientific manner? i just don't understand your point...
These tests serve no purpose outside of academic studdies. Distributing them for people to self-score sully their scientific value, and perpetuate their use for unsound usecases.
so you're saying you have an agenda and you're pushing it.
Psychologists are scientists and the replicability of IQ testing is extremely high and repeatedly confirmed. And despite how much psychosocially challenged nerds here like to complain about psychology, they are in good company: psychology itself is not normie opressors, psychologists are also psychosocially challenged nerds.
before you say anything else, the statistical methods we use today across medical testing were first applied and developed to psychometric testing, so if you are going to attack that, you are attacking all of medical science.
No, I think he's closer to the science than this comment is. IQ has validity for its intended purpose of as a diagnostic tool for cognitive deficits. It is in fact not a valid tool for casually ranking ability based on individual tests, both because of test-retest consistency and because ordinality of IQ breaks down as scores get higher.
I think you could have written a reasonably strong argument that the parent commenter overstated their case, but you didn't do that: you just overstated the opposite pole of the argument and then declared the discussion off limits due to politics.
>ordinality of IQ breaks down as scores get higher
ordinality of any sample from a Gaussian process breaks down as the thin part of the population density is approached, but that will only affect those at least three sigmas above or below, so it's an edge case that doesn't matter for the fat part of the curve.
you are cherry picking pieces of arguments that might threaten your "nobody is better than anybody else" anti-merit ideology. "From those who have the ability to those who have the need" is a merit-based sickle, comrade, and IQ is its hammer, is my argument.
>I think you could have written a reasonably strong argument that the parent commenter overstated their case, but you didn't do that: you just overstated the opposite pole of the argument and then declared the discussion off limits due to politics
I don't think you really think any of that. You are disingenuous if you claim that your (collective (in more than one sense of the word)) side wants to actually discuss the science of IQ; you simply want it removed from the discussion because it does not support your politics. If the economy rewards high IQs, and people have social mobility, you will see an economic sorting from top to bottom, and you don't like that. If IQ has genetic factors (which it seems to) that's a bigger disaster because once the economic sorting takes place, social mobility goes away (the latter half of the 20th century) A true scientific socialist would not try to imagine/censor these problems away in a central committee, but would admit them and try to figure out better ways.
I talked about the science of IQ in my comment something that you did not actually engage with. the correct wording would have been for you to say "g does not exist" and provide some basis for that belief
One way I know that I didn't say "nobody is better than anybody else" is that isn't something I actually believe. I think you have me confused with someone else.
(you edited your comment and added a paragraph to it after I wrote this)
Im honestly not sure what you're trying to get across here. IQ is a dated but good scientific tool to measure cognitive differences across large samples of humans.
I never said they're not scientific. They're invaluable statistical tools. I'm saying their use outside of academia for hiring (among other things) is a fundamental missuse of both the tests and statistics.
Online versions of ICAR tests like these serve little purpose for anyone, and at worst encourage people to abuse ICAR in a similar way.
>IQ has a lot of flaws, not the least of which is its usage outside of academic research, as a measure of job aptitude and hiring potential
Isn't IQ one of the best predictors of job training success, across both civilian and military, blue collar and white collar?
It's also one of, if not the single most generalizable predictors that we know of right now, even more so than nationality, race, gender, SES (socioeconomic status), parental SES, you name it. It predicts just about everything - from hard biological measures like reaction time and brain mass to lifetime odds of being in a car accident (distinct from causing a car accident - higher IQ people are statistically less likely to be hit by another driver), divorce rates, lifetime income, longevity, the list goes on and on. IQ is not the strongest predictor for every one of these, but every stronger predictor for any one of those fails to predict as many things as IQ does. Parental SES, controlling for IQ, provides no predictive power for your reaction time, for instance, despite predicting educational attainment better than IQ does.
The critique that IQ is an imperfect proxy for g is totally valid.
The self-assuaging fantasy that g itself doesn't exist is a classic example of a psychological defensive mechanism of rejection, one rooted in a need to defend a worldview that holds all people as inherently equal, when we're measurably, biologically not.
> The self-assuaging fantasy that g itself doesn't exist is a classic example of a psychological defensive mechanism of rejection, one rooted in a need to defend a worldview that holds all people as inherently equal, when we're measurably, biologically not.
I think this statement conflates two different senses of the word “equality”. Equality of abilities is different from moral equality. It is perfectly coherent to accept that people aren’t equal in terms of their abilities but are still morally equal. For example, just because Person A is smarter than Person B it does not follow that the interests of Person A matter more than those of Person B, or that the suffering of Person A matters more than the like suffering of Person B, etc. So the view that g is real and people have different IQ scores is consistent with the idea that all people are inherently equal. Because in most contexts the concept of inherent equality is not a biological or psychological concept but a moral concept.
I don't disagree with moral equality one bit - the golden rule should absolutely apply to everyone and we should all strive to look at each other with compassion, tolerance, empathy, understanding, grace, humility, and goodwill - but there is a loud, vocal subset of people that truly believe in absolute biological equality - not just between people with different IQ's, but even between different biological sexes and all other categories of humans; "tabula rasa" proponents who argue that ALL differences in outcomes along the lines of categorical differences (e.g. sex, race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, culture) are exclusively and irrefutably explained strictly by discrimination and discrimination alone, which is a patently absurd assertion that should be refuted. Discrimination is real and should be confronted vocally, but the idea that it's the only factor explaining differences in outcomes between groups is a harmful myth.
The fact of the matter, relating back to the original discussion, is that sex/race/gender/ethnicity/nationality/religion/culture-blind IQ testing is not only a strong predictor of job performance, it is perhaps one of the best tools we have for eliminating discrimination based on sex/race/gender/ethnicity/nationality/religion/culture in hiring, as it explicitly controls for differences along these lines by exclusively targeting an assessment of g in abstract ways that are explicitly stripped of cultural, religious, racial, and gendered biases.
Pseudonymized hiring that relied exclusively on IQ tests, with zero indications of race/sex/gender (e.g. legal name), stripped of proxies for SES and/or parental SES (e.g. which university was attended, if any) would be significantly less biased than current hiring practices. Throw in job-specific pseudonymized skill evaluations (so, no voice calls, no video calls, just direct assessments to candidates) and you've got a system to dramatically reduce hiring discrimination along protected classes.
... or you can just discard all the hokum and only use job-specific pseudonymized skill evaluations --- a concept more widely known as "work samples" --- and be using the gold-standard tool for candidate selection, supported by research going all the way back to Deming.
IQ is meant for population statistics. For that purpose it's a great scientific tool.
> socioeconomic status
No. A real IQ test tries to cancel out educational level from the score by comparing people in buckets of age, education and a few other importance factors.
A systematic deviation of education quality in the same "level" is not possible to cancel out, making IQ indirectly measure socioeconomic status. Hence why the us governments banned IQ on the basis or racism for government hiring.
You cannot measure two prople with 1/4th of a IQ test (logic puzzle is only one part of a full test) and make any useful statistical conclusions. A domain specific interview question or aptitude test a much clearer value to hiring prococess.
If IQ was one of the best predictors of job training success, it would be used everywhere. Instead, very few companies use it. There's a persistent myth that IQ isn't more widely used because of legal concerns, but that can't be right, because IQ and general cognitive tests are used by several of the largest companies (with the deepest pockets for discrimination suits) in North America --- and, further, the Griggs v. Duke jurisprudence that roots the myth doesn't have any force outside the US, where... IQ testing is not generally used in employment.
I don't know what the "self-assuaging fantasy" is supposed to mean, but you can read Cosma Shalizi to see how any set of tests structured like IQ tests are necessarily give rise to a "g" fact, even if you randomly generate them. I feel like I don't have to assuage myself too much that math works.
IQ is limited because it only looks at one facet and it generalizes a lot. Tests that look both into ability and aptitude, and especially those who split them by domain are much more relevant and applicable to real world scenarios.
IQ does actually measure quite widely, but only one of many parts (the visual pattern matching part) is widely know outside of academic use. But even then it should not be used for hiring or intelligence scoring people against one-another.
If you actually want to test people for hiring, using domain specific interview questions and tests is a-lot more reasonable and usefully correlated with real-world job performance.
57. I got a ton of shape rotation problems. Figured out a strategy for those:
Focus on the 3 pronged shape. It is unique in all 4 orientations. You can use this to filter out bad rotations. Then use adjacencies to filer out the rest.
"You achieved a total score of 50! This means that you are 70% higher than 13351 participants who have completed the test. The percentile score is calculated on-the-fly. This means that your percentile rank may change as more people complete the test."
Not sure this was worth 65 minutes of my time. Would have liked to see whether whatever this version of the ICAR60 is is pegged to a standardized (IQ) test score. I'm assuming the 13,000 people who have also taken this are not representative of the wider pop.
The self-selection bias is definitely something to consider. I’d guess people who feel relatively confident in their intelligence are more likely to take the test.
Bear in mind that while most questions are language-agnostic, some require the knowledge of the English alphabet and definitions of uncommon English words.
I do not understand the shape problems. How are they solved? Does then pattern progress left to right, top to bottom? Or is that part of the riddle?
For the dice questions, which rotation on the is being performed? I think that's part of the riddle, most rotations are impossible given the initial position.
Either am an idiot or the solution to the riddles is something taught in school, which is something I've never been taught.
> I’m now 43 and other day I was looking up test papers for the 11+ (school entrance exams for 11 year olds) and thinking - damn this is HARD!
Are you me? I've been helping my daughter study for the 11+, and some of the questions I really struggle with (I'm 44). However if you look up the answers and see how the answer is calculated/resolved, it does seem like it's a case of just learning the method.
This does make me think that to pass the 11+ you basically need to pay for private tuition. We'll see how well my daughter does in a few weeks time (when the 11+ test is conducted).
Likewise with a lot of these cognitive IQ tests, if you know the method or tricks you can basically pass no problem... but I'm not 100% sure it means you're "smarter" than everyone else.
IQ is age-adjusted. Without the adjustment, it drops quite a bit.
Some cognitive abilities diminish more slowly with age (so-called crystallized intelligence), but unfortunately, fluid intelligence drops noticeably much earlier in life than most people would care to realize.
You just need to lean into what you know instead of solving novel problems. Or be comfortable knowing that it'll take longer than it used to. Typically, you can still arrive at a solution if you could have before, but you'll need to put more work into it. Sometimes, a lot more work.
Do you think it’s really the fact that you were younger or just that you have a lot more responsibilities now?
I’m in my early 30s and I definitely feel less sharp than in my 20s, but I also feel like my priorities have changed and I have more responsibilities at work and at home, so I have much less ability to just be able to do very long periods of focused studying/thinking like I used to in my 20s
I asked my parents about this as they are both accomplished people and work in STEM/academia.
They both mentioned feeling less sharp when they hit their mid-to-late 30s, which corresponds to… when they had kids. I know correlation isn’t causation, but seeing all of my coworkers who have young children now all mention they’ve had a marked decrease in mental acuity for work due to sleep deprivation (and having to prioritize their kids), I’m going to guess this is it.
I also wonder if you just had a month to focus on refreshing what you learned in school how quickly it would all come back.
It cannot be understated how much kids interrupt the ability to focus on tasks. The ability to do nothing but focus on solving on a problem for a week straight felt like 100x the productivity of having to totally context switch at the end of the day to someone needing a juice or going into a screaming tantrum because the color of the cup is wrong and that being non-stop until the next work-day, which totally obliterates all the short-term working memory you had of the task at hand.
I think i would really enjoy a refresh course for university level maths and physics. But perhaps it would be better spent learning new maths and physics, which force a refresh on relevant prerequisite maths.
I think it’s mostly about your level of interest in taking the test. This can obviously be influenced by your priorities and other responsibilities. Incidentally, I think IQ tests and similar “cognitive tests” are all mostly just measuring the subject’s interest in the test.
Is this a test whose abilities would survive being retaken periodically? Because having a baseline to compare against would let you know if your cranium was headed south, or if particular circumstances were contributing to that.
(my 2¢: avoid sugar, fast food& other carbs, nitrite meats)
Not me. More than half of my 20s were mostly defined by working service industry jobs, hanging around with party kids, staying awake until the sun came up, and basically getting by doing the bare minimum for everything. It was probably the lowest point of my life cognitively. It wasn't really until sometime around my mid-30s that I started feeling pretty sharp and performing well on cognitive tests. I didn't grow up in an environment where there were any cultural expectations of achievement in anything. I had to find all of that on my own through a lot of trial and error. That being said, who knows where I would be today if a nice chunk of my 20s had been less dumb? I ruminate about it fairly often.
If you work with some piece of software everyday for 10+ years... I guarantee you the Jr programmers will have a look of terror as you bring them up to speed in a project. Speed is a function of practice, and not potential cognitive gifts.
One just becomes hyper-specialized with age if you aren't careful, and don't explore new technology or hobbies. One Phd physicist I knew often said he was only an expert in Spoons, and while that probably wasn't really true... it did allude to the irrational competitiveness of the insecure. =3
I'm in my 50's and I feel smarter than I did in my 20's. I'm less energetic certainly, but I can focus better now. And I feel like my knowledge and understanding of mathematics, politics, economics, sciences, history, people, etc, is much better.
I still do not understand why we are wasting scientific resources trying to stack rank humans on arbitrarily defined concepts like cognitive ability or intelligence.
After over a century of psychometric research in cognitive abilities and intelligence, what do we have to show for it? Whose life has actually improved for the better? Have the benefits from such research, if any, outweighed the amount of harm that has already been caused?
In clinical contexts, cognitive tests are used for diagnostic purposes. They are important to determine exactly what sort of ongoing care and support the person needs in order to thrive. In these sorts of contexts, it's not hard to imagine the utility in knowing someone's cognitive ability. It's also not arbitrary—a good cognitive test will give insight into the ability to perform everyday cognitive tasks.
> In clinical contexts, cognitive tests are used for diagnostic purposes.
I'm not certain I agree. If anything, cognitive tests can be used as a single point of datum, but to my knowledge, no condition can be diagnosed via a cognitive test alone. Of course, I could be mistaken. I wish administered the WAIS-IV on top of many other tests for an ADHD diagnosis.
> They are important to determine exactly what sort of ongoing care and support the person needs in order to thrive.
Interesting, upon my receiving my diagnosis, I was not provided any support nor would I declare I have thrived. Obviously, n = 1. I was merely given the social approval to take pharma-grade speed and thrown back to the wolves.
> It's also not arbitrary—a good cognitive test will give insight into the ability to perform everyday cognitive tasks.
That's the part I believe I am clearly missing. These tests provide insight into the ability to perform everyday cognitive tasks better than one's history of already performing various tasks? It's not as if someone with a perfect SAT score takes an IQ tests and then is met with the sudden reality that they are mentally disabled nor vice versa.
What do these tests tell us that we already do not know? If I want to find someone with high mathematical abilities, then I would administer a math exam. Reading? Reading exam. Chess? Chess tournament. And so on...
> I'm not certain I agree. If anything, cognitive tests can be used as a single point of datum, but to my knowledge, no condition can be diagnosed via a cognitive test alone.
I did not read the comment you're replying to as saying otherwise.
> Interesting, upon my receiving my diagnosis, I was not provided any support nor would I declare I have thrived. Obviously, n = 1. I was merely given the social approval to take pharma-grade speed and thrown back to the wolves.
United States? It's not quite like that everywhere.
Yes, United States. I should add that I wasn't diagnosed until I was 22.5 years old.
Growing up in the South East, USA, there were no such things as Autism, ADHD, etc.. Things have gotten better, I suppose, but I'm in my early 30s, so this wasn't exactly a long time ago either. You know how schools have 'gifted and talented' programs? I was in the 'cursed and talentless' program.
Honestly, imo clinically in aggregate the actually score itself provides very little information beyond what a 5 minute conversation would achieve, and the result could be better thought as bordering on 5-6 level categorical variable rather than a gradient due to their biases and inherent individual patient variance on performance and test taking context.
The sub-sections of things like the WAIS can be of some value for identifying specific abnormalities or deficiencies, but as you said, is probably of more value clinically to split them out into separate tests/activities rather than to group them all together into an aggregate score. It's a bit like judging athletic ability and skill by BMI and fat percentage rather than just playing an opponent in tennis to find out if they're a good tennis player.
On scientific front, it's very useful. Its use outside of academia is has however been very problematic.
There are studies that empirically measure drop change cognitive ability from lead poising, oxygen deprivation, sleep deprecation, post-burnout, environment distraction, noise pollution, temperature, aging, drug and alcohol use during puberty, smoking, school teaching style, etc. etc.
Notable is that these are either population metrics or compare each individual with themselves. This is what IQ and other similar tests were meant for. Comparing one person with another is nonsensical and a flawed use of these metrics.
This is where where IQ has fallen and become a rather bad metric. People are familiar with the problems scewing results. IQ test performance and education level is highly correlated, which is supposed to be compensated for in the final score. But poor education quality in certain regions make the statistics easily used to argue quite unsavory ideas.
"Notable is that these are either population metrics or compare each individual with themselves."
Yes, for the purposes of that research. Why would a comparison between two people be a flawed use case? Do you just mean the colloquial use and understanding of IQ is flawed?
Over a population, outside factors affecting the score is smoothed out to create a normal distribution. Over one individual, most factors remain the same.
Over two different people, so many factors affect the score that making the claim "one person is more intelligent than the other" is statistically unsound without a massive score difference. This is even ignoring that a full IQ test involves FAR more than the usual online logic puzzles people tend to know, yet still have these flaws.
so yes;
> colloquial use and understanding of IQ is flawed.
Let's say you had a caliper that added a random number between zero and one inch to every measurement. If you measured a trillion small peas and a trillion big peas, you would be able to conclude that one set was smaller than the other. If you compared two peas, it'd be a 50-50 guess driven by that random number.
IQ tests have a 95% confidence interval of about 10, so it's a bit more accurate than you're implying, but still a range of a good fraction of a standard deviation. (basically, the measurement is about 5 times sharper than the variation in the population, so it's for sure a blurry view but they do give you a meaningful idea of where an individual sits in that distribution)
My test only provided at a 90% CI. Not like it is a substantial difference, but I thought I’d throw that out there.
Then again, the same psychologist told me that the discrepancy between my scores was so large that a true FSIQ cannot be used. In a sense, he told me that based on that test, I didn't actually have an IQ that could be accurate measured based on that given test. Apparently, it’s not normal to have almost two SD between some scores...
Being a smart idiot isn't easy work, but someone has to do it.
I'd even suggest the point of these tests is more than simply comparing people. IQ tests, at least how they are commonly used, are used to determine the one's worth as a human-being. I am not saying I personally agree with those views, but merely that such views are reflected in many modern societies and how people treat one another.
You can create a proxy for IQ by simply asking a group of people to invent their own questions, summing them together, randomly sampling from those questions, and then rank ordering the outcome. High IQ people will score in the top percentile for any set of questions. That's the whole point.
Do you have a citation for this? It sounds pretty unlikely to me.
I'm pretty sure if I asked a group of people to invent their own questions I'd get a load of general knowledge questions about music, sports, and popular culture.
This is a talking point from an old university class lecture interpreting factor analytic data on personality and IQ [1].
In practice, intelligence tests don’t depend on the specific questions asked. If you let a group of people generate their own items, pool them together, sample randomly, and then rank scores, the same individuals would tend to rise to the top. The high IQ people would cluster toward the top with a correlation of 0.9. This is because people with higher general cognitive ability perform better across virtually any cognitive task, a phenomenon first documented by Spearman (1904) and repeatedly confirmed in psychometrics research (e.g., Jensen 1998; Deary 2012).
A lot of things are correlated. Let me know when causation is determined.
Also, your Vox link was pay-walled, but nevertheless, I am fairly well versed in some of the data. I have my own archive of research on this topic for what it is worth (not likely much).
Any hoot, the correlations, while positive, are nothing to write home about in my opinion. Sure, IQ might have more breadth of predictably, but it definitely lacks depth of predictably compared to more granular models depending on the domain.
For example, IQ is not a better predictor of chess performance than say a chess tournament.
The breadth of predictability is why it’s such an effective measure. Most tasks involve many different skills, so it’s helpful to have a single measure that’s correlated with a bunch of different competencies. That’s why we use what are essentially IQ tests in everything from assigning jobs in the military (ASVAB) to selecting lawyers (LSAT). There’s tremendous social value in a single test that can scaleably sort through millions of people even if it’s not the most predicative test for a specific problem domain or a specific individual.
> For example, IQ is not a better predictor of chess performance than say a chess tournament.
So we should determine who to give chess lessons to with chess tournaments? That seems pretty dumb.
There are many times where we don't want to select for current ability but for potential ability, and then a direct test like you suggest is a much worse predictor than IQ is.
> So we should determine who to give chess lessons to with chess tournaments? That seems pretty dumb.
By your logic, we could even declare grandmasters based on IQ scores alone without anyone needing to play. Clearly that misses the point of skill assessment.
History also doesn’t support the claim of potential ability all that well, in my opinion. Lewis Terman’s study tracked high-IQ children across several decades. Many of the children went on to lead ordinary lives and did not reach noteworthy achievements. However, two lower-IQ children that were excluded went on to become Nobel Prize winners. IQ alone does not seem to be a robust predictor of domain mastery.
Psychometrics has clear value. Cognitive ability predicts academic/job performance (Schmidt & Hunter 1998, Psych Bull), and standardized tests reliably forecast college outcomes (Kuncel, Hezlett & Ones 2004, Science). Conscientiousness adds further predictive power (Poropat 2009, Psych Bull). The science is robust. The issue is the discomfort it causes, not lack of benefit or predictive power.
No they didn't. There's ~basically nothing to this claim. IQ tests are openly used by several of the largest firms in the US. The companies that provide the tests and testing infrastructure brag about it with logo crawls just like every other company.
Why is this myth so pernicious? It comes up a lot here!
No, the Supreme Court ruled that you have to have a concrete business reason for implementing a test that is disproportionately likely to favour one ethnic group over another:
> The touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.
Isn't that the same thing? Basically a business that believes hiring is better using IQ is not able to do so since the supreme court ruled that is racist.
You're all trying to axiomatically derive a result that clearly conflicts with empirical evidence. IQ tests do get used in American hiring; not not that often, because they don't work well for that purpose.
You already posted this. It’s not proof. It’s a meta analysis that suggests that in general cognitive ability might have some role in differences in job performance (maybe up to 25%).
It doesn’t even touch the question of whether IQ tests are good measures of cognitive ability, nor does it only include IQ tests as measures of cognitive ability.
So you just affirmed "a business that believes hiring is better using IQ is not able to do so since the supreme court ruled that is racist" without realizing it. Not being consistent but it's okay. Great job lol
Does your IQ score bring you some sense of purpose or identity? Does someone disagreeing with you or asking question cut at the very core of your sense of being?
In this thread, you have been nothing but rude, condescending, and snarky to your fellow YC users. So, what gives?
I've never taken an IQ test. I just care about intellectual honesty and was responding to someone who called for IQ testing as a prerequisite to posting on this forum. What's the next pivot in the argument?
Duke Power Company was discriminating by IQ not race. It just happened to have been easier for white people to pass the IQ test at the time, but that's secondary. You're using the same logic used by Duke power Company's defense team.
> If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.
This heavily implies the opposite:
> If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes CAN be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is NOT prohibited.
The problem is you’ve got an indicator that appears to favour white people, and a lack of evidence that the indicator shows anything of relevance to the actual position or job content.
Hypothetically, let’s say you were a racist, a nice easy way to do racist things like “disproportionately hire white people” would be to find some metric which disproportionately favours white people, and then evaluate everyone against that.
If you can prove it’s important for the job, you can discriminate still. For example, a Chinese restaurant can require knowledge of Mandarin, a metric which very likely favours people of Chinese descent. They just have to be able to explain why (e.g.: internal communication is in Mandarin, most of our customers speak Mandarin, etc).
Actually it is, if you're talking about white collar knowledge economy jobs, like law jobs. Top tier law firms routinely give either actual IQ tests or IQ test-like assessments during interviews.
I don't know where you live, but it quite clearly is where I'm from.
Oooh, to be sure they don't call them IQ tests explicitly, but the psychometric capabilities and performance tests they've gotten me to do (mathematical, logical, verbal, reasoning etc) are pretty obviously IQ proxies.
Of course it is[1]. Every single method used to screen a candidate is essentially testing for general mental ability. Being admitted to an Ivy League school is basically an IQ test. Interviews are basically IQ tests. Employers want to hire smart people. The fact that his is even a debate is crazy.
Your definition of an IQ test seems to be so vague as to be meaningless.
Last time I passed a job interview, on several rounds of interview not one was about general intelligence, or general knowledge, or general anything. It was about my ability to solve the kind of problems they were solving and I had some experience solving. Last time I failed a job interview it was because of a bad culture fit.
I have not looked at the numbers, but I would suspect Ivy league admissions to be more correlated with wealth / geography than possibly anything else, but you probably square that with a belief that intelligence is hereditary as wealth is.
IQ tests measure the ability to solve quickly some abstract problems in an exam-like situation. There is certainly a use case for that, but thinking it captures the whole of "cognitive ability" is like thinking that duolingo captures the whole of litterary.
By the way, anytime one can't understand why $DEBATED_TOPIC is debatable should be an indication that one should switch to a slower though process.
>Your definition of an IQ test seems to be so vague as to be meaningless.
This is actually like one of the primary tricks of the IQ perverts. They'll take literally any test, run the results through a transformation function to get it into their bell curve, and start making claims about how IQ correlate with This-Or-That based on it.
If you dismiss IQ research, you might as well disregard all of psychology. The psychologists who developed intelligence tests were pioneers in using the statistical methods (e.g. factor analysis) that now underpin the entire field. IQ is defined more precisely than almost any other psychological construct. Discarding it leaves you with poorly defined concepts and no clear way to handle them. [1]
So: the people that developed intelligence tests were not psychologists; lies, damned lies and statistics; "pioneering" the idea of using math doesn't mean that people using math today are doing the same thing; whatever the definition of IQ might be is irrelevant because "IQ tests" are not rigorously defined; however precisely IQ is defined is also irrelevant because it's supposedly just a proxy for "g"; psychology is not psychometry and so discarding IQ does nothing to the field of psychology.
In practice, intelligence tests don’t depend on the specific questions asked. If you let a group of people generate their own questions, pool them together, sample randomly, and then rank scores, the same individuals would tend to rise to the top. This is because people with higher general cognitive ability perform better across virtually any cognitive task, a phenomenon first documented by Spearman (1904) and repeatedly confirmed in psychometrics research (e.g., Jensen 1998; Deary 2012).
Yes I'm aware of that, and I had this in mind when I wrote that "IQ tests measure the ability to solve quickly some abstract problems in an exam-like situation." Maybe that was not carefuly worded enough.
I am of the opinion that, although there is some generality in IQ tests, they measure only one specific aspect of cognitive ability defined by: abstract + quick.
My intuition is that cognitive abilities encompass much more than that. Anyone who have ever argued at length with that smart but obtuse engineer who can't tell the forest for the tree will know what I'm refering to. To me, a better test for "cognitive abilities" would also measure how someone is able of nuance, of humor, of seeing things from different perspectives, of introspection, etc, not just solving puzzles that can be described in a couple of sentences.
And I'm not talking about "emotional intelligence" here. To me, E-I is just the other side of that same flawed model that smells too much like modern day phrenology.
There are plenty of benefits to studying it, and plenty of downsides to not studying it. I recommend “The Neuroscience of Intelligence” by Richard Haier from Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience in Psychology for a comprehensive, accessible, and modern review.
I think have read this before. Wasn’t he trying to find neuroscientific evidence to support IQ via neuron transmission rates and whatnot? Or was it grey matter volume?
Regardless, I am still skeptical of a lot of neuroscience research, as well.
I feel that neuroscience often suffers from the same issues that psychology does —- where correlation apparently equates to causation.
So, without IQ it would be impossible for social programs to give better educational opportunities to exist? And on that same note, and this a genuine question, how much evidence supports that better educational opportunities truly manifests into the outcomes we socially desire?
I'd be leery of anyone that claims that the only reason they were able to become a doctor, lawyer, etc. was because of being in a gifted program or something similar.
As far as I am concerned, I firmly believe the truly talented will create their own environment within reason. Take Von Neumann, for example. He was god-like in abilities. I am certain someone of his caliber did not need better educational opportunities in order to be exceptional. The man was, by all accounts, born exceptional.
Also, I am not certain that giving better educational opportunities to the bright is better than giving better educational opportunities to the disadvantaged, but I will admit I am likely too ignorant on this topic to have an informed opinion.
> So, without IQ it would be impossible for social programs to give better educational opportunities to exist?
It wouldn't be impossible. The extra resources might not go as far, which makes the program more likely to look like a waste.
> how much evidence supports that better educational opportunities truly manifests into the outcomes we socially desire?
The rate of technological progress we can make as a species is largely dictated by the area under the +2 sigma -> infinity region of the IQ curve. Further adjusted by the amount of those people that we can find and motivate to participate in the economy.
As for evidence, the US poaches high IQ people from around the world. You can chalk that up to coincidence if you want.
> The rate of technological progress we can make as a species is largely dictated by the area under the +2 sigma -> infinity region of the IQ curve
That was precisely my point. If little Johnny or Sally need a special education program to properly challenge and educate them, then I hate to break the news to their families, but whatever "it" is, those children don't have "it."
I also find it interesting how "gifted" programs and the like are predominately a Western intervention. To my knowledge, countries like Japan and China do not have "gifted" programs. I am not saying there are not academic and social discrepancies between highly intelligent and the normies, but Western culture does tend to be less community driven than cultures of the two countries I previously mentioned.
> You can chalk that up to coincidence if you want.
I cannot comment about modern times, but I know a certain group of people that I am half descendant from were commonly denied entry into the US during the 1920s - 1950s. However, those same people allegedly had the highest IQ scores on average. At least, historically.
Children from low income families tend to do poorly. Being able to measure their IQ helps demonstrate when it's more environment than genetics which strengthens the argument for improving their environment.
Without this educational opportunities would primarily be given to the obviously/observably bright and advantaged children since their parents can afford it.
Wait, I thought IQ and income were highly correlated. I also thought IQ was highly heritable? In fact, I thought the heritability was sooooo high and environmental factor played a very minute role in the outcome of one's IQ?
(I am being sarcastic, of course.)
> Without this educational opportunities would primarily be given to the obviously/observably bright and advantaged children since their parents can afford it.
Hell, for any highly intelligent child, I say drop their asses off the public library. The truly smart ones will find their way, and the environmentally gifted will not. We do not need special programs for these kids. Special programs equate to more busy, bullshit work. A high IQ earns one more worksheets and homework. Education, at least in the USA, is rotten to the core. I am not convinced more of it is better. Do not mistake me though, I do not believe more knowledge and wisdom are worthless. I am just saying the education system rarely provides either.
I feel like people miss the echelons of IQ. IQ might have predictability, but the more narrow one focuses, the worse it gets. For example, let's taking programming. Something near and dear to my heart and to many others on this site. If one is capable of learning how to program, then their IQ is clearly sufficient enough to be a programmer. Past that point, I would not be willing to bet that a higher IQ would necessarily translate into a better programmer. It's like being in tall and playing basketball. Being 6'5 is better than being 5'5 in the NBA. However, being 6'7 vs. 6'5 much less advantageous.
If anything, I think we should start highly selecting for more altruistic and empathic children. Intelligence is not exactly uncommon. An IQ of 130 puts one in the 98th percentile. With a world population of 8.142 billion people, that means there are roughly 162.84 million people at or above the 98th percentile. I am not certain there are 162.84 million people out in the world making a big difference.
If you view academics through this kind of lens most of them should be disband. Like practically everything outside of STEM. Actually 90% of math and science too.
A great part of science breakthroughs is mostly made by people who just want to know more, for the sake of knowing more.
Because as a race, we’re curious. It’s a way to improve ourselves. Facing a challenge like this leads to learning, innovating new tools and techniques, greater understanding of how we are, how we work on the inside.
Long term programs such as Duke’s TIP have provided significant evidence that kids who score highly on the things they measure are correlated with high levels of professional achievement, such as patents. It makes sense to identify talented individuals and provide them with the resources they need to reach their potential
Why wouldn't those children have such an outcome? Modern life is a series of gatekept outcomes. Perform well in early education => access to better universities, better universities => access to better experiences/careers, better experiences/careers => access to higher income, better income => ..., etc..
Who is more likely to have more time and the means to develop patents? The high income/high intelligence person who pays for others to do various chores, labors, and services for them so that they may focus on their work, or the people deemed unworthy by society who spend their time performing the chores, labors, and services for the high income/high intelligence person?
I believe intelligence alone is worthless, if not dangerous, without altruism and empathy. As I type this very message, somewhere in the world, there are people being torn to shreds, families destroyed, etc. by various contraptions designed by some of the most intelligent people on the planet. While unintelligent people may have less potential to change the world in a positive manner, it is apparent that those same individuals have less potential to change the world in a negative manner, as well.
Whatever potential these children have, I believe it's imperative that we are damn certain those children have the moral and ethical composition deserving of their potential, at least, that is my starry-eyed opinion.
>resources trying to stack rank humans on arbitrarily defined concepts like cognitive ability or intelligence.
"arbitrarily defined concepts like cognitive ability or intelligence" correlate very well with objective metrics like educational attainment and income.
“Because it stratifies people, which has the effect of saying some people are better than others in some way”.
I’m not being sarcastic towards you, I’m being sarcastic towards people who think this is truly harmful. I apologize - I should’ve made that more clear.
Apologizes gladly accepted.
But maybe my question was not clearly phrased - it was not "Why are tests bad". You contrasted "doing no harm" with "doing good" and I wanted to ask what good have IQ tests done. Because to me the harm is kind of obvious (overinflating the importance of one criteria and ideological agenda) but the good not so much (obviously, I'm not questioning the good of any cognitive ability per see, I'm questioning the good of assigning a numerical value to it and making it a characteristic of some individual).
Oh, I see. A good IQ test would be a good way to help our most promising children get the largest head start. It could help point out adults in your own company that have some type of potential. It could be used for scholarship purposes. Stuff like that.
I'm a bit sceptical that we could discover unsuspected geniuses with IQ tests, but I will concede that it could be useful the other way around: to prove to someone, most liekely ourselve, that one is not often as clever as one believe. :-)
> A good IQ test would be a good way to help our most promising children get the largest head start.
If that were true, then why are they not administered to every child? IQ tests appear to only to the potentially disabled and potential precocious. If a child is already showing signs of precociousness, then what would an IQ test present that was not already observed?
> It could help point out adults in your own company that have some type of potential.
I highly doubt adults at a company have hidden potential that is unknown. Underused? Sure. It's not like the companies have some sort of hidden genius that no one knows about. If one were a genius, it would have likely been apparent far earlier in their life.
> It could be used for scholarship purposes.
Do you really believe we should be awarding scholarships for meritless human attributes? Why not offer scholarships to other human attributes like height, weight, and beauty while we are at it?
That's thing about IQ, according to the research, it's like eye color, skin color, etc.. There isn't a damn thing one can do to change it (positively). So, I am not certain I am comfortable offering scholarships on raw IQ alone. In fact, isn't the entire purpose behind grades, standardized testing, etc.?
(Yes, I am aware the early SAT was a psuedo-IQ test, but that ended in the 80s or 90s, I believe. ACT was never truly comparable to my understanding.)
>If that were true, then why are they not administered to every child?
We've never had a good understanding of what intelligence is, let alone a good test for it. We didn't even realize that until recently.
>I highly doubt adults at a company have hidden potential that is unknown
I think you'd be surprised how economic status can take a brilliant mind and squash it, or a rigid society can take a uniquely thoughtful mind and squash it
>Do you really believe we should be awarding scholarships for meritless human attributes?
You should see how easy it is to get a basketball scholarship if you're over 7 feet tall. And for good reason.
>it's like eye color, skin color, etc.. There isn't a damn thing one can do to change it (positively)
Can't make tall people grow more either. 7' people still have a much easier time with the sport than anyone else.
I guess I don't understand why you think we shouldn't be able to discriminate based on the brain? Should we just waste this wonderful natural gift in the name of fairness? Sounds like more of that "it's more important to do no harm than to do good" garbage.
So is the goal to predict someone’s future income? Or to inform someone of how much money they supposedly should be making based on their test results and the supposed correlation between test results and income? Surely the test results aren’t being used anywhere to actually determine people’s income.
The goal is to predict if, for example, someone is better suited to sweeping the floors vs working with complex systems. Both are useful and respectable jobs but you both want an individual who can actually do it, not someone who just thinks they can, and someone whose capabilities won't be wasted on too simple tasks. These tests are great tools to help you figure out future performances of said individuals, as well as their satisfaction on the job/task. A mismatch will cause impact both for the individual and the company/military unit/etc.
> The goal is to predict if, for example, someone is better suited to sweeping the floors vs working with complex systems.
That is a perversion of the purpose and origin of these tests, and a core reason why ICAR tries to replace IQ tests with a wider set of different logic puzzles without any established "aggregate score" metric for people to abuse.
The US Army requires a minimum AFQT percentile of 31 for enlistment which, based on standard IQ norms (mean = 100, SD = 15), maps to roughly an IQ of 85 (one standard deviation below mean).
I.e. if you have an IQ below 85 you can't even sweep up the floor for the army
Around 50 million Americans fall below this threshold and are positively counterproductive for ANY military purpose, no matter how menial, no matter the shortage of recruits.
Well the flynn effect is global so either the russians won ww2 with people an SD below today's mean IQ or the US military thinks that the russian army (that won ww2) circa '40 wasn't even fit for cannon fodder.
Flynn effect operates on the assumption that intelligence is a valid and measurable metric, while you previously argued it was not. You selectively do believe in when it affirms your bias? Nice one. You think you know more about this than experts who study it. I see. That's enough of you lol.
No, the Flynn Effect is an observation that raw scores on "IQ tests" have increased over (a far too short period to be attributable to evolution) time and/but IQ is defined as having a median value of 100 . It is not an assumption that intelligence is a measurable metric (redundant) it is an observation that the metric is a shit metric -- particularly over time. It is explicitly a point against "IQ" as a valid and measurable metric.
So now you're pivoting to saying Flynn Effect is just an observation of noise and human error with no meaning. You brought up the Flynn Effect, but you don't think it's meaningful to measure IQ? But you do think time series analysis on IQ is meaningful? You made no attempt at even a reasoned claim that Flynn Effect debunks validity of IQ. It's all patchwork emo stuff going on with u, and u agree grammur policing is a last resort of a broken mind. Not much respond to when you have to twist yourself in a pretzel and then trip over your own arguments on the pivot.
So you're arguing it ws low IQ vs low IQ? Okay... Do you have a point? I understand that you're upset for some reasno.
Do you have a counter-point? You think the army is stupid and you know better? What is your point?
Would you prefer your child have an IQ of 120 or 80? If you have a preference, then you're morally inconsistent and don't even realize it? That must be a frustrating condition to go through life with? At least try to have a nice day in spite of your limitations. It's not your fault, we're all equal in God's eyes.
Good job being incapable of synthesizing both of your perversions into a single post.
I am "arguing" (not arguing, simply stating basic facts) that neither Russia nor the USA were giving "IQ tests" to soldiers. Also neither Russia nor the USA are currently giving "IQ tests" to soldiers.
To Wit: I do not think the Army not accepting people who score too low on their entrance exam has anything to do with "IQ".
Also neither I nor my hypothetical child will be taking an "IQ test" (again not actually a defined thing) so having a preference is not a sensible idea.
If you had to pick 120 or 80, what would it be? You have no preference whether they can read or write? Notice you're cornered logically? Wouldn't you prefer to have a strong opinion based in reason?
In a cruel and inhumane manner virtually devoid of all empathy and compassion for our planet, the life our planet supports, and for each other? I honestly wish I didn't understand how the world actually functions.
It’s just a business, and it sells because institution leaders find it useful to have some convincing ideas to back up their positions, then the cottage industry it spawns defends it, and we all arrive in the world with established ideas like this in play. There are many little distortions like this in society that experience eventually puts the lie to. It’s the landscape to navigate, to play along with. A huge part of what makes a strong society is how many of us know what the game is, who can also put on a good performance of it. Imagine being in an improv group and people keep calling out that it’s pretend.
IQ scores perpetuate racism. True worth of a human being for a civilization is empathy and ability to cooperate. I wonder though if IQ has any impact on those
Pretty sure cognition is biological. I am of the opinion though various programs and college admissions accelerate a large portion of capable and able people to the top, they are not likely the best out of the entire population. I have frequently met (mostly young males) working in restaurants or supermarkets who would do exceedingly well if they had the right circumstances. Though personality (in terms of choosing to fight for an education) is important too: of those I offered to sit down and chat with (because their media landscape is mostly bad social media/conspiracies), none have taken me up on the offer. Whether due to their personality or my approach I do not know.
From your article, which claims that intelligence is reflected in how "foldy" your ears are:
>Imagine that you know that you aren’t so smart. It’s difficult to do well in class. Then you hear of this theory, go check your ears in the mirror, and find that your ears are not so foldy. Maybe they’d feel relief at understanding why things are the way they are. They could then endeavor to do better for their kids and the next generation armed with the knowledge of prenatal nutrition and its benefits
What kind of crackpottery is this?
>My personal opinion is that only people with these biologies are not Aristotle’s natural slaves, only able to live in the worlds of others.
This is the kind of fatalist intelligence eugenics that makes me recoil.
This is developmental biology: to recognize both inherent and natural limits but also to recognize the ability of humans to adaptively improve their surroundings for the better.
To say that everyone has the same level of skill and talent is harmful for people can clearly see their own ability yet cannot meet the expectations of society. If we believe everyone is the same, then it puts the culpability onto the individual to do well rather than society and government.
Aristotle reflected that king does not beget king, nor does slave beget slave. He thought some to be worthy and capable despite their lowly position in society. It comes from the book Politics.
You might not want to give them your personal data. That's run by the same Cambridge that housed the Facebook scraping mechanism that was used by Cambridge Analytica to create personality profiles that got Trump elected in 2016.
No, Cambridge Analytica and University of Cambridge are not the same Cambridge. Neither is Cambridge Chip Shop or the dozens of other businesses associated with Aleksandr Kogan with Cambridge in their name. It's a city in England.
University of Cambridge wasn't exactly completely clean in this, though, given Aleksandr Kogan was a member of the university at the time that he did this, though how much visibility the organisation had of what he was doing is not clear.
>You achieved a total score of 55!
Oh no, I'm retarded
>This means that you are 88.68% higher than 13391 participants who have completed the test.
Hmm
> >This means that you are 88.68% higher than 13391 participants who have completed the test.
But this makes no sense doesn't it? It looks like the intention is
"You're score is higher than 88.68% of 13391 participants who have completed the test."
What it's literally saying is that 13391 participants got a score 88.68% lower than yours
Well, that 88.68% higher than 13391 stat could still put you in the first decile if a few hundred thousand people have taken the test.
"The entire test will take about an hour to complete."
Doesn't that skew things? That is a lot of time a lot of people don't have.
To map the raw score out of 60 to a population (normalize) you would need to control for biases like free time. For example, with the cooperation of institutions, it could officially replace an hour of school or work. You can look up such normalization tables for this test.
There's no time limit on the test either, so people could take arbitrarily long.
But it seems from what's written at the start that what they're looking for is correlations between the different types of questions, rather than scores across people
No, not in any way. Ability to be present for a test does not have any bearing whatsoever on cognitive ability, nor does any test on the planet account for whether or not the taker is present.
I think the suggestion is that people who have less free time might be in more of a rush to complete the test, and that surely affects test results without indicating cognitive ability.
I'd bet they don't consider incomplete tests, and most people I think would just peace out in ten or less questions vs continuing on either uninterested or rushed for time
Why would they rush when they have a specified time limit to complete it that everyone else suffers from? Does having less free time make you stupid? Is Jeff Bezos a brain-dented man as a result of being busy?
I’m going to guess this is an economically comfortable person with lots of free time imagining that people less well off have none. To an approximation, that trend is surely true - poor people have less free time - but almost everyone can find time to do things they want to do. Would it skew results? Hard to say.
Nope, I’m not thinking about their test in any way. I’m explaining that it’s explicitly unrelated to your cognitive ability. Getting a more convenient job does not boost your brain.
I’m going to guess you’re obsessed with the plight of those you perceive to be “under” you. I mean, they’re poor - there’s NO WAY they’re doing well on the test right!?
Such an obnoxious point of view. Of COURSE your job has no causative effect on your natural cognitive ability. What a ridiculous way to try and look down on the poor.
I think you took my comment the wrong way. I was suggesting the opposite.
You’re right, I completely misread it, thank you for correcting me
> Ability to be present for a test does not have any bearing whatsoever on cognitive ability
The irony of making such a big mistake while discussing cognitive ability...
Please tell me how having a free period in your schedule causally makes you smarter.
A smarter approach would be to run an experiment and look at what the data says. Just because you cannot think of any doesn’t make it so.
continues to be ironic
Oh man you are lost lol
It doesn't. The fact that the IQ test takes a lot of time means that generally only people who want validation of their high IQ will be motivated enough to take the test.
"Test your fitness with this 1 hour workout! ... Hmm our totally unbiased test shows that everyone is really fit."
See? Unbiased sampling is really hard but an hour long test means you're not even trying. (Which tbf they might not be.)
“Test your mountain climbing ability by summiting K2!” Hey wow turns out 70% of the population can summit K2!
That’s true of every test, right? Is there a single test where unmotivated people do well?
And an hour is a pretty reasonable ask of most people. How long do you think studies usually take?
> And an hour is a pretty reasonable ask of most people.
lol no. Most people are not going to spend an hour doing an IQ test. 5 minutes? Sure. Look at how many people here are commenting about it - and HN has a very high concentration of people that love IQ tests.
> That’s true of every test, right?
You can reduce this bias by either making the test a lot shorter (5 minutes) or paying or forcing people to take it (e.g. tests in school don't suffer from this bias).
I don't think you're ever going to get anything that isn't totally useless out of a 5 minute IQ test, and I have no idea why you'd think HN has a high concentration of people that like IQ tests? I mean, maybe conceptually?
Anyways, asking for an hour of someone's time is fine. I really don't believe that dumb people would, for some reason, be particularly short on time. Maybe you're right that we won't get a fantastic sample of people working 4 jobs at once with 8 children at home.
> I don't think you're ever going to get anything that isn't totally useless out of a 5 minute IQ test
Depends what you're trying to learn, but yeah it would be difficult. That's not really relevant to whether hour-long tests are biased due to their length though.
> I have no idea why you'd think HN has a high concentration of people that like IQ tests?
Because it's full of programmers and geeks who value intelligence and generally think of themselves as more intelligent than the average person. This is really obvious IMO.
> I really don't believe that dumb people would, for some reason, be particularly short on time.
I never said they would. I said that they would be unlikely to invest that free time in an hour long IQ test.
Its an modern open-source and collaborative resource of IQ style questions for research studies. IQ has a lot of flaws, not the least of which is its usage outside of academic research, as a measure of job aptitude and hiring potential (spoiling its utility as a metric since the questions can be trained... setting aside its dubious usefulness as a hiring tool anyway).
It seems like ICAR is spending a-lot of effort to remain scientific, and i feel like a website like this goes against that by spoiling the test utility for future potential participants.
>i feel like a website like this goes against that
what do you mean "a website like this", HN? or the destination of the link at the top of this discussion?
The link for this discussion goes to the test on the same site that you link to.
Are you saying people need to make their way to that test from the front page of the site following particular breadcrumbs? that people from HN shouldn't go there till they're ready to participate in a scientific manner? i just don't understand your point...
These tests serve no purpose outside of academic studdies. Distributing them for people to self-score sully their scientific value, and perpetuate their use for unsound usecases.
so you're saying you have an agenda and you're pushing it.
Psychologists are scientists and the replicability of IQ testing is extremely high and repeatedly confirmed. And despite how much psychosocially challenged nerds here like to complain about psychology, they are in good company: psychology itself is not normie opressors, psychologists are also psychosocially challenged nerds.
before you say anything else, the statistical methods we use today across medical testing were first applied and developed to psychometric testing, so if you are going to attack that, you are attacking all of medical science.
No, I think he's closer to the science than this comment is. IQ has validity for its intended purpose of as a diagnostic tool for cognitive deficits. It is in fact not a valid tool for casually ranking ability based on individual tests, both because of test-retest consistency and because ordinality of IQ breaks down as scores get higher.
I think you could have written a reasonably strong argument that the parent commenter overstated their case, but you didn't do that: you just overstated the opposite pole of the argument and then declared the discussion off limits due to politics.
>ordinality of IQ breaks down as scores get higher
ordinality of any sample from a Gaussian process breaks down as the thin part of the population density is approached, but that will only affect those at least three sigmas above or below, so it's an edge case that doesn't matter for the fat part of the curve.
you are cherry picking pieces of arguments that might threaten your "nobody is better than anybody else" anti-merit ideology. "From those who have the ability to those who have the need" is a merit-based sickle, comrade, and IQ is its hammer, is my argument.
>I think you could have written a reasonably strong argument that the parent commenter overstated their case, but you didn't do that: you just overstated the opposite pole of the argument and then declared the discussion off limits due to politics
I don't think you really think any of that. You are disingenuous if you claim that your (collective (in more than one sense of the word)) side wants to actually discuss the science of IQ; you simply want it removed from the discussion because it does not support your politics. If the economy rewards high IQs, and people have social mobility, you will see an economic sorting from top to bottom, and you don't like that. If IQ has genetic factors (which it seems to) that's a bigger disaster because once the economic sorting takes place, social mobility goes away (the latter half of the 20th century) A true scientific socialist would not try to imagine/censor these problems away in a central committee, but would admit them and try to figure out better ways.
I talked about the science of IQ in my comment something that you did not actually engage with. the correct wording would have been for you to say "g does not exist" and provide some basis for that belief
One way I know that I didn't say "nobody is better than anybody else" is that isn't something I actually believe. I think you have me confused with someone else.
(you edited your comment and added a paragraph to it after I wrote this)
Im honestly not sure what you're trying to get across here. IQ is a dated but good scientific tool to measure cognitive differences across large samples of humans.
I never said they're not scientific. They're invaluable statistical tools. I'm saying their use outside of academia for hiring (among other things) is a fundamental missuse of both the tests and statistics.
Online versions of ICAR tests like these serve little purpose for anyone, and at worst encourage people to abuse ICAR in a similar way.
[flagged]
>IQ has a lot of flaws, not the least of which is its usage outside of academic research, as a measure of job aptitude and hiring potential
Isn't IQ one of the best predictors of job training success, across both civilian and military, blue collar and white collar?
It's also one of, if not the single most generalizable predictors that we know of right now, even more so than nationality, race, gender, SES (socioeconomic status), parental SES, you name it. It predicts just about everything - from hard biological measures like reaction time and brain mass to lifetime odds of being in a car accident (distinct from causing a car accident - higher IQ people are statistically less likely to be hit by another driver), divorce rates, lifetime income, longevity, the list goes on and on. IQ is not the strongest predictor for every one of these, but every stronger predictor for any one of those fails to predict as many things as IQ does. Parental SES, controlling for IQ, provides no predictive power for your reaction time, for instance, despite predicting educational attainment better than IQ does.
The critique that IQ is an imperfect proxy for g is totally valid.
The self-assuaging fantasy that g itself doesn't exist is a classic example of a psychological defensive mechanism of rejection, one rooted in a need to defend a worldview that holds all people as inherently equal, when we're measurably, biologically not.
> The self-assuaging fantasy that g itself doesn't exist is a classic example of a psychological defensive mechanism of rejection, one rooted in a need to defend a worldview that holds all people as inherently equal, when we're measurably, biologically not.
I think this statement conflates two different senses of the word “equality”. Equality of abilities is different from moral equality. It is perfectly coherent to accept that people aren’t equal in terms of their abilities but are still morally equal. For example, just because Person A is smarter than Person B it does not follow that the interests of Person A matter more than those of Person B, or that the suffering of Person A matters more than the like suffering of Person B, etc. So the view that g is real and people have different IQ scores is consistent with the idea that all people are inherently equal. Because in most contexts the concept of inherent equality is not a biological or psychological concept but a moral concept.
I don't disagree with moral equality one bit - the golden rule should absolutely apply to everyone and we should all strive to look at each other with compassion, tolerance, empathy, understanding, grace, humility, and goodwill - but there is a loud, vocal subset of people that truly believe in absolute biological equality - not just between people with different IQ's, but even between different biological sexes and all other categories of humans; "tabula rasa" proponents who argue that ALL differences in outcomes along the lines of categorical differences (e.g. sex, race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, culture) are exclusively and irrefutably explained strictly by discrimination and discrimination alone, which is a patently absurd assertion that should be refuted. Discrimination is real and should be confronted vocally, but the idea that it's the only factor explaining differences in outcomes between groups is a harmful myth.
The fact of the matter, relating back to the original discussion, is that sex/race/gender/ethnicity/nationality/religion/culture-blind IQ testing is not only a strong predictor of job performance, it is perhaps one of the best tools we have for eliminating discrimination based on sex/race/gender/ethnicity/nationality/religion/culture in hiring, as it explicitly controls for differences along these lines by exclusively targeting an assessment of g in abstract ways that are explicitly stripped of cultural, religious, racial, and gendered biases.
Pseudonymized hiring that relied exclusively on IQ tests, with zero indications of race/sex/gender (e.g. legal name), stripped of proxies for SES and/or parental SES (e.g. which university was attended, if any) would be significantly less biased than current hiring practices. Throw in job-specific pseudonymized skill evaluations (so, no voice calls, no video calls, just direct assessments to candidates) and you've got a system to dramatically reduce hiring discrimination along protected classes.
... or you can just discard all the hokum and only use job-specific pseudonymized skill evaluations --- a concept more widely known as "work samples" --- and be using the gold-standard tool for candidate selection, supported by research going all the way back to Deming.
IQ is meant for population statistics. For that purpose it's a great scientific tool.
> socioeconomic status
No. A real IQ test tries to cancel out educational level from the score by comparing people in buckets of age, education and a few other importance factors.
A systematic deviation of education quality in the same "level" is not possible to cancel out, making IQ indirectly measure socioeconomic status. Hence why the us governments banned IQ on the basis or racism for government hiring.
You cannot measure two prople with 1/4th of a IQ test (logic puzzle is only one part of a full test) and make any useful statistical conclusions. A domain specific interview question or aptitude test a much clearer value to hiring prococess.
... no it isn't? IQ tests were explicitly designed as individual diagnostics. They're clinical tools.
From where did you get the idea that IQ was meant for population statistics?
If IQ was one of the best predictors of job training success, it would be used everywhere. Instead, very few companies use it. There's a persistent myth that IQ isn't more widely used because of legal concerns, but that can't be right, because IQ and general cognitive tests are used by several of the largest companies (with the deepest pockets for discrimination suits) in North America --- and, further, the Griggs v. Duke jurisprudence that roots the myth doesn't have any force outside the US, where... IQ testing is not generally used in employment.
I don't know what the "self-assuaging fantasy" is supposed to mean, but you can read Cosma Shalizi to see how any set of tests structured like IQ tests are necessarily give rise to a "g" fact, even if you randomly generate them. I feel like I don't have to assuage myself too much that math works.
IQ is limited because it only looks at one facet and it generalizes a lot. Tests that look both into ability and aptitude, and especially those who split them by domain are much more relevant and applicable to real world scenarios.
IQ does actually measure quite widely, but only one of many parts (the visual pattern matching part) is widely know outside of academic use. But even then it should not be used for hiring or intelligence scoring people against one-another.
If you actually want to test people for hiring, using domain specific interview questions and tests is a-lot more reasonable and usefully correlated with real-world job performance.
The site seems overloaded at the moment, but if the URL is any indication, this seems to be the ICAR 60: https://icar-project.com/
Though the sample tests there are behind a login page.
Got a score of 33, scoring 36.5% higher than 13456.
No idea what that means but I no longer want to see another cube for at least a few weeks :P
57. I got a ton of shape rotation problems. Figured out a strategy for those:
Focus on the 3 pronged shape. It is unique in all 4 orientations. You can use this to filter out bad rotations. Then use adjacencies to filer out the rest.
"You achieved a total score of 50! This means that you are 70% higher than 13351 participants who have completed the test. The percentile score is calculated on-the-fly. This means that your percentile rank may change as more people complete the test."
Not sure this was worth 65 minutes of my time. Would have liked to see whether whatever this version of the ICAR60 is is pegged to a standardized (IQ) test score. I'm assuming the 13,000 people who have also taken this are not representative of the wider pop.
The self-selection bias is definitely something to consider. I’d guess people who feel relatively confident in their intelligence are more likely to take the test.
Many highly intelligent people might decide that it is not worth their time though.
True, and many not so intelligent people may overestimate their intelligence and do it. So maybe it does somehow end up being representative.
No it does very much not end up being representative.
> not so intelligent people
They generally won't ever know that the test exists.
What was with the fascination about rotated cubes?
Were we supposed to have scratch paper? I didn't use any.
I got 50, I guess that's good, especially because I'm ready for bed.
Bear in mind that while most questions are language-agnostic, some require the knowledge of the English alphabet and definitions of uncommon English words.
Sorry, this test has too many users right now. Please try again later.
Or is that message the first challenge of the test...
I do not understand the shape problems. How are they solved? Does then pattern progress left to right, top to bottom? Or is that part of the riddle?
For the dice questions, which rotation on the is being performed? I think that's part of the riddle, most rotations are impossible given the initial position.
Either am an idiot or the solution to the riddles is something taught in school, which is something I've never been taught.
Man my cognitive abilities have tanked since I was in my 20s. I remember doing IQ tests and scoring 130+
I’m now 43 and other day I was looking up test papers for the 11+ (school entrance exams for 11 year olds) and thinking - damn this is HARD!
Anyone else feel like they used to be so much quicker?
> I’m now 43 and other day I was looking up test papers for the 11+ (school entrance exams for 11 year olds) and thinking - damn this is HARD!
Are you me? I've been helping my daughter study for the 11+, and some of the questions I really struggle with (I'm 44). However if you look up the answers and see how the answer is calculated/resolved, it does seem like it's a case of just learning the method.
This does make me think that to pass the 11+ you basically need to pay for private tuition. We'll see how well my daughter does in a few weeks time (when the 11+ test is conducted).
Likewise with a lot of these cognitive IQ tests, if you know the method or tricks you can basically pass no problem... but I'm not 100% sure it means you're "smarter" than everyone else.
FWIW, after I started treating sleep apnea my mental sharpness increased a lot over the course of about a year. (I’m 39)
IQ is age-adjusted. Without the adjustment, it drops quite a bit.
Some cognitive abilities diminish more slowly with age (so-called crystallized intelligence), but unfortunately, fluid intelligence drops noticeably much earlier in life than most people would care to realize.
You just need to lean into what you know instead of solving novel problems. Or be comfortable knowing that it'll take longer than it used to. Typically, you can still arrive at a solution if you could have before, but you'll need to put more work into it. Sometimes, a lot more work.
- A homeschooling father helping with SAT prep
100% - used to be so much sharper with math and abstract math concepts in my 20s and 30s. Could be just a use it or lose it thing though?
In part. I notice when I do math again, it comes back.
Do you think it’s really the fact that you were younger or just that you have a lot more responsibilities now?
I’m in my early 30s and I definitely feel less sharp than in my 20s, but I also feel like my priorities have changed and I have more responsibilities at work and at home, so I have much less ability to just be able to do very long periods of focused studying/thinking like I used to in my 20s
I asked my parents about this as they are both accomplished people and work in STEM/academia.
They both mentioned feeling less sharp when they hit their mid-to-late 30s, which corresponds to… when they had kids. I know correlation isn’t causation, but seeing all of my coworkers who have young children now all mention they’ve had a marked decrease in mental acuity for work due to sleep deprivation (and having to prioritize their kids), I’m going to guess this is it.
I also wonder if you just had a month to focus on refreshing what you learned in school how quickly it would all come back.
It cannot be understated how much kids interrupt the ability to focus on tasks. The ability to do nothing but focus on solving on a problem for a week straight felt like 100x the productivity of having to totally context switch at the end of the day to someone needing a juice or going into a screaming tantrum because the color of the cup is wrong and that being non-stop until the next work-day, which totally obliterates all the short-term working memory you had of the task at hand.
This is a good point. I’d say if having kids was the start of my mental fogginess.
Just the lack of sleep must have an large effect.
Pretty sure you mean to say, it cannot be overstated :)
I think i would really enjoy a refresh course for university level maths and physics. But perhaps it would be better spent learning new maths and physics, which force a refresh on relevant prerequisite maths.
I think it’s mostly about your level of interest in taking the test. This can obviously be influenced by your priorities and other responsibilities. Incidentally, I think IQ tests and similar “cognitive tests” are all mostly just measuring the subject’s interest in the test.
I think interest and concentration definitely play a part - but to say that’s all it measures is kinda crazy
Is this a test whose abilities would survive being retaken periodically? Because having a baseline to compare against would let you know if your cranium was headed south, or if particular circumstances were contributing to that.
(my 2¢: avoid sugar, fast food& other carbs, nitrite meats)
You describe it as if it’s a bad thing. It’s your brain working as intended.
Now, you can be strategic about staying sharp about topics that interest you.
It’s your brain working as intended.
As intended by whom?
Evolution.
It’s more like evolution just doesn’t give a shit about your cognitive abilities once you’ve reproduced…
Most people help their kids, and are pretty old once the kids have moved out, so it matters for most of your life.
Not me. More than half of my 20s were mostly defined by working service industry jobs, hanging around with party kids, staying awake until the sun came up, and basically getting by doing the bare minimum for everything. It was probably the lowest point of my life cognitively. It wasn't really until sometime around my mid-30s that I started feeling pretty sharp and performing well on cognitive tests. I didn't grow up in an environment where there were any cultural expectations of achievement in anything. I had to find all of that on my own through a lot of trial and error. That being said, who knows where I would be today if a nice chunk of my 20s had been less dumb? I ruminate about it fairly often.
If you work with some piece of software everyday for 10+ years... I guarantee you the Jr programmers will have a look of terror as you bring them up to speed in a project. Speed is a function of practice, and not potential cognitive gifts.
One just becomes hyper-specialized with age if you aren't careful, and don't explore new technology or hobbies. One Phd physicist I knew often said he was only an expert in Spoons, and while that probably wasn't really true... it did allude to the irrational competitiveness of the insecure. =3
I'm in my 50's and I feel smarter than I did in my 20's. I'm less energetic certainly, but I can focus better now. And I feel like my knowledge and understanding of mathematics, politics, economics, sciences, history, people, etc, is much better.
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I still do not understand why we are wasting scientific resources trying to stack rank humans on arbitrarily defined concepts like cognitive ability or intelligence.
After over a century of psychometric research in cognitive abilities and intelligence, what do we have to show for it? Whose life has actually improved for the better? Have the benefits from such research, if any, outweighed the amount of harm that has already been caused?
In clinical contexts, cognitive tests are used for diagnostic purposes. They are important to determine exactly what sort of ongoing care and support the person needs in order to thrive. In these sorts of contexts, it's not hard to imagine the utility in knowing someone's cognitive ability. It's also not arbitrary—a good cognitive test will give insight into the ability to perform everyday cognitive tasks.
> In clinical contexts, cognitive tests are used for diagnostic purposes.
I'm not certain I agree. If anything, cognitive tests can be used as a single point of datum, but to my knowledge, no condition can be diagnosed via a cognitive test alone. Of course, I could be mistaken. I wish administered the WAIS-IV on top of many other tests for an ADHD diagnosis.
> They are important to determine exactly what sort of ongoing care and support the person needs in order to thrive.
Interesting, upon my receiving my diagnosis, I was not provided any support nor would I declare I have thrived. Obviously, n = 1. I was merely given the social approval to take pharma-grade speed and thrown back to the wolves.
> It's also not arbitrary—a good cognitive test will give insight into the ability to perform everyday cognitive tasks.
That's the part I believe I am clearly missing. These tests provide insight into the ability to perform everyday cognitive tasks better than one's history of already performing various tasks? It's not as if someone with a perfect SAT score takes an IQ tests and then is met with the sudden reality that they are mentally disabled nor vice versa.
What do these tests tell us that we already do not know? If I want to find someone with high mathematical abilities, then I would administer a math exam. Reading? Reading exam. Chess? Chess tournament. And so on...
> I'm not certain I agree. If anything, cognitive tests can be used as a single point of datum, but to my knowledge, no condition can be diagnosed via a cognitive test alone.
I did not read the comment you're replying to as saying otherwise.
Maybe my IQ is too low to understand them?
> Interesting, upon my receiving my diagnosis, I was not provided any support nor would I declare I have thrived. Obviously, n = 1. I was merely given the social approval to take pharma-grade speed and thrown back to the wolves.
United States? It's not quite like that everywhere.
Yes, United States. I should add that I wasn't diagnosed until I was 22.5 years old.
Growing up in the South East, USA, there were no such things as Autism, ADHD, etc.. Things have gotten better, I suppose, but I'm in my early 30s, so this wasn't exactly a long time ago either. You know how schools have 'gifted and talented' programs? I was in the 'cursed and talentless' program.
Honestly, imo clinically in aggregate the actually score itself provides very little information beyond what a 5 minute conversation would achieve, and the result could be better thought as bordering on 5-6 level categorical variable rather than a gradient due to their biases and inherent individual patient variance on performance and test taking context.
The sub-sections of things like the WAIS can be of some value for identifying specific abnormalities or deficiencies, but as you said, is probably of more value clinically to split them out into separate tests/activities rather than to group them all together into an aggregate score. It's a bit like judging athletic ability and skill by BMI and fat percentage rather than just playing an opponent in tennis to find out if they're a good tennis player.
On scientific front, it's very useful. Its use outside of academia is has however been very problematic.
There are studies that empirically measure drop change cognitive ability from lead poising, oxygen deprivation, sleep deprecation, post-burnout, environment distraction, noise pollution, temperature, aging, drug and alcohol use during puberty, smoking, school teaching style, etc. etc.
Notable is that these are either population metrics or compare each individual with themselves. This is what IQ and other similar tests were meant for. Comparing one person with another is nonsensical and a flawed use of these metrics.
This is where where IQ has fallen and become a rather bad metric. People are familiar with the problems scewing results. IQ test performance and education level is highly correlated, which is supposed to be compensated for in the final score. But poor education quality in certain regions make the statistics easily used to argue quite unsavory ideas.
"Notable is that these are either population metrics or compare each individual with themselves."
Yes, for the purposes of that research. Why would a comparison between two people be a flawed use case? Do you just mean the colloquial use and understanding of IQ is flawed?
Over a population, outside factors affecting the score is smoothed out to create a normal distribution. Over one individual, most factors remain the same.
Over two different people, so many factors affect the score that making the claim "one person is more intelligent than the other" is statistically unsound without a massive score difference. This is even ignoring that a full IQ test involves FAR more than the usual online logic puzzles people tend to know, yet still have these flaws.
so yes; > colloquial use and understanding of IQ is flawed.
> Comparing one person with another is nonsensical and a flawed use of these metrics.
Isn't this what IQ tests literally do, given that they transform raw scores to a normal distribution for comparability?
Let's say you had a caliper that added a random number between zero and one inch to every measurement. If you measured a trillion small peas and a trillion big peas, you would be able to conclude that one set was smaller than the other. If you compared two peas, it'd be a 50-50 guess driven by that random number.
IQ tests have a 95% confidence interval of about 10, so it's a bit more accurate than you're implying, but still a range of a good fraction of a standard deviation. (basically, the measurement is about 5 times sharper than the variation in the population, so it's for sure a blurry view but they do give you a meaningful idea of where an individual sits in that distribution)
My test only provided at a 90% CI. Not like it is a substantial difference, but I thought I’d throw that out there.
Then again, the same psychologist told me that the discrepancy between my scores was so large that a true FSIQ cannot be used. In a sense, he told me that based on that test, I didn't actually have an IQ that could be accurate measured based on that given test. Apparently, it’s not normal to have almost two SD between some scores...
Being a smart idiot isn't easy work, but someone has to do it.
You seem to be suggesting that IQ tests simply don't work, not that their point isn't to compare people.
I think that would be a fair summary of my opinion of them, especially when related to the somewhat problematic view of "IQ" in popular culture.
As far as I can tell, their only real purpose in the UK is to try to convince "intelligent" people to give money to MENSA.
I'd even suggest the point of these tests is more than simply comparing people. IQ tests, at least how they are commonly used, are used to determine the one's worth as a human-being. I am not saying I personally agree with those views, but merely that such views are reflected in many modern societies and how people treat one another.
You can create a proxy for IQ by simply asking a group of people to invent their own questions, summing them together, randomly sampling from those questions, and then rank ordering the outcome. High IQ people will score in the top percentile for any set of questions. That's the whole point.
Do you have a citation for this? It sounds pretty unlikely to me.
I'm pretty sure if I asked a group of people to invent their own questions I'd get a load of general knowledge questions about music, sports, and popular culture.
This is a talking point from an old university class lecture interpreting factor analytic data on personality and IQ [1].
In practice, intelligence tests don’t depend on the specific questions asked. If you let a group of people generate their own items, pool them together, sample randomly, and then rank scores, the same individuals would tend to rise to the top. The high IQ people would cluster toward the top with a correlation of 0.9. This is because people with higher general cognitive ability perform better across virtually any cognitive task, a phenomenon first documented by Spearman (1904) and repeatedly confirmed in psychometrics research (e.g., Jensen 1998; Deary 2012).
[1] https://youtu.be/D7Kn5p7TP_Y?t=47m50s
It’s not an arbitrary concept. It’s reliably measured and correlated with lots of factors we care about: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11683192/iq-testing-intelligen...
The benefits have been huge. The Chinese realized this a thousand years ago when they invented civil service exams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination.
A lot of things are correlated. Let me know when causation is determined.
Also, your Vox link was pay-walled, but nevertheless, I am fairly well versed in some of the data. I have my own archive of research on this topic for what it is worth (not likely much).
Any hoot, the correlations, while positive, are nothing to write home about in my opinion. Sure, IQ might have more breadth of predictably, but it definitely lacks depth of predictably compared to more granular models depending on the domain.
For example, IQ is not a better predictor of chess performance than say a chess tournament.
The breadth of predictability is why it’s such an effective measure. Most tasks involve many different skills, so it’s helpful to have a single measure that’s correlated with a bunch of different competencies. That’s why we use what are essentially IQ tests in everything from assigning jobs in the military (ASVAB) to selecting lawyers (LSAT). There’s tremendous social value in a single test that can scaleably sort through millions of people even if it’s not the most predicative test for a specific problem domain or a specific individual.
Also, IQ predicts chess performance as well: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160913124722.h...
> For example, IQ is not a better predictor of chess performance than say a chess tournament.
So we should determine who to give chess lessons to with chess tournaments? That seems pretty dumb.
There are many times where we don't want to select for current ability but for potential ability, and then a direct test like you suggest is a much worse predictor than IQ is.
> So we should determine who to give chess lessons to with chess tournaments? That seems pretty dumb.
By your logic, we could even declare grandmasters based on IQ scores alone without anyone needing to play. Clearly that misses the point of skill assessment.
History also doesn’t support the claim of potential ability all that well, in my opinion. Lewis Terman’s study tracked high-IQ children across several decades. Many of the children went on to lead ordinary lives and did not reach noteworthy achievements. However, two lower-IQ children that were excluded went on to become Nobel Prize winners. IQ alone does not seem to be a robust predictor of domain mastery.
Psychometrics has clear value. Cognitive ability predicts academic/job performance (Schmidt & Hunter 1998, Psych Bull), and standardized tests reliably forecast college outcomes (Kuncel, Hezlett & Ones 2004, Science). Conscientiousness adds further predictive power (Poropat 2009, Psych Bull). The science is robust. The issue is the discomfort it causes, not lack of benefit or predictive power.
Intelligence testing is not widely used in employment hiring, despite many attempts. Why is that?
Because the supreme court ruled that it's racist to do so
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
No they didn't. There's ~basically nothing to this claim. IQ tests are openly used by several of the largest firms in the US. The companies that provide the tests and testing infrastructure brag about it with logo crawls just like every other company.
Why is this myth so pernicious? It comes up a lot here!
No, the Supreme Court ruled that you have to have a concrete business reason for implementing a test that is disproportionately likely to favour one ethnic group over another:
> The touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.
Isn't that the same thing? Basically a business that believes hiring is better using IQ is not able to do so since the supreme court ruled that is racist.
No. A business that believes hiring is better using IQ is able to do so if they can show that it has a relation to job performance.
The problem is that that is very easy to prove... but really hard to convince a modern judge of.
You're all trying to axiomatically derive a result that clearly conflicts with empirical evidence. IQ tests do get used in American hiring; not not that often, because they don't work well for that purpose.
Can you prove it?
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You already posted this. It’s not proof. It’s a meta analysis that suggests that in general cognitive ability might have some role in differences in job performance (maybe up to 25%).
It doesn’t even touch the question of whether IQ tests are good measures of cognitive ability, nor does it only include IQ tests as measures of cognitive ability.
So you just affirmed "a business that believes hiring is better using IQ is not able to do so since the supreme court ruled that is racist" without realizing it. Not being consistent but it's okay. Great job lol
Does your IQ score bring you some sense of purpose or identity? Does someone disagreeing with you or asking question cut at the very core of your sense of being?
In this thread, you have been nothing but rude, condescending, and snarky to your fellow YC users. So, what gives?
I've never taken an IQ test. I just care about intellectual honesty and was responding to someone who called for IQ testing as a prerequisite to posting on this forum. What's the next pivot in the argument?
That’s fair, I shouldn’t have said that, I’m sorry.
So the NBA is discriminating by using physical tests that require height?
Any kind of skill-based testing is obviously racist. Thanks for teaching me.
No? The quote specifically says “If [it] cannot be shown to be related to job performance”.
Maybe we should implement IQ testing before people are allowed to post on HN.
The NBA doesn't discriminate by height. They have chosen players that are 5'3" over players who are 6'6".
You're welcome for me educating you.
Oh you're right, it is very diverse in the NBA in terms of height and race. Not at all dominated by tall guys.
The Duke Power Company had as many black people in management as the NBA has short players.
Your argument is not even internally consistent.
That is discriminating by ability not height. It happens to be easier for taller people to have that ability but that's secondary.
Duke Power Company was discriminating by IQ not race. It just happened to have been easier for white people to pass the IQ test at the time, but that's secondary. You're using the same logic used by Duke power Company's defense team.
> If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.
This heavily implies the opposite:
> If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes CAN be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is NOT prohibited.
The problem is you’ve got an indicator that appears to favour white people, and a lack of evidence that the indicator shows anything of relevance to the actual position or job content.
Hypothetically, let’s say you were a racist, a nice easy way to do racist things like “disproportionately hire white people” would be to find some metric which disproportionately favours white people, and then evaluate everyone against that.
If you can prove it’s important for the job, you can discriminate still. For example, a Chinese restaurant can require knowledge of Mandarin, a metric which very likely favours people of Chinese descent. They just have to be able to explain why (e.g.: internal communication is in Mandarin, most of our customers speak Mandarin, etc).
Actually it is, if you're talking about white collar knowledge economy jobs, like law jobs. Top tier law firms routinely give either actual IQ tests or IQ test-like assessments during interviews.
It's used by police, because if you're too smart you might refuse tyrannical orders. Whoops, I meant, you would get bored.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...
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I don't know where you live, but it quite clearly is where I'm from.
Oooh, to be sure they don't call them IQ tests explicitly, but the psychometric capabilities and performance tests they've gotten me to do (mathematical, logical, verbal, reasoning etc) are pretty obviously IQ proxies.
Of course it is[1]. Every single method used to screen a candidate is essentially testing for general mental ability. Being admitted to an Ivy League school is basically an IQ test. Interviews are basically IQ tests. Employers want to hire smart people. The fact that his is even a debate is crazy.
[1] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1998-10661-006
Your definition of an IQ test seems to be so vague as to be meaningless.
Last time I passed a job interview, on several rounds of interview not one was about general intelligence, or general knowledge, or general anything. It was about my ability to solve the kind of problems they were solving and I had some experience solving. Last time I failed a job interview it was because of a bad culture fit.
I have not looked at the numbers, but I would suspect Ivy league admissions to be more correlated with wealth / geography than possibly anything else, but you probably square that with a belief that intelligence is hereditary as wealth is.
IQ tests measure the ability to solve quickly some abstract problems in an exam-like situation. There is certainly a use case for that, but thinking it captures the whole of "cognitive ability" is like thinking that duolingo captures the whole of litterary.
By the way, anytime one can't understand why $DEBATED_TOPIC is debatable should be an indication that one should switch to a slower though process.
>Your definition of an IQ test seems to be so vague as to be meaningless.
This is actually like one of the primary tricks of the IQ perverts. They'll take literally any test, run the results through a transformation function to get it into their bell curve, and start making claims about how IQ correlate with This-Or-That based on it.
If you dismiss IQ research, you might as well disregard all of psychology. The psychologists who developed intelligence tests were pioneers in using the statistical methods (e.g. factor analysis) that now underpin the entire field. IQ is defined more precisely than almost any other psychological construct. Discarding it leaves you with poorly defined concepts and no clear way to handle them. [1]
[1] https://youtu.be/D7Kn5p7TP_Y?t=47m50s
Oh for fuck's sake.
So: the people that developed intelligence tests were not psychologists; lies, damned lies and statistics; "pioneering" the idea of using math doesn't mean that people using math today are doing the same thing; whatever the definition of IQ might be is irrelevant because "IQ tests" are not rigorously defined; however precisely IQ is defined is also irrelevant because it's supposedly just a proxy for "g"; psychology is not psychometry and so discarding IQ does nothing to the field of psychology.
In practice, intelligence tests don’t depend on the specific questions asked. If you let a group of people generate their own questions, pool them together, sample randomly, and then rank scores, the same individuals would tend to rise to the top. This is because people with higher general cognitive ability perform better across virtually any cognitive task, a phenomenon first documented by Spearman (1904) and repeatedly confirmed in psychometrics research (e.g., Jensen 1998; Deary 2012).
Yes I'm aware of that, and I had this in mind when I wrote that "IQ tests measure the ability to solve quickly some abstract problems in an exam-like situation." Maybe that was not carefuly worded enough.
I am of the opinion that, although there is some generality in IQ tests, they measure only one specific aspect of cognitive ability defined by: abstract + quick.
My intuition is that cognitive abilities encompass much more than that. Anyone who have ever argued at length with that smart but obtuse engineer who can't tell the forest for the tree will know what I'm refering to. To me, a better test for "cognitive abilities" would also measure how someone is able of nuance, of humor, of seeing things from different perspectives, of introspection, etc, not just solving puzzles that can be described in a couple of sentences.
And I'm not talking about "emotional intelligence" here. To me, E-I is just the other side of that same flawed model that smells too much like modern day phrenology.
There are plenty of benefits to studying it, and plenty of downsides to not studying it. I recommend “The Neuroscience of Intelligence” by Richard Haier from Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience in Psychology for a comprehensive, accessible, and modern review.
I think have read this before. Wasn’t he trying to find neuroscientific evidence to support IQ via neuron transmission rates and whatnot? Or was it grey matter volume?
Regardless, I am still skeptical of a lot of neuroscience research, as well.
I feel that neuroscience often suffers from the same issues that psychology does —- where correlation apparently equates to causation.
> Whose life has actually improved for the better?
High-IQ children in low income families. In so far as they are targeted by social programs that give them better educational opportunities.
So, without IQ it would be impossible for social programs to give better educational opportunities to exist? And on that same note, and this a genuine question, how much evidence supports that better educational opportunities truly manifests into the outcomes we socially desire?
I'd be leery of anyone that claims that the only reason they were able to become a doctor, lawyer, etc. was because of being in a gifted program or something similar.
As far as I am concerned, I firmly believe the truly talented will create their own environment within reason. Take Von Neumann, for example. He was god-like in abilities. I am certain someone of his caliber did not need better educational opportunities in order to be exceptional. The man was, by all accounts, born exceptional.
Also, I am not certain that giving better educational opportunities to the bright is better than giving better educational opportunities to the disadvantaged, but I will admit I am likely too ignorant on this topic to have an informed opinion.
> So, without IQ it would be impossible for social programs to give better educational opportunities to exist?
It wouldn't be impossible. The extra resources might not go as far, which makes the program more likely to look like a waste.
> how much evidence supports that better educational opportunities truly manifests into the outcomes we socially desire?
The rate of technological progress we can make as a species is largely dictated by the area under the +2 sigma -> infinity region of the IQ curve. Further adjusted by the amount of those people that we can find and motivate to participate in the economy. As for evidence, the US poaches high IQ people from around the world. You can chalk that up to coincidence if you want.
> The rate of technological progress we can make as a species is largely dictated by the area under the +2 sigma -> infinity region of the IQ curve
That was precisely my point. If little Johnny or Sally need a special education program to properly challenge and educate them, then I hate to break the news to their families, but whatever "it" is, those children don't have "it."
I also find it interesting how "gifted" programs and the like are predominately a Western intervention. To my knowledge, countries like Japan and China do not have "gifted" programs. I am not saying there are not academic and social discrepancies between highly intelligent and the normies, but Western culture does tend to be less community driven than cultures of the two countries I previously mentioned.
> You can chalk that up to coincidence if you want.
I cannot comment about modern times, but I know a certain group of people that I am half descendant from were commonly denied entry into the US during the 1920s - 1950s. However, those same people allegedly had the highest IQ scores on average. At least, historically.
Children from low income families tend to do poorly. Being able to measure their IQ helps demonstrate when it's more environment than genetics which strengthens the argument for improving their environment.
Without this educational opportunities would primarily be given to the obviously/observably bright and advantaged children since their parents can afford it.
Wait, I thought IQ and income were highly correlated. I also thought IQ was highly heritable? In fact, I thought the heritability was sooooo high and environmental factor played a very minute role in the outcome of one's IQ?
(I am being sarcastic, of course.)
> Without this educational opportunities would primarily be given to the obviously/observably bright and advantaged children since their parents can afford it.
Hell, for any highly intelligent child, I say drop their asses off the public library. The truly smart ones will find their way, and the environmentally gifted will not. We do not need special programs for these kids. Special programs equate to more busy, bullshit work. A high IQ earns one more worksheets and homework. Education, at least in the USA, is rotten to the core. I am not convinced more of it is better. Do not mistake me though, I do not believe more knowledge and wisdom are worthless. I am just saying the education system rarely provides either.
I feel like people miss the echelons of IQ. IQ might have predictability, but the more narrow one focuses, the worse it gets. For example, let's taking programming. Something near and dear to my heart and to many others on this site. If one is capable of learning how to program, then their IQ is clearly sufficient enough to be a programmer. Past that point, I would not be willing to bet that a higher IQ would necessarily translate into a better programmer. It's like being in tall and playing basketball. Being 6'5 is better than being 5'5 in the NBA. However, being 6'7 vs. 6'5 much less advantageous.
If anything, I think we should start highly selecting for more altruistic and empathic children. Intelligence is not exactly uncommon. An IQ of 130 puts one in the 98th percentile. With a world population of 8.142 billion people, that means there are roughly 162.84 million people at or above the 98th percentile. I am not certain there are 162.84 million people out in the world making a big difference.
Variance in income is more highly correlated with IQ.
But hey if you don't like it we could have it my way and bulldoze the public schools since personally I think they're a huge waste of money.
If you view academics through this kind of lens most of them should be disband. Like practically everything outside of STEM. Actually 90% of math and science too.
A great part of science breakthroughs is mostly made by people who just want to know more, for the sake of knowing more.
Because as a race, we’re curious. It’s a way to improve ourselves. Facing a challenge like this leads to learning, innovating new tools and techniques, greater understanding of how we are, how we work on the inside.
Long term programs such as Duke’s TIP have provided significant evidence that kids who score highly on the things they measure are correlated with high levels of professional achievement, such as patents. It makes sense to identify talented individuals and provide them with the resources they need to reach their potential
https://today.duke.edu/2016/06/whenlightningstrikestwice
Why wouldn't those children have such an outcome? Modern life is a series of gatekept outcomes. Perform well in early education => access to better universities, better universities => access to better experiences/careers, better experiences/careers => access to higher income, better income => ..., etc..
Who is more likely to have more time and the means to develop patents? The high income/high intelligence person who pays for others to do various chores, labors, and services for them so that they may focus on their work, or the people deemed unworthy by society who spend their time performing the chores, labors, and services for the high income/high intelligence person?
I believe intelligence alone is worthless, if not dangerous, without altruism and empathy. As I type this very message, somewhere in the world, there are people being torn to shreds, families destroyed, etc. by various contraptions designed by some of the most intelligent people on the planet. While unintelligent people may have less potential to change the world in a positive manner, it is apparent that those same individuals have less potential to change the world in a negative manner, as well.
Whatever potential these children have, I believe it's imperative that we are damn certain those children have the moral and ethical composition deserving of their potential, at least, that is my starry-eyed opinion.
>resources trying to stack rank humans on arbitrarily defined concepts like cognitive ability or intelligence.
"arbitrarily defined concepts like cognitive ability or intelligence" correlate very well with objective metrics like educational attainment and income.
>the amount of harm that has already been caused?
Like what?
It’s just more of that unbelievably annoying modern attitude that doing no harm is more important than doing good.
I don't see what harm these tests are doing, but I don't see the good either. Could you elaborate?
It stratifies people, so anyone in a strata that isn’t the best is azhkchually being harmed by not being rated equally to everyone else.
You did not answer my question, which was in good faith; instead you seam to keep using a sarcastic way of discussing that we try to avoid here.
Yes I did. “Why is this bad”
“Because it stratifies people, which has the effect of saying some people are better than others in some way”.
I’m not being sarcastic towards you, I’m being sarcastic towards people who think this is truly harmful. I apologize - I should’ve made that more clear.
Apologizes gladly accepted. But maybe my question was not clearly phrased - it was not "Why are tests bad". You contrasted "doing no harm" with "doing good" and I wanted to ask what good have IQ tests done. Because to me the harm is kind of obvious (overinflating the importance of one criteria and ideological agenda) but the good not so much (obviously, I'm not questioning the good of any cognitive ability per see, I'm questioning the good of assigning a numerical value to it and making it a characteristic of some individual).
Oh, I see. A good IQ test would be a good way to help our most promising children get the largest head start. It could help point out adults in your own company that have some type of potential. It could be used for scholarship purposes. Stuff like that.
I'm a bit sceptical that we could discover unsuspected geniuses with IQ tests, but I will concede that it could be useful the other way around: to prove to someone, most liekely ourselve, that one is not often as clever as one believe. :-)
> A good IQ test would be a good way to help our most promising children get the largest head start.
If that were true, then why are they not administered to every child? IQ tests appear to only to the potentially disabled and potential precocious. If a child is already showing signs of precociousness, then what would an IQ test present that was not already observed?
> It could help point out adults in your own company that have some type of potential.
I highly doubt adults at a company have hidden potential that is unknown. Underused? Sure. It's not like the companies have some sort of hidden genius that no one knows about. If one were a genius, it would have likely been apparent far earlier in their life.
> It could be used for scholarship purposes.
Do you really believe we should be awarding scholarships for meritless human attributes? Why not offer scholarships to other human attributes like height, weight, and beauty while we are at it?
That's thing about IQ, according to the research, it's like eye color, skin color, etc.. There isn't a damn thing one can do to change it (positively). So, I am not certain I am comfortable offering scholarships on raw IQ alone. In fact, isn't the entire purpose behind grades, standardized testing, etc.?
(Yes, I am aware the early SAT was a psuedo-IQ test, but that ended in the 80s or 90s, I believe. ACT was never truly comparable to my understanding.)
>If that were true, then why are they not administered to every child?
We've never had a good understanding of what intelligence is, let alone a good test for it. We didn't even realize that until recently.
>I highly doubt adults at a company have hidden potential that is unknown
I think you'd be surprised how economic status can take a brilliant mind and squash it, or a rigid society can take a uniquely thoughtful mind and squash it
>Do you really believe we should be awarding scholarships for meritless human attributes?
You should see how easy it is to get a basketball scholarship if you're over 7 feet tall. And for good reason.
>it's like eye color, skin color, etc.. There isn't a damn thing one can do to change it (positively)
Can't make tall people grow more either. 7' people still have a much easier time with the sport than anyone else.
I guess I don't understand why you think we shouldn't be able to discriminate based on the brain? Should we just waste this wonderful natural gift in the name of fairness? Sounds like more of that "it's more important to do no harm than to do good" garbage.
So is the goal to predict someone’s future income? Or to inform someone of how much money they supposedly should be making based on their test results and the supposed correlation between test results and income? Surely the test results aren’t being used anywhere to actually determine people’s income.
The goal is to predict if, for example, someone is better suited to sweeping the floors vs working with complex systems. Both are useful and respectable jobs but you both want an individual who can actually do it, not someone who just thinks they can, and someone whose capabilities won't be wasted on too simple tasks. These tests are great tools to help you figure out future performances of said individuals, as well as their satisfaction on the job/task. A mismatch will cause impact both for the individual and the company/military unit/etc.
> The goal is to predict if, for example, someone is better suited to sweeping the floors vs working with complex systems.
That is a perversion of the purpose and origin of these tests, and a core reason why ICAR tries to replace IQ tests with a wider set of different logic puzzles without any established "aggregate score" metric for people to abuse.
The US Army requires a minimum AFQT percentile of 31 for enlistment which, based on standard IQ norms (mean = 100, SD = 15), maps to roughly an IQ of 85 (one standard deviation below mean).
I.e. if you have an IQ below 85 you can't even sweep up the floor for the army
And it’s because they found that using people below that threshold for _any purpose, including canon fodder_ has disastrously bad outcomes.
Around 50 million Americans fall below this threshold and are positively counterproductive for ANY military purpose, no matter how menial, no matter the shortage of recruits.
> counterproductive for ANY military purpose
Putin uses such people as cannon fodder, meat wave attacks
I mean, a quick look at the flynn effect would indicate that's complete fucking nonsense.
we won ww2 with an army a solid SD below today's 100.
We won it against a regime led by a certifiable nutcase who forced many of his smartest citizens to flee the country. Many of them ended up here.
Are you Russian?
Well the flynn effect is global so either the russians won ww2 with people an SD below today's mean IQ or the US military thinks that the russian army (that won ww2) circa '40 wasn't even fit for cannon fodder.
Flynn effect operates on the assumption that intelligence is a valid and measurable metric, while you previously argued it was not. You selectively do believe in when it affirms your bias? Nice one. You think you know more about this than experts who study it. I see. That's enough of you lol.
No, the Flynn Effect is an observation that raw scores on "IQ tests" have increased over (a far too short period to be attributable to evolution) time and/but IQ is defined as having a median value of 100 . It is not an assumption that intelligence is a measurable metric (redundant) it is an observation that the metric is a shit metric -- particularly over time. It is explicitly a point against "IQ" as a valid and measurable metric.
So now you're pivoting to saying Flynn Effect is just an observation of noise and human error with no meaning. You brought up the Flynn Effect, but you don't think it's meaningful to measure IQ? But you do think time series analysis on IQ is meaningful? You made no attempt at even a reasoned claim that Flynn Effect debunks validity of IQ. It's all patchwork emo stuff going on with u, and u agree grammur policing is a last resort of a broken mind. Not much respond to when you have to twist yourself in a pretzel and then trip over your own arguments on the pivot.
So you're arguing it ws low IQ vs low IQ? Okay... Do you have a point? I understand that you're upset for some reasno.
Do you have a counter-point? You think the army is stupid and you know better? What is your point?
Would you prefer your child have an IQ of 120 or 80? If you have a preference, then you're morally inconsistent and don't even realize it? That must be a frustrating condition to go through life with? At least try to have a nice day in spite of your limitations. It's not your fault, we're all equal in God's eyes.
Good job being incapable of synthesizing both of your perversions into a single post.
I am "arguing" (not arguing, simply stating basic facts) that neither Russia nor the USA were giving "IQ tests" to soldiers. Also neither Russia nor the USA are currently giving "IQ tests" to soldiers.
To Wit: I do not think the Army not accepting people who score too low on their entrance exam has anything to do with "IQ".
Also neither I nor my hypothetical child will be taking an "IQ test" (again not actually a defined thing) so having a preference is not a sensible idea.
If you had to pick 120 or 80, what would it be? You have no preference whether they can read or write? Notice you're cornered logically? Wouldn't you prefer to have a strong opinion based in reason?
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It is generally good to have an understanding of how the world actually functions.
> how the world actually functions
In a cruel and inhumane manner virtually devoid of all empathy and compassion for our planet, the life our planet supports, and for each other? I honestly wish I didn't understand how the world actually functions.
The ostrich approach is certainly an approach!
I'm afraid my head is too far up my own ass, but I should probably give the sand a try...
I just think they're neat.
It’s just a business, and it sells because institution leaders find it useful to have some convincing ideas to back up their positions, then the cottage industry it spawns defends it, and we all arrive in the world with established ideas like this in play. There are many little distortions like this in society that experience eventually puts the lie to. It’s the landscape to navigate, to play along with. A huge part of what makes a strong society is how many of us know what the game is, who can also put on a good performance of it. Imagine being in an improv group and people keep calling out that it’s pretend.
Sorry, this test has too many users right now. Please try again later.
“Sorry, this test has too many users right now. Please try again later.”
A Cognitive test struggling under load is ironic/amusing.
"Sorry, this test has too many users right now. Please try again later."
Never have we seen a result so relatable to most users. =3
IQ scores perpetuate racism. True worth of a human being for a civilization is empathy and ability to cooperate. I wonder though if IQ has any impact on those
Pretty sure cognition is biological. I am of the opinion though various programs and college admissions accelerate a large portion of capable and able people to the top, they are not likely the best out of the entire population. I have frequently met (mostly young males) working in restaurants or supermarkets who would do exceedingly well if they had the right circumstances. Though personality (in terms of choosing to fight for an education) is important too: of those I offered to sit down and chat with (because their media landscape is mostly bad social media/conspiracies), none have taken me up on the offer. Whether due to their personality or my approach I do not know.
https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/intelligence.shtml
https://kaiwenwang.com/writing/hypothetical-foldy-ears-as-an...
From your article, which claims that intelligence is reflected in how "foldy" your ears are:
>Imagine that you know that you aren’t so smart. It’s difficult to do well in class. Then you hear of this theory, go check your ears in the mirror, and find that your ears are not so foldy. Maybe they’d feel relief at understanding why things are the way they are. They could then endeavor to do better for their kids and the next generation armed with the knowledge of prenatal nutrition and its benefits
What kind of crackpottery is this?
>My personal opinion is that only people with these biologies are not Aristotle’s natural slaves, only able to live in the worlds of others.
This is the kind of fatalist intelligence eugenics that makes me recoil.
This is developmental biology: to recognize both inherent and natural limits but also to recognize the ability of humans to adaptively improve their surroundings for the better.
To say that everyone has the same level of skill and talent is harmful for people can clearly see their own ability yet cannot meet the expectations of society. If we believe everyone is the same, then it puts the culpability onto the individual to do well rather than society and government.
Aristotle reflected that king does not beget king, nor does slave beget slave. He thought some to be worthy and capable despite their lowly position in society. It comes from the book Politics.
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You might not want to give them your personal data. That's run by the same Cambridge that housed the Facebook scraping mechanism that was used by Cambridge Analytica to create personality profiles that got Trump elected in 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Kogan_(scientist)
No, Cambridge Analytica and University of Cambridge are not the same Cambridge. Neither is Cambridge Chip Shop or the dozens of other businesses associated with Aleksandr Kogan with Cambridge in their name. It's a city in England.
University of Cambridge wasn't exactly completely clean in this, though, given Aleksandr Kogan was a member of the university at the time that he did this, though how much visibility the organisation had of what he was doing is not clear.