Flynn’s IQ

http://www.bryanappleyard.com/flynns-iq/

by tortilla • 14 years ago

197 133 14 years ago

tokenadult2• 14 years ago

Links to information about the book under review, Are We Getting Smarter?: Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century by James R. Flynn:

http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item6835805/?site...

http://www.amazon.com/Are-We-Getting-Smarter-Twenty-First/dp...

(The three expert reviewers shown on Amazon are all very impressive researchers on human intelligence in their own right, so their joint endorsement of Flynn's book carries a lot of weight for people like me who follow the research.)

Here is what Arthur Jensen said about Flynn back in the 1980s: "Now and then I am asked . . . who, in my opinion, are the most respectable critics of my position on the race-IQ issue? The name James R. Flynn is by far the first that comes to mind." Modgil, Sohan & Modgil, Celia (Eds.) (1987) Arthur Jensen: Concensus and Controversy New York: Falmer.

AFTER EDIT: Replying to another top-level comment:

I don't understand how anyone could not have an emotional response being told 'your IQ is x'.

People have emotional responses to most statements about themselves that they think are overall evaluations. Some of those emotional responses are more warranted than others. Devote some reading time to the best literature on IQ testing (besides the book under review in this thread, that would include Mackintosh's second edition textbook IQ and Human Intelligence

http://www.amazon.com/IQ-Human-Intelligence-Nicholas-Mackint...

and the Sternberg-Kaufman Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence,

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Handbook-Intelligence-Handbo...

both recently published). Any of these books will help readers understand that IQ tests are samples of learned behavior and are not exhaustive reports on an individual's profile of developed abilities.

AFTER ANOTHER EDIT:

Discussion of heritability of IQ, a reliable indicator of how much discussants read the current scientific literature on the subject, has ensued in some other subthreads here. Heritability of IQ has nothing whatever to do with malleability (or, if you prefer this terminology, controllability) of human intelligence. That point has been made by the leading researchers on human behaviorial genetics in their recent articles that I frequently post in comments here on HN. It is a very common conceptual blunder, which should be corrected in any well edited genetics textbook, to confuse broad heritability estimates with statements about how malleable human traits are. The two concepts actually have no relationship at all. Highly heritable traits can be very malleable, and the other way around.

Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

is an interesting paper that includes the statement "Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."

Another interesting paper,

Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

admits the disappointment of behavioral genetics researchers.

"But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. Once the twin registries have been assembled, it’s easy and fun, like having a genoscope you can point at one trait after another to take a reading of how genetic things are. Height? Very genetic. Intelligence? Pretty genetic. Schizophrenia? That looks pretty genetic too. Personality? Yep, that too. And over multiple studies and traits the heritabilities go up and down, providing the basis for nearly infinite Talmudic revisions of the grand theories of the heritability of things, perfect grist for the wheels of social science.

"Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn’t an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical. With a moment’s thought you can see that the answer to the question of how much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place."

The review article "The neuroscience of human intelligence differences" by Deary and Johnson and Penke (2010) relates specifically to human intelligence:

http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neur...

"At this point, it seems unlikely that single genetic loci have major effects on normal-range intelligence. For example, a modestly sized genome-wide study of the general intelligence factor derived from ten separate test scores in the cAnTAB cognitive test battery did not find any important genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms or copy number variants, and did not replicate genetic variants that had previously been associated with cognitive ability[note 48]."

The review article Johnson, W. (2010). Understanding the Genetics of Intelligence: Can Height Help? Can Corn Oil?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(3), 177-182

http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/...

looks at some famous genetic experiments to show how little is explained by gene frequencies even in thoroughly studied populations defined by artificial selection.

"Together, however, the developmental natures of GCA and height, the likely influences of gene–environment correlations and interactions on their developmental processes, and the potential for genetic background and environmental circumstances to release previously unexpressed genetic variation suggest that very different combinations of genes may produce identical IQs or heights or levels of any other psychological trait. And the same genes may produce very different IQs and heights against different genetic backgrounds and in different environmental circumstances."

nostrademons5• 14 years ago

"did not find any important genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms or copy number variants, and did not replicate genetic variants that had previously been associated with cognitive ability"

It's worth making another point here - just because there is no single gene for a trait does not make in unheritable, and just because a trait is genetic does not mean there is a single gene for it.

Eye color, for example, is clearly a genetic trait, but may be controlled by as many as 16 different genes. Race is also genetic, but really is shorthand for variation in hundreds, maybe thousands of genes.

It's well-established that intelligence is polygenic. That doesn't mean it's not genetic - if everybody had the same genes, ~80% of the variation in intelligence would be eliminated. It also doesn't mean that there's a single genetic switch we can throw to design a master race of human geniuses. It means exactly what it says: that there are some combination of genes that interact together to produce ~70-90% of the variance in the measured quantity that we label "intelligence".

eevilspock• 14 years ago

"Race is also genetic, but really is shorthand for variation in hundreds, maybe thousands of genes."

There's a subtlety in your statement that I think will be lost on too many people, even more so given the juxtaposition with the statement about eye color. So at the risk of sounding pedantic...

Race is not a trait like eye color. Variations in the human gene pool are not evenly distributed geographically or across ethnic groups for a number of historical reasons. Many of these genes manifest in our physical appearance. But there is no countable number of races. Dividing humanity into 3, 4, 5 or even a hundred races is totally artificial. All you have to do is walk from Europe to SE Asia, or Europe to Africa via the middle east and you will see a gradual change, a gradient for each of the observed physical differences.

So description of "race" as a "shorthand" is spot on. Sadly it is a poor shorthand because most everyone conceive of race as discrete types of humans.

Sigh.

joe_the_user• 14 years ago

Indeed, it would seem that if human genetics aren't also changing at a lightning rate, the alternative explanation for the Flynn Effect would have to be that human beings are learning the particular skills called-for to take IQ tests "at a lightning rate".

Does that mean people are learning more skills in general? I don't think so. In fact, it doesn't seem like people are learning the skills on other standardized tests more quickly. What is it about IQ tests that allows scores to increase like this?

marquis4• 14 years ago

Am I the only one who refuses to take an IQ test? I hate being tested - especially with a time limit, I rarely play games (chess and logic puzzles being the exception) but above all I don't understand how anyone could not have an emotional response being told 'your IQ is x'.

sp3322• 14 years ago

Did you have an emotional response when you learned that you could only hold "7, plus or minus 2" things in your short-term working memory? Or when you found out what your adult height was going to be for the rest of your life?

marquis4• 14 years ago

>Did you have an emotional response when you learned that you could only hold "7, plus or minus 2" things in your short-term working memory?

Well, no - because I could use tools to extend that. And it's not about insecurity, as I'm quite comfortable with myself and my brain. I just don't see it as being a valuable reference. However, I know if I had a number I'd start comparison-shopping and I might feel either elated (if high) or depressed (if low). Is anyone here, if you have had an IQ test, honestly prepared to say that you didn't or wouldn't be curious about what that meant and that it wouldn't affect how you viewed yourself?

I just don't need to know. I guess that for me, as long as there isn't a 'goal' or a 'fence', the sky's the limit.

andrewflnr2• 14 years ago

The 7 plus or minus two thing is universal. Adult height non-universal, but less emotionally sensitive. Even so, it's easy to be sensitive about one's height.

IQ is a comparison between you and everyone else, on a topic which is close to the core of our being, especially for the kind of people on this forum.

graeme2• 14 years ago

Does anyone have a good source or summary on this "7, plus or minus 2" thing? I teach the LSAT, and have noticed it empirically when students try to solve the Logic Games section.

I've love to know more about the research backing this up. I googled, of course, but I'm sure there must be a good discussion of this that I've missed.

ghshephard4• 14 years ago

I have a very emotional response each morning, when, depending on the quality/duration of sleep I had the night before, and whether I had a late night snack, I'm able to memorize the 10 digit (Yes, 10) passcode for whatever conference call I have to dial into. I know it's going to be a good day when (about 10-20% of the time) - I can nail it in one try. Not so much when it takes me a round trip to the calendar entry. Particularly when the conference service times out.

vectorbunny• 14 years ago

I was tested once, in high school, for the so-called 'gifted' program. We were not supposed to be shown our scores, but I did see mine. No emotional response. It told me what I was already knew... that I was good at taking standardized tests. Real problem solving skills came later, and were largely a product of working with people who were experienced, patient, and generous.

dohko2• 14 years ago

No, I refuse to take an IQ test as well. Not because I would feel afraid to have an IQ score associated with me. Rather because I think that the concept of an IQ score is rather silly and I question our overall ability to measure it via a standardized test.

First, Intelligence (as probably this article says) is an ever evolving concept and its multidimensional. Accurately measuring it seems probably impossible, the least really hard. The way we attempt to measure it, is via standardized tests - but those don't really prove much because instead of really measuring what they should measure, they usually end up measuring "test-taking" abilities.

Just think about Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci for that matter. Einsten did terrible in school and would have probably done terrible on an IQ tests. Leonardo da Vinci (arguably the greatest genius of all history) was rather slow in problem solving, but increadibly effective. He would have probably done terrible on a timed standardized test.

yaakov343• 14 years ago

Please don't spread legends. Einstein excelled in school, and his grades were fine (his only weak subject was French, which he apparently had little interest in). See http://www.albert-einstein.org/article_handicap.html .

theorique2• 14 years ago

It's a sign of a high EQ to have a neutral response to being told 'your IQ is x'. It's actually just another part of the battery of psychological tests.

DanBC• 14 years ago

I've never heard anyone claim to have an IQ less than 125.

EvanKelly• 14 years ago

My mom is a children's psychologist who used to administer certain tests. I know I was tested as a child, due to requirements of the school I went to, but my mom didn't look at the results and never showed them to me.

She was worried that it could affect the way she treated me and my success (or lack of success) in school if she had some expectations based on a single number.

bithive1233• 14 years ago

Are you saying it's rational to avoid things that might cause an emotional response? Should I not have attempted Stripe's CTF challenge since, as a web developer, it would have been demoralizing to fail?

marquis4• 14 years ago

That's not the same thing: you're not given a time-limited test that has specific answers. A challenge means solving problems in creative ways: that kind of test is fascinating and in no way demoralizing unless you haven't learnt that even failure can be useful in it itself for the fact of trying.

jessedhillon• 14 years ago

The IQ test is, to many people, an evaluation of themselves and their capabilities. It may even be received as an assessment of one's limits.

If you think that the Stripe CTF challenge has the potential to evaluate and define you as an individual, then perhaps you should either think twice about it, or work really hard. For most entrants, and I guess probably you too, it's a harmless and fun challenge with very few implications for your core identity.

EdiX2• 14 years ago

I don't refuse to take them but midway through I always start thinking about the philosophical implications Wittgenstein rule following paradox, computational learning theory and solvable games.

I also wonder if I would have a higher IQ (or would that be an IQ that appears higher?) were I not to think those thoughts (and would I be stupid for thinking them in that case?)

EdiX2• 14 years ago

And what if I'm just distracting myself thinking about irrelevant philosophical problems because I'm too stupid for the test?

Tycho• 14 years ago

I also refuse. I worry that if I had a high score I'd be a douche about or if I had a low score I'd resign myself to lower goals.

mistermann• 14 years ago

> I don't understand how anyone could not have an emotional response being told 'your IQ is x'.

This is a wild guess: You're probably ~young, with high aspirations for yourself, you don't think people should ever be prejudged. You have great promise and show all the signs of competence, but you haven't actually achieved anything particularly noteworthy, yet.

I base this hypothesis on the theory that once you achieve certain things, and you have confidence in yourself, you won't give two shits about what some IQ test says. In fact, if it scores low, if you are genuinely competent, you would think "wow, now that's an interesting development, let's investigate" rather then feeling that you've been somehow slighted.

kevinpet• 14 years ago

I have no idea what is the author of the articles opinion, and what is from the book being reviewed. I'm not even sure what the title of the book being reviewed is.

agscala• 14 years ago

I'm glad I wasn't the only one completely confused. I have no idea what he was trying to say, I can't imagine what his book is like.

ilaksh• 14 years ago

So the vast majority of people misunderstand intelligence, at least as measured by IQ tests, as being a limiting factor for performance and potential, while it is actually just a measurement of current abilities.

> the penultimate chapter is a list of 14 examples in which science has failed because of social blindness.

This carries through more broadly and generally to the application of many incorrect fundamental assumptions to the design of our institutions, which consistently fail because of the resulting flawed structures.

bearmf4• 14 years ago

It is a limiting factor for many tasks, even such "simple" tasks as basic algebra and calculus. A lot of people fail at math simply because they do not have enough brainpower.

DiabloD3• 14 years ago

No, they fail at math because they have never learned how to use their brainpower effectively. The difference between geniuses and everyone else, from my experiences, are not any fundamental difference in their brain wiring, but that they learned how to better focus what brainpower they do have,

Its like the difference between a guy who gives 120% every day but his work, taken individually, is mediocre vs a guy who gives his 1% but his 1% is the Nobel prize winning work of his field... the guy who gives his 120% day in and day out is a smarter man.

Ironically, an IQ test will not say much about either of them. The 120% guy might score lower than the 1% man by 10 or 15 points, but the 120% guy, if he were, say, a researcher or inventor, would be spending day in and day out finding thousands of ways that don't work just so he can find one that does. The 120% man learned how to focus the skills he does have and learned how to apply them well; of the two, I'd hire him over the 1% man, Nobel or not.

The few super geniuses that history remembers (such as Tesla) had both: 120% work ethic combined with a brilliant mind. These people are rare, but every single person no matter their racial or religious background has the ability to become that kind of person to.... they just never learn how to.

notb2• 14 years ago

My impression is that IQ seems to be a measurement of a person's capacity to think abstractly, which is something you learn through the world around you. Perhaps those who fail at math have simply never experienced anything that requires abstract thought. Therefore, it seems like there is a skill that even basic arithmetic is dependent upon, basic abstractions. I can see how an otherwise able person would be hopeless at math if they never learned abstract thought.

eru5• 14 years ago

If you spend lots of brainpower on basic algebra and calculus, you are doing it wrong. Learn the tricks (i.e. theory), and it'll be so easy that even a computer can do it.

Claudus2• 14 years ago

The Flynn effect tends to be used to support the feeling that intelligence isn't something you're born with.

People who think that intelligence is innate will refer to the "g factor". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_%28psychometrics%29

The racist (technically speaking) and controversial Jean Rushton believes that "gains in IQ over time (the Lynn-Flynn effect) are unrelated to g".

What's really going on with discussions like this is that humanity seems to have come to the conclusion that "smarter is better". Intelligence almost certainly exists, but is quite difficult to quantify exactly, and is further complicated by the fact that people resent others who are "better" than them. Given that there is a genetic component to intelligence to a certain degree, race becomes a factor and leads to a line of inductive reasoning that makes people uncomfortable:

  1) Smarter is better
  2) Intelligence is genetic
  3) Race determines genetics
  4) One race is better than another
  5) Hitler was right (or other outrageous conclusion)

As far as I can tell when you see terms like "g factor", "Flynn effect", "multiple intelligences", "crystallized intelligence", "fluid intelligence", "cultural fair IQ tests", "The bell curve"... people are really secretly arguing about one race or sex being smarter than the other, or not.

bearmf4• 14 years ago

Points 1-2 are valid, though intelligence is not entirely genetic.

Your points 3-5 are completely wrong. Genetics determines race, not the other way around. Points 4 and 5 are just meaningless "racist" phrases, not statements in a line of reasoning.

ajross8• 14 years ago

It may be semantics, but genetics certainly does not determine "race" alone. If it did, "african american" and "hispanic" wouldn't exist as "races". The idea of classifying people like that doesn't work genetically. First, people have been interbreeding like rabbits throughout history; there are no "pure" stocks anywhere. And more importantly, the amount of genetic variation between any two individuals from the same "race" is much higher than it is, statistically, between the aggregate genetic profiles of distinct "races".

Basically, "race" is a cultural distinction. It's a label we apply as a proxy for other stuff (usually cultural). Scientists (well, except anthropologists studying that cultural stuff) don't use it, and for good reason.

ajross8• 14 years ago

The idea of a measurable "G factor" isn't incompatible with Flynn's work. He simply argues that the value of G is determined by social context and background. So to go straight for the hotbutton interpretation: arguments of the form "Blacks are less intelligent than whites due to genetic factors, as measured by IQ scores" is unsupportable simply because those same whites are smarter than their own grandparents (i.e. the same gene pool) were at the same age, and as measured by the same tests. That is, there is clear proof that non-genetic factors can cause that effect, so absent specific evidence arguments for "racial intelligence" must be dropped via Occam's razor.

bearmf4• 14 years ago

And still IQ is very good at predicting various life outcomes: probabliity of being arrested, income, number of children.

Group differences in IQ do exist, and Flynn effect does not make them go away. Flynn effect increases scores across the board, it does not equalize different groups.

Black people in US have lower average IQ than white people do, Asian people have higher average IQ. The reasons for this are many, but genetics certainly comes into play: IQ is heritable.

Trying to explain away group differences by "culture" is mostly bad science - trying to make the facts fir your desired conclusions.

paranoiacblack4• 14 years ago

No, I agree with this. There was obviously nothing wrong eugenics movement 100 years ago. And obviously minorities get arrested more, have lower income, and a lot of children because of their extremely low IQ as opposed other social forces.

See the difference is you are talking out of your ass, whereas Flynn has a book filled with verifiable statistics.

jeremyjh• 14 years ago

And yet its clear you did not read the article.

Steko3• 14 years ago

Key takeaway from the article:

Flynn’s interpretation overturns one of the most dangerous myths of IQ research — that blacks have been shown to be fundamentally less intelligent than whites. With what seems to me to be a series of cast-iron statistical analyses, he shows that this has, in fact, never been proved ... What the evidence actually shows is that racial differences, once all external factors are removed (primarily the social and cultural context of the testees), seem to be almost undetectably small.

esrauch3• 14 years ago

I personally don't believe there to be real genetic differences in this context, but that conclusion doesn't seem to preclude there being differences in social and cultural predispositions for different races, then there would still be a direct causal relationship between race and intelligence.

Daniel_Newby• 14 years ago

The twin adoption studies disprove this. Adult twins resemble each other more than anyone else, and resemble their adoptive families no more than they resemble families selected at random.

I have not read Flynn's book yet, but he will have to do something amazing to explain away the twin adoption studies.

bearmf4• 14 years ago

As I understand the book is not out yet, so I still have to see these "cast-iron" analyses. Surely it would be interesting to have a look.

The problem that I see here is that by removing all social and cultural context we will lose some genetic information as well. It is very hard to measure influence of genetics on social or cultural outcomes, but it definitely does exist.

Dylan168076• 14 years ago

These people aren’t any less intelligent than the researcher — their minds just work differently. They focus on the practicalities they know rather than hypothetical possibilities.

That's going to need some explanation. First off, I can see how the question itself is abstract, about a place they have never been, but "no camels" sounds extremely concrete to me. Second, how is ignoring information anything other than a lapse in intelligent thought?

paranoiacblack4• 14 years ago

You're missing the point. If you ask someone a question that expects them to think in a way foreign to them, it does not say anything about their intelligence if they have difficulty approaching it.

Think of the old "analytical" thinking questions companies used to give out like "how many golf balls can you fit in a bus", "how many high schools are there in America", etc.

Now, I'm not the smartest person but my peers and bosses consider me to be highly intelligent. When I first heard these questions, I was completely stumped. I mean, I've never really taken public transportation and I don't know really have a good idea of how many students go to a typical high school or even how large America is, so how was I supposed to know? However, the population cutoffs for high schools and the size of buses and golf balls are very concrete and well known. Does this show a lapse in my intelligence?

Dylan168076• 14 years ago

The examples you gave only have issues in not knowing the sizes of things. They have nothing to do with thinking in 'foreign ways'. If I show someone a golf ball and ask how many fit into a wagon I expect them to at least say "a lot". If they have math skills then I expect an order-of-magnitude estimate.

If you don't know the sizes, then the test-maker has failed you. If you know the sizes and still can't answer, then yes it is a lapse in intelligence.

Can you give me an example of a problematic question that isn't caused by using unfamiliar nouns?

azakai• 14 years ago

>> These people aren’t any less intelligent than the researcher — their minds just work differently. They focus on the practicalities they know rather than hypothetical possibilities.

> That's going to need some explanation. First off, I can see how the question itself is abstract, about a place they have never been, but "no camels" sounds extremely concrete to me. Second, how is ignoring information anything other than a lapse in intelligent thought?

The underlying point is valid, but it was not explained well in the article.

The point is that "extremely concrete" is always relative to language. For example, in the bible, "40 years" meant something like "a long long time", not 40 literal years. Likewise, a "foot" today does not mean a concrete human foot (although it originated as a particular one). A more annoying example today is that "literally" no longer means "literally" ("I literally died when ...").

To be specific about this example, it is possible that saying "There are no camels in Germany; how many camels are there in city X?" is interpreted in different ways in different languages and cultures. Perhaps "there are no camels" means "camels do not naturally live in that area", but there could be camels brought there artificially, say to be in a zoo. And especially when asking "how many camels are there in city X?", the implication is that specific details about city X matter, for example if it has a zoo or not. The person being asked might try to guess if it has a zoo based on the city size etc.

Also worth noting that the question is of the form of a classic logic puzzle. That sort of thing is part of the Western cultural tradition since ancient Greece. But other cultures have other traditions.

See also the philosopher Wittgenstein on "following a rule". No sentence in any language is ever so concrete that it cannot be interpreted in many ways.

Dylan168076• 14 years ago

Ah, I hadn't even thought of it being a phrasing that is hard to translate. Interesting idea.

Variance• 14 years ago

I definitely agree. While it may be entirely true that the Flynn effect can be explained without any difference in what is being defined here as intelligence, I don't want anyone to write with the preconceived conclusion that there must not be any difference in intelligence, which it sounds like is the case with the statement you quoted.

pixelcort• 14 years ago

OT: Just me, or does browser zoom not seem to increase font size for this page in Safari and Chrome?

peregrine• 14 years ago

Super annoying, I had to read it in Instapaper just to cope.

aaron695• 14 years ago

To not know the answer to "there are no camels in Germany so how many camels do they think there are in B, a specific German city? " is not a cultural difference, to think that other cultures are seriously that dumb is more a statement on ones self than anything else.

This is similar to statements engineers sometimes make that the Chinese are good copiers but can't innovate.

No, cultures are the same as everyone else. They have humour, art and like to tinker and have in jokes. If they don't publicly innovate it's more likely it's not economical in that environment yet.

The fact 'camels' was used has strong undertones to me, if this was an actually a study I'd be interested to know.

eru5• 14 years ago

> No, cultures are the same as everyone else. They have humour, art and like to tinker and have in jokes.

Oh, cultures share lots of features. But I've been in a few. Even countries as geographically close as Britain and Germany have quite a few differences.

Aloisius• 14 years ago

Wait, people take IQ tests seriously? Really?

I was tested twice when I was in second grade, the first time by a psychologist in a class setting and the second time one-on-one to verify the first. I tested quite high, but even then I knew I wasn't noticeably smarter than others; I just test particularly well.

Frankly, it cracks me up when someone refers to their IQ seriously or boasts about being in Mensa. Other than testing for mid-to-high level mental retardation, subjectively, IQ tests seem to be terrible at measuring actual brilliance.

ghshephard4• 14 years ago

I don't know about "IQ tests seem to be terrible at measuring actual brilliance." - Some of the components of IQ tests are fantastically accurate. I can't read maps, I can't put a monitor back in it's box. And I score very poorly on the pattern assessment components of IQ tests. I guess you might say I'm "mid-to-high level mentally retarded on pattern assessment."

Likewise, I have a friend who is world class _stellar_ at putting Monitors back in complicated styrofoam packing and into boxes (Seriously - his ability in this task is amazing) - and he tests off the chart on the pattern recognition component of IQ tests.

So - I can, based on the admittedly small anecdotal sample of n=2, suggest that there is strong predictive power of at least some elements of the IQ tests.

aik3• 14 years ago

I think the main point is that IQ measures some sort of current fluid intelligence. It doesn't measure other types of intelligence, and most importantly it doesn't measure potential. So the blanket concept of it defining someone's common-understanding-of-"intelligence" is flawed to the extent of it being a pointless or harmful measure in many of cases.

drpgq• 14 years ago

Why does it have to be about brilliance. The US armed forces is one of the bigger users of IQ tests and has plenty of data showing higher IQ scores leads to better performance.

aik3• 14 years ago

I think it would be fascinating to view the outliers (low IQ when measured=high performance) and investigate the reasons.

(My hypothesis:) Naturally what I would expect would be found is that IQ is just one measure that sometimes correlates in certain types of people, and that it completely fails and miscalculates actual intelligence and mis-predicts future performance in other types of people. And that it fails in a statistically significant number of cases. And that due to the behavior confirmation effect (self-fulfilling prophecy) it ends up true in more cases than it could.

Meaning IQ is an OK measure in many cases, but very flawed. I'm curious what will eventually take it's place as more useful.

TDL• 14 years ago

It is my understanding the DoD uses IQ test only for initial entry into the various services. I believe the threshold is 105 (although some military guys have said that at the peak of the Iraq & Afghan campaigns recruiters would let a few sub 105s in, quotas & bonuses.) I would be interested in a link to those studies (if you have them available.)

mynameishere• 14 years ago

It's pointless to judge an accomplished person, like a businessman or scientist, with an IQ test, because that misses the point. It's just a very quick (15 minute) way to categorize people efficiently.

So, if the army wants to determine who should be an officer candidate, or an NCO, or a radar operator, or a potato peeler, when they have 3 million men to process, it's incredibly efficient. If you are interviewing 10 candidates for a management position, an IQ test would make no sense.

adgar2• 14 years ago

> Frankly, it cracks me up when someone refers to their IQ seriously or boasts about being in Mensa. Other than testing for mid-to-high level mental retardation, subjectively, IQ tests seem to be terrible at measuring actual brilliance.

Frankly, it cracks me up that you're so confident in your opinion when you argue past a strawman and demonstrate incredible ignorance about IQ tests.

> I tested quite high, but even then I knew I wasn't noticeably smarter than others

Now we're onto something.

pud• 14 years ago

Unrelated to the content, when I use Command-plus to increase the font size on this blog (in Chrome, at least), the font doesn't grow.

Which means I can't read it, because my eyes suck.

Alex3917• 14 years ago

"contrary to widespread assumptions, no clear link between nutrition and IQ has been found."

Someone call up Paul Krugman and tell him that iodine deficiency doesn't actually cause mental retardation.

pmb• 14 years ago

Two wonderful companions to this article are "Thinking Intelligence is Innate Makes You Stupid" http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2007/12/03/thinking-intellige... and (especially) Cosma Shalizi's article on the malleability and heritability of IQ http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html

mistercow• 14 years ago

>For this to happen, evolution would have had to have accelerated to light speed.

What? No... no. There are plenty of ways that intelligence could have dramatically increased since the '30s without any evolutionary effects.

avatarlite• 14 years ago

Anyone interested in this topic should read the primary research papers.

The pattern of differences in IQ test answers between generations is not congruent with the pattern of differences between individual who do better and worse on average within generations -- at least according to the few studies which have looked at this question. For this reason, we can infer that the generational changes in IQ test scores are not changes in the same underlying factor that causes differences in performance within a generation. If we call the factor that causes within-generation differences in IQ test scores intelligence, then what differs between generations isn't intelligence. In other words, the Flynn effect is something other than what it might appear at first glance. It's still something of a mystery.

Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis can be used to demonstrate this, or you can just look at the correlation matrices.

Flynn’s IQ

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