Debating what intelligence is, is such a circle-jerk.
The term is so broad, that it encompasses aspects like motivation, memory retention capacity, memory recall rates, differentiates between verbal, spacial and emotional intelligence, and occasionally veers into scientific racism.
It's a fucking shit show. The comment sections of posts about intelligence are generally toxic because people end up talking past each other.
If debating intelligence is waste of time, imagine what a "shit show" trying to measure it must be. This is the central point: measuring intelligence is just as foolish as measuring beauty or charm.
The problem is that this isn't just a debate on the internet. Your IQ score can still literally be the difference between life and death in the US legal system. So it's pretty important to let people know it's pseudoscience from eugenicists that, by the way, doesn't work!
IQ tests are interesting, because they're mainly a test of pattern recognition.
However, knowing how the patterns are formed, can easily net you +10 points on an IQ test.
It's a shit way to determine "intelligence".
Some people might score highly, but are socially inept and unmotivated, meaning they have a lot of raw power, without having the mental capability to channel it productively, which is pretty fucking stupid.
Then you get people like Musk and Trump, who are both highly motivated people, despite being dumb as rocks. Yet, our geniuses can't figure out how to mitigate their stupidity.
"Occasionally" seems rather generous
Yeah, there are a lot of low IQ dickhead out there, must be genetic or something.
I got a clinical assesment and it took 12 hours spread over 12 weeks. Indeed contained verbal and visual memory tests, verbal and visual ability to fantasize, pattern recognition, logic, social ability, etc
I'm just going to point out the irony of using this meme format to make that point.
It just makes it that more delicious.
People who boast about their IQ are losers ~Stephen Hawking
Of course Thickie Hawking would say that ~Albert Einstein
he really said that https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/magazine/the-science-of-secondguessing.html
The purpose of IQ is to measure some sort of “g factor” which is a model of “general intelligence.” This was based on the idea that people who tend to do good at some kinds of tests tend to also be good at other kinds of tests.
The IQ test is “reliable” - ie its consistent and you’ll usually get the same results +/- an acceptable amount every time. However, there are lots of concerns about its “validity” - whether it measures what it purports to measure - ie, the “g factor.”
Of note is the “Flynn effect” - that performance on the test in the general population has been improving over time, so the test has to be renormalized. (IQ is a “normalized” test - so about 68% of the population needs to be within 1 standard deviation of the mean. I think standard deviation is about 15 - so 68% of people are going to score between 85 and 115.)
The question then would be - are people getting “smarter” or is it just that people are more adapted to taking tests on pattern recognition and mathematics/logical thinking? How would that measure the intelligence of a tribal person who has not seen abstracted geometrical shapes?
You can bring in alternative models of intelligence - like Gardner’s multiple intelligence - but then that doesn’t really have much of the psychometrics behind it.
(In general, I think a huge issue in psych research is a lack of critically examining the validity of psychometric instruments. It seems we often stop at being reliable.)
Isn't intelligence somewhat like the word "good" - as in, someone must be "good at" something, rather than inherently. Are cars "good"? (sometimes but not always...) Are cats? Are people? e.g. regarding the latter, there are many tasks for which a computing device is much better than most people - e.g. sorting a list of >1000000 elements, within one second (and then doing that task, without pausing or slowing down or error, in perpetuity). So the term "good" is only definable given a known fitness landscape.
Which then becomes somewhat naive to try to extrapolate beyond that - bc then someone good at sports could be said to be "intelligent" (at performing their particular sport?), or someone with high emotional flexibility at adaptive to new circumstances, etc. Ironically enough, someone with good accounting skills (always thinking within the box, that being the whole point for them) would likely make a horrible scientist (who needs to think OUTSIDE of the box), and potentially though not guaranteed vice versa.
So intelligence must be reflective of.... SOMETHING, blah blah hand waving meaning things that "I" am good at, basically. I know right, I have all the best-er-est words, I am such a jenius, and so on.
How would that measure the intelligence of a tribal person who has not seen abstracted geometrical shapes?
So yeah, they would be less "intelligent" at performing those tasks that are measured by the test. Corollary: people on average may legitimately have gotten more intelligent over time, depending on availability of schooling. Thus necessitating adjustment of the measurement system, if the real goal was not to measure "intelligence" and rather to provide some kind of separation among people based solely on that singular metric (which itself should be questioned, if the people doing so are wise rather than merely intelligent:-).
The things I think the standard IQ test measures are more about a combination of an ability to quickly visually process information, and some elements of mathematics/logical thinking. I’ve scored +1.3~2.0 z score at various points in my life, and I think that the elements are that I can read extremely quickly and perceive math problems very quickly.
I’ve frequently worked with students who understand math and patterns very well, they just struggle with some element of the visual processing. They transpose numbers and letters when they see them, they switch up letters in geometrical figures, they get so overwhelmed with the stress of reading under eye or the clock that the words mix up and they miss the meaning.
They have the low “IQ” has measured. But they are capable of understanding the concepts - just not conveying them in the way that a standardized instrument can (or even should?) measure.
Ie; I don’t think it’s that great a measure beyond the sub 80 - which is a meaningful deficit and is acknowledged in the process of diagnosing for developmental delays/impairment. (It also can entirely be overcome in some cases with good support - like istfg as someone who has been paid to do this kind of thing the difference is that poor/middle class kids don’t get help)
The purpose of a test is what it tests.
Ok, you've officially taken the propaganda phrases too far, because this one doesn't even make sense. The purpose of an algebra test is ability to do algebra? The purpose of an intelligence test is pattern recognition, working memory, and some other things? Huh?
The right thing to say would be "The purpose of a test is what it does", in keeping with the phrase you modified this from, but that's arguably false too. The purpose of a test is what it was designed to do, and what it does is what it actually does.
You could say that the purpose of our continued usage of a test is to encourage what it actually does, regardless of what it was designed to do; which is what I believe you're trying to say, and I would agree with that statement. But I object to the thoughtless propagation of dumb phrases like the one you used.
Intelligence is the Intel core i3 4th gen
How it called this meme format? I want see more of this examples
Thank you!
Anyone who hasn't listened to the podcast "My Year in Mensa" by Jamie Loftus, do yourself a favor.
Its one of my favorite podcasts ever.
I don't get it? I'm still in the middle of the graph.
The average person (and to be fair, most psychologists) thinks of intelligence as the innate, fundamental characteristic of a person to think across all cognitive areas. However, this concept is not easily falsifiable and therefore arguably exists outside the realm of science.
For example, say I wanted to come up with a concept called "sportsness" which is the ability to be good at sports. I could test a bunch of people in a battery of sports-related tasks, and I'd probably get a nice bell curve where some people have high sportsness across all tasks and others have low sportsness across all tasks.
But does that prove the existence of sportsness? Or did I just measure a spurious correlation caused by the fact that some people are just more likely to be playing many different sports than others, or that some body types may lead to being better at sports related tasks, or some people are just better at handling the pressure of athletic performance tests, or some combination thereof? Of course most would say the latter, but then maybe some would defend the concept of sportsness by saying sportsness is just an emergent property of those things or something like that. But then is sportsness useful as a concept at all? You get the idea.
That's why scientists ( I assume they're supposed to be the right hand side) claiming to measure "intelligence" should pick a more specific term for what they're measuring.
If they use the word "intelligence" I'd be extremely suspicious about why they've chosen that word. I would assume they have a decent understanding of how the word is likely be interpreted by the other 97.5%, if not they need to get out and do some fieldwork.
That's a great example.
I like the comparison to measuring physical attributes, but I think a better analogy for IQ testing would be "trying to measure athleticism by trying to measure who's best at playing basketball."
Defining "athleticism" itself is hard. It might include reaction time, coordination, strength, speed, flexibility, etc. There are some naturally occurring differences in those attributes, but to a degree they are also changeable. Any bottom-line, all-in measure is going to include some arbitrary decisions about the relative value of each attribute.
Trying to measure athleticism by who's best at basketball adds another layer of problems. Basketball (analogous to test taking, cultural context, etc.) involves skills that are separate from whatever you're calling athleticism. It's also a game where a big factor in success -- height -- is also probably something a lot of people would consider separate from athleticism.
The left side is the position that definitions of intelligence are all arbitrary, and that psychologists just make up tests and call what it measures "intelligence."
The middle is the position that there is a real thing that can be called "intelligence," which can be defined in different (meaningful) ways, and that intelligence tests are objective ways to measure it.
The right side is the position that intelligence is probably still real and can probably still be defined in different (meaningful) ways, but that we can never directly measure intelligence and instead observe it indirectly through observable indicators like someone's performance on an intelligence test. This means that any practical statement about intelligence, while probably real and definable, are contingent on the specific test used to measure it.
Left side is saying that intelligence is an objective thing that can be measured with the test.
Right side is saying the test is the objective thing that defines what we think of as intelligence. "If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree..."
Tying intelligence to IQ seems like the left side to me. I'm still in the middle 🤔
Edit: or maybe the left
I recently had a psychological assessment that led to ASD and ADHD diagnoses. Part of it was intelligence testing and it led me to have some additional context I didn't have before. I always knew I was "smart" - at the very least I had the numerical data of always doing really well in school. As an adult I continued to have people tell me I was really smart, and my response was usually (internally) like "Sure, Jan" or "K" like, maybe in some ways but it seemed like kind of a pointless thing to think about. I've never felt any amount of superiority about being smart - my brain is what it is and I didn't really do anything to earn it so it seems weird to feel any certain way about it.
In my assessment, there were 6 intelligence factors that were measured. In 4 of them, I scored 95-98th percentile, one around 80th, but the last one I scored exactly average. That last one was processing speed. According to my assessor, it's more or less true that a brain wants to be similar levels across the board. Otherwise you basically have perceived bottlenecks in your processing. And I thought that was really interesting and resonated, because my brain can do some really cool things, but yeah it always feels like when it comes to actually articulating and thinking in certain ways, I basically have to slam the brakes. It was helpful to explain certain things, and apparently having a discrepancy with processing speed can be caused by unmedicated ADHD. I'm still unmedicated but hopefully that will change soon.
No idea what I'm trying to say about this. Maybe I just want to shout out to the void lol. But the meme definitely resonates. I guess I have some nuance in that, I agree with what I read to be the intent of the meme, that IQ is just a measurement that doesn't mean anything in a lot of ways. But this lense was new to me - that there are several axis of intelligence, and it's more typical that people are similar across all axes (whether low, high, or average), and spikiness on these axis can lead to dysregulation and other issues.
