RE: Hello, STEEMIT: Let's Talk About IQ
I've never taken an IQ test
It is likely school gave me one. Yet I have not really taken them either. I have had some concerns with the IQ score most of my life. There was also a British documentary that found that it misses some truly gifted people. I believe in that documentary and experiment they actually ended up coming up with multiple types of IQ. I believe what they came up would be more accurate.
My concern with IQ is that so many of the things it does test you on are things you can be good or bad at with practice. My wife loves to do logic problems. She doesn't test and has no interest in joining Mensa or anything like that, but she loves doing their little brain teaser programs.
She does things like that so often that she internally recognizes the mechanisms and can rip through those quickly. You could call it experiential knowledge.
I've seen many IQ tests and there are a lot of questions that are experiential in my opinion. Meaning how much experience you have dealing with those types of problems will influence how effective you can be at them.
To take your RPG mention and extend it. It is more like IQ is closer to a Class with levels than it is an actual stat/attribute. We all have some levels in that class naturally, but due to the presence of experiential questions people can actually be higher level in it without it being due to some physical/mental stat or attribute.
As with classes in an RPG they are really good at what they do, but they intentionally always have things they cannot do. I find this describes IQ fairly well.
I was in a state competition (Knowledge Bowl) in 1989 (Senior year of H.S.) where they said the average IQ in the room was 120, but I am fairly certain they just made that up.
The things about Knowledge Bowl is it was primarily jeopardy like rote memorization, and quick math skills. On my team I was the one that tended to know the weird not normal things and I'd answer those quickly. There were other team members that way faster in almost every other regard.
Yet I also got to see and work closely with people that'd be considered super high IQ. It was interesting the things they couldn't see. Yet, this was supposedly true of people like Einstein too. Brilliant at some things most people are not as gifted at, and dumb as a rock in other areas.
I think IQ may be giving some fringe ideas, yet I think it has a lot of holes and that some truly gifted people are overlooked when people rely on IQ.
Hi @dwinblood!
My answer is very similar to yours, seen from a different angle! Read here: https://steemit.com/science/@lennstar/why-iq-tests-suck-at-testing
This relates to the point I was making about height. You can train your brain to be as good as it can be, yes, but there's no evidence that shows that you can be trained beyond your natural threshold. Basketball players are tall, for example, but if you're short, putting you on the basketball team isn't going to make you any taller.
Your wife likely just has a high IQ, and those types of problems are interesting to her because they exercise parts of her mind that aren't normally stimulated in everyday life.
This is true. For instance, I mentioned that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest ethnic IQ, and while this is true, it is because they score amazingly well in linguistic and memory, but only average in geo-spacial, so the mean comes out at around 115. Whereas East Asians score much, much higher in geo-spacial than Ashkenazi, but their mean IQ comes out around 105-110. I don't believe that this is evidence against the relevance of IQ scores, however.
Hmm... Have you ever spent a lot of time around low IQ people? It seems like your experience is with incredibly bright folks like yourself, and so you might possibly be operating from a biased position here. I'm not using this as a pejorative, btw.
Thanks for this extensive comment!!
Hard to say. I go out of my way to try to uplift people too, and thus be uplifted myself. Environment, culture, and opportunity can determine such things as well.
If I can recall what that documentary was I was talking about I'll let you know as it was very interesting, and I tend to agree with their findings. They didn't say IQ didn't work. They basically came to the conclusion that there are actually several types of IQ and the tests we use miss some of the others.
The documentary took people that were considered exceptionally gifted in various DIFFERENT fields and applied the IQ test to them and then ran some reality TV style tests against them.
Ahh I believe the documentary was called "Battle of the Brains"
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/battle-brains/
Oh cool! I'll check that out when I have the time. Thanks :D
There are people who have no "left" or "right" word, instead they only have North, South etc.
Means they have to ALWAYS know where which direction is. (Yes, they say "The door is in the northern wall and the sink at the eastern side of the southern room)
Would be interesting how they differ on those subtests.
Which cultures and languages are those?
I'm curious also.
Sorry, I cannot remember. Both were desert tribes. The dice example I have seen in a TV docu about IQ tests several years ago (but it stuck ^^) and the language example in a text a year ago, so I can't remember it.