What does IQ mean in the real world?

Note: I am not disagreeing with the OP though.

 

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But then the results are still wrong if a person takes multiple IQ tests.

The link does not indicate it is wrong AND google search does not suggest using 'each other'. I think it is acceptable to use it as a single word. Thou the spell checker is very good, that i must admit.

 

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OG, i am afraid to take one of these tests. What if my IQ turns out to be around 60?

 

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Only if they take fewer than five but closely spaced together.

Then you can't read.
Nowhere is it used as a single word in that link, and Google search only comes up with that single instance (i.e. where it is actually TWO words) - all other Google references are to two words, as the second and third references ALSO state.

 

IQ (and certain other standardized tests) turn out to be fairly good predictors of success in certain pursuits - things like college, specifically, that also feature similar emphasis on learning facts and concepts, taking tests, etc.

They are not so good at predicting other types of success, and so do not correlate with the intelligence that produces those types of success. An example would be emotional or social intelligence - plenty of high-IQ, summa-cum-laude types have real difficulties socializing or maintaining healthy relationships or raising functional children, etc.

Most reasonable people will tell you that the idea of measuring a feature as broad as "intelligence" on a one-dimensional scale is pretty ridiculous to begin with. It only works well if you you reduce "intelligence" to something like "scholastic aptitude."

 

IQ matters to the extent that the person isn't mentally retarded, but I agree that the persons work ethic and values play a bigger factor in his or her success than IQ alone.

 

100% agreed, like saying if you have black hair your more likely to be the CEO of a corp.

 

The question of IQ and race has always been a touchy subject. Many people will have no problem accepting that Jewish people (and those from China and Japan) have the highest average IQs in the world. The fact that sub-saharan africans have the lowest, on the other hand, is something that will have you branded a racist.

 

Many people think IQ test is rather pointless or just academic, I'm one of them.

 

Is this "pointless or just academic"?

The link I posted says that criminals with IQs lower than 70 have generally been exempted from the death penalty in America over the last eight years. Should this trend be reversed, since IQ is allegedly irrelevant?

 

there have also been many death sentences that have had very strong evidence that proved there innocence.. should judges and jurys have higher IQ then?

 

It gives an edge over everyone else. It is also the door to the awesome gifted program where you have a better chance of a better education, which leads to a better job usually. I also get a gifted certificate once I finish grade 12

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. It also comes with bragging rights ( I love that part also

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).

 

People with average or even high IQs don't necessarily exercise good judgement in every instance. And I'm pretty sure that potential jurors aren't subjected to IQ tests. But the point is that a low enough IQ is seen as grounds for sparing someone's life by our courts and some people have IQs low enough to leave them incapable of functioning. Does something like that really qualify as pointless or just academic? I don't see how it could.

 

It's easy to test for something you know. It's impossible to test for something you don't. Since we know next to nothing about what makes a genius a genius, I'd say standard IQ tests are a good measure of one's proficiency in normalcy.

 

Did anyone ever get hired based solely on an IQ test?

 

Let's see an example of IQ test questions (if you are interested, open a notepad and type your answers. For each question, you shouldn't spent more than 10 seconds, don't look the answers down there, so that you can count how many you get correct):

1. Some months have 30 days, some months have 31 days. How many months have 28 days?
2. If a doctor gives you 3 pills and tells you to take one pill every half hour, how long would it be before all the pills had been taken?
3. I went to bed at eight 8 'clock in the evening and wound up my clock and set the alarm to sound at nine 9 'clock in the morning. How many hours sleep would I get before being awoken by the alarm?
4. Divide 30 by half and add ten. What do you get?
5. A farmer had 17 sheep. All but 9 died. How many live sheep were left?
6. If you had only one match and entered a COLD and DARK room, where there was an oil heater, an oil lamp and a candle, which would you light first?
7. A man builds a house with four sides of rectangular construction, each side having a southern exposure. A big bear comes along. What color is the bear?
8. Take 2 apples from 3 apples. What do you have?
9. How many animals of each species did Moses take with him in the Ark?
10. If you drove a bus with 43 people on board from Chicago and stopped at Pittsburgh to pick up 7 more people and drop off 5 passengers and at Cleveland to drop off 8 passengers and pick up 4 more and eventually arrive at Philadelphia 20 hours later, What's the name of the driver?


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I said don't look down before you finish answering, otherwise it's useless

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. It will just take you nearly 2 minutes. Come on, you want to know your score ^_^


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Answers

1.
All of them. Every month has at least 28 days.
2.
1 hour. If you take a pill at 1 o'clock, then another at 1.30 and the last at 2'clock, they will be taken in 1 hour.
3.
1 hour. It is a wind up alarm clock which cannot discriminate between a.m. and p.m.
4.
70. Dividing by half is the same as multiplying by 2.
5.
9 live sheep.
6.
The match.
7.
White.
8.
2 apples.
9.
None. It was Noah, not Moses.
10.
You are the driver.

Source


I scored 9 out of 10. How about you, did you get the same, lower, or higher score than I did? And what do you think does it mean in the real world? Does higher score mean you are more able to make friends or network than me? Does lower score mean you are more lazy and will be less successful than me? Does same score mean we are equally attractive and will have same job chance in an entertainment industry? Does it mean we are equally honest and trustworthy? Answering more correct answers show that you have faster problem solving speed, better reading comprehension skill, better logic, etc., but they aren't the main or the only factors that determine our survival as human or how good as employees or scientist we are. Even if you have 20 lower/higher IQ than the average, it only means that you are less/more intelligent than the average. Well, that's what I think anyway

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Feynman's IQ

I realise this is somewhat of an old topic, but every time I read things on this topic I am struck by something I have thought of that nobody seems to post about. Namely that at least my own experience with IQ tests is that they don't really test high level deep thinking very well, because as many have mentioned, they were never really designed for that. Without knowing all the precise details, roughly speaking they are testing to see if a person is capable of learning the normal capabilities one needs to survive in our society, such things as whether a person is capable of learning the basics skills kids learn in elementary school, the three r's, reading, writing, and arithmetic. So can do a large enough portion of the tested tasks in it, it says there's a good chance you are capable of getting through school and/or functioning normally in society. If you get a very high score, all it really says it that it is even more likely that you will be able to do those reasonably routine things. Not being able to master some of these routine skills will disadvantage you for the kind of higher thinking skills that it takes to become a scientist, so there is going to be *some* correlation, just as there is *some* correlation between arithmetic skills and being a successful mathematician. On the other hand, it is well known that there are plenty of brilliant mathematicians, who are not outstanding in arithmetic.

As to Feynman specifically, people talk endlessly about the verbal skills part being what messed him up. This is nonsense. I've heard him lecture. There's nothing wrong with his verbal skills. Plus I knew someone who used to play various games with people at Cal Tech. She was an English major and got beaten by all the physicists in chess, but could beat all of them in Scrabble. All except Feynman.

The other thing with him people often neglect, though, is the nurture side of it. He had a father most intelligent people could only dream of having. It is not at all inconceivable that a person with only modestly above intelligence could achieve what he achieved with the kind of teaching he got. That is not to say that innate ability doesn't matter. The best of nurture isn't going to turn an idiot into Feynman. I have seen this in the different branches of our family where in privileged branches of the family below average people become good upstanding citizens, and in less privileged branched those of the same ability end up on the street and the most intelligent ones end up only a little above average. I went to grad school in mathematics with yes, some really smart people, but many who were having an easier time than me without being any smarter, because they came from families where it was expected to get a PhD, and I came from one both with a lot of dysfunction and one where I was the first to even get through university.

This is not to say at all that I think the IQ tests he took where real reflections of his intelligence, whatever that means, only that I don't think it would be impossible for someone of 125 IQ to do what he did, with the right nurture. At the same time I think the issue of the test not really testing for higher kinds of thinking is a really possibility, particularly given what it was designed for. It is well known that there are kinds of people who do better in university than in elementary school and high school, precisely because it's a different kind of thinking. I'm not talking about just drive or even creativity. Even if you are talking about innate ability, what we really associate with high intelligence, for example the ability to formulate and understand complex ideas or even really properly think abstractly, does not strike me as really being tested in IQ tests. I knew someone, for example, who was test at 160 on an IQ test, and among many others who thought they were good in math, because they were good at arithmetic, fell totally apart when they got to even the abstraction of a Linear Algebra course. Also schools and tests like this reward precision, whereas success in something like theoretical physics needs a certain amount of sloppiness. I taught mathematics for a number of years, and there is a typical A high school student, that almost always has trouble getting beyond a certain point, because they miss the forest for the trees. My guess is that a person of true high intelligence in any way that is meaningful, will find an IQ test a waste of time, and not try hard enough to keep from making careless errors. It's a bit like an observation that I once made about people who become school valedictorian. The really smart people at least in my school weren't number 1. They were in the top 20. Number 1 was there, because that was what they cared about. They often even took less challenging classes in order to do so.

Another analogy I could use is the skaters that I used to know as a child, who measured who good they were by how few times they fell, not realising that the really good people fell quite often. I suspect that measure a highly intelligent person by an IQ test designed to discover retarded people is a bit like measure a skater by how long they can skate without falling.

As to real concrete dirt that can get in the way of IQ tests testing what we even thinking of as the kind of intelligence they are supposed to test, it is all over the place, and doesn't even need to be anything profound. Slight undiagnosed dyslexia kinds of problems have got to be very common. I knew someone in math grad school who scored 85 on an IQ, probably because he was a little dyslexic. He was put in all these low track classes in school and advised not to go to university. Yes, he did succeed in getting a PhD in math eventually, so yes it is possible to get a PhD in math with an IQ of 85. His dyslexia should have been diagnosed, one could say. But where do you draw the line between learning disability level dyslexia, and just enough tendencies to careless errors that might make an otherwise brilliant thinker seem less than stellar on a test. To me it is not at all inconceivable for many people who seem in high level thinking ways to be great geniuses, but don't score exceptionally high on the tests, to sort of live in that grey area. Everybody knows that there are massive numbers of bright people who are not good at certain simple skills.

 

Hi lauren

That was quite a first post, welcome to the forum. I totally agree with this last paragraph of yours. A slight case of dyslexia can be very hard to diagnose but can cause a significant learning disability that has nothing to do with intelligence. Now let's add a slight case of attention deficit which can also be hard to detect and diagnose to that dyslexia and what do we have. A very frustrated child growing up thinking they are not as good as most other kids. That alone will take a very big toll on that child.

We need to do a lot better at identifying these types of learning disabilities at the earliest possible age that we can and then start treating the child with both information and medication.

 

I love IQ tests.

Online IQ tests are poor examples of a proper IQ test, or so I've been told.
I've taken many of them and I've noticed a common trend among the popular ones, the problems are easier to figure out, but you're rewarded more for how quickly you can complete the test. These tests are popular because more people can finish them and feel good knowing they answered most of the question correctly. I prefer the test with no time limits. The good ones have really good problems, some of which I still have yet to solve. But when you make the leap in thinking to solve such problems, it's rewarding. In fact, I theorize that advanced IQ tests meant for unmeasureable scores against the general public don't really have an absolute answer at all, but rather you must create the logic behind your own solution, and it better be goooood.

My strengths are spatial abilities, then math. If you've ever found yourself wondering "Is there a pattern to magic squares? If so what could it be?" or, "What angles would I need to enter along all three axis in AutoCAD to create a perfect Icosahedron?" Then you've independently created your own little IQ problems. This is why some people train their brains from a young age to perform better on the tests as opposed to others. I truly believe it's simply out of interest.

 

that is a mock IQ test, it's just 10 riddles.