this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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"IQ" and other intelligence tests are incredibly flawed. The biggest issue is that intelligence is very hard to define. Not to mention the IQ test comes from racist origins and was used for immigration testing for a long time.
Well the origins were laudable, it's just that it was shortly thereafter extended for racist means. Binet and Simon wanted to see if they could devise a test to measure intelligence in children, and they ultimately came up with a way to measure a child's mental age.
At the time, problem children who did poorly in school were assumed to be sick and sent to an asylum. They proposed that some children were just slow, but they could still be successful if they got more help. Their test was meant to identify the slow children so that they could allocate the proper resources to them.
Later, their ideas were extended beyond the education system to try to prove racial hierarchies, and that's where much of the controversy comes from. The other part is that the tests were meant to identify children that would struggle in school. They weren't meant to identify geniuses or to understand people's intelligence level outside of the classroom.
This is a good and nuanced take, thank you for taking the time to write it down. Piggybacking on this, if anyone wants to dive more deeply into the subject of psychological measurement, there's an excellent book by Derek Briggs about this: Historical and Conceptual Foundations of Measurement in the Human Sciences: Credos & Controversies.
I think labeling kids as slow can be problematic depending on the context. We are all good at different things. If a kid needs help in math get them help but don't treat them as inferior. If a kid has no self worth then they have no motivation to get better. Separating them from there pears is incredibly humiliating and can cause trauma.
Anyway this is a very complex subject that goes far beyond the IQ test.
Let's not pretend verifiably 'slow' people with intellectual disabilities don't exist please. Pretending these people don't exist or acting like the severity of their symptoms aren't absolutely something that they need help with doesn't make these issues go away. It makes them worse. It hasn't worked for any other issue where people didn't want to call a spade a spade.
It hasn't worked for any neurodivergent people for the last 40 years where parents and society wanted to pretend everyone was the same despite people drowning and needing help for fear of being 'different' or oh no their brain and body work fine no medications or doctors for us thanks!
Being different is okay. Everyone needs help in different ways. It's shit like the above that causes these kids to think they are.
So just because they failed a test they now are condemned to be labeled as retarded?
I know multiple people who were told they were retarded back when they were in public school but they all went to college and were very successful. That doesn't mean it came easy as learning can be harder for some people. What is important is that they had the drive to push though. I also know people who are supposedly smart who are terrible at making good choices.
It sounds like the tests confirmed they had IDs and got the help they needed.
This is exactly how it's supposed to work lol.
Yeah, in the '80s we called them "special"
We know this, the issue is until a more comprehensive test comes around, the IQ test is the best we have, also measuring general pattern recognition can be pretty useful as a "quick and sweet" measure since pattern recognition is the base for all other forms of intelligence
Why do we even need such a test? It seems like you shouldn't place people into arbitrary categories. Intelligence can't really be defined. A test that looks for intelligence is always going to be biased and discriminatory.
It reminds me of social scoring and even of ethnic cleansing in the worse case. People shouldn't have there lives defined by a test.
I can see where your coming from but i have to say, intelligence is definitely not arbitrary, it's just very wide and can be difficult to define exactly. Kind of like consciousness, we know it exists but we can't really place a finger on it
Some people are 100% stupider than others and some are definitely smarter than others. I'm sure we can all agree Einstein is smarter than a hair stylist, and while yes thats an extreme example, it's necessary to get the idea across
The real issue of measuring intelligence (in my opinion) is that there's so many different types of intelligence which is why the IQ test is flawed, it boils down hundreds of different spaces into a single number
I actually disagree with that. Why would Einstein be smarter than a hair stylus?
This is stupid. Noting that there is a bell curve of some innate talent we label intelligence is like noting there’s a bell curve on a person’s height.
Sure.
What makes you think that the hair stylist doesn't have a lot of "innate talent" that just never presented itself due to environment and circumstance?
Fine. It’s not even a concession to say that people are a mix of nature and nurture. But people assume that saying there exists such bell curve for intelligence is the same thing as saying that people’s worth is on a bell curve, and no one is suggesting that (or at least I’m not).
It’s ok to say that there exists natural differences between people.
My point was what makes a person intelligent? Einstein is a particularly interesting example as he failed school. He also had a very bad sense of style and to my knowledge was not good at cutting hair. In that respect, a good hair dresser is far superior. They are way better at being a hair dresser than Einstein.
We all have talents. It just is a matter of finding what we love. Also it helps to we willing to learn as you can be as smart as can be but still be lazy.
The reason for testing is that people on either end of the bell curve need to be educated differently to the people in the middle and to each other
A man who single handedly created: Brownian movement, which helped prove the existence of atoms and molecules. Thequantum theory of light, which explained how light can be both particles and waves. Thespecial theory of relativity. Which explains that time and motion are relative to the observer. The link between mass and energy E = mc2, which also forms much of the basis for nuclear energy
This man basically discovered and explained the universe's workings before we even had the technology to prove him right
... vs a person who makes hair look pretty
I have to ask. What makes you think we're all the same intelligence?
Because if we did consider everyone the same, it would take away credit and undermine the people who discovered all these amazing accomplishments. It's the same reason we don't view Olympic athletes the same as college athletes, they simply aren't the same. Removing people's uniqueness doesn't create equality, it just creates a depressing dystopia where everything is the sameness, nothing has character, and nothing is unique. Kind of like the beginning of Fahrenheit 451 where everything is black and white because God forbid someone has a different favorite color
Instead we should be celebrating the fact that there are people like Einstein and inspire to be like them, and work towards that level of intelligence. Not pull them down because we aren't on their level
Why then does IQ predict success?
I imagine it's because the attributes that IQ measure could be the same as we use to measure success.
Effectively if your test is based on the skills needed for STEM, and the STEM fields have jobs with high pay and respect, then you're likely to be considered "successful". But the same person could be awful at communication, politics, the arts, and just be ignorant at large to how the world works. They may even be hyper specialized to their field but lack the flexibility in their intelligence to understand other STEM fields (I hear physicists are guilty of this).
Another, simpler answer, could just be that already wealthy people have better access to stable education, so they were already successful in many ways.
Just to continue to throw wrenches into the preconceptions, let's not forget that a huge part of what we consider success in the modern world can be attributed to emotional intelligence as much as spatial awareness and logic.
A lot of CEO's and people who climb high in the world are excellent at understanding how others feel and using emotion to communicate, share and inspire people to follow. Sometimes it's the only thing leadership figureheads even know how to do. It's also very, very hard to manage teams effectively if you don't have a good understanding of how people feel at different times, how best to address those feelings and an idea how to manage the emotional atmosphere in a workplace. Yes, having good logic and reasoning is massively important, but rarely alone.
Yep, I'm starting to see how useful studying psychology would have been.
I'm 15 years into a tech career and it's becoming increasingly obvious that the hard problems are not usually tech problems...
I don't know, I think there's more to be said for actual experience and someone's attitude more than education. Having a deep understanding of psychology can only help with analyzing issues and understanding people's motivations, but there's still going to be a disconnect from academic understanding of a subject, and actual experience and connection with a challenging area of learning.
Or to put it more simply, in my last job as a manager I hired two people who had psychology degrees or majors for a technical/data position on a team, hoping for the very same kind of understanding and empathy with each other that you would think an education in human psychology would provide, and those people turned out to have the most issues with others because of their own lack of real-world experiencing socializing and maintaining relationships with others.
It's not psychology, it's attentiveness.
Even though popular culture likes to equate intelligence with lack of social intelligence and even outright autism, it's more likely that an intelligent person is intelligent in all of these things.
Have you seen IQ tests? They are not exactly "based on the skills needed for STEM".
Because it also correlates with parental wealth, better access to education, etc.
Kids with better off parents get better school/tutoring from a young age > get better IQ scores > go on to better colleges > have better creds and connections> success.
Intelligence has a genetic component. Smart parents tend to have smart kids. It's not the only factor certainly, and it's not clear how big of a factor it is, but it undoubtedly plays some role in it.
I don't doubt that there is a factor but you're clearly overestimating how much of a factor it is.
If two smart people have a kid and the kid grows up in poverty, they're much less likely to grow to be "successful".
What do you mean when you say that I'm "overestimating"? I'm asking this because I feel like you're thinking that I'm claiming something I don't think I'm claiming.
Well, you claimed that children of parents with higher IQ have more successful children.
I pointed out that this is largely due to social factors, to which you replied a non sequitur about how intelligence has a genetic component.
From that, a reasonable person would assume that you believe that genetics is a major component of IQ, and not just a small contributing factor.
That wasn't my first claim. My first claim was that IQ predicts success.
Then I went here because you brought up parents. So not a non-sequitur but a specific reply to your comment.
When I specifically said it's not clear how big of a factor it is. So no, I don't think a reasonable person would assume that.
Does it though?
Yes? There are correlations everywhere.
Did you miss the memo about correlation not being the same as causation?
Did you miss the one that defines the word "predicts"? Don't feel bad, from this thread it seems you're not the only one.
Are we going to get into arguing pedantries now?
Oh, I love this part.
..... Just kidding. I'm out. Have a good day.
Ditto!
It very much doesn't
can confirm did well on an iq test whilst absolutely sloshed in school