Do you believe in IQ?

[Nervous Rex]

Perhaps Dunning-Kruger in reverse where people make attribution for skills that one does not possess.

I think the opposite of Dunning-Kruger is imposter Syndrome.

 

[Gerald Wilgus]

I think the opposite of Dunning-Kruger is imposter Syndrome.

Sometimes I needed to run very hard just to keep up with those I thought had better technical skills that I was fearful of being seen as an imposter. But sometimes was pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed Statistical Design of Experiments and Statistical Process Control and would run ideas past formally trained Biostatisticians and felt good when they thought I was skilled in applied statistics.

 

[zurb]

IQ is not a measure of success. As Robert T. Kiyosaki said: "A" Students Work for "C" Students and "B" Students Work for the Government.

 

[OkRad]

Same. My neuro psych explained it to me. They no longer use one number. They CAN crunch a number for obsessed Drs, etc. but the experts hate that. She said you simply cannot crunch them. AND for ASD, she said you can be brilliant in scale A and really suck on scale b.......

 

[ForestGumpett]

High IQ, but dumb as a box of rocks socially. Largely due to poor face recognition and poor mindreading skills.

Hey @unperson ; just fyi, that face recognition thing....I had that and it got a lot better after I got glasses lol. Seriously though, had no idea my eyes were so bad cause it’s always looked like this. Just found out at 60 I have double vision in each eye, yeah, two of everything PLUS a shadow so kinda 4. Eyes are hard to get right on a face when you already see four...just say’in lol, so a total of eight eyes, 4 noses and mouths I stopped waving at people cause mostly it wasn’t who I thought it was.

Glasses do help, they have mini blinds in them to pull your focus in when you see double.

 

[Crossbreed]

I believe that you are mistaking "intelligence" for "education/knowledge" (or lack thereof).
IQ is a score of how clever you are (and it is nothing to be ashamed of).

Intelligence has more to do with

how well you use what you know​

than

how much you know.​

(Political rhetoric often conflates the two, as well.)

I got a high punctuation in a IQ test applied by an neuropsychologist,...

Not to nitpick, but what is "high punctuation" supposed to mean in that sentence?

 

[Crossbreed]

A somewhat apt quote:
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
- Charles Darwin

But knowledge & intelligence are independent of each other...
(They are not the same thing. Intelligence = cleverness.)

 

[Gerald Wilgus]

(I'm a machinist now and they can kiss my butt lol).

Bravo. I have great respect for machinists and Tool and Die makers. I worked with a couple when I was designing process systems for nuclear pharmaceuticals and enjoyed the education they provided me. I knew the chemistry and process sequencing and they taught me about materials and basic mechanical drawing so that I could communicate in their language.

 

[Judge]

I've always thought of them as a relatively meaningless benchmark with no real practical application, which sadly makes some people feel good about themselves, and others bad about themselves. Other than that, I suppose it's a toy for psychiatrists with play with regarding some of their patients.

 

[SDRSpark]

Personally, I resent it that my peers somehow learned of my score and thought that I must be normal in other aspects of my life when my social skills were severely retarded. Perhaps Dunning-Kruger in reverse where people make attribution for skills that one does not possess

I feel this so much. I'm gifted in a lot of ways...but people DO routinely have expectations of me that I can't or don't want to meet. And I'm not sure how they got those expectations. I never intend to mislead anyone about my abilities and yet....

 

[GadAbout]

Intelligence tests were originally developed to predict who will do well academically and who may do poorly. That being the case, they actually function relatively well - on academic performance. A read through the above comments shows many people with above-average intelligence did in fact do well with academic performance.

Another useful factor about the full professional intelligence tests is analysis of the subtests. In situations where there has been brain damage, they can suggest areas of weakness. In complex psychiatric cases, subtests may give an inkling to why an individual is struggling, and may provide clues to diagnosis. Subtests can also provide guidance for career planning; for instance, engineers may score off-the-charts on "block design" (a visual-spatial skill) but average or even a little lower on all other subtests!

We all know that IQ tests don't measure success in life, but as one commenter said, it can be an asset to be smart enough to handle life's challenges.

Another commenter mentioned impostor syndrome. I've met many smart folks, me included, who knew that they scored highly on IQ tests, whose peers indicated a great deal of respect for their knowledge and ability, and yet who feel only average in intelligence. Perhaps it's a matter of being smart enough to know how much you do not know.

 

[Nervous Rex]

Another commenter mentioned impostor syndrome. I've met many smart folks, me included, who knew that they scored highly on IQ tests, whose peers indicated a great deal of respect for their knowledge and ability, and yet who feel only average in intelligence. Perhaps it's a matter of being smart enough to know how much you do not know.

I think that's pretty much right. To get better at something, a person has to be able to critique their own performance - see what's good and see what they need to do better at. They could also compare their performance to someone else's to learn the same things.

Those people with Dunning-Kruger don't have the ability to critique and evaluate. They literally don't see any difference between their performance and a pro's performance, so they think they're just as good at it as the pros.

Imposter Syndrome (I think), comes from over-critiquing. Someone who excels at comparing and critiquing will drive themselves to excel, but will also always feel like they fall short.

 

[GadAbout]

Imposter Syndrome (I think), comes from over-critiquing. Someone who excels at comparing and critiquing will drive themselves to excel, but will also always feel like they fall short.

Yes, that sounds right. That, and the fact that I came from a high-achieving family, where graduating from college or even grad school was considered no big deal; it seemed like no matter how well you did, it was not viewed as exceptional.

 

[Louie]

This is sad..

I am not sure what you mean by "high punctuation" but I assume it is safe to say you received an I.Q. score that is much higher than average.

Why is this sad.. well..self-depreciation is often used to attempt to make others feel better at the cost of oneself.. but i find this to be immoral. Think about this another way. Say the results are indeed accurate and true, if you call yourself "dumb as hell" with a high score, what are the adjectives you would use to describe everyone who has scores below you?

..it just doesnt help.

I said that I'm dumb because it's what I feel. Despite the IQ, I'm not very good at nothing. I'm not cleaver or smart. I know so many people that are brilliant (a lot of them have lower IQ's than mine). Musicians, writers, scientists...
I asked because I wanted to know how the IQ is related to intelligence, and I had a bunch of informative answers (thanks to everybody ♥).

 

[EuclidWasRight]

I was just looking over my neuropsych tests. This is what I have been thinking...

The question isn't so much "Is it real?", as "What is it?" IQ is a (apparently) good predictor of certain things, and is (apparently) stable, so it must be something.

The first thing is that it's more than one test or measure. There is not really one IQ. IQ tests are composed of many smaller tests that measure different things. It's easy to see that if you are really good with one thing, but really bad with another, that your composite score is not meaningful. If you score 90% in one area, but 10% in another, the overall average would be 50%. You can't be 50% overall, if you are 90% in any one area. 60-40 maybe, but not 90-10. I assume they have some way of correcting for this, but you understand what I am saying.

The individual tests are supposed to test abilities, rather than how well you take a test. Lets assume that it does so. You have to be able to use imagination, memory, etc. when taking the test, so it measures those things - at least in some way. For example, remembering a list of fruits and vegetables is a test of memory, but it isn't exactly a real-life memory assessment. You are sitting in a quiet office, in test-taking mode, focusing completely on remembering, and using strategies to do so. It tries to isolate "memory" from other things like "processing". It may do that, but for that reason it's also somewhat artificial. It's not the same thing as trying to remember some guy's name, or your own phone number, or what you were supposed to do yesterday, but forgot.

The tests measure performance on various tasks. That is the only thing they can directly measure. Performance of tasks is not always the same thing as what we normally consider "intelligence". In fact we often associate intelligence with absent-mindedness or practical incompetence. We do say that people are smart when they do exceptional things. However, we also think that people are smart when they have certain qualities, like perception, creativity, insight, knowledge, and wisdom. I would say that creativity, insight, etc. are what people mean most when they say "smart". They are not necessarily tasks. We often make judgements about them without seeing someone do anything. A test might be able to predict how much perception, creativity, etc. a person has, but it can only measure them in a very small, limited way.

To me, IQ tests are "for what it's worth". They may be useful for a lot of things, and may be meaningful, but it's not exactly what we think of as "intelligence". People have been making judgements about "intelligence" for all of history, but we have only had IQ tests for a century(?). It wouldn't be advisable to allow "IQ" to replace those concepts.

In the end neither IQ tests, nor what other people think, really matter. A person is not reducible to "IQ".

 

[WildCat]

It's something that I've thought about over the years. In short, no, I no longer believe in it.

I believe in the importance of and prioritising attitude over talent now.

 

[HidinginPlainSight]

For me, believing that IQ measures intelligence is a failure of an intelligence test.

 

[Johann]

so so so weird....

I will say it another way..

It scientifically measures your ability to abstract which is the fundamental cognitive process for learning, judging, inferring, reasoning, planning, conceptualizing, etc., in relation to other people.

 

[oregano]

I always tell people who ask me what my "IQ" is that an IQ test only measures how well you can do on an IQ test. When my mom was trying to get me services (what few existed in the 70s) from the state of California, the "regional center" gave me two IQ tests with two different proctors. One result said I was "trainably mentally retarded", the other said I was a genius. The point was supposed to be to average the two tests out, but in this case they couldn't, which really confused the bureaucrats.

After the invention of the original IQ test in 1916, it was quickly adopted as a tool to separate out the supposedly "feebleminded" and incarcerate them for life, because the feebleminded were presumed to be destined for a life of criminality and degeneracy, so the government decided that they should be preemptively locked away from society so they would never have a chance to victimize the respectable citizenry (as they were called then). A lot of the "feeble" were orphaned boys or teen girls who had been raped and become pregnant.

Basically the original IQ test was used in the US at least in furtherance of the American eugenics system, which used crude quantifications to separate the worthy from the criminal. I don't know if Philip K. Dick had this history in mind (at least consciously) when he wrote his famous novel Minority Report, but one can see echoes of it in the story.

 

[Crossbreed]

...an IQ test only measures how well you can do on an IQ test.

That can be true of multiple choice-type IQ tests but not so much for the WAIS/WISC. One can study up for the former, but the latter is a neurological skills test, in real time.

The memory tests in the WAIS/WISC are much like the game of Simon where they see how far you can get. You can't study for that.

A Review of the 1978 Original Simon Game!

The Block Design Test is one of my favorites, too. You can't fake that, either.
(On a different IQ test, I didn't do so well on the Finger Oscillation Test.)
None of these are pass/fail tests. They are aptitude tests. A person can be strong in one area and weak in another.

One result said I was "trainably mentally retarded", the other said I was a genius.

The vast majority of autistics (who don't have severe co-morbids) will under-perform on verbal IQ tests, but get their best score on non-verbal tests.