What Does IQ Really Measure? 488
sciencehabit writes "Kids who score higher on IQ tests will, on average, go on to do better in conventional measures of success in life: academic achievement, economic success, even greater health, and longevity. Is that because they are more intelligent? Not necessarily. New research concludes that IQ scores are partly a measure of how motivated a child is to do well on the test. And harnessing that motivation might be as important to later success as so-called native intelligence."
Problem Solving (Score:2, Interesting)
IQ is bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
I recommend Steven Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" for a thorough look at IQ tests over the ages and how that 99% of the time they are bogus.
I have done several different IQ tests (Score:0, Interesting)
In my opinion (Score:5, Interesting)
I've always felt that the score from an IQ test was actually the real test. Reason being is that some people get a big score, think they're all that and a bag of chips, and let life beat them into the ground because they thought success was predestined. Other people get a low score, think they are stupid, and let life beat them into the ground because they thought failure was predestined. The most successful people, in my experience, see the score from an IQ test, say, "hmm, that's interesting," and then continue to try to do their best at whatever it is they want to do with their lives.
In other words, I feel that IQ tests are largely curiosities that are frequently harmful and only rarely actually useful.
Lets not even get started on the blatant testing demographic bias (target vs actual demographic/etc) that makes the scores skewed against people based on background.
IQ (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a subject I've studied before. IQ means different things to different people. Looking over some major tests, I found several schools of thought:
1) Mental quickness and flexibility
2) Factual knowledge
3) Ability to do problem solving
4) Spatial recognition.
IQ is *supposed* to be a general measure of how "smart" someone is (general intelligence), but while it does seem true that general intelligence does exist (doctors can pick up new knowledge in unrelated fields faster than people in some low-level fields), generally the tests just measure specific intelligence.
For example, when trying to test for mental quickness, they might give a kid a jigsaw puzzle to solve (this is what they did on my test in 2nd grade, actually - I spent half my time trying to put it together in unusual ways). But a kid can be "smart" and still be bad at jigsaw puzzles. Since its a timed event, there's also a certain amount of luck involved in how well a kid scores. The difference between "gifted" and "normal" might just be the time span it takes an unlucky kid to try the wrong pieces before he randomly pulls the right piece.
Factual knowledge is also a very difficult to assess subject. I looked over the Titan test (http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/), which is supposed to identify the top 0.0000....01% most intelligent people on the planet. Ok, cool. But one of the answers was an analogy involving Kuru, the prion brain disease contracted by cannibals in Papua New Guinea. I think the test only allowed you to miss a few questions (out of 45) before it ruled you out of the cool kids club. But my objection is, how does knowing what Kuru is make you a smart person? You might just be a trivia buff. And how can you rule someone out for not knowing it? The potential knowledge space for humanity is so impossibly large, that the probability of knowing individual random tidbits of knowledge like that is correspondingly low. How do you differentiate between smart, super-smart, and super-duper-smart? I don't think that any IQ test can provide that level of resolution, really.
More unanswered questions:
Another problem is, of the four categories above, and others people have thought of, which do you assess on an IQ test, and how do you average them together?
Why do we assume that IQ follows a Gaussian distribution?
What role does linguistic fluency and creativity play into the assessment?
I'm not saying that IQ tests are bullshit, but I think people assign them too much value. When you can have the same person take five different IQ tests and get scored between 150 and 230 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_vos_Savant#Rise_to_fame_and_IQ_score), I think we could agree the person is "smart", but beyond that, I don't think tests really mean that much.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)