IQ Test Scores Increased For a Century. But Did it Help? (bbc.com) 260
IQ test scores have been increasing for 100 years, reports a senior journalist at BBC Future. He also writes that there's evidence "that we may have already reached the end of this era -- with the rise in IQs stalling and even reversing."
But this raises an even larger question: did a century of increasing scores on IQ tests bring benefits to society? You might assume that the more intelligent you are, the more rational you are, but it's not quite this simple... Consider the abundant literature on our cognitive biases. Something that is presented as "95% fat-free" sounds healthier than "5% fat", for instance -- a phenomenon known as the framing bias. It is now clear that a high IQ does little to help you avoid this kind of flaw, meaning that even the smartest people can be swayed by misleading messages. People with high IQs are also just as susceptible to the confirmation bias -- our tendency to only consider the information that supports our pre-existing opinions, while ignoring facts that might contradict our views. That's a serious issue when we start talking about things like politics.
Nor can a high IQ protect you from the sunk cost bias -- the tendency to throw more resources into a failing project, even if it would be better to cut your losses -- a serious issue in any business. (This was, famously, the bias that led the British and French governments to continue funding Concorde planes, despite increasing evidence that it would be a commercial disaster.) Highly intelligent people are also not much better at tests of "temporal discounting", which require you to forgo short-term gains for greater long-term benefits. That's essential, if you want to ensure your comfort for the future.
Besides a resistance to these kinds of biases, there are also more general critical thinking skills -- such as the capacity to challenge your assumptions, identify missing information, and look for alternative explanations for events before drawing conclusions. These are crucial to good thinking, but they do not correlate very strongly with IQ, and do not necessarily come with higher education. One study in the USA found almost no improvement in critical thinking throughout many people's degrees. Given these looser correlations, it would make sense that the rise in IQs has not been accompanied by a similarly miraculous improvement in all kinds of decision making.
The article concludes that "this kind of thinking can be taught -- but it needs deliberate and careful instruction," and suggests "we might also make a more concerted and deliberate effort to improve those other essential skills too that do not necessarily come with a higher IQ..."
"Ideally, we might then start to see a steep rise in rationality -- and even wisdom... If so, the temporary blip in our IQ scores need not represent the end of an intellectual golden age -- but its beginning."
But this raises an even larger question: did a century of increasing scores on IQ tests bring benefits to society? You might assume that the more intelligent you are, the more rational you are, but it's not quite this simple... Consider the abundant literature on our cognitive biases. Something that is presented as "95% fat-free" sounds healthier than "5% fat", for instance -- a phenomenon known as the framing bias. It is now clear that a high IQ does little to help you avoid this kind of flaw, meaning that even the smartest people can be swayed by misleading messages. People with high IQs are also just as susceptible to the confirmation bias -- our tendency to only consider the information that supports our pre-existing opinions, while ignoring facts that might contradict our views. That's a serious issue when we start talking about things like politics.
Nor can a high IQ protect you from the sunk cost bias -- the tendency to throw more resources into a failing project, even if it would be better to cut your losses -- a serious issue in any business. (This was, famously, the bias that led the British and French governments to continue funding Concorde planes, despite increasing evidence that it would be a commercial disaster.) Highly intelligent people are also not much better at tests of "temporal discounting", which require you to forgo short-term gains for greater long-term benefits. That's essential, if you want to ensure your comfort for the future.
Besides a resistance to these kinds of biases, there are also more general critical thinking skills -- such as the capacity to challenge your assumptions, identify missing information, and look for alternative explanations for events before drawing conclusions. These are crucial to good thinking, but they do not correlate very strongly with IQ, and do not necessarily come with higher education. One study in the USA found almost no improvement in critical thinking throughout many people's degrees. Given these looser correlations, it would make sense that the rise in IQs has not been accompanied by a similarly miraculous improvement in all kinds of decision making.
The article concludes that "this kind of thinking can be taught -- but it needs deliberate and careful instruction," and suggests "we might also make a more concerted and deliberate effort to improve those other essential skills too that do not necessarily come with a higher IQ..."
"Ideally, we might then start to see a steep rise in rationality -- and even wisdom... If so, the temporary blip in our IQ scores need not represent the end of an intellectual golden age -- but its beginning."
Senior Journalist? (Score:2, Funny)
It was reported by a SENIOR journalist? Whoa, I better pay attention.
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I know I have gotten dumber over the years due to my reliance on looking stuff up on the Internet. Also, I have learned the correct usage of words like "looser".
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There are now more people in the world than ever before so just by statistics we should have genius outliers who should be making incredible breakthroughs like during the renaissance but that is not happening.
The renaissance got the low hanging fruit. Scientific breakthroughs are much harder now though the tools are so much better.
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They're too busy arguing on Twitter.
Seriously though, the problem is we made a bunch of smarter liars and criminals. We forgot to tie all that knowledge together into a cogent case for good social ("social" as opposed to anti-social here) behavior. So now, we have more sophisticated liars who know how to lie to smarter people and don't see a reason not to.
Opposite (Score:5, Funny)
It was reported by a SENIOR journalist? Whoa, I better pay attention.
Actually, we should pay less attention since according to what they wrote the more senior they are the lower their IQ is likely to be.
Re: Opposite (Score:2)
We don't live in a meritocracy (Score:5, Insightful)
We live in a world where people who originally owned huge chunks of the material world continue to own that regardless of IQ, merit, effective use, or other metric of human progress. The greed of the 1% does not rule by IQ.
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Additionally, money tends to have one similar effect that power has: it tends to corrupt. Many of The Rich, over time, seem to incrementally abandon their morals and conscience, through a long series of rationalizations and justifications. Not all, mind you, but many. Money tends to change people. As an e
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I don't see the relation between your argument and your examples. Many people would see this as an argument that lottery winners don't change, they're poor because they're terrible with money and if you gave them money they'd just squander it. It's a very common sentiment among the rich that having amassed the wealth proves they deserve it, they don't want to hear about the slum kid who worked 10x as hard to drag themselves out of crime and poverty to get 1/1000th of the wealth. If they do it'll circle back
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All that is required to become one of The Rich is to ignore your Moral Center and discard your ethics and conscience, thus freeing you to do whatever is required to acquire and hold on to wealth and power. Additionally, money tends to have one similar effect that power has: it tends to corrupt. Many of The Rich, over time, seem to incrementally abandon their morals and conscience, through a long series of rationalizations and justifications. Not all, mind you, but many. Money tends to change people. As an example, look at the typical lottery winner and what suddenly having tens of millions of dollars does to their lives -- and how hard they tend to fall when it's all gone. Logically, rationally, you know that having even a paltry million or two dollars would allow the average person to live out the rest of their lives without ever having to work again, but in reality the average person blows through it all in a wink of an eye and are left worse off than they were to start with; why do you think that happens?
There are plenty of criminals and others with poor morals and ethics that are not "one of the rich". Unless you inherited your wealth or won the lottery, you need knowledge, discipline, some good ideas and be willing to take a risk. Plus a lot of luck. If you're disciplined and well educated, you can get well off but you're not likely to become wealthy.
As for why some lottery winners and others blow through money quickly: They're not knowledgeable and disciplined, and spend more money than they earn. If yo
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Whatever you say, comrade. These 'journalists' are trying to justify why it's ok that 30 years of 'progressive education' have damaged critical thinking skills across the board.
Meritocracy with inheritance and luck (Score:5, Interesting)
Then there is inheritance. If your parents were meritorious and amassed wealth and influence then that is going to help you even if you are far less meritorious. This is the one that we have to balance carefully as a society to ensure that while parents can help their kids we don't end up inheritance trumping merit entirely. Having an inheritance tax with a high threshold - above the vast majority of the population's level - is a good way to do this since its point is not to raise money but to prevent an establishment of a hereditary aristocracy.
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In the case of the business and especially the farm I have no problem with that at all. The family can sell the farm at immense profit and buy a new "cheap" farm somewhere else. Yes, it does mean that they have to move but the only reason for that is that they have had a huge windfall in terms of
This is just better nutrition (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the trend could be continued. IQ is more complex than just good food and environment. But we've got the low hanging fruit. If we want to continue this then we're going to need a lot more (and more expensive) social programs. Now, I'd argue the marginal benefits outweigh the costs (e.g. tuition free colleges pay for themselves in a better educated society producing more wealth), but the up front costs are a bitter pill to swallow, especially when people are faced with paying for services for children that aren't theirs (or that they just plain don't have).
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If we want to continue this then we're going to need a lot more (and more expensive) social programs.
Nope.
We can just identify the genes that correlate with intelligence, and splice them into embryos using CRISPR-Cas9.
Problem solved.
We're a _long_ way from doing that safely (Score:5, Insightful)
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Otherwise, there's been plenty of cautionary tales about, for instance, artificial intelligences that were created, but lacked emotions and a conscience, and they became brutal and tried to wipe out humanity. Everyone being born with an IQ of 180 isn't necessarily going to make things better, it might make them worse if the other elements necessary to balance that out aren't present. For instance: If pure logic and reason are all we r
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For instance: If pure logic and reason are all we required and could discard the rest, then logic and reason would dictate that there are too many people in the world straining too few resources, and the 'logical' course of action would be to eliminate them, thus bringing supply and demand into balance. As an extreme, theoretical example.
If pure logic and reason are all we required, and could discard the rest, then logic and reason would have dictated a LONG TIME AGO that we should embrace limits on reproduction so that humanity as a whole does not exhaust its resources. All forms of birth control should be encouraged and readily available, and those wanting to die should be helped into a painless termination.
Instead, we have idiots promoting the agendas of their respective psychotic, make believe, sky fairies creating and enforcing the la
Re:This is just better nutrition (Score:5, Informative)
The thing is, there isn't *A* gene for intelligence. But there are huge rafts of genes that contribute in combination...except that some of them don't work well with others of them, so you can't have them all.
An example of this is the foxp2 gene. Which we discovered what it does by a family in England that had a mutation so about half the kids got the mutated version. As a result they couldn't handle grammar. They were otherwise fairly normal, but that's *some* otherwise. This was really interesting because foxp2 is one of the genes that is a) strongly conserved across species boundaries, and b) evolved rapidly away from the normal value, which was retained by chimpanzees.
So we have clear evidence that one particular human skill is strongly affected by one particular gene. And it's *part* of being intelligent, but only part. The evidence for most other contributors is a lot murkier. Generally we don't know WHAT they do, just that they're important. And there are at least hundreds of them, if not thousands. And they don't all work well together.
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That doesn't sound like a gene affecting intelligence as much as a gene causing some part of the brain to malfunction. Presumably there are other effects, lack of grammar comprehension being just one of them.
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But intelligence is just a large number of parts of the brain functioning in ways that we call good. (Often for fairly good reasons...but still...there's almost always a tradeoff.)
Re:This is just better nutrition (Score:4, Insightful)
The real story here is that IQ is widely misunderstood. Consider that the average IQ in 1930s America was the modern equivalent of 80. They keep having to make the test harder to keep the average person at 100, a phenomenon called the Flynn Effect.
An IQ of 80 is described as "elementary school dropout (0-7 years education)."
Clearly the average person in the 1930s was not barely capable of functioning as an adult. There were not huge waves of crime perpetrated by extremely dumb individuals making bad life choices.
IQ measures something, but not what most people seem to think it does.
Re:This is just better nutrition (Score:4, Insightful)
IQ measures something, but not what most people seem to think it does.
It's very possible what it measures is entirely worthless, as is the field that spawned it. I see birds solving puzzles more complicated than what some grown adults struggle with. I'm not saying these adults are smart, but I'm also not saying the birds are smarter than those humans. Someone developed a tool to measure what he thought of as intelligence, and it turned out to be not that useful since it produces results that do not support his hypothesis.
Re:This is just better nutrition (Score:4, Insightful)
Your theory seems a bit overcomplicated to me. I think a better conclusion from the idea that IQ test scores have increased for a century is that IQ is meaningless and doesn't correlate to anything particularly meaningful. They're just logic puzzles that people are better able to solve today because we make children toys/video games that provide our kids with practice for these types of puzzles (if Zelda hasn't changed from my youth, it is a good example). As TFA demonstrates, these skills don't really translate into what one would consider to be practical intelligence.
The whole field of psychometrics/IQ is a joke. If it was measuring something innate (as the practitioners claim), then IQ scores wouldn't be able to jump so quickly because it's too short a time for human evolution to occur. It could be due to environmental factors, as you claim, but while I think that reduced lead and better nutrition have probably had positives effects on society, I doubt those changes are as significantly transformative as you claim. The fact is that you can practice logic puzzles and do better on IQ tests, whether you grow up around cars using leaded gasoline and eating cornbread everyday or if you grow up around Teslas and eating Whole Food. I'm not arguing against clean air and a healthy diet—I just don't think we should be concerned with creating a correlation between those things and IQ because IQ is an absurd reification of a very arbitrary test.
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As TFA demonstrates, these skills don't really translate into what one would consider to be practical intelligence.
The IQ test doesn't correlate with general intelligence, but it does correlate with math skills, which are very practical.
Ultimately once we realize that these are useful skills, but do not include wisdom, then we can realize that the test does measure something useful, and that it is easily trained with the right types of games, and avoiding certain types of heavy metal pollution.
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no. state funded tuition simply drives up the cost of school for everyone
This. And from TFS:
These are crucial to good thinking, but they do not correlate very strongly with IQ, and do not necessarily come with higher education.
The article concludes that "this kind of thinking can be taught -- but it needs deliberate and careful instruction,"
Start with teaching critical thinking skills in public schools. Sorry about that all you people who believe in the invisible sky being.
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This sounds like the same argument that public schools are a failure, when all evidence exists that not only has it been a run-away success and contributed in a large part to the success of our country at a time when it was most needed, but catapulted us from a back-water to a world leader. And people like you are trying to rip it apart, when what's clear is that we have a great thing and we need even more of it for a longer period of time.
Certainly higher education is not for everyone, and rather than bein
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It might be far from a good thing, but there's significant evidence that people today are, on the average, less healthy when not sick than they were a century ago. It's not definite, as the conditions are sufficiently different, and the worse conditions of a century ago are largely handled. But the level of pollutants of multiple sources is way up. Even though, officially, each single one is below the level at which it would have much effect, this doesn't say about the combined effect. There's also epid
Swings and roundabouts (Score:5, Funny)
I hope that wasn't too long.
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And yet Neal Stephenson and Robert Jordan are best-selling authors in the modern age. So somebody out there still has an attention span.
And then there is twitter.
Lots of people on slashdot have long attention spans. How else would they complete their manifestos?!
Except scores are not comparable! (Score:4, Insightful)
IQ is a *relative* measurement! 100 is always the average person's IQ, by definition!
You can't just compare different decades, and expect to get a useful result. As that decade's 100 and today's are not linked in any way
Re:Except scores are not comparable! (Score:4, Informative)
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No, if you take a standard Stanford-Binet style test you get slotted into a result based on the number of correct answers and there are only a fixed number of questions. It does not automatically normalize or readjust. If I take the test now, it is the same test and the same result as when I took it in the 90s.
And here, allow me to magically raise your IQ! The fish is always 72 inches, because the people who write the tests hate math and it is a disguised algebra problem. That's in the last group of questio
Tests measuring your capability to solve the test (Score:5, Interesting)
When IQ tests where devised they were a novelty, no one was accustomed to work with that kind of questionnaires.
Nowadays, you get all kind of tests and quizzes in mainstream media, and the specific kinds of logic proofs used in testing IQ are commonly used for entertainment, so it's common that people solving the test will have already been exposed to that kind of experiment, which wasn't true in past times.
So, unless you're controlling for familiarity with this kind of test, an average increased IQ could mean just that our culture has assimilated it and it has become common knowledge, not that average intelligence has increased.
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So, unless you're controlling for familiarity with this kind of test, an average increased IQ could mean just that our culture has assimilated it and it has become common knowledge, not that average intelligence has increased.
They do control for familiarity. This has been done for a very long time.
I've taking quite a few IQ tests over the years. I've had to take them in grade school, high school, to get into university, to get into the military, to apply for jobs, and one or two just because I had them offered to me. At the time I took them I didn't always recognize them as an IQ test but after reading up on how an IQ test is constructed I see them now for what they are.
Here's how they control for familiarity. They will star
Re:Tests measuring your capability to solve the te (Score:4, Interesting)
IQ tests are extremely effective at predicting success in life.
This makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but it doesn't make it any less true.
This applies for tests which are specifically designed to not require any background knowledge.
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IQ tests are extremely effective at predicting success in life.
They don't however give you a good grasp of statistics or marginal probabilities.
If A correlates well with B, then in the absence of any additional information, then knowing A will allow you to predict B with a god deal of success. That doesn't mean that A causes B or that A is a good predictor of B if there is additional information.
For example if you told me that yesterday saw strong sales for ice cream, I could predict from that that it likel
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knowing A will allow you to predict B with a god deal of success.
When your predictions reach god success, you don't have to worry about causality anymore. Everything becomes symmetrical.
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So, unless you're controlling for familiarity with this kind of test, an average increased IQ could mean just that our culture has assimilated it and it has become common knowledge, not that average intelligence has increased.
You cannot control for that. There is no reference point and no way to measure this type of familiarity. You would need completely different tests to deal with that issue. For example, telling people a story and then asking things that are non-obvious in it. Would need to be graded by a smart human and you would need to remove time pressure completely. For me personally, that would mean I would sometimes come up with an insight years later and not due to some external event. But when you go that route, the
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Or maybe we have a lot fewer lead pipes delivering drinking water to our general population....
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They mostly measure nonsense unless you are pretty close to average. As soon as you are in the, say, 10% smartest or dumbest, they basically just tell you the direction from the average and that the distance is large. Sure, they may even measure that nonsense relatively accurately, but what they measure is exactly performance on the test, not anything else.
Most schools don't teach critical thinking (Score:2)
Making that worse, are 'philanthropic' programs from the private sector, teaching kids 'life skills' like computer programming -- which is ironically just programming them to become programmers, which
That's what the humanities are for (Score:5, Interesting)
We've been cutting those back to focus more on "practical" skills. But the end result is that people who don't automatically think critically aren't learning it. The result is people educated beyond their ability to understand the world. They're dangerously easy for demagogues to manipulated...
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Re:That's what the humanities are for (Score:5, Insightful)
The humanities exist to teach critical thinking to those that it doesn't come naturally to.
This is really strange to read for me. In my environment, it always felt like humanities were mostly about indoctrination. You must accept specific interpretations of beauty and ethics, and anyone who goes against the current is considered dumb or misguided. Maybe it's different where you live. Anyway, if there are places in Academia that encourage questioning, it's debate clubs. It's really interesting to see someone being forced to defend an opinion the opposite of his. Sometimes helps you empathize with your enemies too.
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The humanities exist to teach critical thinking to those that it doesn't come naturally to.
That was the idea, anyway. Once.
This is really strange to read for me. In my environment, it always felt like humanities were mostly about indoctrination.
This didn't use to be the case, but it certainly is now.
That's only with bad teachers (Score:3)
Properly taught your expected to read texts and come up with your own interpretation of them with a bit of historical and literary context to help you along. Lazy teachers will give you answers and expect you to regurgitate them because that's the easiest thing to grade.
Also some well meaning teachers
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Interesting. Where I live there was nothing like Vietnam. Here it seems more like the humanities faculties decided to act as a balance against the constant religious propaganda that we're exposed to. I'm living in Israel which is formally a jewish country, which means that just like you have sociology and comparative literature, you have state funding for Yeshivas (orthodox jew colleges) and Bar Ilan (A "jewish religious university", where sometimes male lecturers must wear a head cover and women must dress
I obviously can't speak to Israel (Score:2)
What I'm saying is, if the left seem extreme on LGBTQ acceptance it's becaus
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When I talk about preaching "gender queerness", I'm not talking about tolerance, I'm talking about things like "everyone are bisexual, gender is a social construct", etc. etc. Frankly, I don't know what's "natural" and what's a "social construct" and I don't care much for it, I just think that people should leave other people the fuck alone and let them marry and have the same rights that a heterosexual couple has. In most of my country, this would brand me a leftist. However, in our sociology and some of o
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"The humanities exist to teach critical thinking" I wonder. I once taught generative linguistics in a university in Latin America (name of country withheld to protect the guilty). At least at that time, generative linguistics was all about thinking critically about the arguments for this or that linguistic analysis. The students came from a humanities background, and could probably have talked circles around me when it came to that subject; I had taken the bare minimum of it in college, preferring to sp
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At least here in the U.S., at least, (public) schools don't seem to teach critical thinking; all they seem to be interested in doing (or perhaps have time to do?) is hammer things into kids' heads by rote, so they can pass all the standardized tests well, so the schools can continue to get their State funding.
This is a Conservative trope in the US. In blue States it is certainly not true, though Republicans here gleefully repeat it anyways. Is it actually true in red States? Maybe, in the ones that don't fund education. I don't know. But don't speak for the whole country, much of the country has really high quality schools. And they certainly spend a lot of time trying to teach critical thinking, with the expected success rate of teaching that sort of thing. (Which is low)
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At least here in the U.S., at least, (public) schools don't seem to teach critical thinking; all they seem to be interested in doing (or perhaps have time to do?) is hammer things into kids' heads by rote, so they can pass all the standardized tests well, so the schools can continue to get their State funding.
Unfortunately, that tendency is increasing in Europe too. Critical thinkers are inconvenient to those in power, so they (probably unconsciously) try to reduce any teaching of that. Of course it looks now like the human race will critically depend on critical thinkers for its survival for the foreseeable future. That is probably why things are so messed up (not enough critical thinkers) and are slowly coming to a decision point that could well be the final one for the human race.
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Why would you expect IQ to help with biases? (Score:2)
In *theory* at least, IQ measures your ability to respond to schooling. That's historically the reason for creating IQ tests, to sort students into categories by their potential for academic achievement. But if you don 't actually teach anyone to read and think critically, the fact that they would have been a bit easier to teach if you'd tried doesn't mean a damn thing.
We're conflicted about education. We believe we want to empower students, but on some level we also want to indoctrinate them. This come
I don't think it's about indoctrination (Score:2)
I realize this is counter intuitive since that sounds like indoctrination, but the point wasn't to change their way of thinking, it was just to make good workers.
There continues to be a push to
Re:I don't think it's about indoctrination (Score:4, Interesting)
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IQ is a strong predictor of general success in life.
This is validated over, and over, and over, and over again.
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IQ tests were designed in a way similar to the way big data classification schemes figure out you're the kind of person who would buy, say, a unicycle. There weren't computers of course, but in effect the designers by deleting tasks that didn't tend to produce the result they expected and adding tasks that did, so in a sense they trained the instrument on their sample set.
So it's not surprising at all that IQ tests correlate with success and school, and since success at school correlates to later economic
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You have that the wrong way round: Low IQ is a pretty good predictor for low success in life, but high IQ is not for the opposite. There are plenty of high-IQ people that did not even make it through school, because it was far too boring. The problem with education is that its worth only can become obvious when you have it, not before. And education level _is_ a strong predictor for general success in life.
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That is what you know, as in if you have seen those types of problems before and experiences several solutions they are familiar to you and you can deal with new ones more easily.
It's the same reason why kids practice past exam papers before taking the real ones - the questions are different but the experience really helps.
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Assume makes... (Score:2)
You might assume that the more intelligent you are, the more rational you are...
No, I might not. Plenty of evil geniuses have proven otherwise.
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Evil geniuses are rational. They may not be moral, but that is an entirely different thing.
Intelligence for what? (Score:2)
Less violence and dysfunction perhaps (Score:2)
IQ is a rough measure of the individual's ability to process information. The five senses process visual, olfactory, auditory, tactile and taste information. IQ processes catch-all information not in these groups. I have met people with high verbal ability and low math ability; low verbal ability and high math ability; and high ability in both. Then of course there's social intelligence, the ability to understand people, human interactions, and human systems, which I don't think IQ tests measures except in
IQ is not the "measure of merit" (Score:2)
If higher IQ were all that important the whole human species would have been selectively bred to that level long ago. There must be downsides (depression, indecision, slowness ...) that countervail.
Using a computer analogy (inevitable on /.) a fast CPU is only one part of performance: you also need a good OS, software, data and I/O. There is no substituting one for the other.
Besides this is from Auntie, you know they're having us on.
Mostly EDUCATION (Score:3)
A surprising amount of IQ tests has nothing to do with actual intelligence, but instead with culture. It is one of the reasons why certain races do better on it.
For example, a typical IQ question looks like this.
Book is to Reading as Fork is to:
Now, what if you came from a culture that did NOT use forks? How many inner city kids would be able to answer "Book is to Reading as Chop Stick is to..."
Better yet, how would you answer this question:
"The student was caught with a fag by the principle. What did the principle do?"
The proper answer to this test depends on if it was written in England (detention for the student caught smoking), or America .
Almost all IQ tests are first and foremost a Reading Comprehension test that tests your capability with the language. Intelligence is the secondary test, with culture being the third. To do well in any IQ test you must first be extremely capable in that language, then be intelligent and finally be from the same culture that wrote the test.
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Book is to Reading as Fork is to:
Funny thing: I do not find an answer to that. It cannot be eating, as food is consumed on eating while a book is not on reading, making this fundamentally different processes.
I would probably score lower on such tests unless I dumb down my answers. I just seem to see a lot more context than the average person.
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In Thailand they don't use forks or chopsticks, they eat everything with a spoon.
But they know about chopsticks, because Chinese takeout is popular.
The big picture here (Score:2)
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At Our Wit's End (Score:2)
The book to read is At Our Wit's End.
The authors argue (with data) that while IQ has been going up, it has mostly been going up in low-g tests and that our actual g has been on the decline for a while. Basically, the modern world gives the average person far more practice in skills like 3D visualization and analytical thought than it did before. With those skills honed to historically unusual levels, we are scoring higher on IQ tests than before, but we are backing those skills up with less mental horsepo
While IQ increased, intelligence did not (Score:2)
The whole thing is more likely due to better education and the increasing appearance of IQ-test-like things in popular culture. It has been known for ages that training for an IQ test has a large impact.
Hence people have not gotten smarter, these tests have just gotten less and less meaningful.
Technology (Score:2)
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Is there any intelligence-boosting reason or evolutionary advantage to someone like (You) conducting ad hominen attacks (if not just plain old garden-variety schoolyard insults) against anyone who has not even spoken on a subject yet? It's just a waste of bandwidth, and it just demonstrates that you have no internal ability to control your own emotions and impulses. Wouldn't it be b
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Re:The only metric that matters ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Capitalism, stripped of a moral center, a sense of ethics, and a conscience, stops observing the Social Contract, and you get out-of-control greed and a disregard for the effect it has on our societies and civilization in general -- in other words, what we see rampant today.
Capitalism that has been stripped of the social contract ceases to be capitalism.
The very idea of capitalism is based on contracts, the most basic being a verbal or implied contract at a point of sale of me promising to pay for the promise of goods in return. If there is no social contract, where law and order is maintained by a community or government authority then no contract can be upheld. If I fail to hold up my end of the contract at that point of sale and simply run off with stuff I didn't pay for
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Socialism requires people all be of a generous and good nature. This will always fail as soon as someone enters that lacks a good nature. Always appeal to one's greed, because the person you are making the appeal may not have a good nature.
According to an article on Mental Floss [mentalfloss.com],
In the late 1960s, mangoes briefly became the most celebrated and revered symbol of Chairman Mao's munificence to the working class of China, and it all happened because Mao was a re-gifter.
Nice, generous Mao.
Upon receiving the mangoes, the workers were astonished. Here was a box of exotic fruit they had never seen before and, even more amazingly, it was a gift originally intended for Mao himself.
So far so good. Everyone is happy. But is everyone happy?
when a mango ce
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Unfortunately this is a correct observation about modern laissez-faire shareholder-first capitalism. The concept of the GDP is one of humanity's worst inventions, it's a key part to making capitalism work as a paperclip maximizer indifferent to life, liberty, or happiness.
Before the GDP, the only measurement of how the economy was doing was how most people felt like it was doing based on their observations. It was more like Median Household Wellbeing than Gross Domestic Product. It didn't matter if a few me
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What he says can be offensive as hell, but has no consequence to the real world
Inspiring hate crimes and right-wing terror attacks, increasing society's partisanship and bigotry, flouting democratic norms that existed for good reasons, and wantonly vandalizing relations with foreign governments and intergovernmental bodies are real-world consequences, even if they don't immediately hit you in the wallet. What kind of crude being only cares about how many paper leaves are stuffed into that orifice?
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You know, like the indigenous people in Latin America who have benefited from socialist policies.
You can meet them and see for yourself. They are all wading across the Rio Grande.
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Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Worse; the people creating the tests are the top experts, they understand the shortcomings of the test, they understand what the test actually tests for, but nobody has figured out how to test for general intelligence in an abstract testing context.
They test a few types of abstract thinking. That is all they know how to test for. Attempts to test for other types of intelligence have persistently controversial results.
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Under the circumstances, perhaps the next wave of IQ tests ought to be meta tests - design better tests.
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We can't properly quantify intelligence because we really don't understand how it works.
Indeed. And we do not even really understand what it does, hence we cannot even really describe it without quantification. We do know it is not data-processing, as that is always done in the abstract and without context. Intelligence always uses context, even of it has to simulate it.
Re:What do we measure with "IQ"? (Score:4, Informative)
Any (honest) psychologist will (eventually) admit that we don't really know what "IQ" measures.
Bullshit. They know precisely what it measures and it is highly correlated to success in school, success at work, health (which includes height and weight), longevity, IQ of parents/siblings/children/etc., wealth, and more.
And it's certainly not the only factor that accounts for success.
IQ is not the only factor but it is a big factor when taken over large populations. Any given individual with a high IQ may not reach high levels of wealth because there are factors in which an intelligent individual may chose a path of less wealth or success because of personality traits outside of IQ. IQ correlates highly with success. Certain personality traits are highly correlated to success. Those two together will show an even higher correlation. Take into account matters of their environment and there will be even higher correlations. But there's always a chance of pure dumb luck that upsets the whole thing, that doesn't negate this correlation.
So what with the peak?
The average IQ of large populations correlate highly to the success of that population. It's far better for your future success to have an IQ of 100 in a population with an average IQ of 105 than to have an IQ of 100 in a population with an average IQ of 95.
Well, why did it rise up in the first place?
Improvements in nutrition mostly. There was a lot of IQ held back by not getting enough calories and vitamins. The use of vaccines and other health measures to prevent disease certainly helped too. This is not all that controversial.
Did we all get more intelligent? Did we simply learn to game the IQ testing? Is something else going on?
We did in fact get more intelligent. People might debate why and how much each part played but there is a well established record of intelligence increasing over time.
So if IQ scores are influenced by the level of education and not just your intelligence, why, "peak IQ" would mean that education going to pot (which it obviously had for the last half century or so, at least) is finally catching up with us.
IQ is not all that well influenced by education. People don't get more intelligent by going to college. The reason successful people were college graduates used to be because it took intelligence to get into college. What is making education "going to pot", and what is "finally catching up with us", is that we've lowered the standards to get into college to the point that people getting into college are not able to comprehend their educations in a meaningful way and ending up dropping out ,or graduating and then failing in their subject of education.
The US military has been using an intelligence test for a very long time to equate the success of a recruit in any given specialty. They have many years of experience with this, and lots of people from which to collect data. If you are going to be an officer in the US military then not only are you going to be required to have a college education (which used to be an intelligence test in itself but lowered standards pretty much killed that) but you also had to meet a minimum score on their intelligence tests.
This correlation to intelligence and success is so high that it has become illegal to enlist, in any branch of the US military, a person in the lowest 15% of IQ. The only way around that is permission from the Secretary of Defense. The few times this exception in the law was used it was disastrous for those recruited and often for those warriors in proximity. A recruit that could not understand the operation of some very complex equipment, understand orders given with speed and clarity, and able to carry them out with precision, ended up getting themselves killed. And they often took their battle buddi
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Your point of the reduction of diseases is something that I have pondered on. Roughly 50 years ago, when my sister and I were young children, we got common childhood diseases such as measles and chickenpox. My sister blames the partial deafness in one of her ears as being the result of her catching measles. Given that one of the side-effects of measles can be brain damage, I wonder whether many people lost a fraction of their intelligence by this means and whether it might be part of the reason for the obse
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"Koko the Gorilla had an IQ of 85": I very much doubt that. I googled it, there's a reasonable discussion here: https://skeptics.stackexchange... [stackexchange.com]. But notice that both of the links to this claim in the "Evidence" section of that come from koko.org, hardly an unbiased source. (The third link under "Evidence" isn't about this claim.) And the claim in the "Meaning" section comes from an MA thesis that was done under the direction of Francine Patterson, Koko's primary trainer, and quotes Patterson for the c