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How much could you learn about a person in two minutes, just getting them to answer written questions? I suppose you could ask them their favourite colour or song, or quiz them about their other preferences, occupations, and sundry other demographic matters. Getting them to reveal marital status, religion, politics, earnings and savings might be good. Letting them write a few comments might reveal vocabulary levels and personal attitudes.
In comparison, imagine trying to measure a person’s intellectual level in two minutes. It seems unlikely that anything of interest could be obtained so quickly. That was exactly my supposition when, a year ago, I came across results on a 2 minute intelligence test, part of the UK biobank study. By way of explanation, in clinical settings it takes 45 to 90 minutes to do a full Wechsler intelligence test. Additional special tests, of long and short term visual and verbal memory, can lengthen that to 120 minutes. 2 minutes seemed a little short. I decided to dig a little deeper.
The test is called the verbal-numerical reasoning test by Ian Deary at the University of Edinburgh, and has been incorporated into the UK Biobank study. Here is a relevant study:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4844168/
The cognitive test was limited to a 13-item verbal-numerical test to be completed in 2 minutes, which ought to be enough to grade the general population. The mere notion of such a test will discomfort those citizens who regard their own intellects as more wide-ranging and multi-faceted than could ever be measured by mere earthly means, and who rank their brainpower of greater value to Western Civilization in ways that could not possibly be assayed in 120 seconds. Personally, I quail at the thought of having to subject myself to such a harsh evaluation. I mean, 13 into 120 is, let me see, well, not very long at all to solve each item. On reflection, it is a mere 9 seconds to pass each question. Can such people exist?
This test, Verbal-numerical reasoning (UK Biobank data field 20016) consisted of thirteen multiple-choice items, six verbal and seven numerical. Participants responded to the items on a touch-screen computer.
One of the verbal items was: “Stop means the same as: Pause/Close/Cease/Break/Rest/Do not know/Prefer not to answer”.
One of the numerical items was: “If sixty is more than half of seventy-five, multiply twenty-three by three. If not subtract 15 from eighty-five. Is the answer: 68/69/70/71/72/Do not know/Prefer not to answer”.
Participants had a two-minute time limit to answer the thirteen questions. The “prefer not to answer” option was considered as missing data for the purposes of the present analyses. The scores from the test formed a normal distribution.
Astoundingly, even a 13 point short test arranges itself into a crude bell curve, almost as if it was picking up something real about the population, in this case a very respectable 158,845 participants. A real Foxtrot Oscar number. In terms of proper psychometry, this is excellent, because the researchers know exactly who the participants are, and have tons of data on them, including their genetics. It is extremely rare, to put it mildly, to find samples of that size in most psychological research. You can also get big numbers with web based tests, but that is without getting independent verifiable data from participants.
Of course, I would not wish to make too much of this having been achieved in the United Kingdom, as part of their longstanding avid interest in epidemiology, but I would not want it ignored either.
The Cronbach alpha coefficient for these items has been reported elsewhere as 0.62 which is a reasonable consistency, given that both verbal and numerical aspects of reasoning are being measured.
Test-retest reliability: Two-way random Intra Class Correlation statistics showed statistically significant correlations for verbal-numerical reasoning (ICC = 0.65, 95% CI = 0.63 to 0.67). This suggests stability of the measurement over time.
However, one should not imagine that a test of this brevity has the power of more extensive testing. For example, if you add in another 4 short tests (numeric memory, reaction time, visual memory errors and prospective memory) the resulting g factor on the combined short test comes to 40% of the variance, rather than up to the 50% obtainable with more extensive testing. The raw correlations with the other, rather different, cognitive tasks are low. Reaction times and memory task are not direct measures of fluid ability, which is mostly what the verbal and numerical reasoning task is tapping into. Nonetheless, it is telling that reasoning power can be measured with 13 quick items. It is sobering to find how well it does in such a short time period.
Ian Deary says that measuring intelligence is ridiculously easy. This comes as a severe disappointment to some people, who would like to believe that it would take a very extended period of closely detailed study to even begin to map the outer boundaries of their manifold talents. Exactly so.
We lesser mortals reveal ourselves quickly.
It depends on what level of performance you seek to assess.
Talk about using a chat app with the average avereage-85-nation girl and she’ll mistype the app name (example: watsapp for whatsapp) and/or type her phone number with at least one missing figure, one figure too many, one mistyped figure (and no I am not including in this the cases where a wrong number is purposely issued).
Then she will stop talking when you point out the mistake (this involves narcissism, to be sure, but it wouldn’t play to such an effect if uncoupled with ≤85 IQ.
Any IQ up to 130 can be assessed in 2 minutes.
not surprising.
but (one of) your critics will not be satisfied until you design a battery of games with different payoff structures and prove that those who score more highly on IQ tests also have higher time-average growth rates across the set of games.
as you know, with a few items, a computer can zero in on your approximate ability level, & then give you a few more items specifically around your ability level – & voila! ability measured quickly & accurately. item response theory should be taught to teens:)
Yes, a dynamic approach is best. A universal, anytime intelligence test.
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/the-oscars-for-intelligence/
Such a conversational assessment of intelligence is probably within the reach of an AI system right now. Or you could you could use a speech-to-text system and get a Flesch–Kincaid grade level.
The wonderlic test is 50 questions in 12 minutes and s considered very reliable for measuring IQ
They won’t be happy until you create a test that’s uncorrelated with lifetime outcomes
What is the value in measuring academic achievement? At all grade levels even starting in grade 1, students typically receive at least a vague description of academic performance. As students progress, increasingly precise psychometric assessments are given.
Why? Why bother?
Readers of the blog are highly familiar with the g theorist perspective that intelligence is largely the consequence of a genetically encoded life plan. It seems to me, now that I consider it, quite odd how obsessively focused many people can be on achievement scores when they are merely trying to estimate g. Perhaps one should measure g directly and call it a day.
Furthermore, simply looking at achievement scores can be highly deceptive. It is not difficult to imagine any number of life circumstances that would put someone at an overwhelming disadvantage if one only considered achievement. What is of most relevance long term is not the result of any given achievement test, but the total psychometric load that an individual can manage at any given time.
Achievement is ultimately not what the economy is interested in: g is! We are now rapidly approaching a time in which g could be measured with a simple PGS. For me, this would make achievement testing even less informative of true potential.
A researcher in the field sent me the following comments:
I just saw your post and think that the test is not as good as you imply.
This test is given under a severe time constraint. When this is done, the standard formula for coefficient alpha as a measure of reliability no longer applies. This is because the items are no longer independent measures of the same trait. If someone does not answer item 10, it is likely that he will not answer 11 and 12.
Even if we ignore this problem, the fact that the items measure, in addition to g, the verbal and quantitative factors means that Cronbach’s alpha is not a good estimator of the test variance accounted for by g. Alpha will overestimate it. Now it may be that you want to measure the additional factors, but even in this case Cronbach’s alpha is probably not telling you precisely what you want to know.
A better measure of reliability (if we care about g alone) is the square of the test’s factor loading. According to the attached preprint, this is 0.38. A reliability of 0.38! Now my opinion is that the authors’ model is mis-specified. But even according to my preferred factor model, the reliability of this 12-item test is perhaps about 0.44. All in all, my opinion is that there is a lot of room for improvement in the measurement of abilities in this type of study.
I replied:
I can see that the time pressure has a cut-off effect on items not reached, and that it will affect the item covariances. I am not against time pressure per se, because that makes evolutionary sense, but was still surprised at what seemed to have been achieved in two minutes.
He responded:
Just to be clear, I am in no way denigrating the genetic results obtained with such crude measures. The results have been outstanding, much more far-reaching than I would have guessed in 2010 if you had asked me then what it would be possible to do with 12-item tests or years of education. But even more is possible.
I typically do not achieve high scores on internet IQ tests that require video game like responses to questions. I enjoy trying to solve the difficult questions even if this results in a lower score. Modern IQ tests using adaptive methods do not penalize test takers who are not interested in solving easy questions. Usually I believe that I would perform higher relative to other test takers with relaxed time constraints. Does psychometric literature support this position? This might not help much on the two minute IQ test as you would then have a ceiling effect, though what might happen if the test questions increased in difficulty? For example, create an IQ test that was so difficult that a bell curve would emerge even if there were no time limits. Would measured IQs under both conditions be similar?
By your comment I’d estimate your IQ at above 125.
It took me some rereading, and effort, to decode it (while I assume you wrote it casually) :D.
Adjusting for age, I would expect the results to be much alike each other.
Oh is it? I scored between 37-39///
PP(Pumpkinperson) did a post on this
That would put my IQ at…. 130///
https://pumpkinperson.com/2019/01/21/more-thoughts-on-converting-wonderlic-to-iq/#comments
It is actually, apparently it has more than a 90 % correlation with the WAIS
Might anyone on forum consider posting their EDU PGS from the Nature Genetics paper posted last July? It would be fascinating to align a person’s PGS with their comments on unz.
I would think some adjustment should be made for age. My IQ was listed as 119 on the military AFQT. a test I took in 1947. But at age 90 I am not sure I would be able to register the same IQ on a two minute test because no doubt in my brain has slowed down If I were given a bit more time I might register the same 119. I suspect that would not be fair.
I wonder if a similar short test could be given to chess players, and used to estimate their FIDE rating?
(I bet it could!)
Would help in medical interviews and communications. However, using short words in short sentences generally helps every patient understand what is being advised.
No, I think.
What helps us is what is more alike us.
The impression that simplicity and simpleness help communication matches reality, but allows for its exceptions.
Somebody who likes to use terms such as “notwithstanding” or “nonetheless” (a non-pragmatic type, let’s say) will understand advice, medical and not, better if given in those terms, with more rounded phrasing.
Perhaps the mistakes are intentional.
If there were more people like the one you think you are – no.
Why is this ‘astounding‘?
Nobody who got above a ‘C’ in year 11 mathematics should find this ‘astounding’.
It’s a convolution of (semi?-)independent binomial variables (1/0 for right/wrong).
The properties of such convolutions have been a solved problem since the 17th century (albeit in other contexts).
The “Bell curve” you see, is what you get when you run a binomial ‘tree’ forward 14 times with 1/0 payoffs at each child node … it’s Pascal’s Triangle.
And that’s the same as 14 consecutive draws from an iid binomial random variable.
I am interested that the actual distribution looks skewed (and in the direction I have often said I would expect in ‘raw’ scores: mode & mean < median) – with N as large as it is there's a very good chance that the skewness is not an sampling artifact.
Take home exams? Time limits are relaxed and yet students’ scores continue to be dispersed (though this could be a result more of the grading key). On a high school test, some questions would be unanswerable by testees of certain ability levels even with unlimited time (item response theory). Over-speeding IQ tests leads to an unreliable test. url speaks of adding 10 points to one’s Wonderlic score with 3 hours of coaching. Move up from 50th percentile to 90th percentile in 3 hours? Considering the many tens of billions of dollars that have been spent unsuccessfully trying to raise g over the last few decades, this would seem a true psychometric bargain. https://beatthewonderlic.com/ When time limits are relaxed such dramatic changes in scores would not be expected to occur.
a few years ago Vox Day linked to some online site that purported to measure your verbal IQ and many of us went over and tried it and almost all of us scored 99th percentile or higher, lol
apparently it was juiced
This website has a ton of wonderlics for NFL players: https://wonderlictestsample.com/nfl-wonderlic-scores/
The highest name I recognized is Harvard -> NFL QB Ryan Fitzpatrick, 48.
Kaepernick is 38. Brady 33.
Out of those three I know who I’m picking with my precise 20/20 hindsight.
It should be acknowledged that g and IQ scores are not meaningless or without value to measure but “for what?” should be asked.
Tentatively I divide the question into what it tells you about the individual (and tells him/her) and what generalisations are made available for assessing groups.
Perhaps the emphasis is on the individual and fairness to the individual if one says “there are only six places available in the Thursday evening special maths class with the graduate student tutor so we will take the top six on the 12 question test, following Eysenck’s advice on the 11 Plus test by having them take it three times”. There doesn’t appear to be anything conceptually wrong about that even if it can be argued that much greater reliability can be achieved with a well designed 30 minute test. The seventh candidate might complain, speculatively or just possibly with evidence that he would benefit from the fairness of a more reliable test. Whose motives and criteria, including those of cost and benefit to the testing authority, become an issue and it is possible in the case hypothesised that a much less verbal test would be fairer or more efficient. But what this snippet of discussion does lead to is a reminder of the limited use of any general IQ test. After all, ex hypothesi one is probably looking for potential mathematicians.
Sorry I got diverted….
The test strikes me as the kind I used to blitz (and even now I had the answers to the two questions before I finished reading them). There were even occasions when I got, in one hour, 100 per cent in a first year uni math exam for which three hours was allowed (not in the maths faculty of course) and later passed a three hour 10 questions law exam
What uses do you think the 12 question rest – or slightly more extended version – could sensibly be put to?
Sorry what use could the 13 question test be put to?
I have always found the dissident right’s obsession with I. Q. rather amusing. There is no question that a preponderance of groups with a tendency towards low achievement in this respect is deleterious for society. But if a certain group tends to score high on I. Q. tests—well, so what?
Whites and Jews are among the highest scorers on such tests. (I make no mention of Asians, who outperform them, because they—at least as of yet—wield no great political power in the West.) Yet the Mark Zuckerbergs, John Kerrys, Jean-Claude Junckers, Christine Lagardes, Alan Greenspans, Larry Pages, Jacinda Arderns and so on of the world are precisely the architects of Western society’s collapse. Open borders, sexual degeneracy, curtailment of free speech, erosion of national sovereignty, ethnic/national self-hate, etc.—all these and more are policies devised and dictated by high I. Q. achievers. What good, then, does high I. Q. do for whites, say, when their highest achievers are also possessed by a collective death wish?
I was stumped by the verbal question: the more I thought about it the more lost I became.
However, a quick trip to a thesaurus: https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/stop?s=t. made my day brighter.
The thesaurus lists pause, close, cease and break as SYNONYMS of the key word stop. Only “rest” is missing. Thus, either the correct answer is “prefer not to answer” or multiple correct answers are envisaged…..or the question has been poorly thought out.
I have formulated a number of neurological hypotheses based on peculiarities of my own brain (though I am not sure how closely related my difficulty understanding Scotch and similar strong accents is to my inability – preceding deafness – to understand the words of arias and lieder sung in English). On the one hand I could blitz tests like the two minute one and in fact had the answers to the two questions you quoted before I finished reading them but, though I equally blitzed the tests long ago when I did a rapid reading course, I never found myself reading fast accordingly but always flicking a pedantic nitpicking eye around. Presumably there is something which goes “click” when I am faced with a test requiring speed and it’s not then my usual self which can cause a top civil servant to say “X you always make things too complicated”. (Actually I like to think I can produce an alternative click and jump which cuts through to the point….) 🙂
Ian Deary and the Blockheads. Coming to your town.
How does this compare to Wordsum, used in the GSS?
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/wordsum-iq/#.XN5R0y-B0UE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordsum
I’d like to see a detailed treatment of ways to determine someone’s approximate IQ without his consent, either when all you have are appearances in the media and writing samples, or when you have physical access to the person and can interact with him.
I might imagine that as one input one’s own IQ might be important.
13 into 120 is easy, if they don’t want a decimal value to any precision, which I suspect they wouldn’t. I love the logic exercise; nice touch. Reminds me, however, of the occasional “IQ tests” one sees in the Daily Mail.
Yes, point taken. I should have said that it was surprising, given that we do not know the pass rates for each item, nor the truncation effects of the time limit on later items in the sequence, nor anything about answers which might be considered “near misses” and worthy of a very small correction factor of a fifth of a point, that the answers are almost normally distributed.
Nice.
I took a longer test with a really hot Psychologist.
Might have cost me a hand full of points, but was worth it.
Related:
Where can I, a mere ignorant bumpkin on the road to further red-pilling, find an accurate and hopefully cheap IQ test?
I have attempted googling “IQ tests” but am not surprised to find confusing or disappointing results, as the internet search engines are run by the Devil.
(One friend has suggested I simply take the Wonderlic test and multiply the results by 2 to get a roughly accurate IQ sample.)
Thanks in advance
My apologies for the slightly OT nature of this post.
Look, it is an idiotic argument. Miss typing using phones is so common,taking the small size of the pad used. And the response time often involve that it is useless as a argument .
NAVARRO
I think Jewish verbal IQ is higher than Asians and this is why Jews have succeeded in Hollywood and litigation.
Looking over that list it’s clear Wonderlic scores have no correlation to playing ability. In fact, I think most NFL scouts might discriminate against players with scores above 35. But looking at the lower end I see names of guys who have issues with the law and behaving off the field. But let that go.
One of highest scores is Benjamin Watson (48). Watson is black and a big conservative pro-life Christian married to his high school sweetheart. I’ve heard him on conservative talk shows and he’s very warm and articulate. Another top score is Matt Birk (46). He’s a Harvard econ grad and conservative pro-life Catholic starting his own Catholic school. Some of the other top scores are similar. I can’t help but think of Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart, where he mentions that it is among the higher social-economic ranks where you’ll find church goers (contrary to the PC narrative).
Your best bet would be WORDSUM. Razib Khan (and others) have discussed the high correlation between a WORDSUM score and IQ.
You can find a legit online WORDSUM test here: https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/VIQT/
Lol, I just took that wordsum test it takes less than a minute and I scored exactly the same as in a real IQ given by a psychologist when I was 16.
So I guess it correlates really well.
Seems to have a low ceiling though.
I recently received a frantic call at 2:30am from my doctor and he asked me to come down to his office immediately. When I got there, he told me my IQ test had come back totally negative. He hooked me up again to the testing machinery and turned it on and the indicator needle didn’t move. He said he’d tested the his machine on other people and it worked with them (they all had at least some IQ), so it wasn’t the machinery – It was that I have zero IQ. He also said he’d made an appointment for me to go up to the university. That they were very interested in my case. No one had ever heard of a case of someone with zero IQ. Possibly, I can earn a living as being the only person on the planet walking around with a zero IQ. This is great.
Wonderlic scores might not correlate with athletic ability but for the NFL they are a strong signal of coachability in a complicated system.
Very low Wonderlic = very instinctual players. Hmmm. Funny how that works out.
Too high Wonderlic is also not great for some positions. QBs need to be smart but not too smart such that they clash with their coaches.
My guess is that their is a target score range for each position and any variation +/- is counted against a prospect.
One of the many reasons that Brady has had so much success is that Belichick designed an offense around him that prevents him from having to make high latency complicated decisions. Not saying that Brady is dumb just that he benefits from not being too smart.
Where is the verbal-numerical reasoning test of Deary?
As a former Cincinnati Bengal fan during the Wonder Years (Wonder if they’ll ever be this good again), Pat McInally is a familiar name. As an aside, he created the Starting Lineup series of sports action figures, with sales of $700 million.
Just a minor comment: “Astoundingly, even a 13 point short test arranges itself into a crude bell curve, almost as if it was picking up something real about the population.”
Wrong. Many many random variables in nature are bell curves, or thereabouts. It goes back to the central limit theorem: when a bunch of random variables are summed, even if their individuals distributions are not normal, the sum tends to be. So anything that is the result of a lot of complicated factors, tend to produce a bell-shaped distribution. And almost any human parameter – height, weight, distance between the eyes, length of index finger, etc. – will have a roughly bell-shaped distribution. So no, the mere fact of a bell curve BY ITSELF means nothing.
LOL! What shit.
The test measures
Reaction time: Visual memory: Prospective Memory:
Memory and reaction time is not IQ. Nothing to do with solving problems.
IQ was originally defined as “the ability to solve problems you had never seen before”.
There is a report out there on the internet somewhere, about a medical doctor who was making poor judgement calls, and he peers asked for him to be tested. Turned out he had a photographic memory and and IQ of 70. Borderline moron. Yet the “photographic memory” was enough to get him through medical school.
Sounds like the people who invented this latest test got through psychology, without really being able to think, and are now trying to justify themselves.
Reg Cæsar says: “Ian Deary and the Blockheads. Coming to your town.”
Regards, onebornfree
The holy grail in intelligence testing for liberal university sorts is a test that will show themselves in the top hundredth of one percent, yet blacks and Hispanics well above the mean for the white proles! The reverse ordering of reality, in other words
I had I girl in my class, her Nickname was RaffNix
(raffen could be translated with grasp and Nix is just Null),
but she had exactly that, a near photographic memory, when I remember it correct, she finished school with the highest grades.
Once I tried to explain to her the not so complicated concept of determinism, took her a while.
In fact a couple of weeks till she told me now she got it.
And no, she wasn’t a below 70 IQ points moron, but she could easy be just a slightly below average 95er plus a very good memory.
Maybe we can use this to get rid of everyone under 100 IQ…
“ISRAEL IS REPORTEDLY developing a biological weapon that would harm Arabs while leaving Jews unaffected, The “ethno-bomb” program is based at Israel’s Nes Tziyona research facility.
https://www.wired.com/1998/11/israels-ethnic-weapon/?fbclid=IwAR3mnDiNWeyAcaiG_nTobdVZBgnOT6Gg4NCwrsKOsI4Ysn9TcysRXsYXfoc
Good example, God-fearing!
That’s sorta against the concept of g is it not? That a person could be top flight at one cognitive task but abysmal at another? Memory and iq strongly are connected
Let me repeat: IQ was originally defined as “the ability to solve problems you had never seen before”.
To score well on tests of this ability, you just need enough memory so you don’t forget what you are doing half-way through.
Culturally and educationally-biased IQ tests are a corruption of the original idea.
Here are some IQ tests on animals that avoid that pitfall …
“Genius” Chimp Outsmarts Tube | National Geographic –
And the problem the chimp solved in nothing compared to the problem the crow solved –
Genius the crow solves amazingly difficult probems – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNHPh8TEAXM
That’s ridiculous. I don’t believe in any 2-second intelligence assessment, even if taken by anti-Trump people who are all geniuses by default by comparison with our great, spelling-phobic leader.
When I was a kid, I took the Wechsler, scoring relatively high, although not stunningly high as I would have preferred. I remember the mazes of escalating difficulty, cool little shape-manipulation tests and the part where you had long lists of numbers to recall in sequence.
I’m probably wrong, but I think adeptness at such tasks can be at peak levels during times of life when you’re performing similar tasks on a daily basis.
In a crazy-busy office job that I once held, we were required to keep long policy numbers in our heads while doing a bunch of other things, like typing data and answering questions on multiple lines. I thought I couldn’t do it when I first got the job, but after a few weeks, it became second nature. It had to be absolutely accurate, too.
Around that time, in one of the cheesy meetings, we were asked to go around a large circle of people, trying to keep in our heads nicknames made up by each person at the spur of the moment. Naturally, I was alnost at the circle’s close, but just by concentrating hard, I remembered every ****** one of those silly nicknames.
If I had not been doing similar tasks all day long, day in and day out, I don’t think I would have been able to do it. If I had not gone into concentration mode, reflexively, I doubt I would have remembered all of those random nicknames. I was just used to being under severe pressure to remember long strings of numbers in that job.
The sweet spot of grand master chess players is 135, well below genius.
I remember the article about Israel’s “ethnobomb”. Similarly, when the SARS outbreak happened I remember there being conspiracy theories about how that virus was developed as a bio weapon to target East Asian people.
When are we going to get a “moral quotient” test (MQ). Surely there are some moral measurables. Why can’t empathy and honesty be measured in two minutes?
No, they are not synonymous.
The correct answer is “cease”, because it (like stop) is permanent.
● Marilyn vos Savant has an IQ of 228, the highest ever recorded, according to the Guinness Book of Records. And her greatest achievement so far is: She runs an “Ask Marilyn” column on Parade magazine, where she answers readers’ questions on puzzles.
● Michael Langan is said to have an IQ of 190 to 210, and has been called the “smartest man in the world”. And his greatest achievement so far is: He runs a horse ranch in Missouri and posts on Quora.
● Albert Einstein had an estimated IQ of 160. And he created the General Theory of Relativity which has been called “the greatest intellectual and philosophical leap-forward in human history”.
Einstein once said: “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer”.
☛BOTTOM LINE:
Having the ability to score highly on IQ tests doesn’t mean much, unless you also have the desire and the determination to apply that ability to something profound.
What about people with slow processing speed or with learning disorders (where one set of skills- verbal vs spacial dominate). Surely this test is either invalidated by them or produces a skewed result?
It seems like it would be a worthwhile exercise to calibrate a variety of short IQ tests to one of the standard tests. Perhaps the short tests could be administered to one of the normalization samples for a more rigorous test? Some potential short tests to use.
– This test. Ian Deary’s 13-item verbal-numerical test to be completed in 2 minutes. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4844168/
– Wonderlic Personnel Test. 50 multiple choice questions to be answered in 12 minutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_test
– Wordsum. 10 word vocabulary test. https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=7645
Also three short tests from:
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/so-you-think-youre-intelligent/
https://www.hungrymindlab.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/von-Stumm-2014.pdf
Any other ideas?
What kind of criteria would be best to evaluate? Some that come to mind.
– Test time and administration requirements.
– Correlation with IQ from longer test.
– Floor/ceiling.
– Accuracy/resolution.
– Relationship between short tests and longer form subtests (i.e. which areas are over/under represented by the short tests).
Given the large scale GWAS being done now, it seems like this could be very beneficial for establishing a common set of well understood and easy to administer (by computer?) tests for use quickly and effectively measuring cognitive ability in these GWAS.
Also consider that combinations of two or more of these tests may work better than any one of them by itself.
Any thoughts on this?
Nobel Prize winner in physics & MIT physics Ph.D., William Shockley, was tested twice and scored both in the 120’s. Nobel Prize winner & Princeton physics Ph.D., Richard Feynman, scored 125. Ron Unz has argued that such test scores show IQ tests to be ludicrous (or the concept of IQ is BS) rather than measuring Feynman’s intelligence.
I suspect that Google has already measured our intelligences by checking on our search items. They probably put us categories by intelligence.
I am sure they do with our views about the catastrophe that is Israel or the MH17 or 9/11 or Skripals or WMD or “Syrian” chemical weapons or Ukrainian “democracy” etc.
It would have to be 128. 256, or even 512 to match Feynman. (2⁷, 2⁸ or 2⁹ )
I already tsaid the cases where they give you a “null info” were omitted (I have the IQ that’s needed to know when they are leading you astray, and it’s not hard to).
Sometimes, after I communicate the mistake they strain their wits, and find out the mistake.
Other times I had recourse to all my diplomacy, added them to another app later, and found out only a figure/ID letter had been wrong.
It’s something normal in the 75-85 IQ range I have come to think.
Feynman was just having fun.
There is no possibility he had a honest IQ of less than 150. 150 is nothing more than an average for top-tier people in science and humanities alike.
It must take a very chess-suited kind of brain to be grand masters with an IQ as “low” as 135, though.
You can measure them in a far shorter time span than 2 minutes.
Show them a half-minute predation scenes, while checking perspiration and scanning what goes on in the brain.
‘Maybe we can use this to get rid of everyone under 100 IQ…
“ISRAEL IS REPORTEDLY developing a biological weapon that would harm Arabs while leaving Jews unaffected, The “ethno-bomb” program is based at Israel’s Nes Tziyona research facility.’
The difficulty with that is that Zionists are remarkably stupid. The consequences for Israel would be catastrophic.
‘IQ-fetishists have come up with the silliest theories to justify the 125. Maybe he had a bad day. Maybe he did badly on the Verbal questions. The bottom line is if Feynman really scored 125 on a legitimate IQ test (a test that allowed scores higher than 125) then “IQ Is Bunk.”’
Not necessarily. There are always freak results.
I once caught two fine trout in water that must have been eighty degrees. This doesn’t alter the fact that trout will bite most readily when the water temperature is around 55-60 degrees.
“Increase your Google IQ score by 15 points in 1 week. Custom package of 150 searches, only $199.98. “
Blossom Dearie was of Scottish descent, and yes, that was the name she was born with.
Remember: Einstein’s IQ and Newton’s IQ are now zero.
All IQs return to zero.
“..the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.. for all is vanity” – Ecclesiastes.
So now we are to infer IQ from a person’s intellectual performance in whatever happens to be their specialty, and if their IQ test result contradicts that inferences, then the data must be a joke. LOL
Apparently, it never occurs to an IQist that intelligence is not one thing measurable on a single linear scale and precisely defined by a single number.
If Ramanujan was a mathematical genius, then, according to an IQist, he must have been, by definition, a literary genius, at least potentially, a musical genius and a genius in any other way you can think of. Which is an idea unsupported by any evidence and seems to be a foolish supposition entirely at odds with experience and what we know of the modular structure of the brain, where difference mental processes occur in different lobes and neural networks, that are likely under independent genetic control and which have been affected in different ways by whatever environmental experience, e.g., education, the possessor of that brain has been subject to.
But then IQists are probably among the dumbest group of people one can find among those who purport to be scientists, so futile to debate the issue here.
150 on one test will be 130 on another, even though both are normed around zero. You have to know which test it is, and the standard deviation.
Maybe Feynman’s test was from a paperback bought in the drugstore. I once took a Mensa book test– which, by the way, Mensa won’t accept; you have to have the real thing. Victor Serebriakoff’s name was on the cover, but who knows who developed the test.
I tripped up on a question because I had no idea what a mangetout was. I knew how to pronounce it and what it meant in French, but what the hell did it mean in English?
In America, we call those snow peas.
How many IQ points do you get for knowing that a mangetout is a snow pea?
And how many IQ points does one get for knowing what Shakespeare meant when he talked of golden lads and chimney sweepers,
Whatever the answer, you can be sure that very few physicists, even very bright ones, would know, so you can deduct that number from their potential IQ test score, before you go on to test their musical intelligence, their spatial ability, their kinesthetic intelligence…
Oh, but they’re all the same thing you say? Come on…
Ron Unz addressed this about freak results. Defending the IQ test by coming up with plausible explanations why the score for a super-genius was measured to be in the very bright level. Btw, apparently Feynman’s sister corroborated the IQ score.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_pea
The snow pea (Pisum sativum var. saccharatum) is a variety of pea eaten whole in its pod while still unripe. The name mangetout (French for “eat all”) can apply both to snow peas and to snap peas
Never heard of it before. I hate it when pseudo-intellectual snobs use foreign words in English just to show off and belittle their audience by confusing them.
An example: I remember this smart-ass CNN talking head, interviewing a Russian celebrity and asking him about his “entourage” as though it was normal English. When the Russian guy didb’t know WTF the word meany, the CNN guy called for a translator. The Russian spoke good English and the CNN guy was just trying to belittle him. When someone translated the word, the Russian guy said “Oh! you mean MY ROOMIES!” – which was much better and more mainstream English than the CNN guy’s bullshit. Everybody in the audience understood the Russian guy, and about half didn’t understand the CNN guy – had no idea what “entourage” meant either.
Another example: those who manage to get a psychology degree because they can’t do math and end up writing IQ tests, are pseudo-intellectual snobs too.
I like how the other 2 feeb comments to your very cogent point avoid the question and diverge off into their favorite sound-bytes.
You are the perfect example of the dumb people on here who are so interested in IQ tests. Only dumb people are interested in IQ tests. They want to prove other people dumb to make themselves feel better about themselves. Because they don’t feel good about themselves. Because they are dumb.
I got the answer in 3 seconds. It is “cease” and only “cease.”
Just marvelous. Marvelous. You have made a point, vividly, that I often forget to make.
Intelligence is not the question. It is how much you actually know. How many actual facts that you actually know. About all the world around you.
This “factual” way of thinking is unpopular with both the winger IQ nuts on here and the leftwinger education nuts on other sides.
Because they want to be free!
Defense by lame–and incidentally false–analogy. Bah.
He could’ve been. Who says he couldn’t? He just chose to focus on math.
IQ tests change. Of course they make them easier. They always make everything easier. It is the force of PROGRESS. Of course nobody takes this into account when comparing IQs taken in different places and times.
Actually, there have been some arguments that the test he might have taken may have been too verbally loaded, or that the psychologist didn’t measure the verbal-logical split well enough.
Something that might have been overlooked on thread is that we are now transitioning to a time in which there are actual answers to psychometric questions, that is some answers will clearly be seen as correct by those skilled in the art and other answers clearly incorrect.
Up till this point in the psychometric dialogue, incorrect answers have been judged as correct due to wiggle room created by the state of the science and the resulting sociopolitical climate created. Now, however, we can ask questions with large samples such as UKBB and expect a near definitive result to be reported. Those who suggest incorrect answers will then be seen as being wrong and will then lose credibility and the esteem of others on thread. I can only hope that as this new reality emerges that truth will be accepted as truth. It does not seem plausible to me that arguments based on transparent calculations from clearly stated procedures could be disputed.
Given this truth and after reading the URL posted above in the initial write up, I will change my position regarding the Wonderlic. I had thought that such a test would be hopelessly flawed as a test of g. One of the websites spoke of offering testees a 10 point score gain in a mere 3 hours. I was very unclear how this could lead to a reliable result. However, one must appreciate that the testees were likely not aware beforehand about the true nature of the test. So, they were on average at about the same disadvantage.
With the massive sample size available in the UKBB, it should then not be entirely unexpected that some signal could be detected. The average score is only in the 20s (for the Wonderlic) and some testees score in the single digits. So, there is range available to discriminate between different ability levels.
I would be interested to know whether a GWAS based on the 2 minute test might report back significant SNPs. Might some of these S Ps overlap with the EDU results? Another question that I find much more interesting than any of the questions on the Wonderlic and that I would require more than 15 seconds to contemplate is whether one could simply resample the UKBB or would need to go to an independent replication sample to compare results with the EDU GS etc.
That’s not a wordsum at all actually….
In what language? English or Chinese?
Says you. As an IQ-ist you are bound to believe that. But it’s an assumption, and I think most improbable. But go ahead. Prove it.
If you’ve read Outliers by Malcolm gladwell, he talks about how William Shockley and Louis Alvarez, famous Nobel laureates in physics, both were excluded from his cohort of elite iq children. E o Wilson says he and a friend, who happens to be a famous theoretical physicist, both had tested iqs in the low 120s. James Watson said his iq score was in the low 120s. It’s because scientists are stupid. Poets tend to test in the 160s.
Yes, that is important — often. And some people do excel at knowing things. I’ve known people with an eidetic memory. Very interesting people. Wonderful vocabulary and use of words, seemingly able to recall just about everything interesting they ever read, saw or heard. Excellent logic circuits and top scholars too. Sam Johnson is, I suppose, in literature, the most famous example of this type.
But generally, such peopleare not all rounders. They have difficulty with uncertainty. To them, a thing either is, or is not. Otherwise it’s not worth contemplating. The mental world of the experimental scientist is beyond their comprehension.
But there are, I am convinced, many mental types. For years I worked with a group of top scholars from diverse fields. It was fascinating to realize how smart people can be, and how different from one another smart people can be in mode of thought. Thus seeing the conniptions of the IQists over the fact that, according to the results of an IQ test, Richard Feynman was not a budding Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Justice of the Supreme Court rolled into one, is quite funny.
You’re the one who made the claim in the first place. Musical prodigies themselves tend to have higher IQs Not everyone is supposed to be a polymath. They focus on their own fields. Anyways, I don’t do research papers, nor I intend to start now. There are plenty of resources on the internet. They very well could’ve been, does not mean they had to. Intelligence is multi-faceted and people know this.
I think that’s just what they call it over there. Serebriakoff was a Brit, obviously of Russian descent.
I refuse to call a rounded dead end a cul-de-sac. Do even the French know what the plural is?
Hey, I could teach a turkey to solve those puzzles if it had 10,000 hours. All bird species are equally intelligent.
turkeys are DUMB
A very sound observation. Does mental speed precisely parallel mental ability? I doubt it. Of course, there is probably a positive correlation: people who are ‘slow’ are often also stupid; people who can perform complex calculations or tasks quickly are often smart.
But is the kid in class who is in fact the smartest (to the extent that can be measured) always the one who finishes his exams first? That was not my experience in different schools.
Also, great intellectual/scientific/technological leaps in the real world are often the product of flashes of insight which are the culmination of very patient investigations, as well as some other mental quality, like originality or wisdom.
It is interesting how high IQ is not more clearly correlated with a realistic appraisal (acceptance?) of the world and human nature. (Marx comes to mind. Exactly how realistic is it to assume that the average person will work according to his ability but be content to take only according to his needs?) With some such people, I think it is a form of intellectual snobbery…an indulgence permitted when economic times are good and means of differentiating themselves from the unwashed masses (most of the ones you’ve named). With other high IQ people — the more sincere types — I think it is denialism or wishful thinking about what could be…they are overly imaginative and/or cannot accept the brutalities of life (one or two on your list, and I personally know a few of those types). I’ve often thought that the next best thing to being naturally brilliant is being as brutally honest with oneself and the world as possible. In fact, Ayn Rand once said that a person could immediately raise his or her IQ by 10 points by thinking rationally — it would certainly be a help with the math part of an IQ test.
“Dumb” means unwilling or unable to speak. It does not mean “stupid,” stupid.
An interest in IQ tests is not limited to stupid people (only a stupid person would make that sweeping generalization). In fact, I think a lot of people of average intelligence, but who fancy themselves as well-above average, fear IQ tests because of what the tests would reveal. Reality is not always pleasant or comfortable.
And what’s wrong with being pleased at being above average, whether in intelligence, beauty, or athletic ability? People are naturally competitive. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Rand and Marx.
It says something about the IQ of Jews that most of the most-quoted thinkers in posts were Jews!
Yes, the blank-slaters and egalitarians actually are correct in their thinking…it’s just their timing that’s wrong.
Actually, I think a person should get IQ points for knowing what you’ve indicated here.
The question I have is, why do you and Obwandiyag have such hostility toward IQ tests? If I had to guess, I would say it reflects fear and resentment…probably not for you as individuals, but on behalf of how your ethnic or racial group scores.
Marx and Rand are good examples of the two extremes in facing reality, despite their likely similarity in raw IQ scores.
Your doubt is justified. In the real world there is seldom pressure to solve a problem in a certain time frame. The important thing is just that you do solve it.
I just tried an online IQ test because of this article. There was a 6 minute time limit. And the 2nd question was a missing number in series: 1,16, 81, ? , 625. It took me a while to figure out that the series was 1⁴, 2⁴, 3⁴,4⁴,5⁴. And by that time the test had timed out, and they reported my IQ as 15!
And I was a mainframe computer programmer for years, and customers used to ask for me to come back and fix stuff.
Just sayin…
LOL. My ethnic and racial group happens to include Will Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Sam Johnson, Charles Darwin, Clerk Maxwell, and a few others I’d not be ashamed to mention.
As for hostility to IQ tests, I have none. A test is a test. It’s the interpretation (and the misleading name) that’s the problem, exemplified by the absurd remarks above to the effect that since George Dubya Bush has the same IQ test score as Richard Feynman the two of them must have been equally intelligent.
If that doesn’t make you hoot, then you really need to sit down and have a serious talk with yourself about what the claimed mental equivalence between George Dubya Bush, the 9/11 cover-up bullshit man, and Richard Feynman, a rare scientific genius, could possibly mean.
Hey, don’t come flaunting your actual mental accomplishments here. If you ain’t got the IQ you ain’t got what it takes to accomplish nuthin’, and if you did accomplish sumpin’, then it shows you’re an uppity gamma who needs to learn his place.
I saw something a while ago that one branch of the US Military was actively seeking as many samples of “Russian DNA” whatever that is, as possible.
Oh, lookie, and within the edit window too…..
https://www.mintpressnews.com/putin-questions-us-air-force-dna-collection-ethnic-russians/233946/
Actually, I am skeptical of Feynman’s purported IQ, but I don’t doubt GWB’s. I do question your ability to be rational and not overly emotional, which I believe clouds the judgment of otherwise intelligent people (thus, my comment about too many of such people being in a state of denial about the harsher realities of life — I think you fall into this category).
How do I get to take the test?
That’s too general. Be specific to the case in discussion; do you mean
(A) My IQ really is 15 and I only imagined I was a computer programmer, or
(B) The IQ test gave a false reading because of the time limit.
(C) I don’t know.
Should not this be more correctly stated as, if you do not have a high enough PGS for IQ, then nothing else matters? One could earn a bachelor’s, a master’s, or a PhD degree or any number of life accomplishments, be high or low class and yet someone without any of these could simply ante up with their lucky genotype and claim the win.
Genotype and life outcome could then perfectly correlate- by fiat. People so much want the universe to obey orderly laws that if nature were not to comply to our wishes by choice, then it would be compelled by us to do so by decree.
Yet, we have already seen in very highly selected long term studies that it is not those who have been chosen to succeed, but those who were not chosen. Telling someone that they are not good enough is the most powerfully effective way of letting them transcend their limits.
We have already reached the stage at which the research allows us to try this experiment. While it might seem entirely absurd, perhaps at birth babies should be genotyped and then assigned without any further argument to their life roles. Being born would be the only required life challenge for those who possess the correct genotype. The research has clearly shown that such an interpretation of reality would largely overturn the present structuring of society based on socio-economic class.
None of the above. I mean:
(D) Your IQ really is only 15, you really were a programmer and apparently a good one, but given your low IQ, your accomplishments mean nothing so far as anyone’s judgement of your intelligence is concerned. At best, all one might say is that maybe you’re an idiot savant or something, but that doesn’t count as being intelligent.
There you go. Just pick and choose. That’s fine with me. I judge people by their accomplishments too, not by some alleged test of intelligence that cannot distinguish between a bullshit artist like G.W. Bush and a man of acknowledged genius like Richard Feynman.
Leon Halller: Does mental speed precisely parallel mental ability? I doubt it.
Canspeccy:
(D) Your IQ really is only 15, you really were a programmer
Professional_stranger:
Silly! This is all about time limits on IQ tests. Does this limit the tests ability of measure problem-solving ability. You are not questioning IQ tests at all. You miss the point.
In anything techie like say computer programming, solving problems like finding the missing number in the series 1,16, 81, ? , 625 is the important thing. You can go and get a coffee while you think about it, if you like. But solving the problem is a must. There is no such thing as skipping it and moving on to the next question, in order to boost your average score. If you don’t solve it you are out the door.
Again: you are not questioning IQ tests at all. You miss the point of the whole discussion. You are just accepting IQ tests in general as a holy grail, and trolling the board on that premise.
OMG! I thought the person who used the Troll button was a bit slow on thecuptake but maybe too many years computer programming does some limiting things to the brain!
Actually you taking too much time to see the series of numbers you were asked about probably supports Eysenck’s point that 11 Plus tests were sound and valid but should be practised for. If you had been a devotee of Martin Gardner’s little books you might well have got the answer in about 10 seconds.
If you have to ask, you fail.
“cul-de-sac” is a very common term in England, there are cul-de-sacs all over the place
Not picking and choosing at all. I think Feynman’s IQ is not being accurately presented.
You’re obviously blinded by an irrational, white-hot hatred of Bush if you can say, with such venom, that he is a “bullshit artist” but don’t mention that lying SOB former POTUS for whom the term is much more appropriate; to wit: “History will record that this is the day that the oceans began to recede and the planet began to heal” (this, upon his mere nomination). “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Period.” “Your health care costs won’t increase by a single dime. Period.” “You didn’t build that!” “Not a smidgeon of scandal attached to my administration” (this one is particularly delightful — looking forward to Barr and Durham blowing the lid off the treasonous, criminal acts of the Big Zero administration and his weaponized DoJ, CIA, and FBI and exposing them all for the arrogant criminals that they are…Brennan, Comey, Clapper, Strzok, Page, Lynch, Yates, McCabe…as well as the Big Zero and Herself).
It is time to man up.
Question: Will the Wonderlic scores on the UKBB sample when GWASed into their DNA report SNPs related to IQ, EDU etc. (at levels beyond chance)?
This is a right or wrong type question.
No points will be awarded for IQ tests do not test IQ, IQ is socially constructed based on scientific racism and scientific classism, etc. . Questions of fact are not open to argument. Those who can provide correct answers will earn the esteem of others; those who do not provide correct answers will not earn each esteem: a Darwinian struggle of the correctest.
For the record, somewhat reluctantly, I choose the answer: Yes. (One uncertainty here is that the sample size might not be large enough. A sample size of roughly 1 million should be sufficient.)
Wizard of Oz: OMG! I thought the person who used the Troll button was a bit slow on thecuptake but maybe too many years computer programming does some limiting things to the brain!
Professional-Stranger: Ad-hominem nonsense. Attacks the man not his argument. If you disagree with something I said, try to say what it was and why you disagree. Give examples, be specific.
Yes, you make those points well.
I have seen this effect in action. My wife failed the British eleven plus exam, and has been driven ever since. First class honors degree, faculty positions at top US, Australian and Canadian universities in Departments of microbiology, medicine, biochemistry and chemistry.
At one time, while she shared an office with a future Nobel Prize winner, the university did a departmental audit and concluded that her research was the only program of international significance. She went on to serve as the Editor-in-Chief of several top-ranked international journals. Just retired at 75, she still does the crossword in the national newspaper, perhaps just to prove she can. I can’t. But I don’t give a damn. I passed the eleven plus.
Yes, you make those points well.
I have seen this effect in action. My wife failed the British eleven plus exam, and has been driven ever since. First class honors degree, faculty positions at top US, Australian and Canadian universities in Departments of microbiology, medicine, biochemistry and chemistry.
At one time, while she shared an office with a future Nobel Prize winner, the university did a departmental audit and concluded that her research was the only program of international significance. She went on to serve as the Editor-in-Chief of several top-ranked international journals. Just retired at 75, she still does the crossword in the national newspaper, perhaps just to prove she can. I can’t. But I don’t give a damn. I passed the eleven plus.
Are you kidding? Or you just don’t understand irony?
Insufferable sophomoric pedant. You know nothing.
Just goes to show some people slip through the cracks.
Considering the source, I wear your label as a badge of honor (and, even though you know a few big words, I can see why you eschew the verbal portion of IQ tests).
I don’t know why you responded to me with that blockquote. I didn’t say that. But I agree that some people rise to a challenge and still others spend their lives trying to prove other people wrong. If directed in a productive way, it’s not a bad thing.
https://www.11plusguide.com/11-plus-papers-books/free-11-plus-papers/free-sample-11-plus-maths-papers/#grammarschools
I wanted to give the 11 Plus Test a try.
Two of the answers for the Bond 11 Plus Maths Sample Test are wrong.
Q 42. Area of a hole donut without the whole
Formula: Area of a donut without the hole = Area of the donut with the hole – Area of the hole
3 x 5 – 2 x 1 = 13 not = 12 which is the given answer.
Q50. Perhaps the test’s most difficult question: to the nearest decimeter, what is 5 foot 9 inches?
The best that I could remember, 1 inch ~ = 2.54 cm
so , 69″ ~= 1.7525 m
They expected that you would answer this to a quarter of a cm?
Answer should be 1.8 m.
Yet, answer given was 1.7 m.
After expecting an answer one quarter cm above the round off, they rounded the answer down?
{Checked with an online app, the precise answer is 175.26.}
https://www.11plusguide.com/11-plus-papers-books/free-11-plus-papers/free-sample-11-plus-maths-papers/#grammarschools
But why? Why use a frog term? “Dead end” is perfectly good Anglo-Saxon. It even made a Kinks song.
You’ve got the plural wrong. I don’t know what the proper plural is, but that one clearly isn’t it. What bag has two bums?
Sure. But much is wrong about doing it overtly, not wrapping it all in a cover of denial, denial for the use of others and oneself alike.
Basically, the healthy person:
1) Strives to be as above average as he/she can
2) Strives to make other people see him/her as above average as possible
3) Strives to not know 1) (and to know he/she sees everyone as on the same level
4) Strives to not know 2) (and to make other people think he/she does not, in the least, do 2)
As a girl has told me several times about her business these days, it’s complicated.
Humans have a multiplicity of goals — they need to do and believe and show a lot of things in contradiction with each other, almost the whole time.
Thankfully I am not well adjusted, and that spares me all such fatigue.
Ooh. Scintillating. Incisive. Brilliant riposte! Like all the other boneheads on here, you think you are smarter than people who are smarter than you. But even better is how you think you are funny. Well, you are. You are funny.
Inadvertently.
The Cambridge researchers had already done that on Facebook. If you drink Pepsi you are dumber than those that drink Coke, and both groups are dumber than the average. The Cambridge data were alleged to have been used by the Cambridge Analytica (no relation to Cambridge U) in the Trump election campaign for personalized election messaging.
It was medically proven that initially SARS had higher odd ratio for Asians as it jump species to human there, but it also showed that it fast mutated to affects Whites as there were plenty of Whites in HongKong as well as HongKongers in Canada.
Spoken like someone very ignorantly stupid.
IQ score is relative. Easier test means more people will hit the ceiling, but the stupids are still stupid, there are plenty of space below. It is as stupid as someone who thinks that he can out run his own shadow.
Another ignorantly stupid. True IQ is independent of language and culture, otherwise it is tainted.
See my comment 34. Distributions are informative, particularly those of whole populations on well designed tests, beccause if they then show deviations from normality, this might identify a cause. The Scottish sample (I think for Glasgow) showed a big bulge of low scorers, probably due to the very bad conditions for children at that time, leading to frequent illnesses and a profound and possibly damaging inflamatory response.
Honesty can be measured by tests, but I don’t think it can be done in two minutes.
Do you imagine that these reported scores are accurate?
Thanks. This is exactly what I would like to build up: a list of relatively quick tests which could be used to increase our understanding of a wide range of social phenomena.
No. A disparity between one person’s reported intelligence test result does not invalidate observations based on a million men. This is not a strong argument. Furthermore, a discrepancy between an actual, validated IQ test result and actual real-life achievements in a notable scientist would be interesting. One hundred such discrepancies between notable achievers in science and their IQ test results would be even more interesting, and lead us to question their relevance.
Try looking at Lubinski and Benbow for some actual data on the achievements of bright people, these based on cases in which we have actual results.
No, that is not what general intelligence would predict. General intelligence does not exclude cases of special skills, it includes them. Special skills are rare, but of course they exist.
I think we have covered this many times before: general intelligence, group factors, special skills plus measurement error.
I would agree that there is sometimes a very fine line between healthy self-confidence and arrogance.
I have no interest in being “scintillating or incisive,” nor in making “brilliant ripostes” (but thank you, nonetheless). I also don’t think I’m smarter than people who are smarter than I (how could I, if I know they are smarter?) I said, in an earlier post, that I believe the next best thing to being naturally brilliant is to be brutally honest with oneself, and that comment applies to me. I’m well aware of my strengths and my limitations. Are you? One wouldn’t know it from your comments.
As a start, you should consider the fact that you are the one who comes to this website and, almost without exception, initiates all of the insults, calling people “dumb,” “boneheads”, and other ad hominems.
Actually, Wilson in letters to a young scientist opines exactly this—that super smart people become bored with science. I think it stems from a misuse of the concept of the iq test. The iq test is not for differentiating among high achieving individuals. It’s for placing people into broad categories, such as hands on workers, Middle clerks, cognitive workers, etc. some researchers say that iq tests administered after age 18 or 20 are actually not predictive. I’ve also read that specific talents become most important for iqs over 120. The system did not fail Feynman. He ended up a cal tech physicist. To have failed you would have to see idiots at cal tech and seemingly talented people working in the checkout line at Walmart. (Like the new change to the SAT might give us lol). This is the fallacy of iq narcissism. “My iq score is over 170 so I’m smarter than Einstein. Even though I’m a couch potato.” Not!
Simply that Termin’s series excluded Shockley and Alvarez shows that simple testing is not useful for differentiating high achievers. Actually, I became interested in the offspring of famous scientists, looking at where they ended up. Few seem very talented at all. Only von Neumann’s line seems to have created a dynasty of math professors. Abrupt regression to the mean, or are average seeming people a lot more talented than you might think?
Here’s my final comment, Obwandiyag — I actually don’t like trading insults with commenters on the Web — particularly, anonymously. I don’t do it in my everyday life, and I shouldn’t be doing it here. So this will be my final comment to any Web articles. I wish you well, and whatever is to be, will be.
What does that mean?
It cannot mean that special skills are reflected in IQ test score, since we know that there are people with special skills like Gloria Lenhoff who have extremely low IQ test scores (ca. 65), and people like Richard Feynman and at least several other Nobel Prize winners in physics who though certainly possessed of special skills, had quite ordinary IQ test scores.
Are you sure about this? What kind of honesty?
Let me explain:
Wheelchair-bound woman is gang-raped by six migrants at Swedish asylum centre after asking if she could use their toilet
So let’s talk about honesty and morality:
1) How many European males would be prepared to gang-rape a wheelchair-bound Swedish woman?
2) How many of them would be able to get five accomplices in two minutes – among their immediate, speed-dial contacts? Five? Seriously?
3) Will their children be any better?
4) What’s your view of the Musilm “culture” in Eurpe, so far? How it’s different from the 7-th century rape-and-pillage methods our ancestors died to repel?
EUROPEAN CHRISTIANS DID IT TOO..
Witch burning in Europe
Picture: “Conquistadors slaughter American Indians” following “CHRISTIAN convert or die” RULE in Luke 19:27 “Jesus said.. But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”
Spanish Inquisition: https://images.immediate.co.uk/volatile/sites/20/2018/09/Inquisition-4-1c3f01f.jpg?quality=90&resize=620,413
Try reading Lubinski and Benbow. Intelligence testing works perfectly well at the very highest level.
Try considering the possibility that there may be general findings derived from hundreds of thousands of people which are not thereby refuted by two individual cases.
But we are not talking about hundreds of thousands of people.
There are only 209 people who have received a Nobel Prize in physics, and of those we have, so far as I am aware, information concerning the IQ test score of only three of them; namely, Feynman, Shockley, and Alvarez.
Feynman is widely considered to be the greatest American physicist of the 20th century, Shockley was responsible for the invention of the transistor that has played a central role in the creation of the modern world, and Alvarez is said to have been a very bright guy indeed. Yet Feynman’s IQ has been reported by both his sister and his wife to be 123, and Shockley and Alvarez failed, in youth, to meet the minimum IQ threshold for inclusion in Terman’s long-term study of high IQ individuals.
So in fact it seems clear that special skills are very frequently not reflected in IQ test scores. That being the case, it would seem that IQ testing is a very dangerous business, since it labels as no-hopers people capable of great achievement. Evidently that did not stop Feynman, Shockley, or Alvarez and no doubt many others. But who knows what psychological harm is wrought by such a false diagnostic test.
Muslim culture? Why did you bring this up? You’re just bringing low IQ military aged men from wartorn hellholes, who have had no sort of real education at all. Aldo, strong likelihood that they were black, Afghan or Syrian. You can’t lump us all in because of em.
BENGALI
One reason these people go nuts in Europe is because they are from countries where being a violent criminal is difficult. You’re locked up early and for a long time.
Take Bangladeshis in London. Its innocent until proven guilty and UK prisons are relatively nice. If you happened to be Muslim and wanted to sell drugs or be a gang member, you’re going to do it some country where cops won’t lock you up for 50 years.
Also, is Christianity the reason for black or Mexican or white trash behavior?
This article proposes spatial ability as the explanation for the Alvarez and Shockley results:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/recognizing-spatial-intel/
Note that Lubinski and Benbow (Dr. Thompson has frequently recommended their work here) are two of the three authors. One of the wonderful things about science is the learning aspect. So their work has at least endeavored to improve that gap in Terman’s work. Though if I understand correctly, they only tested spatial ability in the final selected cohort. It was not really included in their screening.
Terman found 1,528 subjects. Does anyone know the original catchment population? IIRC he was looking around the 1 in a 100 level (IQ threshold 135). So roughly speaking, two Nobel prize winners out of ~150,000 people. Neither of whom he detected.
Cohort 3 of the SMPY was 501 participants at roughly the 1 in 10,000 level. So an effective catchment population of ~5 million. That group is around 50 years old now. Does anyone know of any Nobel prize winners (or on track/similar level) in that group or the original catchment area? It seems to me their SAT tested population (top couple percent? does anyone know?) should have a decent chance of catching talent at that level so we would have high ceiling tests from the time even if they did not qualify for the study itself. Though the study testing would provide even better information.
P.S. This looks like a good reference for details of the Shockley and Alvarez results in the Terman study:
http://www.eoht.info/page/Terman+gifted+study
Exactly, religion isn’t that important in this.
Wait, isn’t it mainly just the Mirpuris and Albanians?
That could be so. But I think that by pointing in that direction you are not, as the majority of those in the intelligence research field would surely claim, directing attention from a continent of knowledge toward some little-investigated offshore island of information. Rather, I believe that the majority of the intelligence research community occupy the offshore island and steadfastly ignore the continent to be explored. That means, of course, that there is great opportunity in proceeding in the direction you point.
While spatial ability is no doubt important, it is only one of many special abilities that IQ tests fail to assess, in particular, creativity — wit, and imagination in the arts and sciences — surely the profoundest manifestation of intelligence: which point brings to my mind an image of the late Phillipe Rushton measuring diameter of a pretty young woman’s head to decide whether to hire her as a research assistant. Surely, only a psychometrician could fail to see humor in that.
But then humor is a right brain thing, whereas IQ is a left brain thing. So from the outset, IQism ignores half the brain. The half responsible for the truly creative aspect of human intelligence.
BRICK LANE is supposed to be bad and there are some Bangladeshi gangs. My point is that you are better selling drugs in London than a Muslim country.
I’m not sure why Bangladeshis are so much stupider than Bengali Indians.
As for religion, well, most US criminals are Christians.
Simple. The Bangladeshi diaposra that came were from the impoverished(more so) parts of Bangladesh, and they came because of lenient immigration policies. They were uneducated, hungry, and frankly…kind of stupid. it did not attract the best kind of people
To see whether intelligence tests have any power to predict scholastic outcomes such as Nobel Prizes, Field Medals, and the many other intellectual prizes available, you must start with a large population, measured while young, and then follow them to see what they achieve. There are many measures of academic success which, while rare, are not as rare as a Nobel. Lubinski and Benbow have done this, which is why I said they were worth reading on this subject. You do not seem inclined to do so.
Say, for some reason, that you decided to forget about the predictive value of early life testing, and decided to describe Nobel Laureates in Physic as a group. You would then have to describe all 209 of them, giving an account of their schooling, exam results, and any psychometric testing available on them. You would not be able to draw any conclusions by describing 3 of them.
I assume you understand all this, but I am bemused why you continue to argue as if you thought that taking 3 cases was a disproof of a general observation, less than unity to be sure, but still with predictive value.
That makes sense…Dhaka and Calcutta are far different.
To extend your continent/island analogy a bit. One way to think of this (which I believe has value) is that IQ represents a dominant land mass (say accounting for the proportion of total land somewhat like g accounts for overall intelligence) surrounded by smaller land masses of varying sizes representing various specialized skills. There will be plenty of interesting variation across those islands, but you can say a great deal about “land” by just focusing on the dominant land mass.
Does that Philippe Rushton “image” have any basis in reality or is it just another ad hominem of the type we are so familiar with from comments here?
I disagree with this for a variety of reasons. First is that humor and IQ seem to be correlated. This article gives some research links:
https://www.lifehack.org/378304/there-any-link-between-humor-and-intelligence
Second, I think you are misinterpreting IQ. To some extent it is measuring “good brain functioning”–presumably corresponding to various physiological characteristics like: neuron number and connectivity, myelin sheath thickness and integrity, cell electrolyte status, overall metabolic efficiency, etc. Given the tests we typically use it will also measure a variety of particular skills (e.g. analytical reasoning, which I think is what you are referring to).
Trying to isolate IQ to one side of the brain is simply wrong. I think my model of various specific abilities with g/IQ as a multiplier for them all at once makes more sense.
P.S. You might be interested in https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3682183/
I think the last sentence of the abstract is relevant.
Standardized tests for IQ are, by their nature, intimately linked to ability and exclude most other variables because they tend to be actively controlled for.
In contrast, Nobel Prizes are subjective awards by humans and are subject to unlimited unknown variables: including politics.
One is not comparable to the other in any scientific sense. The best you could hope for is to have enough Nobel prize winners take IQ tests and then observe the correlations or lack thereof, but the sample would be paltry and therefore have low validity. The unknown variables for Nobel prize awards create an inherent issue that would be difficult to overcome in general.
As it stands, one can’t draw any real correlative conclusions in regard to IQ tests and Nobel prize winners. Richard Feinman’s IQ cannot predict his Nobel Prize anymore than my IQ can predict my being elected President. A discussion on that topic is fairly silly.
As a scientific hypothesis that needs to be restated as a falsifiable proposition.
Thus restated, your hypothesis is that a path-breaking physicist requires an exceptionally high IQ test score.
Such a claim is refuted by a single contrary example, and we have three, so we know it’s false.
But we do have two brains, albeit connected and interacting. And the hemispheres do have different functions. Here’s a proof of that for anyone who is skeptical:
Take a long, but casual look out the window, at a garden, a city street or whatever. Just be aware of the scene without paying attention to anything in particular except to note which eye dominates perception — until that is, you spot something of particular interest, a rabbit in the kitchen garden, a man with a gun or some other unusual thing in the street, then see how attention shifts from one eye to the other, and with it, most likely, an adjustment in the angle of the head the better bring the right eye to bear on the object of interest.
Most people find that when just attending to the scene it is the left eye, and hence the right brain, that dominates perception, whereas immediately something requires close inspection it is the right eye, and hence the left brain, that dominates perception. That’s compelling evidence to me that the left and right hemispheres have different roles and the left is the analytical side.
And concerning IQ, a left hemisphere thing, here’s some confirmation:
It’s a bit vague but its what you’d expect. Speech depends on the left hemisphere and if that is damaged IQ must be affected.
I agree that “cease” is the best choice, but repeat that many of the other choices are synonyms according to the Thesaurus.
They are therefore right answers too.
So you are one of those annoying drivers who does not merely pause at a STOP sign, but ceases all motion for what seems like eternity.
Understood. But my point is to the degree that IQ simply reflects good brain functioning in general that will affect both hemispheres.
That makes sense. Scoring on an IQ test depends both on general functioning and specific skills (here speech). Lumping those together means the test can’t give good results about general functioning if there is a specific disability which directly affects the test results.
Put another way, do you really expect IQ tests to be an accurate representation of overall brain function for the fraction of a percent of people with serious specific brain damage?
To the extent to which IQ serves as a metric of overall good brain function it should give an indication of right brain ability as well. I would be interested in hearing what a real psychometrician thinks about this.
Wrong!
He said “to SEE WHETHER intelligence tests HAVE ANY POWER predict scholastic outcomes.. ….NOT “to CONFIRM THAT intelligence tests ALWAYS predict scholastic outcomes..”
He hasn’t put forth a hypothesis yet, he is proposing an experiment in order to formulate a hypothesis.
You are pretty confused on your science 101, Canspeccy!
This is either a higher-IQ joke or an IQ 85-ish earnest reply.
I suspect the former, given the attention paid to moving the space after the second comma to before the third period…and the deft Occam’s Gaper Block of errors that is precisely what a filet mignon never should be (well done).
In fact I suspect Urlash writes social media content for bots to strew about like hyperactive flower maidens at the unholy marriage of Literacy and Telecommunications.
I seems that you do not understand correlation, or at least that you do not understand that correlations which are less than unity are still informative.
🙂
I have to wonder. James, if you understand science, in particular, what it means to falsify a hypothesis.
James Thompson:
“To see whether intelligence tests have any power to predict scholastic outcomes.. you must start with a large population, measured while young, and then follow them to see what they achieve.”
“Canspeccy:
I have to wonder. James, if you understand science, in particular, what it means to falsify a hypothesis.
That’s not a hypothesis. It’s a plan for a study to test for correlations.
It’s hard to believe Canspeccy would try to defend such ignorance.
I restated James Thompson’s claim in the form of a hypothesis at #162. That is the hypothesis under discussion. But since you missed it, here it is again:
James Thompson claimed:
Which I restated in more restricted form as a falsifiable proposition thus:
Such a claim is refuted by a single contrary example, and we have three, so we know that it is false.
But if you don’t like my restatement of James Thompson’s assertion, lets look at what he is saying. He is describing the Terman study, a long-term study of high IQ students, among whom there were no Nobel Prize or Field’s Medal winners. However, among those who were tested for, but excluded from, the study were two candidates who subsequently did won Nobel Prizes: William Shockley and Luis Alvarez. So either way you look at it, intelligence tests clearly lack the power to predict scholastic outcomes such as Nobel Prizes.
So do try to understand what the argument is about before jumping in with really low IQ comments.
Thompson did not state any hypothesis. He stated a plan for a study to test for correlations.
Cansceccy assumed the study had been done and some specific correlation found, then falsely attributed it to Thompson. Then Canspeccy presented a hypothesis based on his assumed correlation, and again falsely attributed it to Thompson. Then CS went on the rebut his own hypothesis, and claimed victory over Thompson.
This just goes to show you: Canspeccy is a moron who knows nothing about the scientific method. And he plays dirty pool to compensate, and hopes nobody will notice. A classic cheat and a liar.
Let the world decide who is the moron. Exchanging epithets may appeal to an IQ-ist, but it is not a form of debate that appeals to me.
Stranger: Thompson did not state any hypothesis. He stated a plan for a study to test for correlations.
Cansceccy assumed the study had been done and some specific correlation found, then falsely attributed it to Thompson. Then Canspeccy presented a hypothesis based on his assumed correlation, and again falsely attributed it to Thompson. Then CS went on the rebut his own hypothesis, and claimed victory over Thompson.
Stranger: Sure! I voted for Canspeccy on the basis of the evidence. In more detail: a moron who knows nothing about the scientific method, plays dirty pool to compensate, and hopes nobody will notice. A classic cheat and a liar.
As I said you are a troll. And as a troll you deploy insults and absurdities in order to drag the debate into the gutter where you are free of the need to deal rationally with the scientific questions at issue.
James Thompson’s claim can be formulated as a testable scientific hypothesis in the way I indicated. Specifically, that:
But this we know from the cases of Feynman, Shockley and Alvarez, all truly great scientists, is not the case. Therefore, the hypothesis is false.
>>=>NEW!
Stranger: Thompson did not state any [claim or] hypothesis. He stated a plan for a study to test for correlations.
Cansceccy assumed the study had been done and some specific correlation found, then falsely attributed it to Thompson. Then Canspeccy presented a hypothesis based on his assumed correlation, and again falsely attributed it to Thompson. Then CS went on the rebut his own hypothesis, and claimed victory over Thompson.
This just goes to show you: Canspeccy is a moron who knows nothing about the scientific method. And he plays dirty pool to compensate, and hopes nobody will notice. A classic cheat and a liar.
>>=>NEW! …. and now he is stonewalling. Not challenging the rebuttals to his nonsense argument, just repeating his error: insisting again that a plan for a study to find correlations, is a hypothesis and now, a claim! Plus a couple of red-herrings to take the spotlight off his stupidity.
LOL. Why not climb out of the gutter and make a civilized argument. I offered no red herrings. What I said was:
Which seems worth repeating, in case anyone is distracted from the point at issue by your canniptions.
ional Stranger says:
May 22, 2019 at 6:26 pm GMT • 200 Words
Thompson did not state any hypothesis. He stated a plan for a study to test for correlations.
Cansceccy assumed the study had been done and some specific correlation found, then falsely attributed it to Thompson. Then Canspeccy presented a hypothesis based on his assumed correlation, and again falsely attributed it to Thompson. Then CS went on the rebut his own hypothesis, and claimed victory over Thompson.
>>=>NEW+0!
>>=>NEW+1!
This just goes to show you: Canspeccy is a moron who knows nothing about the scientific method. He doesn’t know what a hypothesis is. And he plays dirty pool to compensate, and hopes nobody will notice. A classic cheat and a liar.
Hey, you’re quick to shovel more irrelevant insults.
Which makes me wonder, are you by any chance, a mechanical troll?
You know, some kind of, presumably primitive, AI device.
That could explain the repetitiveness of your remarks, assuming that you’re an early-stage implementation of the software.
In that case, we’d have to assume that the repeated misspellings are a ploy to suggest that you’re a true flesh and blood nincompoop, not a mechanical propaganda device.
But if James Thompson considers that your remarks pass for an adequate defense of his position, that is a rather sad admission.
Stranger: This is NOT a hypothesis. … It is a plan for a study to find correlations.
Stranger: Thompson did not state any hypothesis. He stated a plan for a study to test for correlations.
This just goes to show you: Canspeccy doesn’t know what a hypothesis is. He knows nothing about the scientific method.
>>=>NEW!
Stranger: He is still stonewalling with red-herrings.
This to avoid confronting his fundamental error in mistaking a “plan for a study to find correlations” for a “hypothesis”. Then using that error as a premise to his following argument – making it all nonsense.
He is just not going to talk about it, because it’s indefensible.
Canspeccy is a moron and he plays dirty pool to compensate, and hopes nobody will notice. A classic cheat and a liar.
At an earlier stage of your heated conversation with P S you said
“James Thompson’s claim can be formulated as a testable scientific hypothesis in the way I indicated. Specifically, that:
a path-breaking physicist requires an exceptionally high IQ test score.”
I’m not very interested in rescuimg and restoring life and health to any of the moribund nits left in the wake of battle but, when one notes prosaically that the IQ test scores noted for Feynman, Shockley and Alvarez *were* literally exceptionally high – except if confined to physicists – I am conformed in an analysis that has satisfied me for a long time. That is that IQ scores when measured by well designed tests properly conducted can mark thresholds. With some supporting evidence or calculations that I later came across I proffered the view that the threshold IQ for someone to be appointed to and hold the position of full professor of physics would be about 125 (better measured perhaps in SDs). Although I have been sceptical about Feynman’s 125 and so maybe of the others quoted they do seem to support my threshold hypothesis and point to the need for specific abilities and personality characteristics to rise high in the firmament of stars.
There seems to have been little specific research that I know of to identify, define and assess those characteristics. Practical managers of scientific endeavours presumably rely, after SAT, academic honours, publications and enthusiastic reception of papers very little indeed on the psychometricians. I have as a neighbour the highly intelligent but nerdy and odd child of an old friend who was also nerdy and, though given to writing poetry, also probably, to use the fashionable jargon “on the spectrum”. Each have had some trouble with conventional employment and partnership structures but have managed to handle and enlarge substantial family inheritances well enough and one would not be surprised if their gene pool, including that of siblings and cousins, produced a Shockley or, more amiably, an Alvarez.
If there is any lesson in that it is surely that refining tests and accurately identifying the thresholds is what the intelligent opportunity-cost-conscious policy maker and administrator should aim at. Also, of course, assisting those who lack the means to be coached and trained to give their best after identifying somehow those on whom coaching and mentoring would not be a waste of resources.
Thanks. High ability necessary, not always sufficient. Lubinski and Benbow increased predictive power by adding a test of spatial reasoning. It shows up well in their results. Might have improved the Terman study.
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/creativity-and-technical-innovation/
Thank you. It could be said that what I said that made sense was well and truly foreshadowed/demonstrated in your linked piece. Still I can’t help thinking there are many more subtle means and levels of distinction to be pursued.
The first tests I ever did which made me think “this isn’t for me” were at the beginning of National Service, presumably a test for selecting those of us who were to go on officer training courses. For me, unlike my contemporaries, motor cars have been of no interest except for purely utilitarian cheap and convenient transport – just enough interest shown to ensure that I’ve only ever run out of oil or blown a radiator a couple of times – so, just maybe motivation has something to do with the bewilderment and horror which stuck me on seeing questions which seemed to be full of diagrams of levers and pistons. So, maybe not so good on the spatial???? And yet, known for originality/creativity in areas like tax law so…. is there something missing in the testing? I suspect that my kind of creativity would correlate quite well with the solution of Martin Gardner type puzzles e.g. “what age was the bishop?” and “how many of the monks were dead?”. (Come to think of it when I was determined to show off on holiday when an old friend – a medical professor- presented me with one of those puzzles to solve at the end of dinner I resorted to scribbling on napkins rather than rely on my well wined head alone. Just maybe, if I was brought up to scratch on levers, pistons, pulleys, cleats etc. instead of being bored stiff at what all the country boys knew all about, I would have known what to do with pencil and paper to analyse the problem. Yes, maybe there is a lot to be said for remembering how Burke and Wills died c.1861 of starvation where local Aborigines, whom they failed to engage with and learn from [shades of Vikings who didn’t learn to eat seal in Greenland], thrived. Back to Eysenck’s support of an 11 plus test for which everyone had plenty of practice – as well as aiming to add the right kind of tests. None of which suggests that any IQ tests are going to much more than a very primitive waste preventing filter when you are hoping to find which child will be the Andrew Wiles who proves Fermat’s ladt theorem. (Try: this boy has a measured IQ of only 130 but that may be quite enough as he is totally obsessive in his devotion to mathematical problems as yet unsolved).
Rex Jung, researcher on creativity, has begun to think it is simply another aspect of intelligence, and not something in its own dimension.
As to the 11+ it was probably more egalitarian than the unclear procedures that followed it. Intelligence testing was designed to diminish the effects of special tuition, seen as a preserve of the wealthy, thus identifying underlying talent, not the effects of cramming. Current measures are much closer to the curriculum, favouring schools which teach to the curriculum.
Then WoA accepts the
“a path-breaking physicist requires an exceptionally high IQ test score.”
.. as a starting point for more comments comments.
That doesn’t mean Thompson’s
“To see whether intelligence tests have any power to predict scholastic outcomes such as Nobel Prizes, Field Medals, and the many other intellectual prizes available, you must start with a large population, measured while young, and then follow them to see what they achieve.”
… can be formulated as
“a path-breaking physicist requires an exceptionally high IQ test score.”
It can’t. It does not follow. It is a Non Sequitur.
Quite.
Have Lubinski and Benbow done any work looking at the skill profiles (M/V/S) of individuals who have lower M/V scores than are typical for their profession? Especially those with other indicators of achievement like papers,patents, etc.?
The idea would be to see how adding spatial ability to M/V improves the predictive ability of the tests. How might this graphic look with a variety of different predictors on the X-axis? Do any combinations of M/V/S do a better job of prediction than Age 13 SAT math score? Perhaps the best predictors are different for different outcome variables?
BTW, did SMPY ever compare those Q1 rates to the general population? I am guessing income would be an outlier given that I think that graphic shows Q1 actually underperforms the population rate there. If so, that would be worth some investigation IMHO.
Note that Luis Alvarez might be an interesting case study here. He was included in Anne Roe’s work, so in addition to his childhood Terman IQ test results we potentially have access to later in life high ceiling M/V/S test scores.
Perhaps an IQ researcher could request the Luis Alvarez material from Anne Roe’s papers and look into this? I suspect you would need real credentials to gain access.
https://search.amphilsoc.org/collections/view?docId=ead/Mss.B.R621-ead.xml
One caveat here. In Anne Roe’s book she commented about one of her subjects not “doing justice to himself” on the tests. IIRC it was one of the experimental physicists so might have been Alvarez.
I think the Anne Roe high ceiling M/V/S test data would provide a much more compelling estimate of the intelligence of these (Alvarez and many others) high achievers than the SB administered at ~10 years old in the Terman study.
P.S. I thought I saw a comment here about the average spatial score Anne Roe saw being 137 (but can’t find it right now). This is true, but if you look at her book: https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/roe/1953-roe-makingscientist.pdf
On page 167 where she says that she immediately follows with: “But there is a catch here. That is the correlation of this test with age which is -0.40. That means that the younger the man the more likely he is to get a high score on this test. If these men had been tested 20 years earlier they might have scored as much higher on this test as they did on the other.”
One must be more or less literate and numerate to become a professor of almost anything, and IQ tests probably do a reasonable job of measuring numeracy and literacy, they do after all, predict future academic achievement almost as well as traditional subject-based examinations, though neither predict future academic achievement with any accuracy.
The basis of the fraud that Thompson and other IQ-ists perpetrate is in selling the idea that IQ tests measure intelligence, rather that just basic literacy and numeracy.
Why would one assume that a genius like Ramanujan, whose ideas came to him in dreams, the gift of a goddess, would have an exceptional IQ? Maybe he did, but I see no reason to assume that he did.
Or consider John Nash, Nobel Prize winner in Economics for his contribution to game theory, who while afflicted by schizophrenia sought to persuade the US president, the Director General of the UN etc. that he had an urgent message for them from an extra-terrestrial civilization. Following his spontaneous recovery, a friend asked him how he could have believed that he was in communication with an extra-terrestrial intelligence, to which he replied: “because the ideas came to me from the same place that my mathematical ideas came from.”
An indeed, why would one assume that someone like James Thompson has any qualification to assess the intelligence of a person such as Richard Feynman, John Nash, J.S. Bach or anyone else. The IQ testing business is a racket, a racket that serves the interests of those intent on creating a fascist social order.
Can you recommend anything by Rex Jung elaborating on that?
What do you think about Eysenck’s idea that psychoticism is related to creativity?
http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/porzio.html
Or the more common idea that openness to experience is important?
https://scottbarrykaufman.com/opennessintellect-core-creative-personality/
All the Rex Jung stuff here:
http://www.rexjung.com/
I assume you have seen these summaries:
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/heave-half-brick-at-creativity/
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/another-half-brick-of-creativity/
Don’t know about psychoticism and creativity. Much of the early work was on fake creativity, in the sense there weren’t proper controls on what constituted high quality creativity.
Openness to experience might be a personality characteristic, or it might be a weak proxy for intelligence. Unsure of it at the moment. I had a very quick read of the Scott chapter, and can only say that on that skim did not find the data I wanted, showing creativity in business, science, technology etc being better predicted by openness than intelligence.
Thanks! I had seen those summaries, but on a closer look just now I realize I did not read them closely enough. I need to remedy that.
Good points about the different factors involved. One thing I think is important is to distinguish creative activity from creative accomplishment (alternatively potential and achievement). I think the latter is much more related to intelligence than the former.
This paper seems like a good look at the different variables we are discussing:
The Road to Creative Achievement: A Latent Variable Model of Ability and Personality Predictors
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3923982/
Abstract:
I just found that paper and haven’t had time to read carefully yet, but one thing that jumps out is that intelligence appears most closely related to originality.
This excerpt from the conclusion seems like a good summary.
I think this relates to the Eysenck theory in that both posit two abilities required in combination (and potentially uncommon combinations) for creative achievement. From https://www.academia.edu/33603011/A_Conative_Approach_to_Creativity_The_Correlation_Surface_of_Psychopathology_and_Ego-strength_A_Conative_Approach_to_Creativity_The_Correlation_Surface_of_Psychopathology_and_Ego-strength
Visually:
Caption: Figure 1: Correlation surface of psychopathology and ego-strength (Eysenck, 1995, p. 122)
I think the Eysenck model would be even better with a third variable added for intelligence. This seems like a useful discussion.
IN A NUTSHELL:
(A) Intelligence: is the ability to solve problems that you have never seen before.
(B) Creativity: is the ability to come up with something new.
In a sense (A) always involves (B), because in (A) you have to come up with something “new to YOU”. Nevertheless, (B) usually implies “new to EVERYONE”.
________
Creativity: the ability to create.
Create: Etymology: from Latin creātus, “to beget, give birth to”.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/creativity
Psychometric testing which predicts who won’t learn and perform as scientists and engineers so as to be able to design, create and/or assess safe and productive bridges, tunnels, vehicles etc. and research would appear to have considerable value in preventing waste. BTW I’m not sure why you are referring particularly to brrbal and mathematical tests when Raven’s Matrices have long been featured so prominently, not least in relation to the Flynn Effect?????
Thanks. Lots to look at here. Will discuss with Rex Jung.
You do understand that Dr. Thompson is an IQist zealot who is beholden to a very rigid ideology, right? You seem to be under the misapprehension that Thompson is prepared to open his mind to new or contrary ideas and information. He is not.
Ironically, Canspeccy (with whom I don’t agree on everything) is one the few on Unz that is faithful to the scientific method, making him a breath of fresh air around here. Dr. Thompson, whom you are defending, runs like hell from the scientific method.
Okechukwu commits the Ad-Hominem logical fallacy. Personal attacks and accolades don’t change the fact:
Canspeccy asserted that Thompson’s:
“To see whether intelligence tests have any power to predict scholastic outcomes such as Nobel Prizes, Field Medals, and the many other intellectual prizes available, you must start with a large population, measured while young, and then follow them to see what they achieve.”
… can be be formulated as:
“a path-breaking physicist requires an exceptionally high IQ test score.”
When it can’t. It does not follow. It is a Non-Sequitur logical fallacy.
Now we have an Ad-Hominem logical fallacy supporting a Non-Sequitur logical fallacy, presented with a straight face, in a debate where the topic is INTELLIGENCE! 🤣
10 points in the Wonderlic? This is undoubtedly false, possibly a strawman
It would be grand if Dr. Thompson could apply this same level of care and rigor to the flimsy and often fraudulent data he regularly embraces which also happen to confirm his biases.
It’s interesting that to support and defend IQism, Thompson is willing to mimic the conduct of a real scientist. But in terms of “proving”, say, the intellectual inferiority of black people, he’ll accept any junk data you put in front of him. He’ll even post maps and graphs that describe all of Sub-Saharan Africa as retarded, when reality says otherwise and when no credible data and no credible experimentation backs up that conclusion.
So my suggestion to you is that Dr. Thompson, a promoter and defender of the pseudoscientific disciplines of IQism and “race science,” has fooled you into thinking that he cares about the scientific method and scientific rigor. To defend those values he has cunningly donned the garb of a real scientist and deceptively proposed a standard so high and burdensome that it can never be met.
Okechukwu: Dr. Thompson, a promoter and defender of the pseudoscientific disciplines of IQism and “race science,” has fooled you into thinking that he cares about the scientific method and scientific rigor.
The Logic Cops (Stranger): The point here is: (B) above, does not follow from (A).
Attacking the motives of the writer of (A) again, is just another red-herring and another ad-hominem. If you abandon the rules of logic, finding the truth about any topic becomes impossible. Including when the topic is “measuring intelligence”.