No, intelligence is not like height
No, intelligence is not like height
... and the reason is one of the most interesting findings from modern behavioral genetics
It earned its "flagged off HN" badge in under 2 hours
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What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
By Isaac Asimov
What is intelligence, anyway?
When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me.
(It didn't mean anything. The next day I was still a buck private with KP - kitchen police - as my highest duty.)
All my life I've been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I'm highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think so too.
Actually, though, don't such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests - people with intellectual bents similar to mine?
For instance, I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was.
Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.
Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test.
Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I'd prove myself a moron, and I'd be a moron, too.
In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly.
My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.
Consider my auto-repair man, again.
He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me.
One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: "Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand.
"The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?"
Indulgently, I lifted by right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers.
Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, "Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them."
Then he said smugly, "I've been trying that on all my customers today." "Did you catch many?" I asked. "Quite a few," he said, "but I knew for sure I'd catch you."
"Why is that?" I asked. "Because you're so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn't be very smart."
And I have an uneasy feeling he had something there.
~ ~ ~
Autobiography by Dr. Isaac Asimov (1920–1992): It's Been a Good Life
Excellent, “because you’re so goddamn educated.”
What's great is that after reading this I used this exact gag on my (very educated) wife, and she fell for it too!
Funny, but that's not how it works. A (good) intelligence test doesn't ask you about stuff you learn in school. They are designed specifically to not have this problem.
(Some of them have categories where education helps you. This is on purpose and should have little influence on the final score. This is for the more detailed results.)
Everyone knows a good intelligence test asks you Raven's progressive matrices -- the one true sign of intelligence -- and nothing else
Edit: I was of course joking, but from my own link:
The high IQ societies Intertel and the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry (ISPE) accept the RAPM as a qualification for admission,[14][15] and so does the International High IQ Society.[16] The Triple Nine Society used to accept the Advanced Progressive Matrices as one of their admission tests. They still accept a raw score of at least 35 out of 36 on Set II of the RAPM if scored before April 2014.[17]
Sounds like some pretty depressing societies. Give me a secret cool kids club that's all about mazes any day of the week. I like mazes.
my brain is generating a Rationalist version of That’s So Raven where instead of psychic powers she scored really high on an online IQ test and constantly updates her Bayesian priors, and I feel like I need to drink this idea out of existence before Yud turns it into an extensive fan fiction
Delete this now. This is an info hazard.
"wait, is it ALL infohazard?"
"oh come on, that TOO?"
get writing you know you have to
look, the alternative is rewriting your air conditioner's OS again
don’t threaten me with a good time
now, between writing Rationalist Raven and braving the attic in a respirator (I’m terribly allergic to the dust around here) to finally replace my AC’s filters… it could go either way
You could also ask ChatGPT to make it for you. The idea's complete garbage unworthy of an actual writer's time, so I'd let it slide in this case
Intelligence to me has always meant the ability to quickly absorb and apply new information. Best test I ever took for this (imo) was a kids mensa test I took forever ago on the assumption it'd look good on a college application. They tell you a short story at the beginning of the test, let you read along if you like, and then give you an hour and a half of the standard math, spelling, reading comp, and logic questions. Then the last 20 minutes they spend grilling you about the story from the beginning, with intentionally misleading questions and open ended prompts that leave plenty of room for you to hang yourself. The whole point was to see how well you absorbed the information after a long and mentally taxing distraction.
Jokes on them. I ended up going to community and falling in love with welding.
Take the MENSA IQ Challenge! https://www.mensa.org/mensa-iq-challenge/ Three guesses of what kinds of questions this uses and the first two don't count. That's right! Raven's Progressive Matrices! :D
Half of the Finnish Defence Forces aptitude test is just RPM. The other half is a bizarre and inscrutable questionnaire, which includes questions like "is your father a good man" and infamously "would you like to be a florist".
RPM? Like how fast you can spin?
Fuck yeah I’m a finnish DF genius
If it were about that, maybe they hadn't decided I'm NCO material and forced me into a full year of service instead of half.
I've had to do a number of "aptitude tests" in conjunction with applying for jobs[1] and RPMs have been a staple.
- Swedish Defense Force aptitude test (you kind of stand out as middle aged among all the yoofs taking it)
- one for a job at a state-owned enterprise
- one for a job at an outfit selling this stuff for other companies[2]
I never really got a good score on them either!
[1] I don't really like this but beggars can't be choosers
[2] like I said, beggars can't be choosers, lucklily I didn't have to take the job
Please read the mismeasure of man I beg ef you. Intelligence tests are fucking bullshit and all the testmakers have known it from the very beginning. Unless you are of the opinion that the noble art of skull-measuring holds any water, that is.
you mean something like posting this comment to sneerclub? or are all your posts like this?
