Does IQ mean anything?

[lightningandsnow]

Here's why I'm wondering. I have a friend, who's my age - 17. He was identified as having a mild intellectual disability (low IQ) as a child. But, when you talk to him now, he seems average to above average - he understands a lot, and is even more mature in some ways than others his age. He lives the life of any other teenager, and while he has some academic problems, he's headed to college after he takes an extra year of high school, and does a ton of activist work.

So, is IQ destiny, or just a rough measure of potential?

[flvegan]

1. I put little credibility in IQ.

It's how that intelligence is applied that matters.

[TZ]

29. Yep. Especially given that many of the tests are biased towards

certain cultures, the measurement is not only meaningless but often used for political agendas. See "The Bell Curve".

[nomorenomore08]

2. Well, my verbal IQ as tested back in high school was nearly off the charts

(though keep in mind those charts only went up to 150), and I *am* a wannabe novelist with a BA in creative writing, so make of that what you will... :shrug:

[Heidi]

3. I think you worry too much about IQ. Out in the world, you're gonna find out

that no one of any consequence will ask you what your IQ is. What's of equal or greater importance, in my opinion, is emotional intelligence: your ability to manage your own emotions and deal with the emotions of others. :hi:

[TreasonousBastard]

4. It means you're good at taking IQ tests...

and that's not just snark. The tests measure a few things that might come in handy academically, but don't predict much about how you'll do in the world.

Just for shits and giggles, drop into a Mensa meeting some time and see just how impressive they all are.

Treasonous the Mensan (really-- been a member since the 70's and still can't figure out why)

[old mark]

5. TB: A lot of people I know with very high scores have great difficulty

with "real life".
My wife and myself both scored in the 150's, both had a lot of trouble with others, surprisingly enough teachers as far back as K and 1st grade.
Many of the high IQ people I know had problems with alcohol and drugs, many contemplated suicide.

There is some meaning to IQ, but higher ain't necessarily better in life....

mark

[HarukaTheTrophyWife]

24. Apparently, I got accused of cheating on a standardized test in kindergarden for scoring perfectly

My mom said she was like, "well, who else got that score?" and nobody else did.

I do awesome on standardized tests, but that never actually translated into grades, with the exception of English classes. I rock English courses.

[old mark]

26. I did well in everything but math. I hated mathm still do, but I took

College English Comp by examination and scored in the highest .1% of all people ever tested. I had previously flunked the course because I hated the classes.


mark

[Pool Hall Ace]

11. My oldest brother was a member of Mensa at one time.

prudish, selfish, greedy -- he looks like Dick Cheney with hair.

I'm not trying to imply that all Mensans are like that; I'm just sayin'.

[qwertyMike]

12. Agreed

I always scored off the chats in various IQ test because I had knack for taking them.

My real life however had many unintelligent decisions.
I was as moranic in that respect as the next person.

Decisions are based on gut feelings, we use our minds to rationalize them later.

Mike -!Q 151 and falling as I age.
151 doesn't help me find my teeth in the morning, 0r the remote, or my glasses, or remind me to pull up my zipper before going outside.

But I'm not low enough yet to become a Freeper

[Boojatta]

14. "Decisions are based on gut feelings"

Well, you must admit that the Supreme Court does an impressive job of formulating their gut feelings in legal language.

[old mark]

27. You need to lose at least 80 points for that, and adopt a really bad

attitude.


mark

[jobycom]

6. It can give a hint of potential, but it should never be used to predict failure.

A high IQ score usually means a person will do well in school, assuming effort, and that translates into greater possibilities in the job market or in research or academia. Doesn't guarantee success, just hints at it.

A lower IQ score can mean anything from weak testing ability to laziness to cultural differences to lack of proper schooling. My favorite IQ stat from about twenty years ago was that white students who graduated from universities tested the same when leaving college as they did when entering, whereas African American students improved their IQ scores on average ten points. The general interpretation of that study was that traditionally African American schools were doing a bad job of preparing students for college, and that IQ tests themselves, despite claims to the contrary, did measure education levels as much as anything else.

Wisdom, learning, confidence, mental attitude, emotional stability, work ethic, and no telling what other factors all play a role in how a person succeeds and what a person does with their mind.

[Oeditpus Rex]

7. 'Intelligence quotient'

:)

[MrCoffee]

10. Oh, real mature

I'm just pouting because you beat me to it.

[surrealAmerican]

8. It's a pretty good measure of one's test taking ability...

... and as such has some correspondence to scholastic achievement. Intelligence is much more complicated than test-taking and really too diverse to measure in any test.

[sammythecat]

9. I think very high, or very low scores,

are significant. In all other cases I think IQ scores are much more misleading than helpful.

[Inchworm]

13. I think it is just a tool

Your friend kinda shows that. If you find out early what your weaknesses are, one can adapt to overcome.

I don't thing IQ is an end all. It's just like any test -- an evaluation.

It works the other way too. If someone thinks they are "smart" because of their score they can fail to better their strategies for "smartness."

You can use a screwdriver as an icepick.

:hi:

[Orsino]

15. I don't think we know yet what it means.

I don't think the inventors of the concept knew what they thought they were measuring, either.

[KamaAina]

16. I know a woman whose IQ was once thought to be 10

that's right, 10. Then someone thought to hook her up with an augmented communication device. Now she's a graduate of the University of Denver (known as DU!) and sits on CO's developmental disabilities council.

[graywarrior]

17. Only when you compare George Bush's to Barack Obama's

[no name no slogan]

18. IQ means everything. Especially if you only base your self-worth on an IQ Test

And seeing as I am one of those people with an IQ above 200, the rest of you are barely worthy to lick my toejam. So I'm out of here.

Au revoire, you morans.

[applegrove]

19. IQ doesn't grant you success. You have to have all sorts of other intelligences too.

I think I read somewhere where there are like 70 different intelligences. If your not emotionally intelligent (and your friend sounds like he is) that matters more. This isn't measured in an IQ test.

[arcadian]

20. Is this a test?

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

21. Apparently low IQ has no effect...

on your ability to become Governor of Texas or President of the United States.

Don't sweat it.

[Odin2005]

22. Merely your abillity to take timed tests.

I've read many stories of "low functioning" autistic people labeled with mental retardation turning out to have normal or above average intelligence.

[mentalsolstice]

23. Not really

I had an uncle, by marriage, who was a "genius". He could play any musical instrument by ear, could read, write and speak many languages with no effort, graduated from the top university in the country at the top of his class with little effort. Yet, he didn't have the sense to come in from the rain, or the thunderstorm with lightening. Helping manage (often overseas) a family and house was way out of his ballpark.

[MedleyMisty]

25. I lean more towards "rough measure of potential" personally

I mean, it isn't entirely meaningless. There is generally (but not always) an obvious difference in mental capability between someone who scores 60 and someone who scores 160. Not that 160 is a possible score on the newer tests, as far as I know - I think they tend to ceiling around 140-150?

But there are so many variables, from just how you're feeling on the day you take the test all the way to how you did in the general birth lottery - obviously someone who comes from a disadvantaged background is fairly likely to score lower than someone of equal actual mental ability from an advantaged background just based on the differences in what they've been exposed to. Which makes me question the mental ability of both people who look at IQ scores by ethnic and class groupings and declare that rich white people are naturally smarter than everyone else and people who accept that argument and then base their arguments against IQ testing and "ability tracking" on their emotional reaction to it.

At least the whole "Every child is gifted and we all have the same mental capabilities!" comes from good intentions. Although I do like to be perhaps a little mean about it and point out that if our brains are all identical then developmentally disabled people and people with mental illnesses or autism or anything different from the neural norm must be faking it. If you want your total genetic equality pie, you have to eat it too.

I guess part of it is the odd thing I've noticed in American culture. I've referred to it before on here - the bundled concept of intelligence = education = money = personal worth. People tend to evaluate intelligence by what facts you know and what degrees you have and it takes money to go to good schools and get degrees, and well - need I explain the money and personal worth? Hell, it's pretty explicit in phrases like "He's worth $10 million."

Also, I can't tell you the number of times I've seen people discount someone's intelligence (and personal worth) based on their job in my years on the internet. And IRL - I worked in fast food for years, mostly in the drive-thru. I was exactly the same person then that I was when I was doing my brother's senior English homework for him in second grade (reading and answering questions about Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None - he got a 92, IIRC) and scoring high enough on the SAT in 7th grade to go to Duke's TIP program, but it was amazing how differently I was treated.

My current job is fairly respectable (as long as you don't know how much I make - just over $10/hour, OMG I must be mentally disabled), and people are much nicer and more respectful to me now. It's like people don't see actual other people at all. They just see cardboard cutouts and projections and stereotypes. They don't respond to me as a unique individual person. They respond to me as a learned social construct.

And that is how IQ can be destiny, in the way that it affects how other people see you and treat you. Maybe mentally you could handle the honors/AP classes if you were given the opportunity and preparation but there aren't many books at home and you've been going to severely underfunded schools your whole life and honestly you're more worried about your personal safety than about some stupid test - plus, if you do well on it you might become a target for your peers. But the adults around you brand you with the results of the test and use it to slot you into their mental box for McJob fodder and refuse to believe that you have any potential for anything more mentally engaging. And of course that applies on a social level as well - like people in power won't fund your school because "those people" are stupid anyway, Charles Murray said so.

To sum up - I do think that IQ tests have some meaning, but not nearly as much as society gives them. In ideal MedleyMisty world, they'd be used as one of many tools (and certainly wouldn't be the most important tool and all the variables that could affect the score and the failings of the tests themselves would be taken into account) in assessing the educational needs of individuals. And that's all they would be used for - not politics, not judging of personal worth, not excuses for continuing social oppression.

And if you're curious - I took a couple of IQ tests in school. We weren't allowed to know the results of the school wide and electronically scored one in middle school. My mother asked the guidance counselor and was only told that I "could do anything she wanted to do." Which again, underscores adults putting you in a permanent box based on the result of one little test.

In elementary school I took a couple of individually administered and scored ones. I don't remember the first one, but I do remember the re-testing for the academically gifted program in fifth grade. There was a number and a graph but I don't remember those and even if I did I don't remember what test it was and the same number can mean different things on different tests. I do remember some of the phrases in the text though - that I was "working at college level and above" and had "the temperament and abilities to go far with her life."

Which, yet again, is boxing me up based on a test. But I won't deny that it got my self-esteem through middle school and early high school.

LOL - I started this post before reading the other responses, but I just went and pulled it up in another window out of curiousity. The bundled concept is certainly on display - relating intelligence to what is considered external success by our society and the implicit assumption that the "potential" measured by an IQ test is earning potential.

I am forever kicking myself for not bookmarking it and I haven't been able to find it again, but I did once read about a study in which it was shown that the tax bracket of your parents was a much better predictor of your future tax bracket than your IQ. Seems really fricking obvious to me, but hey.

Reading over this before posting it - I think that the general sort of theme is that our culture is fucked up in the head and measures people by what they earn and what they do (which helps explain how that prejudice and assumption on the part of the person giving the test can lead to false low scores for people who are physically disabled or who aren't neurotypical) and that people don't really think of humans that they don't personally know as human and IQ scores are one of the many things that they use to build mental boxes to put people into, which shouldn't totally discredit IQ tests but rather make us more careful about how we use them.

Oh, and that social inequality and the differences between the educational opportunities available to rich white kids as opposed to poor and minority kids have an effect on IQ test scores, and pointing that out and explaining it and advocating for a more equal society would be much better than the "All kids are gifted and you just think you're better than other people!" kneejerk emotional reaction - which tends to provoke the equal and opposite emotional reaction of "Why are you taking your inferiority complex out on me and forcing me to be average to keep your feelings from being hurt?"

And yes, it's late and I'm tired and rambly. But thank you for this thread - it has brought up a lot of things for me and I still have a lot of thoughts about it to flesh out.

[Random_Australian]

28. Correlates. That is, if you go well on an IQ test you are more likely to go well on some other stuff

But that is the extent. The exact correlation and to what depends on the nature of the test, of course. But if you put together all the tests of all the people, it shows two things that are interesting.

1) Succeeding at any one thing, be it math puzzles of vocabulary questions, gives you a higher chance of success at anything else. In other words, people who do better at math do better at english.

2) Some things correlate more highly than others: Success at some types of puzzles give you a much higher chance of going well at some others. Of course, since we've all seen scientists and artists and how they excel at certain skill sets, this is not exactly a suprise.

But still, it shows that intelligence, insofar as it exists, is partly some global attribute (that is, "1" above) and partly something more specialised.

But what is intelligence? I wonder.

[MedleyMisty]

31. From reading research on giftedness

it seems to be almost a sort of personality type. I definitely think it's more about who you are as a person and what it's like to be inside your skin than external success at socially approved and valued activities. For instance, on here I see a lot of people refer to the CEOs and Wall Street people who are responsible for our current economic situation as "the smartest guys in the room." Leaving aside the sexism of that statement, greedy selfish people who make choices that enrich themselves while destroying the lives of other beings certainly don't fit my definition of "intelligent".

I don't know - maybe people just make up personal definitions based on their values. Like to some people, intelligence is financial/corporate success because that's what matters to them. To me it's being empathetic and working for the social good and having less barriers in your mind and questioning authority and your culture, because that's what important to me.

I do have a sort of intuitive basis for the less mental barriers thing. I will have to do more research than just reading the one book, but I did read a book a while ago on human cognitive evolution that was very interesting. The idea was that we started out with a sort of low general intelligence and as we evolved, we developed technical and social and natural intelligence. I liked the idea that the social intelligence was where consciousness and self-awareness first developed because we were more successful if we could predict the reactions of other humans by projecting our own thoughts and reactions on to them. We certainly do seem to do an awful lot of projecting.

Anyway, over time the barriers between the intelligences opened up a bit and we could combine, say, social and technical intelligence and use our tool-making skills to make jewelry that was used for social purposes. We developed a higher general intelligence that could access all the different intelligences and make connections between them.

One thing that's often listed as a gifted trait is the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated things.

I also like that theory because it combines the idea of multiple intelligences and a general intelligence. And like I said in my previous post in the thread - the answer to most dichotomies is both.

So I guess my idea of intelligence would be that it's a way of being in the world - that it's heightened sensitivity and nonconformity and ability to question received dogma and opinion and assumptions and empathy, that it's creativity and new ideas and passion and a brightly burning soul.

Like I said in a comment on a blog I read about giftedness and the definition of "genius" - I prefer to define genius as something that you are. If you define it by what a person does, then for the most part only people born into socioeconomic privilege and to involved and active parents and who have a lot of opportunities and some great luck will be defined as a genius.

[Random_Australian]

36. I agree with some parts, not with others. Here's my take.

Taking for one moment the example of CEO's, I most definately wouldn't say that they are the smartest. Not by an incredibly long way. They are the best at getting picked as (and remaining) CEO's.

But more importantly, I don't see values and intelligence doing anything more than correlating. In other words, I'd say that there ARE smart people who are greedy and selfish. They are very good at understanding things, but just not nice people. Similarly, there are a huge number of people who are around about average, but are just plain nice people.

Also, I really don't respect the opinions of people who judge successful people as intelligent. Consider a class of university-level physicists, for example. They all excel at mathematics, or at least do well enough to become accountants. Or something else that earns a lot of money that they have the skill set for.

But they don't, 'cos they'd get bored. Which leads me to another important aspect of intelligence - smart people have a strong tendency to like challenging stuff.

Or, in short, if we want something about someone that we can measure and say "that person is intelligent" (And we all do that to some extent), I'd pick the ability to think up solutions, regularly, to challenging problems. So if two people make a ton of money, one by parents handing them a company and the other by, say, inventing a bunch of useful stuff (hey, maybe I'll do that ;)), I'd call the latter intelligent and the former not, even if they ended up with the same thing.

What can I say? For all the dislike of "everyone having their own definition", I've had to fall back on intuitive stuff. Ah, such is life.

[datasuspect]

30. it means that i win

people who say it doesn't mean anything or that it means you're good at taking tests obviously have low IQs.

[MedleyMisty]

32. Bumpity

[Taverner]

33. My guess is your friend might be an ADD or ADHD brother...

We are a brotherhood/sisterhood if you will :)

Many of us scored low on IQ tests, only to end up as Doctoral students or other geniuses.

We don't fit in their boxes, that's why

A good read is Thom Hartmann's book on ADD - basically he describes us as "Hunters in a Farmer's world"

[Bucky]

34. IQ tests are a fairly accurate measure of you ability to take IQ tests

People who go about citing their IQ scores sound like idiots to me. There are dozens of different IQ tests and all of them will give you different scores and reveal the different cultural biases of the test makers. The margin of error on them is greater than one degree of standard deviation. In a word, they're useless as objective measures.

I compare the Mensa people who brag about their high IQs to high school boys who brag about how big their cocks are: I don't care how much time you spend measuring the thing, your attitude clearly shows you don't know much about how to use it.

[ThomCat]

35. It's more a test of culture and test taking than anything.

I scored very, very high. 163. It never seemed to translate to much as far as I'm concerned. Everyone else always thought I was smarter than I did. :shrug:

I've always had a lot of problems with languages. I learned to read late. I never could master a second language.

My math skills developed late, and peaked in college sooner than I would have liked. I would have loved it if I could have taken the more advanced statistics and engineering classes, but I knew they were over my head.

Part of that is that I had absolutely no school or home education of any kind until I was 6 years old. So all the formative years I got nothing, and then I spent years trying to catch up. So so no matter how smart you are it's hard to get over that kind of a deficit.

But it just goes to show to IQ doesn't mean much.

[Adsos Letter]

37. IQ=Irresponsibility Quotient...

I always score highly on that particular exam... :D