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I’m now 43 and other day I was looking up test papers for the 11+ (school entrance exams for 11 year olds) and thinking - damn this is HARD!
Anyone else feel like they used to be so much quicker?
Doesn't that skew things? That is a lot of time a lot of people don't have.
I’m in my early 30s and I definitely feel less sharp than in my 20s, but I also feel like my priorities have changed and I have more responsibilities at work and at home, so I have much less ability to just be able to do very long periods of focused studying/thinking like I used to in my 20s
I asked my parents about this as they are both accomplished people and work in STEM/academia.
They both mentioned feeling less sharp when they hit their mid-to-late 30s, which corresponds to… when they had kids. I know correlation isn’t causation, but seeing all of my coworkers who have young children now all mention they’ve had a marked decrease in mental acuity for work due to sleep deprivation (and having to prioritize their kids), I’m going to guess this is it.
I also wonder if you just had a month to focus on refreshing what you learned in school how quickly it would all come back.
It seems like ICAR is spending a-lot of effort to remain scientific, and i feel like a website like this goes against that by spoiling the test utility for future potential participants.
After over a century of psychometric research in cognitive abilities and intelligence, what do we have to show for it? Whose life has actually improved for the better? Have the benefits from such research, if any, outweighed the amount of harm that has already been caused?
"arbitrarily defined concepts like cognitive ability or intelligence" correlate very well with objective metrics like educational attainment and income.
>the amount of harm that has already been caused?
Like what?
There are studies that empirically measure drop change cognitive ability from lead poising, oxygen deprivation, sleep deprecation, post-burnout, environment distraction, noise pollution, temperature, aging, drug and alcohol use during puberty, smoking, school teaching style, etc. etc.
Notable is that these are either population metrics or compare each individual with themselves. This is what IQ and other similar tests were meant for. Comparing one person with another is nonsensical and a flawed use of these metrics.
This is where where IQ has fallen and become a rather bad metric. People are familiar with the problems scewing results. IQ test performance and education level is highly correlated, which is supposed to be compensated for in the final score. But poor education quality in certain regions make the statistics easily used to argue quite unsavory ideas.
(my 2¢: avoid sugar, fast food& other carbs, nitrite meats)
what do you mean "a website like this", HN? or the destination of the link at the top of this discussion?
The link for this discussion goes to the test on the same site that you link to.
Are you saying people need to make their way to that test from the front page of the site following particular breadcrumbs? that people from HN shouldn't go there till they're ready to participate in a scientific manner? i just don't understand your point...
As intended by whom?
A great part of science breakthroughs is mostly made by people who just want to know more, for the sake of knowing more.
Yes, for the purposes of that research. Why would a comparison between two people be a flawed use case? Do you just mean the colloquial use and understanding of IQ is flawed?
I.e. if you have an IQ below 85 you can't even sweep up the floor for the army
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...
Over two different people, so many factors affect the score that making the claim "one person is more intelligent than the other" is statistically unsound without a massive score difference. This is even ignoring that a full IQ test involves FAR more than the usual online logic puzzles people tend to know, yet still have these flaws.
so yes; > colloquial use and understanding of IQ is flawed.
Not sure this was worth 65 minutes of my time. Would have liked to see whether whatever this version of the ICAR60 is is pegged to a standardized (IQ) test score. I'm assuming the 13,000 people who have also taken this are not representative of the wider pop.
That is a perversion of the purpose and origin of these tests, and a core reason why ICAR tries to replace IQ tests with a wider set of different logic puzzles without any established "aggregate score" metric for people to abuse.
Last time I passed a job interview, on several rounds of interview not one was about general intelligence, or general knowledge, or general anything. It was about my ability to solve the kind of problems they were solving and I had some experience solving. Last time I failed a job interview it was because of a bad culture fit.
I have not looked at the numbers, but I would suspect Ivy league admissions to be more correlated with wealth / geography than possibly anything else, but you probably square that with a belief that intelligence is hereditary as wealth is.
IQ tests measure the ability to solve quickly some abstract problems in an exam-like situation. There is certainly a use case for that, but thinking it captures the whole of "cognitive ability" is like thinking that duolingo captures the whole of litterary.
By the way, anytime one can't understand why $DEBATED_TOPIC is debatable should be an indication that one should switch to a slower though process.
I’m going to guess you’re obsessed with the plight of those you perceive to be “under” you. I mean, they’re poor - there’s NO WAY they’re doing well on the test right!?
Such an obnoxious point of view. Of COURSE your job has no causative effect on your natural cognitive ability. What a ridiculous way to try and look down on the poor.
If you actually want to test people for hiring, using domain specific interview questions and tests is a-lot more reasonable and usefully correlated with real-world job performance.
I'm pretty sure if I asked a group of people to invent their own questions I'd get a load of general knowledge questions about music, sports, and popular culture.
I'm not certain I agree. If anything, cognitive tests can be used as a single point of datum, but to my knowledge, no condition can be diagnosed via a cognitive test alone. Of course, I could be mistaken. I wish administered the WAIS-IV on top of many other tests for an ADHD diagnosis.
> They are important to determine exactly what sort of ongoing care and support the person needs in order to thrive.
Interesting, upon my receiving my diagnosis, I was not provided any support nor would I declare I have thrived. Obviously, n = 1. I was merely given the social approval to take pharma-grade speed and thrown back to the wolves.
> It's also not arbitrary—a good cognitive test will give insight into the ability to perform everyday cognitive tasks.
That's the part I believe I am clearly missing. These tests provide insight into the ability to perform everyday cognitive tasks better than one's history of already performing various tasks? It's not as if someone with a perfect SAT score takes an IQ tests and then is met with the sudden reality that they are mentally disabled nor vice versa.
What do these tests tell us that we already do not know? If I want to find someone with high mathematical abilities, then I would administer a math exam. Reading? Reading exam. Chess? Chess tournament. And so on...
The sub-sections of things like the WAIS can be of some value for identifying specific abnormalities or deficiencies, but as you said, is probably of more value clinically to split them out into separate tests/activities rather than to group them all together into an aggregate score. It's a bit like judging athletic ability and skill by BMI and fat percentage rather than just playing an opponent in tennis to find out if they're a good tennis player.
Oooh, to be sure they don't call them IQ tests explicitly, but the psychometric capabilities and performance tests they've gotten me to do (mathematical, logical, verbal, reasoning etc) are pretty obviously IQ proxies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
In a cruel and inhumane manner virtually devoid of all empathy and compassion for our planet, the life our planet supports, and for each other? I honestly wish I didn't understand how the world actually functions.
"Test your fitness with this 1 hour workout! ... Hmm our totally unbiased test shows that everyone is really fit."
See? Unbiased sampling is really hard but an hour long test means you're not even trying. (Which tbf they might not be.)
I'd be leery of anyone that claims that the only reason they were able to become a doctor, lawyer, etc. was because of being in a gifted program or something similar.
As far as I am concerned, I firmly believe the truly talented will create their own environment within reason. Take Von Neumann, for example. He was god-like in abilities. I am certain someone of his caliber did not need better educational opportunities in order to be exceptional. The man was, by all accounts, born exceptional.
Also, I am not certain that giving better educational opportunities to the bright is better than giving better educational opportunities to the disadvantaged, but I will admit I am likely too ignorant on this topic to have an informed opinion.
Never have we seen a result so relatable to most users. =3
> The touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.
The benefits have been huge. The Chinese realized this a thousand years ago when they invented civil service exams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_examination.
As far as I can tell, their only real purpose in the UK is to try to convince "intelligent" people to give money to MENSA.
One just becomes hyper-specialized with age if you aren't careful, and don't explore new technology or hobbies. One Phd physicist I knew often said he was only an expert in Spoons, and while that probably wasn't really true... it did allude to the irrational competitiveness of the insecure. =3
Just the lack of sleep must have an large effect.
Who is more likely to have more time and the means to develop patents? The high income/high intelligence person who pays for others to do various chores, labors, and services for them so that they may focus on their work, or the people deemed unworthy by society who spend their time performing the chores, labors, and services for the high income/high intelligence person?
I believe intelligence alone is worthless, if not dangerous, without altruism and empathy. As I type this very message, somewhere in the world, there are people being torn to shreds, families destroyed, etc. by various contraptions designed by some of the most intelligent people on the planet. While unintelligent people may have less potential to change the world in a positive manner, it is apparent that those same individuals have less potential to change the world in a negative manner, as well.
Whatever potential these children have, I believe it's imperative that we are damn certain those children have the moral and ethical composition deserving of their potential, at least, that is my starry-eyed opinion.
This is actually like one of the primary tricks of the IQ perverts. They'll take literally any test, run the results through a transformation function to get it into their bell curve, and start making claims about how IQ correlate with This-Or-That based on it.
Are you me? I've been helping my daughter study for the 11+, and some of the questions I really struggle with (I'm 44). However if you look up the answers and see how the answer is calculated/resolved, it does seem like it's a case of just learning the method.
This does make me think that to pass the 11+ you basically need to pay for private tuition. We'll see how well my daughter does in a few weeks time (when the 11+ test is conducted).
Likewise with a lot of these cognitive IQ tests, if you know the method or tricks you can basically pass no problem... but I'm not 100% sure it means you're "smarter" than everyone else.
I did not read the comment you're replying to as saying otherwise.
https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/intelligence.shtml
https://kaiwenwang.com/writing/hypothetical-foldy-ears-as-an...
In practice, intelligence tests don’t depend on the specific questions asked. If you let a group of people generate their own items, pool them together, sample randomly, and then rank scores, the same individuals would tend to rise to the top. The high IQ people would cluster toward the top with a correlation of 0.9. This is because people with higher general cognitive ability perform better across virtually any cognitive task, a phenomenon first documented by Spearman (1904) and repeatedly confirmed in psychometrics research (e.g., Jensen 1998; Deary 2012).
>Imagine that you know that you aren’t so smart. It’s difficult to do well in class. Then you hear of this theory, go check your ears in the mirror, and find that your ears are not so foldy. Maybe they’d feel relief at understanding why things are the way they are. They could then endeavor to do better for their kids and the next generation armed with the knowledge of prenatal nutrition and its benefits
What kind of crackpottery is this?
>My personal opinion is that only people with these biologies are not Aristotle’s natural slaves, only able to live in the worlds of others.
This is the kind of fatalist intelligence eugenics that makes me recoil.
> not so intelligent people
They generally won't ever know that the test exists.
Psychologists are scientists and the replicability of IQ testing is extremely high and repeatedly confirmed. And despite how much psychosocially challenged nerds here like to complain about psychology, they are in good company: psychology itself is not normie opressors, psychologists are also psychosocially challenged nerds.
before you say anything else, the statistical methods we use today across medical testing were first applied and developed to psychometric testing, so if you are going to attack that, you are attacking all of medical science.
You're welcome for me educating you.
So: the people that developed intelligence tests were not psychologists; lies, damned lies and statistics; "pioneering" the idea of using math doesn't mean that people using math today are doing the same thing; whatever the definition of IQ might be is irrelevant because "IQ tests" are not rigorously defined; however precisely IQ is defined is also irrelevant because it's supposedly just a proxy for "g"; psychology is not psychometry and so discarding IQ does nothing to the field of psychology.
Without this educational opportunities would primarily be given to the obviously/observably bright and advantaged children since their parents can afford it.
Putin uses such people as cannon fodder, meat wave attacks
It wouldn't be impossible. The extra resources might not go as far, which makes the program more likely to look like a waste.
> how much evidence supports that better educational opportunities truly manifests into the outcomes we socially desire?
The rate of technological progress we can make as a species is largely dictated by the area under the +2 sigma -> infinity region of the IQ curve. Further adjusted by the amount of those people that we can find and motivate to participate in the economy. As for evidence, the US poaches high IQ people from around the world. You can chalk that up to coincidence if you want.
Do you have a counter-point? You think the army is stupid and you know better? What is your point?
Would you prefer your child have an IQ of 120 or 80? If you have a preference, then you're morally inconsistent and don't even realize it? That must be a frustrating condition to go through life with? At least try to have a nice day in spite of your limitations. It's not your fault, we're all equal in God's eyes.
The Duke Power Company had as many black people in management as the NBA has short players.
Your argument is not even internally consistent.
I am "arguing" (not arguing, simply stating basic facts) that neither Russia nor the USA were giving "IQ tests" to soldiers. Also neither Russia nor the USA are currently giving "IQ tests" to soldiers.
To Wit: I do not think the Army not accepting people who score too low on their entrance exam has anything to do with "IQ".
Also neither I nor my hypothetical child will be taking an "IQ test" (again not actually a defined thing) so having a preference is not a sensible idea.
Focus on the 3 pronged shape. It is unique in all 4 orientations. You can use this to filter out bad rotations. Then use adjacencies to filer out the rest.
“Because it stratifies people, which has the effect of saying some people are better than others in some way”.
I’m not being sarcastic towards you, I’m being sarcastic towards people who think this is truly harmful. I apologize - I should’ve made that more clear.
Then again, the same psychologist told me that the discrepancy between my scores was so large that a true FSIQ cannot be used. In a sense, he told me that based on that test, I didn't actually have an IQ that could be accurate measured based on that given test. Apparently, it’s not normal to have almost two SD between some scores...
Being a smart idiot isn't easy work, but someone has to do it.
For the dice questions, which rotation on the is being performed? I think that's part of the riddle, most rotations are impossible given the initial position.
Either am an idiot or the solution to the riddles is something taught in school, which is something I've never been taught.
Also, your Vox link was pay-walled, but nevertheless, I am fairly well versed in some of the data. I have my own archive of research on this topic for what it is worth (not likely much).
Any hoot, the correlations, while positive, are nothing to write home about in my opinion. Sure, IQ might have more breadth of predictably, but it definitely lacks depth of predictably compared to more granular models depending on the domain.
For example, IQ is not a better predictor of chess performance than say a chess tournament.
Regardless, I am still skeptical of a lot of neuroscience research, as well.
I feel that neuroscience often suffers from the same issues that psychology does —- where correlation apparently equates to causation.
So we should determine who to give chess lessons to with chess tournaments? That seems pretty dumb.
There are many times where we don't want to select for current ability but for potential ability, and then a direct test like you suggest is a much worse predictor than IQ is.
Also, IQ predicts chess performance as well: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160913124722.h...
Isn't IQ one of the best predictors of job training success, across both civilian and military, blue collar and white collar?
It's also one of, if not the single most generalizable predictors that we know of right now, even more so than nationality, race, gender, SES (socioeconomic status), parental SES, you name it. It predicts just about everything - from hard biological measures like reaction time and brain mass to lifetime odds of being in a car accident (distinct from causing a car accident - higher IQ people are statistically less likely to be hit by another driver), divorce rates, lifetime income, longevity, the list goes on and on. IQ is not the strongest predictor for every one of these, but every stronger predictor for any one of those fails to predict as many things as IQ does. Parental SES, controlling for IQ, provides no predictive power for your reaction time, for instance, despite predicting educational attainment better than IQ does.
The critique that IQ is an imperfect proxy for g is totally valid.
The self-assuaging fantasy that g itself doesn't exist is a classic example of a psychological defensive mechanism of rejection, one rooted in a need to defend a worldview that holds all people as inherently equal, when we're measurably, biologically not.
Some cognitive abilities diminish more slowly with age (so-called crystallized intelligence), but unfortunately, fluid intelligence drops noticeably much earlier in life than most people would care to realize.
You just need to lean into what you know instead of solving novel problems. Or be comfortable knowing that it'll take longer than it used to. Typically, you can still arrive at a solution if you could have before, but you'll need to put more work into it. Sometimes, a lot more work.
- A homeschooling father helping with SAT prep
That was precisely my point. If little Johnny or Sally need a special education program to properly challenge and educate them, then I hate to break the news to their families, but whatever "it" is, those children don't have "it."
I also find it interesting how "gifted" programs and the like are predominately a Western intervention. To my knowledge, countries like Japan and China do not have "gifted" programs. I am not saying there are not academic and social discrepancies between highly intelligent and the normies, but Western culture does tend to be less community driven than cultures of the two countries I previously mentioned.
> You can chalk that up to coincidence if you want.
I cannot comment about modern times, but I know a certain group of people that I am half descendant from were commonly denied entry into the US during the 1920s - 1950s. However, those same people allegedly had the highest IQ scores on average. At least, historically.
(I am being sarcastic, of course.)
> Without this educational opportunities would primarily be given to the obviously/observably bright and advantaged children since their parents can afford it.
Hell, for any highly intelligent child, I say drop their asses off the public library. The truly smart ones will find their way, and the environmentally gifted will not. We do not need special programs for these kids. Special programs equate to more busy, bullshit work. A high IQ earns one more worksheets and homework. Education, at least in the USA, is rotten to the core. I am not convinced more of it is better. Do not mistake me though, I do not believe more knowledge and wisdom are worthless. I am just saying the education system rarely provides either.
I feel like people miss the echelons of IQ. IQ might have predictability, but the more narrow one focuses, the worse it gets. For example, let's taking programming. Something near and dear to my heart and to many others on this site. If one is capable of learning how to program, then their IQ is clearly sufficient enough to be a programmer. Past that point, I would not be willing to bet that a higher IQ would necessarily translate into a better programmer. It's like being in tall and playing basketball. Being 6'5 is better than being 5'5 in the NBA. However, being 6'7 vs. 6'5 much less advantageous.
If anything, I think we should start highly selecting for more altruistic and empathic children. Intelligence is not exactly uncommon. An IQ of 130 puts one in the 98th percentile. With a world population of 8.142 billion people, that means there are roughly 162.84 million people at or above the 98th percentile. I am not certain there are 162.84 million people out in the world making a big difference.
I am of the opinion that, although there is some generality in IQ tests, they measure only one specific aspect of cognitive ability defined by: abstract + quick.
My intuition is that cognitive abilities encompass much more than that. Anyone who have ever argued at length with that smart but obtuse engineer who can't tell the forest for the tree will know what I'm refering to. To me, a better test for "cognitive abilities" would also measure how someone is able of nuance, of humor, of seeing things from different perspectives, of introspection, etc, not just solving puzzles that can be described in a couple of sentences.
And I'm not talking about "emotional intelligence" here. To me, E-I is just the other side of that same flawed model that smells too much like modern day phrenology.
lol no. Most people are not going to spend an hour doing an IQ test. 5 minutes? Sure. Look at how many people here are commenting about it - and HN has a very high concentration of people that love IQ tests.
> That’s true of every test, right?
You can reduce this bias by either making the test a lot shorter (5 minutes) or paying or forcing people to take it (e.g. tests in school don't suffer from this bias).