Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Losing my religion...

In comments here, Joseph notes that "IQs keep rising anyway."

And yet so does the Twilight series' box office take, which calls into serious question the predictive value of the WAIS...
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19 comments:

Keads said...

What does the Wide Area Information Server have to do with this? =)

9:58 AM, January 04, 2011
Anonymous said...

My understanding is that an IQ test is formulated so that an "average" person will score 100. Therefore, an IQ test measures relative intelligence in a particular population, not intelligence overall.
If you look around, most people consider next week to be the realm of long range planning. The unsuccessful have been supported to the extent that they are taking over and living off of those who work.
Personally, I shrugged.

10:00 AM, January 04, 2011
og said...

IQ is a measure of clock speed of the processor.

People with high IQ's can believe in global warming, for instance. Just like you can have a smoking hot computer and use it to design aircraft wings in real time, or you can use it to play WOW. How good your wetware is has no bearing on your ability to use it for something meaningful.

10:53 AM, January 04, 2011
mikee said...

When my children look back 20 years from now on the first few decades of this century, hoping for a good future for their own teenagers, I wonder if they will have gone through anything similar to what my grandpa saw in the 1930's: a horrible seesawing economy over the past years, with widespread economy-induced migration of people from one continent to another, ending in the worst economic slump of a half-century; wars civil and regional destroying previously stable empires, leading to a worldwide mass slaughter, ending in a disordered world that was tipping into a second worldwide war; plagues that killed tens of millions worldwide without any medical remediation, or that struck randomly each summer and left children incapable of walking the rest of their lives; governments hellbent on ruling their subjects through the purest totalitarianism seen in all history, and so on.

I hope better for them, and I hope better for their children.

11:36 AM, January 04, 2011
BobG said...

Personally, I think IQ's seem to be rising only because the intelligence of the average person is going down, thus making all other IQs look higher.

12:34 PM, January 04, 2011
Ancient Woodsman said...

IQs may rise, but then the bell curve shifts. Along with the new ways to be smart come new ways to be stupid.

As soon as one thing is made 'idiot-proof' God brings tomorrow a new dolt with a more efficient way to exhibit idiocy.

12:35 PM, January 04, 2011
Ed Rasimus said...

The validity of the classic Stanford-Binet IQ measurement went out the window about 20 years ago when the numbers didn't reveal a politically correct answer. With publication of The Bell Curve by Murray and Herrstein it all went out window.

12:51 PM, January 04, 2011
Ed Foster said...

Actually, when measured on a culture-fair like the UNESCO, Grace series, or military Alpha, we've been sliding backwards about one to one and a half points per generation since the '60's. "Norming" the results to a curve common only to a single group, deme, or generation shows nothing except distribution in that group.

I almost swallowed my tongue when I read, on BBC Online no less, the results of a peer reviewed nationwide study in Britain that showed success in school was 80% genetic.

"Well" says JimBob, "that's still the difference between a 60 and an 80, or an 80 or 100 ain't it?"

Think about it, that IS a trick question. The genetic differences between high and low IQ kids are massive and easily proven.

The brighter the person, the faster they can think, the less sugar their brain uses while processing, and the quicker their reflexes. There's a reason the primary prestige sport in the Ivys is fencing.

Think of a train system with a single track, vs. one with many parallel tracks. Which will move more product over a given time?

Basically, cultural distractions and, to a lesser extent, lousy teaching, can make a smart kid fail, but there isn't any way to make a stupid kid smart, and the stupids have more kids.

A demonstration back in the late 1980's proved that the best way to approximate a child's income at age 50 was to average his/her parent's IQ, assign it a percentile value, and scroll across to the same value in the income column.

Within a plus or minus 10% value, it was more than 90% accurate. Nothing else, not education, parental income, or geographic location, came close. Throw in the evil 6% for ADD and the margin of error dropped to less than 4%.

Certain tests, dropped 30 years ago or more, turned out to be accurate within a given cultural group, but not between groups, which spurred the current interest in culture-fairs. I find it interesting that virtually all the arguements against intelligence testing deliberately use information three or four decades out of date.

The limosine liberals publically deplore the idea of testing because it says some people are worth more than others, something that has been obvious to us mere plebians since time immemorial.

Then they use those same tests to get their offspring into the most prestigious pre to prep schools. Ain't PC wonderful.

IQ is the size of the gas tank. It says nothing about rust, bad fuel pumps, holes in the gas line, or the availability of fuel. But, on average, which big block Corvette is going farther, the one with the 20 gallon tank or the one with a 5 gallon tank?

Again, as the Brits showed (and quickly shuffled into obscurity), you can ruin a smart kid, but you can't do much for a slow one. Below a score of 90, the income curve drops dramatically, in virtual lockstep with the IQ score.

1:10 PM, January 04, 2011
Shelley Rae said...

At least they know how to read?

1:55 PM, January 04, 2011
LabRat said...

Given the classic Stanford-Binet test was never designed in the first place to measure absolute intelligence but rather to identify schoolchildren who were either too undereducated or too mentally impaired to progress with their age cohort, its validity should have gone out the window long before Bell Curve.

The IQ test that actually measures general intelligence has not, in my opinion, been invented.

3:00 PM, January 04, 2011
"Stranger said...

IQ is the measure of an individuals intelligence compared to a populations intelligence.

Of course, there are exceptional people. Most politicians are exceptional people.

Most politicians have to take the IQ test twice. They add the results to get into whole numbers.

Stranger

4:36 PM, January 04, 2011
Borepatch said...

One of the common misconceptions (composition fallacy, anyone?) is that "we're smarter than past generations". I'm skeptical, and am still waiting for a compelling argument that this might be true.

Anything concerning IQ falls into "not compelling" in my book. Sure, we all know that some people are smart, and others not. Measuring that; aye, that's the rub.

Offered for your consideration, all the "studies" showing that conservatives are dumber than liberals. Yawn.

I for one would like to see a measure of how hard people work. My suspicion is that past generations worked not just harder than we do, but way harder than we do. My suspicion is that {China, India, Malaysia, etc} also work way harder than we do.

As Thomas Edison said, "Success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." Then again, what did he know? The man didn't even have tenure.

7:56 PM, January 04, 2011
Darrell said...

As Frank Zappa said, "It's not getting any smarter out there."

7:59 PM, January 04, 2011
Chris said...

Agreeing with og, intelligence as a measure is misleading as a predictor of success in many areas: making money, interpersonal relationships, ability to reason deductively, etc. Give me someone who can reason when enough information exists, make informed guesses or connections when it doesn't, and knows when to do more research instead, any day of the week. Too many "intelligent" folks get an (emotional) fixation on something, and assume they "thought" it out; nothing will budge them off that assumption, since they are "so smart".

8:01 PM, January 04, 2011
og said...

"Too many "intelligent" folks get an (emotional) fixation on something, and assume they "thought" it out; nothing will budge them off that assumption, since they are "so smart"."

Pretty effective definition of liberalism, actually.

8:10 PM, January 04, 2011
TheOtherLarry said...

Computers are dumber than a box of hammers - they just do it really fast.

You can't fix stoopid!

8:49 PM, January 04, 2011
Cybrludite said...

Global IQ total is a constant. The population, however, is growing.

6:48 AM, January 05, 2011
George Groot said...

"I Can is more important than IQ"
http://verydemotivational.memebase.com/2010/09/17/demotivational-posters-i-can/

8:13 AM, January 05, 2011
Justthisguy said...

I think the Flynn effect really is tapering off. I also think the ashkenazim really are the smartest group on the planet, who sometimes use their smarts to do some spectacularly dumb things.

WV: shpedl, not to be confused with shtetl.

12:04 AM, January 06, 2011

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