**** Elections thread *****

[MadMojoMonkey]

What things? Are you saying someone who performs a logic puzzle better than another person, can do mental rotation more accurately, or has a larger vocabulary and better comprehension is reflecting something besides intelligence?

No, I'm saying that a high score is probably indicative of the type of intelligence the test was testing for, but a low score could indicate a wide range of things, most of them not related to the test.

But also, YES, I would say that.
You've listed examples of knowledge, not intelligence. Measuring one and calling it the other is weird.

"Street smarts" or more generally, "wisdom" are forms of social intelligence. I'm referring here to cognitive intelligence (i.e., the kind tapped into by IQ tests, and what most people mean when they use the word 'intelligence'). These are largely independent as far as I know and in fact rely on different parts of the brain. Happy to elaborate on that if you want.

This is a huge problem, and failure to incorporate all forms of intelligence into IQ tests is misleading.
Or rather, failure to comprehensively expand the testing process to show the many, nuanced ways intelligence expresses in humans renders the results useless without the handful or more other numbers to get an actual glimmering of someone's intelligence.

I've never heard anyone equate "street smarts" and "wisdom" before. Having high wisdom will lead to more street smarts if you spend time on the streets, but not otherwise.

"What most people mean [...]," citation needed.
Do you mean the people you spend the most time with? or most of the people you spend time with?

If you don't have the time or motivation or security to develop your intellectual abilities, then it's not surprising you become less intelligent. It doesn't follow from that that IQ tests aren't measuring intelligence.

As far as I understand, a 5 year old with a ~140 IQ is most often going to mature into a teenager with a ~140 IQ and then an adult with ~140 IQ, provided things go well enough (e.g. no head trauma).
Ergo, intelligence is not dependent on how you spend your time. However, your ability to score well on a given IQ test certainly is if it's asking vocabulary questions and visualize a rotating shape questions.

The smart brain is very likely operating in a quantitatively better way than the dumb brain. It's faster and more accurate, and so can learn more and learn it better.

Then why are you talking about memorization as an indication of smarts?
You should be measuring how fast a person is at incorporating new information and accurately applying it, right?
I.e. intelligence cannot be measured based on the past, but only based on the present, right?

It's important to keep in mind that a number like IQ is only measuring certain kinds of intelligence that are cognitively-rich and closed-ended and so on. But it's still measuring intelligence.

It's important to remember that when describing a pizza, I'm only really talking about the pepperoni... which your pizza may not have, but "most people's" do. But I'm still describing a pizza.

Why can't you compare them?

Comparing the IQ's of test subjects from different cultures is bogus. Each group is normalized to itself, and there's no mathematical way to compare the mean of one group to the mean of another group, since the tests themselves are different.
We can say, "people who are on the top of the bell curve in one group will tend to be on the top of the bell curve in another group." That's fine. What we can't say is, "This group scores systematically higher/lower than that group."

Because when they give the same test to large groups of people across long time spans, the scores go up over time. Do you find this hard to believe? Education gets better, people stay in school longer, people have better nutrition, more access to learning materials, etc. I don't think it's surprising we get smarter (as a group) over generations.

Hard to believe? No, the opposite. Previously novel ideas embraced by only a few become ubiquitous knowledge over time, and therefore no longer reflect an "advanced" knowledge of anything. Other ideas, once ubiquitously agreed upon as "true," are shuffled out of the culture, as their importance and "truth" is not really all that.

A test based on cultural norms becomes outdated as culture evolves.

Education getting better doesn't make people smarter, it makes them more knowledgeable. Same for additional schooling. Good nutrition increases security and free time, allowing more time for whatever intelligence to express itself on non-survival based thoughts, which are not prized as "smart" in our culture.

Grog the cave man was as statistically as likely of being a genius by today's standards as a child born today. The human genome hasn't changed since his time. Intelligence hasn't changed in many tens if not hundreds of thousands of years. There is 0 evidence that people have "gotten smarter" over the entire human geological record.
Maybe you can't agree with me based a genetic record. Fine. I'm a bit dubious on that assertion, myself.

Ancient history, the oldest writings, Ancient Egyptian culture... if you study it at all, you will see the genius of those people. The smartest people alive today are not in consensus about how the Egyptian pyramids were built. They had genius 6,000 years ago.
What has changed is culture, not intelligence.

But we are talking about what IQ tests measure here, not the social ramifications of how they can be abused by people with bad intentions.

You've solidly agreed with me that the tests are biased toward the cultural status of the testee, and that comparing results of disparate cultures on the same test is bogus.
We already know you can't directly compare the results from different tests, so ...
I don't see how the result (some bigotry) is anything but a foregone conclusion.

You were tested in school I presume?

Yep. Bunch of condescending douchbags. (the testers)

If I locked you in a room with nanners (as opposed to a nice person) and he was testing your IQ, do you think that would tend to increase or decrease your score on that test?
Is that more a reflection of your intelligence, or your patience?
Maybe your determination to remain focused despite distraction?

The tests are sensitive to so many unquantifiable factors beyond what they're designed to test.

This has been known for a long time.

Also not surprisingly - an expert such as yourself continues to deny the extreme relevance of cultural bias to the tests and their results until after you've spent a couple paragraphs saying some things that any statistician should get all squinty-eyed at.
"You can't do well on any of the tests unless you could do well on all (or most) of the tests."
you say while sweeping this under a rug:
"while a high score tends to indicate intelligence, a low score indicates nothing at all."


***
This is too long.
White flag.

I'll try to respond in summary on these long topics. The wall of text thing is fun, but overwhelming and daunting to read, IMO.

[Poopadoop]

As far as I understand, a 5 year old with a ~140 IQ is most often going to mature into a teenager with a ~140 IQ and then an adult with ~140 IQ, provided things go well enough (e.g. no head trauma).
Ergo, intelligence is not dependent on how you spend your time.

Sure it is. If you take two five year olds with an IQ of 140 and one goes to school everyday and studies and the other's parents decide school is for suckers and pull him/her out of it and lock him a closet for 10 years, the former is going to end up ahead of the latter at age 15 on IQ.

Then why are you talking about memorization as an indication of smarts?
You should be measuring how fast a person is at incorporating new information and accurately applying it, right?

Working memory is memory for the last 30 seconds or so. I think you're conflating that with long-term memory, which is beyond 30s and forms the basis of what we consider 'knowledge'.

WM is pretty critical for doing anything that requires you to hang onto information while you process it (and as such, makes it easier to acquire long-term knowledge). If you can't remember what you just read in the previous sentence (context), the storyline will be harder to comprehend, and you will suffer on an IQ test of verbal comprehension. Similarly, if you're doing math or logic tests. So if you have a larger WM capacity, you'll be better at these things than someone who forgets where they started from when they get halfway through a task.

Also not surprisingly - an expert such as yourself

not at all an expert, but I've learned some things about it here and there along the way.

continues to deny the extreme relevance of cultural bias to the tests

well, I don't really. I've said repeatedly that environment (including culture) affects intelligence and hence IQ scores.

Or, if by that you mean the cultural bias in how we define intelligence, this is changing. There are now tests to assess social intelligence, moral intelligence, musical intelligence, creativity, etc.. They just arent incorporated into standard IQ tests- and maybe they should be. But that just means IQ tests are limited, not that they're bogus.

and their results until after you've spent a couple paragraphs saying some things that any statistician should get all squinty-eyed at.

I'm more of a statistician than I am an expert on IQ. Pointing out the existence of correlations isn't in the least bit questionable.

"You can't do well on any of the tests unless you could do well on all (or most) of the tests."

Not what a correlation means, nor what I said. I said you are more likely to do well on one subset of an IQ test if you do well on another subset of an IQ test, and similarly for other more objective tests of cognitive processing speed and working memory capacity. These are established facts, and not controversial.

I added something along the lines of it seems likely from this that these different subtests are tapping into some underlying cognitive ability. I don't think there's anything outrageous about that statement. You can disagree, but then you have to provide some alternate explanation for the existence of this matrix of correlations among all these various things that prima facie seem to be measuring intelligence.

[MadMojoMonkey]

The House Impeached Trump, BTW.