Many People Hate IQ and Intelligence Research
I saw this comment by Carl Bereiter.
I agree with Mr. Bereiter even though IQ has nothing to do with dignity, friendliness, compassion, honesty and a host of other positive human attributes.
A lot of people are very uncomfortable thinking of intelligence as a single dimension, or as inherent. To the extent that by "intelligence" we mean a set of core analytical and verbal abilities largely determined via genetics and early childhood, I agree that it's an unearned gift that they should be thankful for and use to improve the world.
It’s no wonder people hate IQ and intelligence research because it reveals a set of seriously dismal facts about the incredible range of ability among human beings.
[b]IQ is like money... Publicly you proclaim that those individuals who have a lot are no better than those who have a little. But privately you wish you had a lot.
I agree with Mr. Bereiter even though IQ has nothing to do with dignity, friendliness, compassion, honesty and a host of other positive human attributes.
A lot of people are very uncomfortable thinking of intelligence as a single dimension, or as inherent. To the extent that by "intelligence" we mean a set of core analytical and verbal abilities largely determined via genetics and early childhood, I agree that it's an unearned gift that they should be thankful for and use to improve the world.
It’s no wonder people hate IQ and intelligence research because it reveals a set of seriously dismal facts about the incredible range of ability among human beings.
Comments (227)
The problem with research into IQ is that people are mostly interested in using it as justification for drawing conclusions about differences in intelligence between races. Is that where this discussion is going?
Is there such a difference, or is it a social construct?
And how likely or not someone is to die from all causes.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616302331
And rates of mental illness.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4170757/
And propensity to violent crime.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3404054/
...
"Charming" is probably not the word I would use. If the intention all along was to start a discussion about racial differences in intelligence, then "misleading" is more appropriate.
Assuming that is where you intended this discussion to go, it brings up a question I often ask in situations like this. Why does it matter if there are differences between races? Typically, there is a political agenda hiding behind these apparently innocuous discussions. Is that true here?
Sometimes, the question that is asked is more illuminating than the answer to the question. That is generally true for this particular subject.
I am a big admirer of Gould and I've read the book. To be clear, it's controversial and Gould has been vilified for what he wrote. Which has always brought up my previous question - why is it so important to people that he's wrong?
I've read "The Mismeasure of Man." I haven't read "The Bell Curve." I've read a little bit of the discussion about the controversy. My understanding of statistics is not sophisticated enough for me to figure it out. Also, I don't really care except to the extent the discussion hides a political agenda.
So, many people hate the idea of IQ testing and research. OK, so other than that observation, do you have a point to make? Usually an OP should have a thesis of some sort for debate in order to focus the discussion. Nobody seems to know exactly what to talk about here.
It was intended to be a bit tongue in cheek. As I said, OP seems circumspect about their intent here so I more or less agree with you.
How about the sex difference in IQ?
Sorry. I was answering you as if you are the original poster. My mistake.
I don't know.
Science knows.
There is also a market for selling IQ tests (Jordan Peterson does it), so there is, for a some, a business incentive to sell it to suckers.
I mean, surely sensible people understand that those are all cases in which the purported evidence of IQ is being used to justify existing racist sentiments. None of these guys is led to racism by merely following the science or some other such stupid nonsense.
But I would suggest that's just a species of a genus of stupidity. The wider problem, which you're alluding to, is that people use IQ in general as a justification for drawing conclusions about differences in general. This stupidity no doubt feeds on a sort of 'scientism' mindset, and it's absolute philosophical malpractice. The concept of intelligence -- a multi-layered concept with a variety of uses and applications within a variety of contexts -- is quantified, and then essentialized (to individuals or groups), and then re-deployed in predictive or explanatory theorizing. It's plain dumb.
It's then this same pseudo-science impulse that led to the truly foolish notion (properly crushed by MacIntyre in After Virtue) that social sciences hadn't caught up to the natural sciences because the average IQ of social scientists was less than those of natural scientists.
Not to mention -- I can't be the only one -- all those people one meets who discuss their purported IQ scores as a justification of superiority and entitlement across, like, every spectrum of life.
You people remind me of those folk who want to stop social programs because some people take advantage of them and break the law while doing so. That doesn't make social programs bad.
I would argue the same about IQ tests. Just because some use them for nefarious purposes, doesn't mean that they are bad, in and of themselves. There are noble purposes as well.
There are cases of children who have much higher potential than their immediate family and socio-economic situation may indicate. These children do not have fortunate circumstances. Here, nature is in their favor, but nurture is not. IQ tests are quite helpful in getting these sorts of children noticed by the right kinds of people...
IQ tests -- or any other kind of test -- are intended to distinguish between differing characteristics of individuals in a systematic (as opposed to anecdotal) way. The fact is, there are a lot of significant differences between individuals that make a difference in their future. The best intelligence and personality tests (Stanford Binet, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory - MMPI) fulfill that discriminating function reasonably well. It's helpful to know which children in school may have more potential, and which may have less. It's also helpful to know which adults may be predisposed to develop (or have) features of mental illnesses.
It isn't the fault of the test if later some people use the results of the test to support unpopular and or dubious positions.
The problem with IQ tests is that people think they measure innate--untaught--intelligence and everything about intelligence. They do not. People also think that the results are valid for the rest of the person's life -- generally they are not. Most people usually get smarter over time, because IQ tests measure learning as well as native ability.
Not all tests are created equal. Some tests are not worth the paper they are printed on. This is especially true of quickie personality tests. (The MMPI is not a quickie -- there are hundreds of questions to read.) Achievement tests (like you took in school) are not intelligence tests, though their function overlap.
This comment is the sort that can derail a discussion. White people's assumptions about the stupidity of black people were I'm place a long time before the first intelligence test was created.
Intelligence testing has been around for over a century. The Binet Intelligence Test was developed in France to help sort out children who performed poorly in school, but who didn't seem to be retarded (like, maybe they were just lazy) from students who were actually mentally retarded.
It was a worthwhile project. Some children have potential that can be developed in a classroom, and some children don't.
After racism people are likely to drag in the eugenics movement, which relied on such crude categories of deficiency that IQ tests were beside the point. (Single mothers on welfare with "too many children" were likely to attract the interest of eugenicists.) Eugenics lives on by the way, and quite properly, in the form of genetics counseling for people that bear serious transmissible genetic defects.
As usual Bitter, I find much agreement between our views...
:wink:
You figure the IQ tests are responsible for how they're put to use?
:worry:
This also works from the presupposition that "being based upon a category mistake" is somehow unacceptable. What counts as a category mistake on your view?
By 'mediocrity' do you mean 'average'? Most people are 'average'. But it isn't testing that condemns children to mediocrity, it's the aim of education In the present society.
Maybe 20% of students in school need to be very well educated so that they can serve the interests of a technologically complex society under the control of an elite. 20% of the students are getting an excellent education, more or less.
If 80% of students are getting a run of the mill education, it is because more is not deemed necessary. A lot of today's students are not going to be doing complex tasks that require insight and theoretical thinking. This is a long-term trend, observed for the last 50 years, or so.
The emphasis one hears on getting a good education, going to college, does apply to some students. But it's over-reach for many students. Not that they are incapable of benefiting from excellent education; they could benefit if it was offered to them at a price they could afford, and for a long term purpose. It's just that 1/2 of all high school students being urged to go to college will lead to debt, dissatisfaction, and disappointment, because the number of jobs needing college education aren't in fact great enough to employ all those people.
The societal problem with IQ tests results in judging people as being intelligent/unintelligent as a whole, which is unwarranted and cruel as it suggests intelligence is mostly innate. I strongly disagree with that and would suggest that the limit to someone's abilities are innate in many circumstances, the extent to which you can reach those limits depends on practice. And I dislike the English "practice makes perfect" because I don't believe in perfection but if you'd take the Dutch version, it would translate to "practice bears art". Art in the sense of craftmanship and mastery.
It's true that iq research may reveal some uncomfortable facts. However most people disliking/hating iq research seem to conflate iq with virtue.
Quoting T Clark
The main problem about that is that most of them don't know enough about basic statistics to say anything sensible about it. Many of them seem to think they can apply statistical data to individual cases. Resulting in ridiculous statements like "on average asians have a higher iq than whites, so since I'm asian and you are white, I must have a higher iq than you", conflating chance with facts, unwarrently assuming that the possibility with the lesser chance to occur, will not occur.
Nonsense, intelligence is not about how well one can perform a task, its about how quickly one can learn to perform a task.
Though of course, if a person demonstrated to be able to perform a task, that person must at least have the intelligence required to learn to perform that task within the time that person has been living.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
We do measure it, so it can be measured. How accurately it can be measured, especially when measured interculturally, is still being discussed. Another thing is what can be concluded from the measurement, wich is also still under discussion.
Quoting tom
The differences in average iq between men and women are less than the standard deviations. Meaning that the differences in iq between men and women are less than the differences among men and less than the differences among women.
Quoting T Clark
At least you seem to understand the nessecity of understanding statistics in order to say something sensible about statistical data on iq.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I disagree, I think all children need to be well educated. Wich isn't to say they all should be educated the same. Well educated to me means, best suited for the child, not the highest degree of complexity of the material tought. Since only if we provide children with the best education suited to them, they may reach their max potential.
If we talk about intelligence in relation to iq tests, you don't get to choose the definition. It's given by the tests. Now if as you suggest, intelligence is merely about learning rather than learning speed, then why do intelligence tests apply a correction for age?
Sure you could argue that there are skills that require intelligence to learn that are not measured in iq tests, but I don't see how thats relevant to anyting I stated.
The difference is a lot less than the standard deviation, being approximately 0. The SDs are not the same though.
IQ tests measure one thing, and only one thing, uncontroversially: the ability to take an IQ test.
@creativesoul
Of course the IQ tests themselves are not responsible for anything, it is those who believe them to be measuring something other than an ability to take an IQ test that are responisble.
The category mistake is to take an abstract, and very complex concept like intelligence and presuming it to be something akin to a name for a property of human beings that comes in amounts and is measurable, like their mass or height.
I am in complete agreement, but I see the ethos of IQ testing as part of supporting and maintaining exactly those aims, and it is those aims and the support system with it that need to be challenged, and that involves challenging piecemeal the individual supporting elements, such as the idea that IQ tests actually measure anything more than an ability to take an IQ test. Given your other posts on other threads, I am certain you need no lessons in history from me, but just consider that the current educational systems in the West started life because the financial elite - for whom education was largely reserved - were virtually forced, in order to maintain their privilege, into handing out a few social crumbs to those that produced their wealth. Elitism has always been an ethos in Western educational systems and IQ testing spuriously bolsters its standing.
But I'd assume there are ways to test long term learning acquisition skills. While it might not be testable by administering a single 1 hour exam, there would be some way to conduct a long term study, perhaps by charting progress in educational settings. And there's not going to be any way to stop people from using those results to support various ethnic based theories, and those conclusions will of course be subject to the same objections that people make when referencing IQ tests, which is that there are too many uncontrolled environmental variables to make any genetic based conclusions.
It should be mentioned somewhere here that the 'best' IQ test, the Stanford Binet, is individually administered. It's not a paper and pencil test. There is some cultural loading in it -- like the question on the adult version, "Who wrote Faust?" Do you get extra points for asking the examiner "Which Faust -- the English one (Marlowe), the French opera (Gounod) or the German one (Goethe)?"
Asking an American "Who was Batman?" or "What was Superman's name when he wasn't Superman?" would be the equivalent of the 1910 French question about Faust.
You're right. I misstated. What I should have said was that the results of IQ testing research are often used, by others, to support theories and political positions that claim that there are genetic differences in intelligence between races.
On the other hand, I was a psychology major many years ago. One of the classes I took was in psychological testing. As part of it, we created our own questionnaires. Then we had them filled in by students, tabulated them, ran some statistics, and presto! discovered some new psychological characteristic. The lesson I learned - any test measures something, whether is has any explanatory value or gives any insight. That's where I first came across the word "reification," granting reality to something that only exists in our minds.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I trust your judgment on this kind of thing, so I've thought about it. You may be right. I still think my response was correct - many people don't like IQ testing because it is used as justification for racial prejudice. I was probably heavy-handed.
So, is the correct answer "Clark Kent" or "Jorel?" Or George Reeves, or Christopher Reeves. Please, not Dean Cain!
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
We could all write a 10 volume encyclopedia about what is wrong with the education system, and it would probably all be true.
I don't think there was ever a "golden age of education" -- in the US, Europe, or anywhere else, where the aims of the educational system were altogether benign. Societies made up of layers of increasing assets (bottom to top) are not inclined to operate egalitarian, 'open-ended' asset-sharing school systems. All of us live in that kind of society, and we all have been through school systems which are designed to maintain those layers of assets (or privileges).
The technological changes that took place during the 20th century in communication (commercial radio, television, film, recordings, print, etc.) and the economic changes that gradually eliminated a lot of unskilled factory labor--and even quite a bit of skilled white collar work--has left schools with a new and very difficult problem, which has by no means been solved: What do we do for all these students (millions) who are unlikely to find good jobs with good pay?
Like I said, some people (maybe 15-20% of the students) will need very good education to perform very good jobs, and they will get a good education. The rest... screwed from the get go whether they are as smart as whips or as dumb as oxen.
The kind of school that is designed for maximum benefit for each student, K-16, when described comes off sounding more like Alice in Wonderland, these days, than what is going on behind the brick walls of the little red school house.
I don't think everybody is born with the same intellectual potential, but everybody enjoys learning, growing, making the most of what they have, and being able to do interesting things with whatever talents they have. UNFORTUNATELY society is neither prepared nor interested in arranging its affairs to facilitate that happy outcome.
We had comic books and radio. Later television with 3 fuzzy channels. I think young children are smarter today because they don't have to depend on the drugstore's supply of comic books for stimulation. There are so many other forms of mental stimulation children get these days -- their mothers piping Mozart into their uteruses, gadgets in their cribs, TV without end, IPads, smart phones, electronic games (no Parcheesi for today's little Einstein), day care, pre-school, year round kindergarten, babies blogging before they can walk, etc.
People do use IQ for that purpose, true enough. Plus
school performance
crime rates
unemployment
drug use
vocabulary
clothing styles (only a moron would wear something like that in public...)
imprisonment rates
absentee fatherhood
riots
school integration and school segregation
racial intermarriage
I mean, it isn't like people who are racially prejudiced are unable to find material which supports their point of view. And none of their evidence needs to be true, either.
My mistake - Kal-el was Superman's Kryptonian name. Jor-el was his father. There were a lot more actors than the ones I listed. George Reeves was the Superman I grew up with. He was on the TV show. He was the flabbiest of all the Supermen.
Do you deny things such as abstract reasoning, spatial reasoning, ascertaining meaning from context, pattern recognition, etc.?
Are you saying that these things are not measurable or that they're not a measure of human intelligence or both? Something else perhaps.
What is human intelligence on your view if it's not cognitive abilities?
Sure, the point however is, that as long as the difference between the averages are less than either standard deviation, the two groups are more alike than different from each other.
Sure, though that doesn't mean that the result doesn't say anything about intelligence. Since we don't have any better means to measure intelligence, that is what we use.
The groups are quite different. Their standard deviations are different.
I didn't say they weren't different, I pointed out that the differences within each group are greater than the differences between the two groups.
In other words, if you look at the bell curves, the surface area of the overlap of the groups is bigger than the 68% area of each group.
Both - I see it as the same category mistake as the overarching category mistake concerning intelligence in general. Sure, one can try breaking down intelligence into parts, but those parts you mention are complex concepts in themselves - after all, what is abstract reasoning, for instance? We can probably all give examples of abstract reasoning - playing chess, proving mathematical theorems, constructing an argument for metaphysical idealism, planning a holiday.... - but that does not entail that they all have some feature in common that comes in amounts and can be measured. It's tempting to say "well, we canincrease our ability to reason abstractly, so it must come in amounts that can be measured" - but here "increase" arguably just means "improve" and the same problem arises, what counts as improving abstract reasoning, and what makes one believe that it is just one ability in any case? I can become a better chess player by, amongst other things, learning a few more chess openings, understanding a little more about endgame scenarios and how to manipulate towards them from a middlegame.... Compare that with how I would become better at giving arguments for metaphysical idealism - probably not a great deal in common. There may be some analogies that can be made (knowledge of chess opening theory = knowldege of previous attempts to prove idealism) but the crucial thing here to remember about analogies is that things which are analagous are precisely not one and the same thing. It begins to look a little forced to insist that there must be one measurable ability underlying all this, and what is the motiviation for doing so?
Of course, if you are some kind of mind-brain physicalist you might be able to argue that, on the basis of physicalism, all aspects of mentality must in principle be measurable. But then to defend IQ tests on that basis, you would need already to have established that physicalism is true and have gone further and actually identified the (presumably neurophysiological) mechanisms underlying these identifiable abilities you mention. So, even if one is a mind-brain physicalist, as things currently stand one is a long way from being able to say that IQ tests measure anything beyond an ability to take IQ tests.
How else do you explain the 6 point difference between Asians (of the far eastern variety) and Europeans?
Irrelevant. The difference within males is greater than the difference within females.
But that's to assume that intelligence is something that can be measured, and simply to say that it is because we measure it with IQ tests is a petitio principii.
Well according to a pretty detailed comment on the
blog here, the way to account for it is to dispell its relevance on the grounds that the sample sizes for most of the studies were small and there were no control groups. But whether that's a viable response would depend on the studies you are referring to, if they are published online would you provide the links?
irrelevant to what? It's quite relevant to clarifying my statement wich you seemed to dispute.
Quoting tom
I didn't state anything disputing this, so why is it relevant to mention?
Nonsense, research done under a set of definitions, and then pointing out those definitions to someone disputing them is not a circular argument.
If you mean something different when using the word intelligence other than as defined in iq research, you ought to define it. Otherwise I'm going to assume you were referring to the scientific definition. Sure iq research and what they say about intelligence have their limitations, but I'm not aware of a more sensible approach.
What scientific definition? As far as I'm aware there is no settled scientific definition and if you just mean "intelligence is what IQ tests measure" then the charge of circularity remains meet. As for my definition of intelligence, my whole point is that intelligence is not a concept that can be defined in the way you want it defined.
I don't explain it. I was pointing out why many people are suspicious of IQ testing. I wasn't, necessarily, agreeing or disagreeing with them.
Dismissive hostility towards IQ tests has been the key strategy for elites to preserve their undeserved privilege through educational credentialism.
Think about it for a minute and you'll realize it's true.
Think about it for a little longer than a minute, and you might realise this is true.
And the people that I have encountered (personally and through reading) that have been "hostile to" - by which I presume you mean vocally skeptical about - IQ testing have not been elites looking to preserve their undeserved privilege - Gould and Chomsky come to mind on the literary front, several Trotskiest acquaintances of mine on the personal - quite the opposite. Who exactly do you have in mind as an example of a privileged elitist giving arguments against the use of IQ tests?
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
Nonsense, we do measure intelligence using iq tests, so to say it can't be measured is silly, we are doing it. At best you may argue that you consider the method of measuring it not accurate enough, in wich case you ought to suggest a better option. Or you can make the claim that it's not accurate enough to reach a certain conclusions, in wich case you ought to provide at least one example of where that has been the case.
To dismiss the validity of iq tests would be to dismiss that the ability to answer questions correctly has any relation with cognitive ability.
merely applieng a definition both ways isn't the same as a circular argument. Stating that 1+1=2 and then when asked what two is, i answer '1+1' is not a circular argument, it's applieng the definition both ways, not very helpfull perhaps, but logically sound.
Do you think there are differences in intelligence among people?
That's twice you've thumped the table and exclaimed "Nonsense!" although the second time you add a "that's just silly" presumably hoping that a little variety will pass for persuasive argument, but in the end your underlying argument remains the same:
Premise: IQ tests measure something
Premise: That something is intelligence
Conclusion: Therefore IQ tests measure intelligence.
That is an excellent example of a petitio principii, and I think I'll start using it when people ask me "what does begging the question mean?"
Now let's consider in a little more detail your mathematical example. If I am presented with the statement "1+1=2" either I know what those signs mean or I do not. If I know what those signs mean, perhaps the only context it makes sense for me to ask what 2 is would be if I were to be interested in the ontological status of mathematical objects, and if that were my motivation, then the response "2 is 1+1" is vacuously circular - it's not even unhelpful. If I do not know what the signs mean at all, then presumably my question "what is 2?" is motivated by a desire to find out what symbols like "1" and "2" and "+" and "=" mean, and then to be told "2 = 1+1" is also vacuously circular and not even unhelpful. What might be helpful perhaps in both contexts would be a brief introduction to number theory and the definition of the cardinals in terms of bijective relations between sets.
And thus we return to my as yet unanswered question: what is this supposed scientific definition of intelligence? You have not yet responded, so all I can do is put words into your mouth and suggest that "scientifically, intelligence is whatever IQ tests measure", and in which case, from my perspective that just makes the scientific notion of intelligence mean "the ability to take IQ tests". However, although I cannot give you necessary and sufficient conditions for what counts as intelligence (my whole point being to challenge the very idea that this can even be done) I can tell you that there are all kinds of activities other than taking IQ tests that manifest intelligence, so that particular scientific definition of intelligence would be uninterestingly specific, although at least it would not be vacuously circular.
Well, this is a little clumsily expressed, but if by "dismissing the validity of IQ tests" you mean something like "raising skeptical challenges about what IQ tests are supposed to be measuring" then to dismiss the validity of IQ tests does not in the least entail dismissing the idea that something's being able to answer questions might be related to that something's possessing cognitive abilities. So, from petitio principii, we move on to a non sequituur. Of course, being able to answer questions is not in and of itself a sufficient grounds for imputing cognitive ability, since in one sense of "answering a question" robots can answer a question, but it would be a brave (possibly Australian) metaphysician that would infer from that that robots have cognitive abilities.
Wittgenstein once said something along the lines that in psychology there is experimental method and conceptual confusion, and from what I can see, there is no better example of what he was on about than the IQ testing industry.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
Nope, I merely stated the definition I use both ways.
definition:
intelligence : that what IQ tests measure
you are confusing making an argument with stating the applied definition.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
Nope, by dismissing the validity of IQ tests I meant complete dismissal, as in claiming their validity is 0. I have no problem with questioning the validity of IQ tests, wich in my opinion are still not 100% accurate, especially when applied interculturally. Everything measured in applied science that get's represented by numbers has an error margin. Obviously that error margin is greater when one applies iq tests interculturally compared to intraculturally.
At the end I asked you one simplequestion, You failed to adress this..
Ill repeat it for you here, so you can adress it:
Quoting Tomseltje
Now either answer the question, or claim you can't answer it.. but simply not adressing it seems quite disingenious.
How do you expect me to answer the question when you have not even clarified what scientific definition of intelligence you suppose everyone to be familiar with.
Your definition:
Well if intelligence is that which is measured by IQ tests, then intelligence for me is just an ability to take IQ tests, but then your question just becomes
Do you think that people score differently on IQ tests?
You don't really need me to answer that question do you? Of course people score differently on IQ tests, and presumably for many different reasons.
If IQ tests measure intelligence and intelligence is nothing other than what IQ tests measure, then I cannot see how an IQ test can be inaccurate, even in principle. In order to say that a measurement is inaccurate, you would need some more reliable criterion to use as a comparison. Even if no other measurement is possible, one might still say that the measurement diverges from what the property that is being measured actually is (assuming one is a realist about that property). But by your definition the property being measured is nothing other than the result of the measurement, and the result of the measurement cannot fail to be what it is.
I will have to agree with this.
Statistically speaking, there is a difference between being "inaccurate" and having "deviations".
Let's hypothetically say that we have some ways to measure highly objective, critically accurate, perfect measurement of intelligence, and that we have the scores for 100 random people. And then, we measure the IQ of the same 100 people.
1) If the IQ scores are exactly the same as the perfect test, then the IQ test is both "accurate" AND "without deviation".
2) If the IQ scores are somewhat lower or higher than the perfect test depending on the person, but overall in average agrees with the perfect test, then the IQ test is "accurate" but have "some deviation".
3) If the IQ scores are always lower (or higher) than the perfect test, but the values itself are simply just shifted uniformly, then the IQ test is "inaccurate" but "without deviation".
4) If the IQ scores are always lower (or higher) than the perfect test, and the values vary greatly between individuals compared to the perfect test, then the IQ test is both "inaccurate" AND have "deviation".
I speculate that IQ test is "accurate" but have "notable deviation".
This means that although IQ test provide good measurement of intelligence, sometimes the values deviate for certain people, making it not always accurate when referring to individuals. Such deviation may come simply from lack of education, because IQ test usually require some level of fundamental knowledge. In a lot of cases, people can lack concentration, despite being very bright, and score lower for the latter stage of the test. Age also matter.
However, my speculation comes from the fact that IQ test and its scores are based on statistics and thus is a relative measure. The scores we get on IQ tests are merely standard deviation from the most population. As such, IQ tests should not be blindly trusted, but can be used as a reference.
But it is precisely that assumption - i.e. that intelligence is a thing that can be measured - that is under scrutiny here, so as a defence of using IQ tests as a reference measure of intelligence, there remains some question begging going on. However, perhaps I've misunderstood what you are trying to do in your post.
You can use your own definition, wich you didn't provide but clearly must have, since you made a claim about intelligence before I came into the discussion.
Does a measuring cylinder measure the amount of a liquid one puts in it?
Same answer, stictly spoken it just attempts to measure it, and it only does to a degree. Any chemist could tell you that each measuring cylinder comes with a specified error marge, wich has to be accounted for in calculations based upon the measurement of the amount of liquid used for the experiment. The difference is that when it comes to measuring cylinders the error marge is relative small (in measrueing cylinders used in chemistry, less than a percent of the total volume you measure), but when it comes to iq tests the error marge is much greater. Iq's 95% confidence interval is measured iq plust or minus 15 points, wich even increases the more iq scores differ from the average.
Yes. But here you have liquid, or liquid volume, and a measurement of that volume, and the two are not necessarily the same. We could say that the reading from the measuring cylinder is accurate or not if we compare it with a more accurate measurement. Or, if we are realists, we could say that the measurement corresponds or not to the actual volume. But all this makes sense only if the liquid volume can be given independently of what the measuring cylinder is gauging. Otherwise they are one and the same and to say that a measurement is or is not accurate makes no sense.
So clearly you believe to have a way to recognize instances of intelligent behaviour. In other words, means to measure intelligence. Hence intelligence can be measured. You are doing it.
So then the question is, is your way of doing it more or less accurate than the way iq tests do it. I don't know, but eventually you die, and so even if your way is better, untill you describe how you done it in a way so someone else can do it too, we are left with iq tests.
Also, as @SophistiCat mentions, even if all instances of intelligent behaviour had one and one thing only in common, it still need not be anything measurable - it could simply be present or absent, on or off.
We do have a standard for both volume measurement and iq measurement to compare it too. By repeatedly measuring and see how much the results of that differ from what ought to be expected from the standard, we can determine the error margin. The error margin from reading from the measuring cylinder is included in the error margin that comes with the measuring cylinder. Provided of course you apply the instructions on how to read a measuring cylinder, something any chemist is supposed to learn in his/her first year.
I'd say you do. you measure to what degree they fit your memory of the person, and if it's close enough you will assume it's the same person. Though your assumption could be wrong when meeting that persons twin, especially if you didn't know they had a twin. estimating is a low resolution form of measuring.
If by accurate you mean there is no error margin, they are inaccurate, but the same goes for measuring liquids in a measuring cylinder. The only difference is that measuring cylinders used in chemistry are less inaccurate than iq tests.
wich fact?
I agree it's a complex concept, but it's also a property of human beings.
So the fact you are referring to is the fact of recognizing to have made a mistake. Well in that case, no , but you measured something that made you recognize making a mistake. In case of the twins, when coming closer you may have noticed some smaller details that led you to this conclusion. We don't measure fact, we distill facts from measuring and interpreting our measurement.
Simple, we have different kind of iq tests. Had all been 100% accurate, there would be no difference. However, when we use different tests, the results differ, hence either one of the tests used is inaccurate, or both are.
Sure, if you want to go into that much detail. Then I'd argue that in order to recognize, you first measured, meaning the recognizing comes after the measuring and is part of the interpretation of what you measured.
Now, you seem to be implying that even though recognition is not measurement, each recognition is made on the basis of having made a measurement. However, even that is not obviously true - what do I measure when I recognise a spelling mistake? I see the mistake, but seeing isn't always measuring.
In order to determine wether there is a 'z' or an 's' written, you measure several things. Once that is done, you can compare it with what shape ought to be written. Children learning to write are not as skilled in this as you probably are, and thus more often confuse the two, resulting in more spelling mistakes. Even to determine wether we describe something as a curve or an angle, we need to measure. Hence it's so much harder to make an ai that can accurately recognize handwriting, than to make an ai that can accurately write handwriting.
That's disputable. For instance, I simply saw that you misspelt "whether" "wether" - I didn't measure anything and I did not even compare your "wether" with a correctly typed "whether". Developing the skill of spotting spelling mistakes may or may not involve "measuring" , although it would be a strange definition of "measuring" if it did, but even so that would not in the least entail that everytime I spot a spelling mistake now that I have that skill, that I am measuring something. When you learn to play a musical instrument such as a violin, you begin by concentrating very hard on where you place your fingers on the fingerboard. When you are a proficient violinist you no longer need to do that. Things that are done in order to gain a skill are not necessary to continuing to manifest that skill.
Okay, but I don't understand why you assume that intelligence CANNOT be measured. It certainly can.
If you are right, then the word "intelligent" would never have exited, much less used by anyone. It is because we have some (vague) concept of intelligence that we can use the word. I don't need to know the precise definition to say that Richard Feynman was intelligent. I don't need to know the precise definition to say that Albert Einstein was intelligent. But objectively speaking, both of these people are very intelligent academically. The fact that we are saying this already proves that we have some concept in our mind that is capable of testing people's intelligence. So intelligence can be tested qualitatively. The only question is how quantitatively. IQ tests are merely one of these approaches to quantitatively measure intelligence.
Now I understand that you do not understand statistics. If you don't understand statistics, then you won't even know what IQ tests are about. Why are you arguing if you don't know IQ tests?
You keep saying this, but when you are asked what that standard is, you demur or insist that the measurement is the standard.
Quoting Tomseltje
No, that won't work either. If intelligence is just what the tests measure, and you insist that this is the case for all tests of intelligence, then different results can only mean that intelligence is different in each case.
Tomseltje, you should understand by now that you cannot cheat your way out with this simple maneuver of equating intelligence with test results. Even setting aside the issue of accuracy, suppose we accept your idiosyncratic definition of intelligence - what then? So you have a device that measures something, and all we know about that something is that it is just what the device measures.
If you want to have a substantive discussion, you have to address the question of what intelligence is, and how intelligence tests can measure it, how accurate and how useful such tests are, etc. But for that you actually have to care and know something about the subject, and I don't think that you do.
The burden of proof here is not on the skeptic who accepts we have an interesting concept but who suspects a category mistake is being made when the concept is assimilated to physical concepts such as heat and mass. The burden of proof is on those who insist that the concept corresponds to a measurable property. As @SophistiCat points out, the burden of proof is actually more specific than just identifying such an objective property, but also that the property comes in differing amounts and is not simply present or absent.
This the wrong point. Why IQ tests are different to other psychological ones? The questioning of IQ validity is an evidence of low IQ.
You can be sure. I work in a very related domain. People often do not know what is an IQ test.
If, on the other hand, we wish to deny any authority to our vague notion of the sort of question an intelligent person ought to be able to answer, then we must also discard the notion that we can recognise an 'intelligent' person by the sorts of things they are able to do.
Basically, we don't look inside anyone's head for intelligence. If we judge it at all we judge it by the things people successfully do. Put a series of those sorts of things in a test and, by default, you do indeed have a device for measuring the thing we're calling 'intelligence'. Either that, or admit that we really don't know what sort of thing an intelligent person should be able to successfully do, and so abandon the idea that we have any means of measuring it, neither intuitive nor quantitative.
I think the problem with intelligence testing is an entirely resolvable one. It simply doesn't currently test the same sorts of things that we normally associate with intelligence in common usage. It tests a very narrow range and places way too high a value on speed (which we hardly value at all in real life). All of these problems are resolvable. In fact a team at Cambridge Brain Sciences Unit are doing exactly that.
I respectfully disagree.
If you have a concept and can distinguish between an intelligent person or not, whether subjectively or objectively, you are qualitatively measuring intelligence. I can compare average Joe and Einstein and claim that Einstein is smarter, and Joe doesn't have to be severely unintelligent for me to say that. There is some concept within me and most likely most of the other people, that is capable of measuring intelligence. As such, intelligence is measurable, at least qualitatively.
IQ test is, to a certain degree, good measure of intelligence. Most people of Mensa International is indeed, both subjectively and likely objectively, smart. Also, IQ test is a statistical (relative) measurement, and not an absolute measurement.
Since you mentioned measuring physical concepts, I have to make sure you understand that any physically measurable phenomenon must first be defined prior to measurements. As a matter of fact, these definition could change (although it usually doesn't affect quantitatively because of the generality of physical axioms tend to be consistent or at least a good approximation of other physical axioms) depending on the axioms of the physical model it is based on. You mentioned mass and heat, but these first started as an intuition that things feel "heavy" when lifting heavy objects and that one feels "heat" when touching hot objects. The concept was always there but the problem was how to quantitatively measure them. Thus came the definition of mass and heat, which was based on intuition but is practical enough that people accept it.
For example, how would you define temperature? Definition of temperature is actually quite complicated than most people think, despite people generally accepting the concept and its measure. I have (physical) chemistry background, and thus have thermodynamic background when it comes to definition of temperature, but more fundamentally, it can come from statistical mechanics, which can also easily applied to quantum mechanics if the temperature is defined based on grand canonical ensemble. So the definition of temperature also changes depending on the particular physical model that it is based on.
Since the term "intelligent" is not universally well defined, their measurement is obviously not easy. IQ tests are one of these attempts to define "intelligent" so that measurement can be done.
In my opinion, this rules for all psychological (and scientific in general) concepts. Only logical and math concepts are "universally well defined".
I'm not sure what you are implying here, but perhaps there's an argument to draw out of it. Suppose I accept that taking an IQ test is one manifestation of intelligence. Suppose I know someone who manifests other kinds of intelligent behaviour - she speaks a language, plays a musical instrument and has an active social life for instance, maybe she's also quite manipulative of others. Suppose that person fails miserably everytime she takes an IQ test of whichever variety. I might be surprised that she is bad at taking IQ tests, certainly, but then again perhaps not. The point is that there would be no (at least obvious) logical contradiction in supposing that she was simply bad at those tests yet still capable of manifesting all kinds of other intelligent behaviour.
Social, linguistic and musical features of intelligence are also measured in the IQ test. People only show the limitations of empirical science for psychology of intelligence. It is a clear case of selection bias.
Psychological, yes. Scientific in general, to a degree, yes. I agree.
About what specifically - the burden of proof charge?
I've been down this particular path in this thread already - distinguishing one thing from another does not always involve measuring. At least, it is by far from obvious that it does. You may have an entire theory of cognition that is based on a representational theory of perception which assimilates all perceptual activity to measuring the environment, and so everything that involves perception in any way involves measurement, but it would be a whole different thread to examine that kind of idea and what might be wrong with it (the notion of "representation" is an often abused and confused one in the philosophy of mind and psychology).
OK, so I think the first question to answer here would be whether you think we generally consider someone who can solve complex maths puzzles and play a musical instrument as more 'intelligent' than someone who can only do one or the other. My feeling is that that is exactly the term we would use for such a person. So, following from this, so long as the sorts of problem included in the test cover a wide enough range of the sorts of tasks we consider an 'intelligent' person should be able to do, then the test could be considered to be measuring intelligence.
There is, of course, the question of whether such a range of tasks could ever be captured in a reasonably sized test, but I think if we were claim that they could not, then we'd be starting to open the definition of intelligence so wide as to make the word useless, certainly we'd end up defining it in a way it is rarely used. I even think its pushing the boundaries of normal use to describe a good artist as 'intelligent', though I agree it's borderline acceptable.
The second question is how we can relate our use of the expression "more intelligent" to your idea that maybe intelligence doesn't come in amounts.
We could say that the expression was simply a nonsensical one, but it seems a bit selective to accept our intuitive idea that there is such a thing as intelligence but then deny what appears to be an equally intuitive sense that some people have more of it than others.
Hence my first question. Does having an ability in more areas of intelligence make one more intelligent overall? If so, it seems to me to be eminently possible to measure the sum intelligence by some test or other. The problem is merely a pragmatic one of getting the test to match the things we use the word for.
I apologize that I haven't read the entire thread thoroughly.
I would greatly appreciate it if you could provide me the post where you explained why you think intelligence is not measurable. I probably missed a few posts or part of the post where you mentioned them, but all I could find is your assumption that they are not measurable, and not the justification of why it is so.
We're getting down into some complicated issues now! Well, personally I do not play a musical instrument. My colleague who sits next to me does. Other than that difference we have much in common educationally, and the similar jobs we perform we perform to all intents and purposes to the same degree of proficiency, advice seeking between us is a two way street. Do I consider myself less intelligent than he is on the basis that he plays a musical instrument, or did I just not have the same opportunities that he had growing up? Of course, I'm biased, so it's probably not for me to answer, but then why should the outcome of that question be based on our capacity to complete an IQ test either?
Of course, I've met stupid people, or rather people I would call stupid: voters of populist nationalist parties for instance, and so with people like that if I were asked if I were more intelligent, well, I might be inclined to say yes (although I've met some people who do vote that way who are remarkably good at mathematics). Here I think the example introduces the idea of there being some kind of value-based judgement going on in deciding whether someone is more or less intelligent than another.
So, to your general question
I suppose I have to answer "It's complicated".
You recognize someone's face because your brain can process your vision in which particular set of properties in the vision matches the "properties of a face" that you have and not that of the background. As such, you are incapable or will have difficultly in detecting camouflaged faces because it has the properties very similar to the environment and as such your brain processes the face as the environment.
This is a pure act of measurement. You are measuring face.
Well, the brain is actually "smarter" than that.
First, you don't need to recognize every single pieces of the face to recognize that it is a face. Your concept within your brain provides criteria for face recognition (which have been continuously refined ever since you were born and you opened your eyes).
Second, experience allows you to recognize certain faces faster than the other. With experience (for example your face, which you probably see very often in the mirror), your criteria is optimized for certain cases. For example, if you had tons of paint on your face, sometimes it is hard or takes time to recognize that it is you in the picture out of all the other people. However, you will eventually recognize yourself because you have other criteria to judge that your face is your face.
Somewhat rough but a lot of measurements are actually going on in your brain whether you realize it or not. This is particularly fascinating to me.
I suspect that the bias you mention is the main reason why people resist intelligence testing. They wish to retain their authority to determine people to be 'intelligent' or 'stupid' without having to have such use circumscribed by any kind of testing which risks settling the matter in a manner which may offend their purpose.
Personally, I agree that most populist nationalist voters are stupid, but then I'm convinced that they would fail any intelligence test one could devise, so this is not a cause for concern for me.
What I think bothers people most is the other end. The poet and the painter, the philosopher perhaps, don't wish to be tested in any way which may compare them to the mathematician and the scientist. I personally have no real concern here either because I really can't see a need for such a test.
Where I do take some offence is the current state where those with shall we say non-conventional intelligence, resist having their skill measured quantitatively and yet wish to maintain fervently their authority to do so in their own subjective manner even in public discourse. That seems, to me, a little disingenuous.
OK, we may not have a disagreement about these kinds of people - it sounds like at some level they are being hypocritical, but if you had an example or two of who you are talking about it might be clearer to me what exactly the issue is here.
I'm not sure quite what examples might suffice. I suppose to support my argument I'd need quotes from the less mathematical/scientific community saying they don't want intelligence testing but they do know a couple of geniuses in their fields. I'm not sure I'm going to be lucky enough to find a quote that captures all that. It's more based on the regular use of terms like "genius" to describe people like Mozart and Shakespeare that would certainly not be used to describe Taylor Swift or JK Rowling despite the latter two having achieved just as much in their fields. There's a sense that there's definitely some objective thing that Mozart and Shakespeare have unarguably got, yet a reluctance when it comes to defining what it is.
At my university we used to inevitably have the odd dropout from the BSc courses, occasionally they would transfer to a BA. This was a relatively normal occurence. We would take bets, however, on any successfully going the other way.
Yes, whatever conclusion we might reach about intelligence, I think we can agree that mensa membership isn't it.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
So this is where I start to have problems. I'm not so sure we could find a musicologist or literature professor who could give us good reasons for assuming that Mozart was actually possessed of some quality Taylor Swift lacks (I'm presuming here she writes her own songs?). Mozart is not really considered a genius in China because China has a different musical tradition and Mozart didn't make music which appealed to that sense. So, could we say that Mozart's genius was somehow tapping into the character of his time? But then, isn't that what Bob Dylan did? Nirvana, and I suppose Taylor Swift? If not, and Mozart does have some timeless genius, then why isn't he considered highly in China, are the Chinese all stupid when it comes to music?
What's more, if there was some objective set of thing that Shakespeare could do better than any other, then producing works of literary genius could be taught like maths.
When Ramanujan worked out his mathematics, his culture made no difference, it was immediately recognisable as genius to Hardy, a whole continent away.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
Basically, if someone who is good at maths and someone who is good at music are both 'intelligent', and if someone who is good at maths and music is more intelligent than someone only good at either, then intelligence must have some quantitative element. If a musicologist could define a genius by their capability, then it is possible (although maybe not pragmatic) for them to design a task only the capable musicians will pass. We already know we can have a maths test, so put these two tests together and someone who passes both is objectively more intelligent.
I'm only really exploring the consequences here. Personally, I'd probably fall down on the idea that artistic merit simply can't be measured. I just don't like the hypocrisy in pretending it can be measured when proclaiming mozart a genius, but then avoiding measurement when grouping such abilities with 'intelligence' as a whole.
Having said that, I think I might have to take more of an issue with what seems to be an implication of this remark of yours:
We can teach people how to write poetry, just as we can teach people how to construct mathematical proofs, but it will never follow that the people we do so teach will go on to become outstanding poets or mathematicians, rather than mediocre or even miserable ones. So, I'm not really sure there is any real difference in kind between mathematics/literature/music that can be drawn on the basis of pedagogical limits.
Well, as I hinted above, I do not agree with the premise that someone who is good at both maths and music is more intelligent than someone good at only one or the other. But, even if I were somehow forced into agreeing with that, the most that would commit me to in regards to a quantitative aspect to intelligence generally is that we could quantify intelligence generally by counting the number of distinct intelligent behaviours a person exhibits (given appropriate circumstances for exhibiting them, of course). That is very far removed from the kind of approach engaged in by those involved in the IQ testing industry (at least in its current form).
I think maybe the issue here is one of scale. I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from it, but the difference in ability between even a mediocre mathematics graduate (when compared to someone who has no formal mathematics training beyond primary school) is entire worlds. The non-mathematician would be lost entirely trying to work out some complex mathematical equation. Yet this is not the case for the English Literature graduate. I doubt the difference in poetry ability between an average English Lit graduate and someone with no formal training in English would even be detectable by the layman. It certainly doesn't seem to have much of an impact on what we seem to refer to as literary geniuses, who I'm fairly certain are drawn no more from the pool of English Lit graduates that they are from the pool of non-graduates. The Ramanujan's of this world, however, are vanishingly rare.
So I'm not sure I can support the contention that we're actually teaching the English Lit graduates anything that objectively, or even statistically, makes them more able to produce works of poetry that later get labelled genius.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
I think this reveals the difference between what seems like possibly your more analytical approach, and my ordinary language one. I'm not even trying to assess what we should, or could label intelligence, I don't even think that this kind of analysis makes sense. What interests me is how we actually do label intelligence, and exploring any inconsistencies in that application which might reveal interesting insights into human psychology. So I'm not questioning the 'rightness' of calling the polymath more intelligent that the uni-math. We simply do, I think it's incontestable that when faced with someone who spoke six languages, played concert violin, wrote award winning poetry and had a doctorate in maths we would call then more 'intelligent' than their neighbour who simply played violin in the same orchestra.
Likewise, our entire education system is predicated on the fact that some people are better at maths than others. What interests me about your proposition is how you might talk about, say person A getting 50% in a maths test as opposed to person B getting 100%. Or person A writing award winning poetry whilst person B is published, but not acclaimed. If you'd like to avoid saying that one is more intelligent that the other, what would you say about them? I suppose you could simply say that one was 'better' at their particular task, but I'm not sure whether that would be just equivocating with words. If intelligence is not the capability to be 'better' at some range of tasks, then what is it?
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
Just to confirm, we're in absolute agreement on this. If intelligence testing is possible it certainly isn't being done at the moment by IQ tests. I'm inclined to think it's not testable at all in any pragmatic way, but I think that has implications for the way we currently use the term.
A little story which I'm sure you will have heard in different guises but I think is apt here. A homesteader being told about Einstein commented that whilst he (the homesteader) had lived a long and happy life, working outdoors and enjoying whatever life handed him, having a loving wife and three happy children, Einstein had worked at often menial jobs, could not sustain a marriage, had little or no relationship with his children and died racked with guilt about his part in the atomic bomb. Who's the most intelligent?
You can be both. I don't know if achievement is equatable with intelligence but that's the sentiment I'm getting here. Highly intelligent people are just more productive, by about 1.5x per each SD. So, there may be an issue with directionality but they might just find different things more interesting, which sustains their aura of creativity.
So, the issue seems more like one about creativity instead of ability and skill.
Short answer - I do not know. Slightly longer answer - maybe it isn't really anything (any thing) at all. Perhaps I'm an intellectual nihilist :wink:
To be honest, I'm inclined to agree.
I think intelligence, in the way we use the word, must mean something like 'the ability to successfully (and perhaps also efficiently) carry out some task or other which is not exclusively learnt by muscle-memory'
Hence my conclusion that on this simple level, intelligence can be tested - simply set a mixed range of such tasks and the person who succeeds at most, the most efficiently is the most intelligent.
Its complicated by two things. The first is that intelligence usually must act on knowledge. We must do something with the known facts to produce the result. So if we're claiming to be testing something innate, the only way to do so would be to ensure all examinees have exactly the same knowledge. Pretty much impossible, I think.
The second complication (which the anecdote is really about) comes from the fact that acquiring knowledge, practicing problem solving (in whatever field from maths to music), and even taking intelligence tests, are themselves all part of the larger task (that of living life). So one could conceivably do well in any of these specific tasks, but actually doing well in any of them is not a particularly successful way of solving the overarching problem that they are just a small part of.
Its like an engineer building a really efficient aircraft engine which consequently is too heavy for the aircraft to carry. We would like to applaud his skill in creating such an efficient engine, but really putting all that time and effort into fuel-efficiency without considering weight wasn't very smart. Similarly, dedicating one's life to solving p vs np whilst neglecting to solve the need for companionship, family, sunshine, good food and physical excersice, would equally not be very smart.
Should have tagged you in to the above response. It's aimed at your comment too.
Our disagreement seems to be based upon your more narrow definition of the word 'to measure', You seem to apply it as something that only is about determining quantity. Perhaps if you reconsider my statements under this definition of measure : the act or process of ascertaining the extent, dimensions, or quantity of something;
In case of determining wether an 's' or a 'z' is spelled, you made a measurement of what you saw. Otherwise, how could you tell the two apart?
Why are you assuming it is me who doesn't understand statistics? As long as you don't provide a decent argument for your assumption, you are just poisoning the well.
I might just as easily assume that it is you who doesn't understand statistics to the degree required to understand me correctly, and don't know enough about how iq tests are made and applied to give an accurate response. An assertion that at least is substanciated by the fact that you failed provide any actual counterargument to my statements, but instead opted for an ad hominem fallacy.
Sure it works. It works for bodylenght, so why not for intelligence. If we want to determine whether someone is short or tall, we compare them to the average height. Next to this we can express their height in cm or inches, the latter doesn't tell whether someone is tall or short without a known average.
In case of children we even correct the measured lenght for age, same as with iq tests. Why assume it won't work if the same appraoch clearly works for other things we measure?
The measuring preceeds the recognision.
I'd argue that the questioning of iq validity is evidence of high iq, but that total dismissal of iq validity is evidence of low iq. The first is about separating baby from bathwater, the second is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Exactly, the first statement is as useless as stating "the only thing math tests have ever been able to tell about anyone is how good or bad they are at taking math tests"
Ignoring the fact that it also tells something about the participants math skills.
The more relevant question is: how accurate are the tests?
Odd that you seem to think I don't understand statistics, while we at least seem to agree on this statement. Perhaps your reply was adressed at someone else?
If you think that IQ tests are bad designed, so they are not scientifically valid, you should show some kind of evidence. If your argument is that empirical science is inherently "invalid" in some grade, it is a selection fallacy or a kind of general skepticism equally fallacious.
Agreed, though the fact that we speak about intelligence in a discriminating way, prooves that at least the ones who do this have at least some intuitive way of quantification they believe to be true enough to talk about it. Iq tests are merely an attempt to make such measurements more objective.
Your theory about IQ (predictable by people's belief about IQ tests) is not plausible. I said that dismissed IQ tests shows low IQ ironically. IQ is predicted by IQ tests, but of course not exclusively. Science always tends to go beyond the present knowledge, so we do not have reason to assume that present tests are the best.
I agree on this, since it's very possible to see an s on a page without recognizing it as an s, especially to total illiterate people who don't even have a concept of what an 's' is. You can only start the measurement after seeing the 's'. So the chronological order is: 1 seeing the 's' 2 measureing the shape of the 's' 3 recognizing the 's'. Three steps you have trained your brain to perform within a second, wich someone unfamiliar with the letter 's' has not. Kids spend years in school to train this skill, so eventually some even can get it trained up to the level that they are able to read up to 500 words a minute accurately. Where at the start, even when all letters in the alfabet are known, it can take my 8 year old niece over a minute to read a 5 word sentence. Since she is less skilled at measuring the letters, and on occasion still confuses letters that look similar. d and p for instance are the same shape, just 180 degrees rotated. though when letters are the horizontal flip of each other it is still harder to her (like d and b, or p and q)
Isn't that the difference between intelligence (~ the ability to "work with complexity") and wisdom (~ the ability to make things "work out fine for you")? You don't need to be intelligent to be wise, and intelligence certainly doesn't guarantee wisdom.
If people agree with the rough definition that intelligence has something to do with handling complexity, then we could also move away from testing intelligence via success at tasks. That always sort of bothers me, because there are types of mistakes you only make when you're smart enough for them ("overthinking"). Similarly, someone determined to believe a very simple thing can resist being convinced more easily, if their thought patterns can outmaneuver those of the people who are trying to convince them: Intelligence allows for successful rationalisation of appealing nonsense.
One might also predict that the more intelligent you are, the more easily bored you get by performing simple tasks. Things like that.
Basically, intelligence isn't always an advantage and can often work against you in terms of wisdom. I think any definition of intelligence should allow for self-defeating intelligent behaviour.
So, basically, the Einstein of that anecdote is definitely intelligent, but maybe not that wise, while we have no information whatsoever about the homesteader's intelligence, we could learn a thing or two from his wisdom.
I'm not sure that's entirely how I see it, but it definitely goes in that direction.
Not necessarily. This would require a presumption that the intention of the language user is to accurately communicate some fact. Given what we know of human psychology, I think that's probably unlikely.
That's essentially the distinction I'm suggesting is confused. I can't really conceive of 'intellugence' as a latent ability to deal with complexity. Both mathematics and music are complex in their own ways yet there are those good at one but not the other. Surely if they were possessed of some abstract ability they would be innately good at both?
It seems, at the very least, that latent abilities are more diverse than one measure can capture.
In addition though, I find the traditional distinction between intelligence and wisdom that you've outlined problematic. If we accept wisdom as being the ability to arrive at the 'right' answer to some problem, then 'intelligence' is left defining something that I'm not sure justifies any distinction.
If we say that an intelligent man will be able to solve a maths problem, but a wise man would be able to work out that the problem itself is a waste of time and instead simply enjoy his day, then all we're really saying is that intelligence is the ability to solve a fairly narrow and arbitrarily defined set of problems.
The problem "what should I do with my day?" is solved best by the wise man, the problem "what note should follow this one?" is solved best by the musician, the problem "which shape comes next in this sequence...?" is solved best by the intelligent person. This seems to describe how the words are used, but then not the wider meaning attached to 'intelligent',which is always something more than just 'good at solving a specific range of problems'.
Wich theory would that be, and why don't you consider it to be plausible? I don't have any theory on my name as far as I know, I merely refer to scientific theories commonly known within the scientific community that researches iq validity. All I have to add to those are hypothesis at best.
Not sure what you are getting at. Of course it's not nessesarily the case at every instance, since people can be dishonest when they speak. One of the assumptions would be that the speaker isn't being intentionally dishonest for instance, if that's what you meant.
Next to intelligence, some education on the subject is required. People who are good at both, and have an interest in their simularities, can give very interesting talks about the mathematical components in music.
I stated none of the sort. On the contrary, I think iq tests have been designed very carefully. I just think that the complexity of something as intelligence results in the iq tests having a greater error margin than for instance measuring cylinders as used in chemistry. Wich has been substanciated by my comparison of the error margins used in both. Since where we have measuring cylinders that measure up to 100 ml with an error margin of only 0,2 ml wich means an error margin of only 0,2% when measuring 100 ml , our best iq test still have an error margin of 15 points, resulting in an error margin of 15% on an iq score of 100.
Perhaps my formulation has been abit clumsy, but I got my critisism on iq test from scientific sources. My point is that we still have much to improve on iq tests to increase their accuracy, before they are just as accurate as measuring cylinders used in chemistry. Perhaps intelligence is too comlex we ever reach that level of accuracy, but I'm convinced they can be improved at least to the degree that we end up with an error margin that is half of what it is now.
Even if it is true that to obtain the skill of recognising an "s" requires measuring (and again, I insist that if it does then a very technical use of the notion of measuring is being used) it does not follow that proficiency in that skill once gained requires continual measuring. See my example of a violin player who at the beginning has to concentrate very hard on the exact positioning of fingers on the fingerboard, but who - when fully proficient - no longer needs to concentrate on the exact positioning of his or her fingers, they just hit the right spot.
Scientific theories are supported by empirical data. You have not data (I suppose) of your claim.
Quoting Tomseltje
It is possible, but again you do not show any evidence. You should cite any actual IQ tests, how the are designed, etc. For me the your is not the scientific way of questioning validity (which in addition can be either "internal" -reliability- or "external" -generality-).
I'm not sure if, or how much I disagree with you here. A simplification: if we have (taking my rough definitions as a base) antonym pairs of:
simple-minded -- intelligent
and
foolish -- wise
We get four combinations:
A simple-minded fool
A simple-minded wise man
An intelligent fool
An intelligent wise man
Since I don't have problems coming up with stereotypical fictional characters for either of those types, the distinction is meaningful for me. How? That's a difficult question.
In your anecdote, I see the homesteader as a simple-minded wise man who sees Einstein as an intelligent fool (and who doesn't make the distinction I make).
None of that says what intelligence or wisdom actually is, much less that it is a single trait, or a latent ability. If I take the anecdote at face value, though, and I only have "intelligence" to work with, I find the anecdote much harder to read. "Intelligence" turns into a measure of success, and success is abstract enough that it encompasses both coming up with the theories of relativity and finding contentment in life. I'm not sure what to do with that reading.
Part of my motivation to reply in the first place, is a problem I had with many posts in this thread: a focus on success as a measure of intelligence. I'd like a definition of intelligence that allows me to ask questions like "Under what circumstances does higher intelligence make you more successful? When does higher intelligence become an obstacle?"
For example, if intelligence does have something to do with complexity, then an intelligent person is more likely to mistake a simple problem for a complex one than a simple-minded person, which makes the simple-minded person more likely to successfully solve a simple problem, or be more efficient at solving that problem (because no unneccesary thoughts get in the way).
Now, if we view intelligence as a measure for problem-solving success, we can't meaningfully address these questions. That's my prime problem with IQ tests: they predict success, but don't allow me to look at the relationship between intelligence and success because of that.
Of course, the problem might be that my conception of intelligent is... highly ideosyncratic to begin with. Take language: never mind being a "good" writer; even using language the way every five-year-old does is a highly complex activity. If I ever get serious about "intelligence having something to do with handling complexity" I have to address this distinction between using a complex system and holding its representation in your mind - praxis vs. analysis. It's definitely not a simple task. I'm not convinced yet it's a worthwhile task.
To the topic at hand, I'm highly skeptical of IQ tests, but I've never got the impression that the IQ was supposed to be a metric scale, more like an ordinal scale with huge overlapping categories. I mean, IQ tests come in modules, and everyone who's ever taken such a test has probably found some of those modules easier (I suck at the ones which require spatial perception). Two people with the same score do not have the same abilities in the same way that two people of the same height are equally tall. And I don't think anyone's ever pretended it did. So even if we're talking about IQ tests as they are, we're not talking about a single measure - at least not in the same sense as height or weight.
Quoting Tomseltje
Well, I am not assuming you don't understand statistics. I am assuring you that you don't understand statistics.
I am a photochemistry/photophysics guy who uses quantum mechanics and statistics for life, with a formal education. Plus a PhD if you are not convinced. Of course, I am not saying I am absolutely right (I can be wrong), but I have a good background to say you are wrong.
But fair enough, here's why:
Quoting Tomseltje
I used the common definition of "accuracy" meant for laymans. There is a difference between "precision" and "accuracy". To give you the answer, I was talking about BOTH "accuracy" and "precision" and these two are different. However, you confused "accuracy" with "precision". Being unable to comprehend this correctly based on my post, even though these two are are explicitly explained in my post, shows that you either do not have definitive concept to understand this, or just simply not well trained.
The concept of accuracy and precision is one of the most basic things you learn in statistics. It is most likely one of the first things you learn in statistics classes as well. That is the level of understanding you will need to be able to talk about something like IQ tests, because IQ test is based on statistics.
(It seems like in psychology, terms like "validity" and "reliability" are being used to talk about "accuracy" and "precision", but of course I am not a psychology guy and I don't think these terminology is relevant here.)
Quoting Tomseltje
Well I agree with the specific statement you referred to in the quote. But that has nothing to do with what I said above.
I just wanted to scrutinize the earlier claim about IQ testing and what the results warranted. Someone claimed that doing well on an IQ test only showed that that person was good at taking IQ tests, but it does not necessarily show any measure of intelligence...
Am I the only one here that finds that objectionable?
It works from the presupposition that intelligence isn't needed to do well on an intelligence test. It also works from the presupposition that one may be intelligent and yet not do well on one.
Quoting Tomseltje
This, I must wholeheartedly agree.
Well you didn't mention anything about my reply after your final reply, which I assume you just simply missed.
However, the measurement thing is a well established theory. Your brain is basically a computer with machine learning capability ("machine learning" is a term btw), although not as precise. It is probably your definition of "measurement" which is too specialized and specific compared to my definition of "measurement" which is more general (and is more often used).
Human brain is quite dynamic and smart in a sense. The fact that you don't remember every single details of what you see, for example now, is because your brain automatically filters out unnecessary information the moment you look at something, because when you look at something you have an objective to look at that certain "something". A great deal of measurement and processing is going on in your brain. Interestingly most of the time it is done instantaneously and unconsciously.
For example, because of scotoma, certain detail of your vision is not available. However, your brain automatically processes the blind spot with surrounding details. This is pure measurement and is a fascinating fact.
So how about if we measure weight with a thermometer? (We'll just call it a "weight-measuring device"... for good measure.) We are measuring something, we can do comparisons, calculate average, etc. We should be good, right?
Where am I going wrong with this? Your entire argument is that intelligence is adequately measured by intelligence tests because "intelligence tests" measure "intelligence" - what else could they be doing? Boom, done!
Don't you see how empty and useless such talk is? Look, you can't contribute meaningfully to a conversation about IQ tests if you don't want to get into the substance of the matter. What is intelligence? Is it something that can be measured on a scale? How can it be measured? Are existing tests adequate for the purpose? And what are such tests good for, anyway? These questions cannot be answered with wordplay alone.
You are probably right on this part, however, that doesn't mean it's an indication of my level of understanding statistics. More likely it's just a translation error, since I'm not a native english speaker.
My mathematical training was in my native language. So thanks for pointing it out.
My apologies for causing confusion on this, I didn't think the difference was that relevant to the subject in this case. Since on a single measurement the precision influences the accuracy. Wich applies in this subject, since generally the individuals only get tested once for iq.
Nonsense, in order to consider something to be adequate, you will have to state your reference. Adequate for what?
I don't recall mentioning the word adequately. Nor did I mention an application of what an iq test can be used for. My argument is that its the best way to measure it that is available, not that it can't be improved. Nor that it's adequate to substanciate conclusion x. Whatever x you may think of. Not to say that there are no conclusions to be derrived from iq tests, I just didn't make any claims about them here.
That is what we call muscle memory, wich is separate from what we attempt to measure in iq tests. The measuring is only required when training muscle memory (when the violin player still has to look at his hands).
wich claim I made are you referring to? At best you could make a case that I didn't present the data, you are merely assuming I don't have it since I didn't present it yet. Since I don't know wich claim I made you wan't me to defend, I don't know wich data you are asking for.
Quoting Belter
Why do you want me to cite an iq test as evidence? Even if I could post the symbols used in iq tests here (no idea if that is even possible here) I don't see how that is any evidence for my statements. What I'm talking about are statistical results of great numbers of filled in iq tests. Now I don't have those piles of filled in iq tests, I have to rely on the scientists who do, and published their research. I could post some links to their papers if that satisfies you.
Alas there is evidence that this is the case. I assume we don't disagree on the deviation. But since there are several tests for iq, we have a certain iq test that has results that are on average 12 points lower than another iq test. So either one of the tests is inaccurate and off by 12 points, or both of the tests are inaccurate, off by 0-12 points.
You said that rejecting IQ tests shows low IQ, and to question its validity shows high IQ.
Quoting Tomseltje
Because you are questioning them, but you do not cite anyone. It is such as to question that thermometers are not reliable, but without to give an example of it. Your criticisms is not critic.
As an improvement of what I considered to be a joke you stated:
Quoting Belter
I merely attempted to point out the difference between questioning something, and dismissing something. Where scientifically it's always ok to question something, as in applieng scrutiny. Wich is different from dismissing something, as in stating it's validity is 0.
Though if you didn't intend it as a joke, I would say:
At best they are an indicator, like all the questions in an iq test are mere indicators, having a single question on an iq test right or wrong sais nothing about that persons iq, you can't apply statistics to individual cases.
Nice strawman.
You missed the point. The point being is that you can measure body lenght, or body weight, but just the measuring result in meters or kg doesn't tell you wether the person you measured is tall or heavy. In order to make such a determination you have to compare the measured result with the average. We have units for such measurements that are quite fixed.
The difference with iq tests is that the unit isn't fixed, but gets updated each year to compensate for the flyn effect.
Very well, here is an example, the precision of an iq test has the 95% reliability interval at measured iq + or - 15 iq points. 15 iq points is also the standard deviation in measured iq in a population.
I'm not saying they are not reliable, their reliability is dependant on what they are used for. A thermometer that may give a value 10 K more or less than the actual temperature is quite unsuited to measure the temperature of an incubater for bacteria, but it's adequate for measuring metal temperatures when forging in a coal fire.
Recognizing something using your eyes includes measuring, once you can recognize the s with your eyes closed you don't need to measure it any more. If you have to use your sense(s) to make an assesment, you are measuring, no matter how quickly you do it. Measuring is a skill by itself. It can be trained and improved.
Give the violin player a violin where the strings are twice as much apart, and he/she won't be able to play by just using muscle memory any more. Since the 's' you read, isn't the same shape and size in each instance, you can't rely on muscle memory either, and must measure the 's' in order to recognize it as an 's'.
It is another abstract example. I do not understand what want you say with this. In my view, a rational skepticism would question the validity of the Raven Test, or any other IQ test (Mensa, etc).
Let's recap where we are on this particular line of thought.
I claim that people can recognise intelligent behaviour without having to measure anything.
I point out that recognising something and measuring something are entirely distinct kinds of activity.
You admit that, but you say that nevertheless recognising something always requires measuring something.
I then go on to question this, since on a normal understanding of what measuring is, in so far as it is an activity engaged in by human beings, it is an intentional activity engaged in knowingly. For example, measuring the height and length of a wall in order to work out how much paint I'll be needing.
No such intentional measuring activity is going on when I recognise an "s" on a page, and I doubt very much that it is going on when you do either. I can certainly imagine circumstances where it would be going on - for instance, if I want to make sure that the "s" I have picked out is of exactly the right size to fit into the space I have on the document I am trying to forge, then recognising and measuring an "s" are going on together. However, note that in this kind of case, it is the measuring that depends on the recognition, not the other way around. You seem to be suggesting now, however, that there is some arcane notion of measurement which nevertheless is always going on when I visually recognise anything.
What is that notion of measurement? It is certainly not the usual one. I expect you will be tempted to say something along the lines, well, when I recognise anything at all my brain is measuring stuff.
My reply to that is that you are making a category error: brains are not things that measure. Human beings measure things and by analogic extension, we have created devices that also measure things, but stricly speaking even those devices do not measure anything, we measure things with those devices. It makes sense to say "thermometers measure temperature" since we measure temperature with thermometers, for instance, but strictly speaking, what thermometers do is react in characteristic and usually predictable ways to certain kinds of environmental change, such that they can serve as devices for measuring temperature.
So, now, in what sense do brains measure anything? Brains do not engage in intentional measuring activity themselves, and we certainly do not use them as we do devices such as thermometers. I can probably come up with a scenario in which I might use a brain to measure something, but it would be a truly bizarre scenario - perhaps I want to see if a box I have is big enough to carry a brain in, so I see if a brain I have to hand fits in the box. Arguably there I have used a brain to measure the size of a box.
Now I think you might be tempted to say something like, "but look at MRI scans that are recording what is going on in the brain when people are doing stuff like recognising "s"s: there's specific brain activity going on!". Well, I suppose we could try to use an MRI scan to measure brain activity when a person is recognising an "s" - I am not denying that in the least, although as far as I am aware nobody has been able to pinpoint specific types of brain activity corresponding to recognising anything, let alone something specific like an "s", although its early days of brain science. Regardless, what you seem to be wanting to say is that not only do MRI scans measure brain activity (in the sense that we can use them to measure brain activity), but they are measuring themeasuring activity of the brain. But there we are again back at the same category error. After all, if the brain is actively measuring anything, what is it measuring that thing with?
You probably think I don't understand what you mean by "measuring" and you are probably right. I supsect what you mean by "measuring" is not in fact measuring at all.
It would depend on the skill. When getting skilled in archery for example, you look at the target. Once you are a skilled archer, you still have to look at the target in order to hit it. Even if you were training to shoot blindfolded, in both cases there is still the activity of holding the bow. So in this case your assesment doesn't hold.
iq is a rather abstract concept, what were you expecting?
Quoting Belter
All scientific findings should be questioned, it's called scrutiny. When it comes to science it can't happen too much.
To measure the wall in your example, one could use a measuring device. However a skilled painter can do it without, just by looking at the surface and making an estimate of the surface area. In both cases the width and height of the surface area has been measured.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
That's what you think, I didn't say you should be concious of it.
When a preditory animal encounters another animal, an estimation gets made: Is this something to eat, is this something to run away from. In order to make the estimation, the size of the other animal gets measured. Is it smaller then it's something to eat, is it bigger, then it's something to run away from.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
I gave you the definition I used, what more do you want?
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
This is where you go wrong, reread the definition I gave, a device is not needed to measure, the definition doesn't mention its requirement, though it can still help to obtain more accurate measurements.
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
We measured temperature with our heat sensor cells in our skin way before we discovered how to make a device like a thermometer. You may think its an uncommen way of applieng the word to measure, but actually it's the more common way, we have done so for millions of years, thermomenters only exist a few hundred years.
If we weren't able to measure without such devices, we wouldn't be able to determine whether the water we were boiling is hot or still cold when putting our hand into it.
Stop applieng your narrowed interpretation of the word measure, and start applieng the definition given if you want to make sense in your responses.
So we can unconsciously measure things?
Here is your definition of "measurement"
" the act or process of ascertaining the extent, dimensions, or quantity of something;"
Well acts and processes are distinct things, but presumably based on this definition, to measure something is to act in order to ascertain the amount of something .....So, how can I act to ascertain anything - let alone extents and dimensions - unconsiously? NB, this is not a general question about whether some of my actions can be unconscious or not, this is specifically about actions aimed at ascertaining results.
Perhaps if I somehow managed to use a tape measure during an episode of somnabulance I could be said to have performed an act of measuring whilst unconscious, but it would be tough to say that I had actually ascertained anything in doing so.
Well, there are probably some fine-grained distinctions to make between testing the temperature of something with ones hand and measuring the temperature, but sure perhaps we can use bodily parts as instruments to measure things in general: an experienced painter may indeed size-up a wall with his eyes and then estimate how much paint he needs. Nothing I've said rules any of that out. I think the main point is the intentionality of measurement, not whether the instruments we use to do so are natural or artifactual.
Quoting Tomseltje
I understand. English is also not my mother tongue so I can understand it happens.
I am still unsure if you are correctly understanding statistics.
Precision and accuracy are independent parameters. That means the value of one of them will not influence the value of the other. Simply put, precision DOES NOT influence the accuracy. You still seem to confuse these two terms. It doesn't matter how many times the measurement is done (even if zero measurement is done). Any test has its own intrinsic precision and accuracy.
For example, let's say we are trying to measure the radiation level of a copper-made statue using a Geiger counter.
Geiger counter works by having a electromagnetic wave (of sufficient photon energy like radiation from radioactive material) come into the probe where the gas inside the probe is ionized and it results in electrical current in presence of an applied voltage.
Now, we put the Geiger counter in a perfectly dark nonradioactive box. What would the meter say? It will still have some non-zero number. But why? The Geiger counter is put inside a box where no radiation exists so it shouldn't be detecting anything. This is called "dark counts". There are several reasons why this happens and I won't get to that, but severely high dark counts (for some poorly constructed counters) will suffer high signal-to-noise ratio.
We take the Geiger counter out and go outside. There are tons of radiation source (sunlight, radiation from the ground, etc). This will also worsen the signal-to-noise ratio. Now you go measure the radioactivity of a copper-made statue. Copper naturally have radioactive isotopes, so its decay will emit radiation. Picking this radiation up with Geiger counter gives you a value.
Now, you measure just once (let's say 2 seconds). How accurate is that value? Well it should be inaccurate. That is, the noise level (due to dark count and background radiation) causes a shift to a higher value than it is supposed to. Lack of accuracy due to noise is often processed by taking something called "background measurement". You take the average value of the background and subtract it from the signal value you got. Also, quantum efficiency of Geiger counter is not 100%. Most manuals provide how efficient Geiger counter is at detecting radiation. So you also account for this by dividing the efficiency from the value.
Good, now we should be getting the accurate value. Then how about precision?
If you have done only one single measurement, then you have no way of knowing the precision of the Geiger counter. In statistical terms, this is called "level of confidence". You need to do numerous measurement until the value (in average) converges to a certain value. Most of the time, 95% level of confidence is good enough statistically, but this depends on the exact measurement you are trying to do as well as personal preferences. If you have done only one measurement, then the level of confidence should be extremely low.
So to apply this to what you said about "IQ test only being performed once for each person", this refers to the level of confidence. It is not about precision (although not unrelated)or accuracy. Please be sure to understand these concepts before claiming that you understand statistics. The more you talk about it gives me higher level of confidence that you don't understand statistics.
(To the moderators, I apologize for the slightly off-topic post but the knowledge of statistics is crucially important for understanding IQ tests)
But yes, it is slightly off-topic so let's leave it at that.
Quoting Tomseltje
I indeed agree that there is a deviation.
Can you be a little more specific about "several" test? Are they test with completely different problems? Or are they test with similar problems? This is particularly important when discussing statistics.
Well I am not a neuroscientist, and to be honest I can only refer to lectures from neuroscientists, the most famous out of them was Edvard I. Moser in a conference meeting.
So short answer, no. I don't know specific scientific papers.
However, it should be kept in mind that the only reason we have a disagreement is because we do not share the same definition of measurement. Your definition of measurement seems to be very instrumentally and computationally quantitative, compared to me and Tomseltje's definition which is more general.
But brain do process information in a neuro-network in an extremely complicated but interesting way, which is, from a neuroscientific standpoint, can be effectively called "measurement" and "processing".
I understand well that these words are ill-defined, but this is merely a terminology problem and does not change the fact that the brain process information in a way that involves "measurement".
not from where i stand. I can move my arm as an act, wich includes several chemical processes within my muscles. It's impossible for me to perform that act without those chemical processes taking place.
You sound alot like someone acknowledging that he/she can move his/her arm, but denies the chemical reactions taking place within your muscle tissue.
See, you used the word "perfectly ordinary sense of measurement". This is why I am saying this is purely terminology problem.
To be extreme, if I define pear in biological terms, then both western pear and eastern pear are pear. However, if I define pear as in western pear, then eastern pear is not pear. This is the sort of argument you and I have been making, which I feel is pointless.
If you define "measurement" the way you define then recognition does not involves measurement. However, if you define "measurement" in the way I define, then recognition involves measurement. However, it is not a common practice to define "measurement" the way you do.
My skepticism about intelligence being something that comes in amounts and is measurable was under attack because I was supposed to have been forced to accept that I am measuring intelligence when I recognise intelligent behaviour. If by "measure" you mean just "differentially react to" then, because simply in recognising intelligent behaviour I differentially react to intelligent behavior, the idea that I "measure " intelligence in that sense is tautologically empty and says absolutely nothing to the point that intelligence is a thing that comes in amounts and can be measured in the way scientists measure things.
Exactly what I have I said that entails skepticism about the science of human physiology? Plenty of what I have said manifests skepticism about what the IQ industry is messed up in, but nothing I have said undermines the work of physiologists.
No you are not, which is the problem. You also do not seem to understand how I defined measurement neither, which also a problem. And to accuse me of something I did not say it makes it even more of a problem. You are also twisting and playing around with words so that it can support your point, which is just plain wrong.
But that is okay. I don't expect to you, because it doesn't matter anymore. I am not going to discuss this matter with your ill-conceived statements.
Oh by the way, I am a scientist and I do measurement every weekdays. I have a PhD in chemistry and I skipped a year in doing so. Thank you very much.
Why are you parading your credentials? Does having a PhD in chemistry - or indeed any subject - provide immunity from conceptual confusion?
The reference was to the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale vs. Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale especially when applied to less median groups. I see many people mention their personal iq score, but seldom I see anyone mentioning wich test they used for it. Nor does it seem to get mentioned in other iq discussions, the reference usually is 'iq-tests are [ fill in any claim]' without specifying about wich test the claim is made. Not too surprising, since I had my iq formally tested at three instances, and on neither of those was I informed wich iq test was being used.
No, what I mean when I use the word 'measuring' is measuring, the fact that I might mean something else by it than when you use the word 'measuring' doesn't mean that I did not mean measuring. To imply so is unwarrently accusing me of lieng. The more correct interpretation would have been to conclude that we were using different definitions. Now in order to understand my position, when I started to use the word 'measuring', you will have to accept the definition I used. To substitue your definition for mine while already having estabilished they are different is at best disingenious.
Now in other discussions, your definition might be more usefull, but not in this one. Since you were claiming to try understand what I meant, a genuine attempt at understanding what someone else meant by his/her statement, includes accepting his/her definition provided that apply to the statement.
Only after you proporly understand a statement can you attempt to counter it with arguments, so far your arguments merely point out you didn't understand the original statement to begin with.
As soon as a definition is provided that is different from the one you had in mind when the word was used, it's time to think about what the position could be when appling the new definition, instead of starting to complain about the perceived misuse of the word.
The way you formulate it, you seem to be afraid that when you accept the new definition, you get robbed of the definition that you used to apply. Wich is not the case, on the contrary, if you accept the new definition, you enriched yourself by having learned a new definition on a word that can be more usefull in some circumstances, while still having the oppertunity to use your old definition in circumstances where the old definition is more usefull.
Ascertaining is an intentional activity engaged in knowingly in order to arrive at some specific piece of knowledge about something, so measurement under your definition is an intentional and conscious activity, and there is still a total lack of argument that it is being performed when I or MetaphysicsNow or you or anybody recognises intelligent behaviour. Recognising that X is present does not need to involve intentionally engaging in any activities to determine the extent, dimensions or quantity of X. Let me ask you a question: when I recognise intelligent behaviour, what are the intentional conscious activities I engage in to determine the extent, dimensions or quantity of intelligence? I certainly do not administer any kind of written IQ test.
Yes, unfortunately that's very true. Although IQ is only one of a vast range of traits that vary among individuals and consistently among certain groups, it's probably the most important as a marker for overall success and prosperity, partly because high IQ is related to the the ability to time-bind and delay gratification, and that's very much related to the "middle class" traits that make for success.
There's a vague fantasy on the Left that human beings are equal in potential, so that if you see unequal outcomes that logically has to be the result of some (usually "systemic") injustice somewhere. This silly idea is at the root of the idea of "social justice" and of most of the quasi-religious, cultic lunacy on the modern Left. Any facts that seem to speak against this unquestioned, unexamined background idea have to be rejected with the same sort of hysterical vehemence religious nutcases used to reserve for "heresy."
That sounds backwards. Traits don't emerge from high IQ, lol.
Did I say they did?
yea.. tell me about someone able to recognize wich letter is wich without engaging into the intentional activity of reading the letters. The fact that a person automized the proces to the degree he/she isn't concious about certain parts of the proces he/she engages in, doesn't mean they are not intetntionally actively engaging into the party automized proces.
When I play the guitar, I don't need to think conciously about where and how to move my fingers, because I automized that part, I'm still intentionally actively engaging in playing the guitar.
Poisoning the well now Metaphysics? I answered several direct decent questions on this forum, in order to make that statement, you should have checked all questions asked to me, and checked all my answers to those posts in order to determine I didn't answer any of them, You obviously didn't do so, disingenious at best.
Of course I don't answer questions based upon a strawman of my position. I tend to point out the strawman first giving you a chance to reformulate your question to a question that actually might have anything to do with my position.
You seem to be blaming the one you expect to answer the question. You are painfully ignorant about the invalidity of certain questions, but as an example, why don't you answer the following direct question:
Why did you shot the sherif?
Well, I don't know about you, but I don't intentionally read letters one by one when I read, I read whole words. I may have started reading by intentionally going letter by letter, but I gave that up a long time ago and I suspect you did too.
I was aiming for the deputy but the sheriff got in the way.
Linguistic sophistication.
Social intelligence.
The ability to understand other minds.
The intelligence to understand that the joke is funny.
The pathos with which the joke is delivered.
I think computers will only be intelligent when they can spontaneously create a joke.
Teacher: Let x equal the number of sheep.
Pupil: But teacher, what if x is not the number of sheep?
Thanks for confirming you are just here to troll and not to be actually discussing philosophy.
The fact that you had enough practice so you can recognize most words by just reading the first and last letter of a word and a decent estimation of the number of letters in between, doesn't mean you are not reading letters any more.
Just like how driver tests provide excellent meant of ascertaining how good people are at taking driver tests. That we can say for sure. However, you implying that it doesn't tell us anything else is rather ill informed, otherwise why would passing a drivers test be manditory for everyone before driving a car on the public roads? Same goes for iq tests: the result holds more information than just how good the participant is at taking iq tests.
'social intelligence' is more correlated with personal trait agreeableness than with intelligence.
Computers are not intelligent, they just execute the commands programmed into them, it's the computer programmer who requires intelligence.
teachers mistake: openness, better he had said " the number of sheep is defined as x"
Pupils mistake: disagreeableness, not willing to participate into thinking about the consequences of defining the number of sheep as x.
Propor teacher respond : "we are not talking about what if x is not the number of sheep, we are talking about the situation where x is the number of sheep. I appreciate genuine questions about the subject, but I don't wan't to hear any more questions designed to distract from the subject, last warning."
Not a particularly good analogy - driving tests are also a measure of your ability to manipulate a car - if you can do that in the context of a test you are likely to perform well with a car in other contexts (although not necessarily, bad drivers pass their driving tests). This is a key disanalogy with the IQ test: there is no device/tool being used to take an IQ test, except perhaps a pen (but then there are better ways to test penmanship than an IQ test).
Also, as @MetaphysicsNow pointed out, let us not forget that you still have not answered my question:
when I recognise intelligent behaviour, what are the intentional conscious activities I engage in to determine the extent, dimensions or quantity of intelligence?
Well, hopefully you would have some standard of measure in place. Preferably one arising from extensive observation and comparative analysis of what are undoubtedly very intelligent people performing complex mental tasks and precisely what successfully performing those tasks requires. Namely, the sorts of cognitive abilities, mental functioning, abstract and spatial reasoning skills, along with all sorts of different problem solving skills required to successfully perform certain mental tasks...
Logical argument alone?
No, of course not, that's ludicrous. We watch cats learn, problem solve, etc. just like we can watch slugs detect and react. We can develop a standardized test for cats which shows their ability to figure all sorts of things out. Not all cats will perform equally.
You see, while it may be true that IQ tests certainly show who's good at taking them, if they are created in such a way that only people who have certain kinds of cognitive abilities are able to score well on them, then by virtue of doing well on an IQ test one shows a rare and 'heightened' intelligence level. The greater the level of cognitive ability, the greater the potential. That's what it's about.
Sure, all people have potential. Not all people have the same level of potential.
Quantification is over-rated, and some people use things in suspect ways fr suspect reasons. However, effectively ascertaining the potential of people does not necessarily have to be for nefarious reasons. Rather, if the right sorts of people had the right kinds of power, the IQ test could be used to help everyone be successful. Unfortunately, I do not find that the right sorts of people have the right sorts of power, but that does not make IQ tests horrible in and of themselves. Nor does it make them based upon some fallacy...
One can have high iq and be a high functioning psychopath.
I can't think of any reason why not.
I pointed out the invalidity of the question, since it assumes that the activities must be conscious, wich wasn't stated in the definition I gave. As I attempted to explain with a practical example, at least part of the proces of recognizing can be unconscious.
The claim being made (by a number of people, not just you) is that recognizing intelligent behaviour always involves measuring intelligent behaviour. You were asked for a definition of measurement according to which this is true, since recognizing something and measuring something are prima facie distinct activities (otherwise why would we have two words)? You then give us this definition (copy-pasted from your original post) that measurement is
"the act or process of ascertaining the extent, dimensions, or quantity of something;"
So, for you to recognize something always involves an activity of ascertaining the extent, dimensions or quantity of something.
Metaphysicsnow and then I point out that ascertaining something is an intentional and conscious activity, and so we ask you what intentional and conscious activity we engage in whenever we recoqnize an occurence of intelligent behaviour. You then tell me that this question is invalid. Why is it an invalid question? Is it because for you recognition can be unconcious, that seems to be what you are getting at above? But that is irrelevant since it is ascertaining which you are now being asked about, and ascertaining is very definitely an intentional and therefore conscious activity. Nobody unconsciously ascertains anything. Furthermore, if for you to recognize is to measure, and to measure is always to ascertain, then to recognize is itself to engage in an intentional and conscious activity, which undermines your claim that recognition can be unconscious.
What might get you out of the hole you have dug for yourself is if you could present us with some cogent non-question begging examples of somebody unconsciously ascertatining something. I wish you luck with that.
Certainly people who are sceptical about IQ tests will not want to say that a slug is as intelligent as a cat. Neither would they want to say that a cat is more intelligent than a slug. What kind of circumstance would elicit that kind of comparison between cats and slugs in the first place? I cannot think of any (beyond a desperate and question begging attempt to show that cats and slugs share something in common called intelligence that comes in amounts and can be measured).
There was a prior and more sophisticated exchange earlier in this thread on the idea of oneperson being more or less intelligent than anotherperson, but as far as I recall, that certainly did not end in it being agreed that to talk in this way committed one to a metaphysically dubious position that intelligence is a thing that comes in amounts and can be measured
You can state this, but you didn't demonstrate it to be truth, nor do I agree with this assumption. I did attempt to demonstrate the contrary with an example. Since when I play the guitar I can unconciously ascertain where my finger needs to press the string to get the right sound out of my guitar when I stroke the string with my other hand. The same as when someone walks through a doorway, that person ascertains wether he/she would fit through before walking through it, most people don't require a tape measure to make this measurement, especially the more the size of the doorway differs from the size one would just be able to fit through. And the same kind of unconcious ascertaining is required to drive any vehicle with a steering wheel. Well practiced bikeriders don't consciously think when riding a bike,"ooh im steering 2 inch to far to the right, time to start steering to the left by x degrees", they practiced so they can unconsiously steer the right way in order to stay on the right side of the road as well as to stay on top of the bike and not fall off.
I don't think I was ever in that hole to begin with, since I already gave some examples of that, but you didn't seem to recognize them as such. So perhaps I should elaborate. If you learned to play an instrument like the guitar the example should be familiar, since while you start practicing the guitar, you will have to think consciously about where to place your fingers with one hand and when to stroke the strings with the other hand. However, this proces takes so long, that even if you try to play the music at half the speed, you are still often way too late in placing your fingers. Once you at least partly automized the proces, you willl be able to play the music at its correct speed without missing a note. But once you are there, you trained your body to unconsciously measure where to place your fingers.
The same principal goes for learning to type on a querty keyboard (with the exeption that there is no time limit for typing as there is in music, untill you want to become a professional typist, in wich case you must be able to accurately type an x number of characters a minute, wich most people don't reach after their first five minutes of practice) and learning to ride a bicycle.
You seemed to do so when you stated:
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
My example clearly demonstrates that the act and the proces can be undistinguisable, hence they are not by definition distinct things, at best you could argue they can be distinct ways of adressing what happened. How can the act of making milk into butter take place without the process of making milk into butter taking place? You seem to suggest they can.
It seems simular to me like making the error of stating "miles and meters measure different things" in stead of stating "miles and meters are different ways to measure the same thing (in this case the length of something)".
Quoting MetaphysicsNow
I used a simular example to attempt to explain differences in ways to measure something (since I do play guitar and not the violin I opted for a first hand experienced example). The flaw here is in the assumption that the violin player who is fully proficient is no longer measuring. This is not the case, this violin player learned a way to measure the same thing by other means than when he started to learn how to play wich is way quicker than would be possible compared to having to measure everything required to play the piece consciously.
Has placements of people, with different IQs, to areas of work that doesn't fit the required intelligence level or being far under their level shown a negative effect on their well being, their ability to function well in that line of work and social interaction? Yes.
Can intelligence be trained to increase? Or if not trained, fall? Yes, but studies show that only within a a small range around the baseline you exist under. The base IQ range level is pretty much set for each person.
Is there a lot of stigma around intelligence based on the fact, as the OP posted, that intelligence is talked about in the same way as money? People that do not have a lot of money often despise those who are rich, while those who are rich look down upon those who are poor.
Does the stigma affect how we view and value IQ for it's purpose as a measurement? Do we either view it as a measurement of the value of people or on the other end do we see it as as measurement that is too morally cold and doesn't care about other aspects of human nature that should be taken into account more than IQ for the evaluation of a person? Yes.
What is the value of IQ without the stigma attached to it?
I see these points and I try to deduct the value of IQ. If we take away the stigma in which we value people's worth according to IQ or ignore IQ in order to not do it, then we can get closer to what IQ can be used for as a measurement. If researchers have found both that IQ is predicting how we behave and function in face of the world around us and if we function best in places that fit the level of IQ we have, also with respect to how much we can increase our IQ within our range, then it's a measurement of the optimal function of our mental well being. Someone who is too intelligent for the tasks they do get depressed by it, isolate themselves compared to colleges that are better matched, while those with less intelligence than what is required gets stressed and suffers health issues connected to that stress, while socially ends up isolated as well.
Now, this is a bit coldly calculated, since it's also not a good thing to just divide people into different levels of intelligence as well-being is also generally linked to diversity within the social group. But the stigma gets in the way of what IQ can guide us to when it comes to what we are best fit to be doing. It's a value that shows us a starting point for what we will be best at doing. Aiming for anything else will probably lead to health issues, both mentally and physically.
If we could let go of the stigma, let go of valuing worth of a person based on the IQ and instead value the well being of that person according to IQ, we have a good function for IQ as a measurement. IQ is not a measurement of a persons value, but a measurement of a persons optimal functionality. Put a Ferrari engine inside a small car and the entire thing will collapse under those horsepowers and wind pressure; put a small car engine in a Ferrari and it will slowly roll down the street without utilizing any of the the streamline design for wind pressure at high speeds. But both have a purpose if they utilize their purpose and not what purpose they don't have.
We have an ideology popularized today about how the individual can become whatever they want. It's Sartre's "essence after existence" on crack in which anyone believe they can do anything with their life. It's also why we see increases of mental health issues as the pressure on people not fit for what they do, try all their efforts to do them anyway. There are other aspects of course, like how introverts and extroverts do not fit in each others line of work very well but try to do the tasks anyway. This delusion of how people can be molded into the perfection of their decided essence, has little to no basis in psychology and sociology. While I agree that our essence comes after existence, we have a basic set of stats that we are born with and only those with dark agendas use the stigmatic aspects of our relationship with concepts like IQ to fit their world view and decisions. However, if we see the true value of IQ, it can be utilized for the good of humanity if people who understands it and who are free of the personal emotional evaluation of a person's IQ, decide on it's use for humanity.
(This is more a response to the topic and original post than the pages of debate that followed)
If you have problem with this example because it involves a device like a car, then just think about the theoretical exam for the driving test, wich merely requires the idea of a car, but not an actual car to take the test. At least where I live passing such an exam is required to even start the practical lessons driving a car. And the critisism stays the same, It doesn't merely measure how good you are at taking that kind of tests, it also tells something about how aquinted the person taking the test is with traffic rules. So it also has a predictive value on how well the person will perform when starting practical driving lessons. The reason we don't allow people who fail this test to start practical driving lessons is because it would increase the number of traffic accidents if we did.
Iq tests are similar in that regard, they just test a persons on more general knowledge and ability to reason, and hence they also have a predictive value on how that person taking the test will perform in the future in situations that require skills associated with what the test measures.
It is hard to raise intelligence, however there are numerous quite easy ways to drasticly lower intelligence. Hence the base IQ range level isn't that much set for each person, the max iq range is, but there are no tests to determine someones maximum iq, we only have tests that can measure someones current iq (wich could be temporarily lowered by sleep deprivation, or permanently lowerd by lack of nutricion in early development).
Quoting Christoffer
Many people tend to confuse monetary worth (the amount of money someone has) and/or intellectual worth (how intelligent someone is) with intrinsic worth (the actual worth of a person). Some people even go as far as to conflate correlation with causation. Since there is a correlation between intelligence and monetary wealth, some people even go as far as to assume that poor people can't be intelligent, or that rich people always are intelligent. Especially among wealthy less intelligent people.
Most people who do so seem to have forgotten that our intrinsic worth is not determined by our intelligence or monetary wealth, but rather by how we choose to use the intelligence and monetary wealth we posess.
If talking about physical brain damage, then yes. But it's hard to not use the brain to such a level that your IQ drops so low that you almost simulate brain damage.
Quoting Tomseltje
My point as well. But my comparison between money and intelligence has more to do with how people talk and reason around IQ. It's a value of the person rather than value of the optimal function of the person. The optimal function of a person does not equal value of that person, but works as a guideline to what that person can function optimally around. To function optimally is to find tranquility in our existence, if we push ourself beyond what we are capable of, or if we are capable of more and limit ourselves, it's downhill into mental health problems.
However, the actual worth of a person is another philosophical question entirely, but I agree to some degree that the worth has much to do with how we use what we have and how we act according to it against other people and ourselves.
Not even so drastic, just some sleep deprivation or malnourisment is enough to perform significantly lower on iq score tests.
Quoting Christoffer
Indeed, hardly any one if any achieves functioning optimal all the time. Actual functioning is all we can measure, and then we only do it for the parts we are interested in, not the total picture.
Glad we can agree on the main issue.
You are riding rough shod over numerous subtle distinctions and probably also misusing the word "ascertain". To ascertain means, in the most general sense, to find something out. How do you unconsciously find out where your fingers need to press the string? Does it involve looking at the score, does it involve looking at where your fingers are actually placed? If so, looking here is intentional, conscious activity. A master of the guitar may indeed know exactly where his fingers need to be on the fingerboard, and may know without having to engage in any reflection or looking at all, but that is precisely the kind of case where there is no finding out going on at all, even if there is knowledge. It's not the case that every display of knowledge or know how is the immediate outcome of actually ascertaining anything, although certainly gaining that knowledge or know how may have involved ascertaining things at some stage. I know that I am going to enjoy the cup of coffee steaming beside me. I certainly at some point in my life found out (ascertained) that I like coffee, but that's not what I am doing now: I'm just looking forward to drinking the coffee.
Consider this question:
How did you ascertain where your fingers needed to be on the fingerboard?
And consider in what circumstances that question would actually make sense when:
a) Asked of someone who is learning to play the guitar.
b) Asked of someone who has mastered the guitar.
Now think about the following question:
How did you know where your fingers needed to be on the fingerboard?
And consider in what circumstances that question would make sense when:
a) Asked of somseone who is learning to play the guitar
b) Asked of someone who has masterd the guitar.
There will be differences and similarities between all the circumstances that you can imagine, and its the differences that tell as much as the similarities.
Quoting jkg20
No you don't know, you may believe so, but you don't know. If a meteorite falls through your roof and kills you before you can take a sip you don't. You can't prematurely exclude that possibility. Once you had you first sip you might know you are enjoying that sip, but you can't predict the future, nor can I or any of us.
Quoting jkg20
a) by following the intstuctions for the musical piece conciously
b) no idea, that part has become unconcious, my fingers know more about how to play it than my head.
i don't see how the distinqtion between knowing and ascertaining is relevant here.
If you have no idea, then how do you know that it has become something unconscious, rather than just something that is entirely there for everyone to see when you play the guitar? It's you that know how to play the guitar, not your fingers nor your head.
Then I can only advise you to read over the thread more carefully.
Quoting jkg20
Because it's the same unconscious mechanism that causes someone to lift ones foot before becoming aware of the pain when that someone steps into something sharp. It's basic neurology; reflexes are unconscious.
Perhaps you should elaborate first on why you think
Quoting jkg20
Demonstrate where I rode shod over sublte distinctions, being blunt and direct is no evidence of riding roughshot over anything or anyone by itself.
Quote me where you consider i was misusing the word 'ascertain'. Vague accusations of incompetence are not helpfull in a discussion, either be precise in your critique (at the risk of being proven wrong) or leave your feelings of distrust out of the conversation, since without being precise in your critique best you can establish is just rabble rousing.
If you feel something is probably the case, find out by asking for elaboration, don't make vague accusations. The fact that you dodged me asking for elaboration on this vague accusation with
Quoting jkg20
is indicative for you just having an uncomfortable feeling about it, by no means does it mean I was misusing the word. Though such feelings can be indicative for you not agreeing with what you think I meant by it, don't prematurely exclude the possibility that you just misunderstood me by going in offence mode.
Quoting jkg20
It doesn't involve looking at the score or looking at where my fingers are actually placed, that is only needed when learning to play, once learned there is no more need for looking then I can play blindfolded. Perhaps a more common example would be riding a bike, once learned, you don't have to consciously steer towards the side you are falling off.
This is nor the goal nor the interpretation of iq test results. Yes what you suggest is a stupid idea, but I know of none who actually knows enough about iq tests in order to legally test them to uphold this idea.