If you believe psychology and IQ are nonsense, here’s a comment I copied over from another thread:
IQ means intelligence quotient. A bunch of people take a test and they’re compared to each other. Your result is your intelligence quotient.
Its origins were noble, because it was designed to identify students who needed extra help in school. The creator of the test knew that people could change their results with good instruction.
However, that noble origin story was besmirched by what happened later. Eventually, IQ tests were used as a way to classify people in more brutal and rigid ways. The USA military used it as a cutoff for aspiring cadets. USA colleges use tests that effectively are IQ tests to let people in or not. The worst part is that bigots around the world injected pseudoscience into IQ and used it to decide who they think are worthy of life and who aren’t. It’s as awful as it sounds.
You may notice that helping struggling students sounds wonderful, and you may think that we should go back to that.
However, some people are deeply marked by the dark history of IQ. They have developed beliefs that protect them from the dangers of bigotry and IQ reductionism. They believe that tests aren’t useful at all to tell us something about anything. They believe IQ tests should be banished and never used.
Others people believe IQ tests are a snapshot of how a person answered the questions to a test in a given day. Take the same test days, months, or years after a great education, and the result will be higher. Additionally, these people notice that, in research, IQ scores are robustly associated with other things, such as quality of relationships, happiness, income, and other measures. They contend that learning about the world, about ourselves, and how to think critically and solve problems has massive domino effects in peoples’ lives. Once again, these people believe that a test result one day doesn’t doom you for life and doesn’t define you. A bad test result shows the gap that a good education would fill. These people know that a good education makes the mind curious, nimble, and open.
As a maths person, I have scored high on IQ tests for years. There are plenty of topics I am not great at, but IQ tests typically focus maths topics like pattern recognition.
I like the acknowledgement of racism in IQ tests. There is a bias in the test for western maths education. Sadly, the results could be used for eugenics. Many great mathematicians I have met are neurodivergent, LGBTIA+, cis-women or other groups the eugenics crowd want culled.
My current politicical perpspective frames this as enforcement of heirarchy, legitimized “scientifically” by the IQ test. There are plenty of high IQ people, such as those in maths, that do not fit the eugenic vision. The heirarchy becomes self-fulfilling and “natural” by culling the non-comforming people. The “top” of the heirarchy must legitimize their position, so the bottom doesn’t resist doing all the work for little personal benefit.
IQ tests measure something. Don’t use that measurement to justify heirarchy. Eugenics is bad. A better future, built from the bottom, is possible. All power to all people.
In my perspective IQ only has so many consequences, due to the limitations of the method. Nowadays we know to separate different forms of intelligence and also that transferring skills between those forms can have an impact on overall ‘performance’ . That being said, it can be a good indicator for stuff but as you point out, it’s often misused as divider instead of an accelerator.
Its origins were noble
No they most certainly were not. It’s origins is in eugenics and white supremacist nonsense.
Depends on what you mean by “high.” I have scored between 130-140 on IQ tests I’ve taken of various quality, which is considered high by most. Idk how it would be different from anyone else’s experience of the world. I did extremely well in school and I work as a chemical engineer with a focus on machine learning implementations and capital expansion. I don’t know if I would consider myself “smarter” than the average person, just better at certain types of tasks. I also grew up in a stable two parent upper middle class household that valued education and academic success, which is a huge leg up that can’t be ignored.
You wouldn’t understand.
Hahah! Living up to your aristocratic origins, I see.
I’m asking this partly because I saw someone else asking the same question but about low IQ.
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Thanks for asking this question. I have enjoyed reading the answers people gave you.
I have a high IQ and diagnosed as “gifted” by psy at nearly 40.
I won’t argue about IQ and Giftedness having scientific base or not. All I can do is a professional clinical psy told me I am gifted. And what I’ll say is just my way of thinking.
I have a systemic brain. I have very poor memory concerning names, date, etc… but I can remember complex system (basically, what cause create which consequence) really easily. I also understand problem, and find solutions much faster than most of peoples, I have strong Intuition of things, but I have difficulties explaining how I’ve found the solution. Scientists think it may be related to Myelin. That stuff increase connection speed between neurons, so it makes you think “faster”, but sometime faster than you conscience.
I also wants to give meaning to anything. If I take a nap and hear the wind in the trees, I immediately imagine air molecules traveling and hitting leaves, sound wave propagating and hitting my ears. Wind also blowing the small layer of hotter air near my skin, explaining why it feel cold, etc…
I see object through their functioning, not their usefulness. When I see any new machine, I don’t really care what it does, but more how it does it.
I’m constantly flooded by information, and I’m constantly analyzing everything. Being in a crowed area is exhausting for me, because there are too many stimulus. I’m not going to faint or something, but I think being in a crowd for me is like being in a kindergarten class full of screaming children.
I don’t talk a lot because I’m easily bored by small-talks. I don’t see the point of speaking about what I’ve done this week end, or the weather, or anything. I prefer staying in my own bubble speaking to myself.
I don’t feel part of this world, I more feel like an observer watching some weird TV show. I don’t understand most of human reaction.
If you are French speaking, I strongly encourage you to read the comics Comme oiseau dans bocal. It’s based on serious research and is a very good popular science story about IQ, giftedness, etc…
Since you’ve been to a psychologist for your assessment (is that what you mean by “psy”?) have you asked or considered the possibility of neurodivergence? I have suspected autism in myself for a while, and I resonate with much of what you said in regards to stimulus overwhelm, staying in your bubble, disdain for small talk etc. That’s pretty common in many autistic people.
Yeah, I and some other psychologists had suspected high level autism, like Asperger, but it doesn’t seems to be this. I have a mix of social anxiety linked to my childhood (also called over-adaptation), probably neurodivergence like giftedness, and Endogenous depression. Fuck my brain :D. The good side is that I’m extremely resilient to stress, pressure, or emergency situations.
My last psy (who is excellent) told me that “Autistic people are always autistic”. It’s really a missing social-related circuits in their brain. On my side, I’m “autistic like” most of the time, but I manage to build close relationship with good friends. So I have this “social circuit”, but it switch on only when I feel really secure.
It feel really strange to re-analyse all my life and childhood with this new perspective.
Well fuck me damn. Do you experience anger?
Yes, a lot >_<, but I have calmed down since a few year. I’ve learned to step back from things on which you don’t have control.
Actually, it’s not that I don’t feel anything. It’s even the opposite. I feel the same level of stress when I order a pizza than when I present in front of 100 peoples. Being stressed and anxious is a natural state for me since I was a child. That’s what my psy call “over-adaptation”. Normal people grow up by alternate time of danger and time of safety. So they learn to adapt to different situation. On my side, I always felt unsecured while growing up. Any situation were perceived as potential threat. So I over-adapted.
Also, some things affects me more than “normal” people. I have very low tolerance to injustice, which bring me trouble in my previous job btw. I’m also nearly unable to lie, honesty is primordial for me. At least, my wife is sure I’ll never cheat on her xD. I can also have important emotional reactions caused by little things. It seems like, as connections are faster in my brain, information coming from Amygdala (which basically handle emotions) go too fast through Cerebral cortex (which handle logic). As a consequence, Cortex doesn’t have time to filter them.
In the end, like everyone, I’m a mix of nature, my brain is wire differently than most of people, which gave me high IQ, and nurture, because of environment in which I grew up, which gave me social anxiety.
Thank you for taking the time to write it all down.
Just wanted to say wow, so much of that sounds familiar!
thanks :)
You get to impress the worst people in the world by giving them a number which generally indicates the quality of your education. Other than that, it’s pretty useless.
Episodes of Rick and Morty really hit close to home in a way that normies couldn’t possibly fathom. It’s a blessing and a curse.
Genuine curiosity: I’ve seen piles of “my superior intellect” and “normies would never understand”, so I wanted to ask if your answer was sarcastic. If it isn’t, are you saying that you identify with Rick? Or something different?
The topics of the show tend to deal with fairly high level concepts. Mixed in the chaos of interpersonal relationships.
The show to me has been a more twisted version of the superman paradox. A god living amongst mortals.
I think it’s sarcasm.
I’m neither a Rick nor a Morty, but I think you can look at the biographies of historical figures who’ve been considered “geniuses” and deduce that R&M isn’t too far off base. It may be a sort of survivor bias: it may be that only genius and successful people have had difficulties; or, maybe idiots have just as much depression only they don’t get famous. All we have are examples like DJT for the dumb-but-successful-and-not-struggling-with-depression category.
I really should have a statistic to back this up, but it seems common for “high IQ” people to have issues. My personnel theory is that we’re all on the spectrum: that humans have a band in which we can function normally, socially, but the higher you climb on the “intelligence” scale, the more you edge into what we’d diagnose as autism and start to struggle with issues resulting from either being unable to integrate with society, or being persecuted by it.
I have absolutely no evidence for this theory, of course. It’s just a theory formed after reading biographies of so many notable geniuses who’ve struggled with drug abuse and depression. Depression is the big one; it must get awfully tiresome being surrounded by (relative) idiots.
I don’t take the theory very seriously; however, among my high school close friend group, the unquestioned smartest one, who went on to get a doctorate in math, checked himself out with a shotgun in his early 30’s. He’s the only suicide we’ve had, and I’ve often wondered how much his intelligence factored into it.
Finally, I’ll end with this quote I one read, for which I can no longer find a source and which I have no reason for believing is based at all on any evidence; but which I’ve always found funny:
Philosophers look outside themselves for truth.
Mathematicians look inside themselves for truth.
Psychologists say philosophers tend to be more happy than mathematicians.I was being sarcastic, lol. It’s a play on the “you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty” gag.
My situation is I have an ability to recall a lot of really old information and some of it seemingly mundane. I can also synthesize all this together to make a good decision quickly.
This is basically what learning is, but it’s a broader base I can pull from and the process is just faster.
I don’t do well with forcing specific information to be cataloged. This means I wasn’t a great student in classes where you needed to just remember things (eg history).
The other thing I’ve got going for me is being able to visually see things in my head. It might be memories, but it’s also things for solving problems like this https://www.intelligencetest.com/questions/visualization/medium/3/8.html
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I’m comfortably above average but comfortably below genius, not entirely sure whether that fits your personal definition of high so it felt worth clarifying.
In school, it meant that learning was something I could do with no actual effort. Without studying and without doing homework aside from what I did at my desk to pass the time before class started, I had as strong a grasp on the subject as the students who did and comfortable grades. Then when I started college, that passivity suddenly didn’t work anymore and I had no idea how to cope with it. I never actually learned how to learn, formally speaking.
Emotionally speaking, that whole thing was awful. It sucked when it was easy because I was so bored, it sucked when it was hard because I was so frustrated. I actually failed out of high school due to low attendance at the very end, then tested into the local college without a diploma because I still knew the material even with the problematic attendance, then got suspended from college due to now-for-the-opposite-reason low attendance and never went back. There was also unrelated shit going on, to be clear, but this that I’m describing was not a small part of my overall psychological state.
As an adult, it doesn’t mean much of anything. While it’s a bit easier for me to learn things than it is for the average person, the ease with which I learn things doesn’t matter anymore because it’s largely happening without other people’s direct involvement or on any kind of schedule. On the occasion there needs to be an actual work training lesson I attend, it’s something that only happens for a day and enduring a single day of tedious education is so very achievable compared to it being my entire life.
The biggest impact these days is that it makes me hate Aaron Sorkin.
I think it would be hard to isolate exactly how much of our daily lives we experience as a direct consequence of our IQ and how much is a consequence of other things such as personality, emotional predisposition, environment, and luck.
My IQ is pretty average (around 115 I think? I tested ages ago and I can’t even say the test was reliable). Some people insist I must be somewhat higher than that but I don’t know. I feel dumber every day.
My father though, he does have a higher IQ (I think 135 iirc) and it’s obvious to anyone that he’s a brains guy. Always top student in his youth and later a decent researcher, engineer and programmer. And yet he still makes dumb mistakes like everyone else, and his temper and personality will often turn a mediocre day into a bad one. He has a tendency to overcomplicate things unnecessarily, and sets high standards for others around him- you’d think being smarter would mean he wouldn’t do this, but as I said, intelligence doesn’t work isolated. I remember asking him how it feels like being smarter than most of his peers and his answer is always “bah!”.
So I don’t know if this answers your question, but there’s my two cents for you.
115 is not “average” lmao
By definition, it is. 85-115 is the 1 standard deviation range for IQ and encompasses ⅔ of the population (roughly). So, 115 is “average” or “high average”.
115-130 is above average, while 70-85 is below average (“mild intellectual delay” used to be the term I think? Not sure if that’s still current). 145+ was “genius” and 160+ was “super genius”, back in the day; I assume those terms aren’t used anymore, but I haven’t looked into it. IIRC, about 97% of the population is 70-130 IQ.
My brother is a “genius”; I am not. (I was never told my exact score on the IQ test found for me as a child, but I know the range, and in both our cases came from a psychologist).
I’m more “successful” by most standard measures of success, but that might have more to do with his (undiagnosed and unsupported) autism than his IQ. (Career , house, family, etc.) In math, for example, he could get 100s without effort, until university. I could get 100s with significant but not extreme effort, or coast and get 80s-90s until university. We both got top scores on math contests at the local (academic) school level.
I don’t really think IQ is very valuable for having a “good” life. Emotional regulation, introspection, mindfulness, and other soft skills are more important, imho, and I’m actively working on trying to build more capacity in those areas, and they’re leading to more success for me than my speed at learning a narrow subset of things (what IQ measures).
I’m dealing with a lot of harm from how constantly being labeled “smart” was damaging for me, paired with my at-the-time undiagnosed ADHD. I struggle with a lot of imposter syndrome, need for external validation, and oscillating sense of self worth.
TL;DR: “Emotional intelligence” trumps IQ for life skills and general happiness, equanimity, and “success”.
It’s within a standard deviation, it’s not like it’s getting him into Mensa.
So I don’t know if this answers your question, but there’s my two cents for you.
It does! This is precisely the kind of stuff that I’m interested in! I agree with you, in that it’s possible to think wrong thoughts even with a higher IQ. I see IQ as the speed of thought, and you can very quickly arrive at wrong conclusions. Similarly, if there’s a thought that your skill tree hasn’t unlocked, then you’re left with thoughts that are maybe not ideal for a particular situation, thoughts that could make someone “overcomplicate things unnecessarily” or “make dumb mistakes”, as your dad or anyone on planet Earth would.
I think it’s especially hard to isolate IQ when there are many thoughts or behaviors that we don’t typically associate with high IQ. “Ah yes, the violin is a sensible instrument for a learned man” or whatever people may think. That’s partly why I asked my question. If someone leads a life not typically associated with a high IQ and yet have a high enough IQ that manifested in their life, how did that look like? Of course, I’m not looking for wild stories. I’m looking for genuine stories, and I’m glad that I got an interesting answers like yours!
My highest IQ I scored was 135, the lowest 115.
Do I get to part of it?
The IQ tests themselves are not great tools of measuring intelligence but it’s the best we’ve got. And I’m glad people here realize that.Well…I currently feel like I’m the dumbest one among friends. I’ve got ADD, so I lose concentration a lot and my friends don’t seem to have that, while they have high IQ as well.
It’s also good to see that you know that IQ is speed of measuring thoughts, because I don’t think the current physicists have got it correct at all and fail even on a basic level of natural philosophy/science, but they certainly can whip up complex equations faster than either of us can.
IQ is skull measuring nonsense. how good you are at taking a standardised test is in fact not a remotely good “measure of intelligence”. if you care about education you should discard the notion of IQ.
You can get better at IQ tests by doing more of them and learning the patterns, right? So it’s basically measuring how au fair you are with logic puzzles rather than anything particularly intrinsic.
You can get better at IQ tests by doing more of them and learning the patterns, right?
Yes. That is considered to “invalidate” an IQ test, but it’s not usually an issue since the tests are typically administered to children.
IQ tests are basically only used in the context of individualized education plans for young school children (or for MENSA membership).
So it’s basically measuring how au fair you are with logic puzzles rather than anything particularly intrinsic.
The fundamental issue of testing is that no test can objectively determine intrinsic properties.
But no, a full IQ test done by a psychologist tests a lot more than “puzzles”, including things like memory tests and even fine motor skills or hand eye coordination.
When I was tested they found I scored really high in the pattern recognition stuff and memory tests, but my writing was slow and sloppy and below average.
As part of my individualized education plan I was allowed extra time on tests as well as study aids such as text to speech tools because of this.
The ultimate purpose of the IQ tests is to get a general idea of the strengths and weaknesses in certain area.
Excellent memory, and quick intuitive problem solving, like in my case, can compensate and mask ADHD symptoms like trouble focusing. These tests helped reveal that at an early age.
I think a lot of people think of IQ tests like they’re “how objectively smart are you” when really they’re used to find out which areas you need help in with your education/life so we can provide kids with that support.
how good you are at taking a standardised test
Not even that, how good you are at taking a standardised test on a given day. We also know people who are traumatised by poverty or individual adverse life events have lower success rates on these tests, making them even more useless at best and vicious at worst.
Scores are stable over time. This can be determined by statistics. It’s called test-retest reliability.
