And I have to say, I am not a believer.
I scored around the genius level, but even as I write this, various things assert themselves to conflict a clear definition of IQ. First, I don't come off as all that smart. My "verbal"component is slow. No gift of gab. Then, I can't randomly access any information from my brain that to the degree other "average" people around me can. I remember being completely astonished at a gathering where people were discussing a party from a couple years back, who was there, and what they were doing and wearing. No way! I can't even tell if my wife has got a hair cut, so let's not go into details from a year ago.
Then, math, linear thinking, arrays or information, forget about it. That stuff is for other folks.
Next, I know that (how do I say this), nobody knows anything about "knowing". We don't know anything about intelligence, or about life. I still think there's a kernel of "your never going to get this" in everything that we consider. I think that's a "God thing", but you can disagree. For example, why is it was haven't yet produced one single spec of life? We might able to clone it, to read the genome, to be dogmatic about how it works, but we certainly cannot (and here's a prediction) reproduce it on our own. I mean the creation of life, without a jumpstart from something already living.
Back to I.Q. tests. It's something that a single number or metric will NEVER define. And isn't that so establishment-minded of us? It's like equating beauty to a single number. Non-limier things don't have anything to do with linear things, even though the definition allows a correlation. Currently I am reading a book on Systems theory and it explains how we try to find specific facts about something, only to figure out there is more detail and facts to be found, if you look a layer deeper. For example, Mandelbrot used to ask the question to his students - how long is the coast of Britan? Nobody knows, since if you focus in one one very small section of Britan's coast you see there are fractals at work in the rocks or shells, and those would have to be measured. But wait...fractals have fractals, ad infinitum. So, it's not useful to know all the facts. That would be way too much information, and too much information is a bad syndrome.
Here's a quote from Slate magazine:
A team led by researchers from the University of Western Ontario found that a single number doesn't accurately represent a person’s intelligence. The group said three components must be studied to get a full picture of someone’s faculties: short-term memory, reasoning, and a verbal component. Using special imaging, the scientists were able to show that those three abilities run on different circuits in the brain.
The findings, which were published in the science journal Neuron, were based on the 100,000 people who participated in the experiment. The researchers also noted that regular game-playing helped with short-term memory and reasoning, while smokers performed poorly on short-term memory and the verbal component.
Oh, duh, it's not one number now, it's 3! Done, we have arrived, we now know what intelligence is. Fail. The bests scientists in the world are correlating video game playing and smoking to short term memory. One number, against another set of numbers. Granted, it's better than nothing, but those who are intuitive know these basic thing already. Smoking = Bad (when addicted), Video Games = (good, when not addicted).
Dear "Slate V Staff",
We don't know about IQ. We will never know about IQ, and will find the single number to judge someone by ever elusive. Let's not publish articles that stroke our linear ego's, in a vain attempt to correlate the accountants sense of meaning to the real world. It's very much like a pile of pig feces accidentally falling into a nearly-recognizable splat. It's so far off from art that it isn't related.
In conclusion to my thoughts about IQ, I would express this: Scientists (funded by some CEO or Uni dept.) is trying to to reduce the time it takes to hire someone, and save thousands of dollars by producing a hire-ability metric. Anyone that takes that metric seriously is misinformed. It barely serves the purposes of the commissioning entity, and certainly doesn't server your own.
You want to know how smart your are? I suppose happiness is a much better indicator is IQ than an IQ test. Happy people have figured things out, hacked their surroundings to work for them and not against them. A happy person's intelligence is not measurable by any univeristy or CEO. In other words, no important figure can say why this or that person has the right ingredients for happiness. You can almost say that a CEO, or Professor, or high level Official, or anyone that is striving for more, isn't happy. They might spend their time examining the people that are happy, or that can work well under themselves, but that doesn't place them at the pinnacle of happiness. Because they say "x is the norm" doesn't mean... anything.
I still haven't concluded my thoughts on IQ. I think people that take that measurements seriously are unhappy people. Don't be one of them and your life will be better. I believe that's a specific as any social science can get. Broad strokes, based off intuition.
