BTW - I'm pretty sure Sammy has a 130 IQ.

IQs are a bad judge of intelligence IMO. I took two real ones, one in 5th grade one in 7th grade. At the time, they were really testing pattern recognition and spacial relationships. So if you: 1) Played Video games, 2) Dad is a mathematician and you actually talk about number theory as a kid with him, you will get a higher than you deserved IQ. Same thing with SATs, you can improve you score signficantly on them by not studying the material, but actually learning how the tests are constructed and becoming a better test taker.

I believe they have recently change both IQ and SATs.

Intelligence is really just the mass of people confirming your own opinion on different subjects. What they confirm may not be true and will change with time.

The funny thing is that I knew this already. My Dad is an educational psychologist and has told me about the flaws of IQ tests many times.

I also overweight a person's intelligence by the amount of random facts they know, because I have a very good memory and can spout off factoids like crazy. In my world, Cliff Claven is a genius.

This subject is actually interesting, but I really don't have any strong opinions. On one hand, I tend to think the "IQs are bad judges of intelligence," line started as a sour grapes line and caught on because it told stupid people they weren't stupid, and, therefore, would be widely popular. On the other hand, there definitely is more to intelligence than some of the silly stuff on IQ tests, such as the spatial relationship stuff.

So, I dunno.

What I do know is that I taught the Kaplan LSAT preparation course, and it was all about test taking skills rather than actually getting better at logical reasoning or analytical reasoning or whatever. And I know from my experience and from the experience of my students that it definitely worked to raise scores. So there is some sort of flaw in the LSAT when you can raise people's scores 12%ile points just by teaching them test-taking tips.

(I mention the LSAT in a SAT discussion because I assume Kaplan-type study can game the SAT as well).

I personally think that an IQ test is a measure of just one piece of intelligence. but because the socially-accepted idea of intelligence is fairly open to interpretation, it is kind of useless.

And Mpethy is right...test taking tips will help, as will working with more logical reasoning to increase your score. For instance, I took an IQ test in 8th grade and got something like a 105 or so...certainly nothing special. I took another one my sophomore year of college (about 1.5yrs into playing poker) and had raised my score up to 127. I don't personally think my ability to rationalize spatial logic is the entirety of my "intelligence"...but do think it is something.

So I am torn, and thus don't care much about IQ tests =)

I think playing poker is an excellent way to help prevent alzheimer's disease.

While IQ tests are flawed they measure something meaningful (certain aspects of intelligence) and I doubt that you can improve your IQ significantly through training. Here, a significant improvement would be more than one standard deviation, which in most tests is equivalent to 15 points.

At least one of the tests I've taken included spatial relationships.

Naturally people who perform worse will be more likely to point out the flaws in the test.

I think IQ is a bad judge of intelligence, and I do really really good on IQ tests.

I am v.good at test of any kind.

The term I use in my head is "applied intelligence"... there are plenty of smart people of all sorts all over the place. The thing that makes some people stand out is the ability to apply those smarts in real situations.

Wow, that was interesting. I'm a software engineer and I've worked at startups where we were expected to put in 80 hours a week. It wasn't that there we time clocks, just that the volume of work you were expected to complete generally took that long. Of course dinner was catered 5 nights a week and saturday lunch pizza was provided.

I hate that this is the culture of the skilled American worker.... unless of course they gave you very generous salary, plus healthy stock options/grants.

there is a difference between expected and required.

The rulings state that, yeah times you have to work more than 40 hours a week, but if it is a regular occurrence and there is repercussions from not working significant (which is not defined, and is what the lawyers will argue), then on should be compensated for the "required" extra hours.

I always wished my salary were based on how well i took tests. On one hand i realize that IQ/tests only measure so much of your intelligence...but i think the correlation between how well someone did on their ACT/SAT and how intelligent i think they are is pretty strong.

Are you talking about me, sonny?

BalugaWhale. Is. Awesome.

That is all...

~gtp

Is there any utility to those tests?

I find whenever I am in discussions about how you did on those tests........and all that that conversation entails as incredibly uncomfortable and borderline rude.

I often think - is your actual question......"I am smarter than you, right?"
Or a statement - "I am smarter than you - hey look at me. Yes, you should be envious."

Clearly not, but that isn't the point. They are designed for an era where being able to solve certain types of problems was considered of primary value in life. In general, if the mind is open, being quicker to solve problems would result in more wisdom for given amount of time alive, which is far more important. However, wisdom is no longer considered valuable, only the ability to rouse emotions and build strawmen is considered of any importance. People today would rather succeed at that then to debate whether what they "know" is really true. Of course, that's always been true.

lol.

I don't know that anyone has ever asked me my IQ in anything like casual conversation. I can hardly imagine it happening, tbh. My completely unsolicited advice to you would be that if someone asks you your IQ, dog, that your response ought to be "lets just say two standard deviations above yours and leave it at that."

The remainder of the conversation will be:

Rude person: "what?"

Dog: "see?"

yes I had both a generous salary and good stock options. This was a pre-IPO startup. We actually failed as a business (built a working product but couldn't get the business side going in 2002 but the product worked). If the company has been founded 5 years earlier then we could have sold the company during the height of the dot.com bubble and I would have made several 100k or perhaps millions. A coworker of mine at this startup had better timing than me and had made millions at his previous startup.

In my experience this level of effort is not expected at large companies where your individual contribution makes much less difference. There are places rumored to be sweatshops of course. One way a sweatshop evolves is a successful startup expects startup level effort from new employees even though the company no longer offers startup level rewards.

My first year in graduate school, on a psuedo-blind date I had an undergrad ask me what my GPA was as an undergrad, and upon learning that hers was higher declared she was smarter than me. I decided it would be rude to tell her
A) GPA's more of an indication of how good you are at taking classes, tests, and writing papers
B) My undergrad was a lot more difficult than hers.

I'm still utterly baffled at why she would say such a thing in the first place.

I'm guessing there was no second date?

Finally moving out of my parents house within a week, hello north side of Chicago

and (C) how much you actually care about grades.

In college I did my homework religiously but I didn't always turn it in because sometimes it was a hassle to turn it in (e.g. going to a stupid section when I already knew the material cold) and I didn't really care about grades as long as I got a passing grade.

I had some personal goals like trying to ace math and CS exams (I only succeeded at this a few times) but that was about the mental challenge, not the grade.

White dudes with 70s 'fros playing funk, LOL.

Yeah, if they are letting you in on some huge upside, then by all means, they can ask a lot. I find a lot of companies want a lot, with little to no sharing of the upside.

I actually have a bunch of friends who are in much easier University programs than I and they all like to lol about they have averages way higher than my 65%, yet they're all in the easiest programs I've heard of. One's in geography, the other is in history, and another one is an electronics engineer in college (In Canada there is a MASSIVE difference between college/university). Anyway, the other day my engineer friend texts me while I'm in the middle of teaching myself double/triple integrals for multi-variable calc and asks if I can help him with calculus homework, I say sure, so he emails it to me.

Question 1: if y=4x+2 and y=3x-4, find the point of intersection.
Question 2: Find the slope of the line that passes through the origin and (-3,25)
Question 3: graph y=3(x^2)+5

Like you, I felt too bad to say anything, so I just kept quiet, but it really gets under my skin whenever they bring it up.


edit
BTW, how did you respond to that? If someone who I didn't know was kidding said that to me I would be caught off-guard and it would be pretty clear that I think they are arrogant.

This thought is roughly equivalent to what they said.

No offense.