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this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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IQ tests are not an objective measurement of intelligence! It kinda measures pattern recognition and some other skill! Its a scam to sell preparatory classes for itself!
40-50-ish years ago they quite popular! You were required to take one for uni admissions, for appliying to work… Well before we found out its bs!
We had to take a mandatory IQ test at the beginning of military service, my score was in the highest percentile and because of this I ended up in officer training. It wasn't the Mensa type test, they measured our language, math and pattern recognition skills with a vast battery of questions with a time limit.
Many friends of mine got average IQ scores in the army test but they are the ones who are really smart and extremely succesful.
In university I got a chance to take the Mensa type test and got ~140 points. I just laughed it off since at the same time I was struggling to pass my courses, while my friends who got average scores passed them with ease.
I do not consider myself really "smart" in any way, I just have a very good memory and I'm pretty adept at solving problems. Otherwise I'm just about as average a guy can be.
Uh-huh and everyone stood up to clap buddy?
You know, its a thing to jerk off to yer fantasies but your fantasy is a high IQ score? Really? Was Ariana Grande not in danger in your dreams or something?
No.
The whole point - which you seem to have missed - was that getting a "good" score in some test can mean very little or nothing in real life.
It just means that you're good at that sort of mental exercise.
No that meant that you could afford a 2-3-4 week long preparatory course!or were pursuing one of a few very specific fields of mathematics! And you putting good in quotation marks strongly insinuates that you have no idea what a 140 on an IQ test means, which makes it absolutely impossible for you to have received it since it would have been explained to you! And ppl do tend to remember the equivalent of winning the olimpics, you know?
But I am sure that you received military training 40-50 years ago! Say, where and when did you receive it under whose preliminary command?
I've never taken any preparatory courses for anything and I'm not really good with mathematics, so no and no again.
And why I put the quotation marks around good is a reflection of my native language, we do that when one wishes to express their personal disbelief or doubt. I am well aware that the ~140 score is considered a good one by the designers of the test.
I served in the late 90's and there have been several refresher courses but I'm not at the liberty to discuss any specifics of service matters publicly. If you have done military service you know this.
IQ tests went out of fashion mid 80-ties and they were only ever required in the very very top universities! There is no military academy in the world where you would have been asked for one!
140 is not a good a score! 140 is fucking legendary!!! Which would have been again explained to you if you ever achieved that, which again you would remember since its the equivalent of winning an olympic! But you don’t have a singular fucking clue what a 140 means on an IQ test… How very curious…
Ones military service starts at the end of their training, then you will be required to put your oaths down! Your bulshitting couldn’t even be chalked up as a semblance of protecting your anonymity! Graduation lists of military establishments are not public and even if they were there are 70-200-ish cadets in every year!
And soldiers can and do talk constantly about their service (ps thats how you can spot valor stealers on the internet, ppl like you :))! They are not allowed to talk of restricted info and missions! If you were a career secret sevice agent, you would not talk about being a soldier on the internet!
Another thing that makes absolutely no sense are the refresher courses and is a quite stupid attempt of weaseling out of the question! Most manuals were written in the 60-ties and have yet to be updated! And if you received new equipment you would not be sent back to uni! You would be taken to a field to practice with it!
Now tell me! Does your minsicular penis feel larger for lying and pretending to be a big man on the internet?
Be civil, please. And ditch the body-shaming.
Omgomgomgomg might have hurt the fucks feeling that steals honor
You are quick to leap to wild conclusions.
The army test is taken by every conscript at the beginning of the mandatory military service. It is an aptitude/IQ test which had a lot of similiarities with the Mensa type test I took later. You need a high enough score to get into NCO or officer training. The ones who graduate from the officer training may apply to the military academy after their mandatory service is over.
And like I clearly wrote in my original comment, the test I took later was a Mensa type test, using similar questions. It was a part of cognitive science or psychology department's student thesis, not a Mensa test. I majored in educational psychology, so I do have some understanding of what IQ tests are. I got a high score in one and it resulted in absolutely nothing in my life.
I have not claimed to be a career officer. I am a reserve officer, I did not wish to apply to the military academy, therefore the refresher courses. And even if my soldier's oath would not prevent me from discussing service matters with aggressive strangers on the Internet, my common sense would.
You are indeed a peculiar one. On my first comment I tried to validate the very point you made of IQ tests being poor indicators of true intelligence by sharing a personal experience (even though I know the fallacy of empiric experiences) on the matter. Yet you vehemently attacked my statement and accuse me of lying.
Lastly, your opinion of me is irrelevant, only the truth is relevant. One would gain nothing from lying to strangers. Perhaps practising some restraint on your part would result in more fruitful and pleasant dialogue in the future?
You just can’t stop lying, can you?
An ASVAB is not an IQ test, which you would know if you took one; which you would especially know if you just happened to specialize an unnamed (very very convincing) next to IQ tests!
So you didn’t take it get into uni, huh?
If you were ever a soldier, or even if you ever a conscript you would not refer to yourself as an officer! Your contract would state that you may refer to yourself as one without rank, as you are part of the fucking reserve!
Aaand you found the edit button! You know your edit history is publicly available?
But you still refused to answer me! Does your miniscular penis for lying on the internet!
You're getting quite incoherent.
I have edited nothing, so it matters not if the edit history is publicly available or not. If this is your attempt to discredit me, it's pretty pathetic. You just didn't bother to read what I had written, right?
Our universities do not use IQ tests to select students nor have I claimed that they did. This is your own mental fabrication.
Depending of the situation, in my country we DO refer to ourselves as "officers" or "reserve officers". Spesific rank is used in the garrisons and drills or when an individual is interviewed by the media. In the refresher drills the reserve officer ranks are equal to career officer ranks.
I understand that this all may be new and confusing information to you, but some things can be done very differently in different countries.
I do am getting tired of you
You have edited your first comment 3 different times as you have edited almost all your other comments! Do you think ppl are not going to look it up if that nono you didn’t?
You did and I hope everyone looks up your edit history
I am suuure they do, pray tell what fabled country that might be?
You referred to ‘my country’ how many times now? Can you maybe, just maybe your the name of your country as a synonym for once? You can change it postumus if you walk yourself into another corner!
No edits have been made and you know it.
Just admit you made a mistake and we'll laugh this off.
Aaaand you stop adressing it! And since I do lots of things I might not even notice it! With how many things did you get away like this?
What is your country?
Read it again. This post is not a flex.
He edited his comment, look up his edit history
Yes! If you know how to look up edit history, please do so! There has been no editing on my part.
Pffffffffffffffff 😂
You know its so sad that this might even work out for you, after all Trump supporters too refused to read the jan files
But you have yet to answer my one question! Does your miniscular penis feel larger for lying on the internet?
Are you familiar with the concept of "projection" in psychology?
I have never claimed a 140 IQ, nor have I unjustly claimed to of a profession I am not! I am not the one trying to compensate for something here?
But can you answer that one question for me? Pretty please?
I have not claimed any profession.
In my original comment I did state that I got into officer training, perhaps you assumed that as a career officer? I admit that the conscript army system is so profoundly different that I could have been more precise.
I assumed that the later mention of university studies would have made it clear that I was not a career soldier.
It is also true that I cannot verify my claim about the IQ test. Like I said earlier, it was a part of another student's thesis. We got to hear the results after the test, then the gathered data was processed anonymously. If I recall correctly, the study was more about the qualities of the test itself, the qualities of the participants were not important. I think everyone got a free movie ticket for taking the test and I spent mine on "Kill Bill" 1 or 2.
But tell me, why would I want to lie about this? To what gain?
Still no country huh? You fear any and all verifiability… I wonder and wonder and wonder why
Its rllly more that you can’t since it did not happen! I could ask about the parameters of your non-existentent experiment, question its purpose, which you have not stated or its validity, as you said they were made by one of your fellow university students assuming that too wasn’t a lie, which it likely is considering your knowledge of IQ tests… But whats the point? You will posthumously edit yourself out of your contradictions or simply ignore them… I will probably miss the time I wasted on you
You should ask yourself! Why are you lying on the internet? You know, you can imagine ‘what if’-s without commenting them?
It's a relative measure of performance for narrow and specific set of tasks. It's not BS, that's like saying the 100m dash is BS. It's just that people have wildly overstated the general implications of the measure.
The people who have wildly overstated the implications of IQ are the ones who developed and use it. Your analogy would be more correct if the 100m dash was used to measure the freshness of your breath.
That's the central problem with IQ. Intelligence as a thing that can be measured is much closer to "freshness of breath" than it is to 100 meters. It's subjective and colloquial. You admit as much yourself that IQ tests measure something, but not intelligence.
I think there is and always has been massive contention in even defining intelligence. Is it the same as wisdom? What about being smart? Are these all the same thing? How does experience inform success in general problem solving? What even IS a "general" problem?
I think it's still a valuable tool to assess peoples ability to recognize and apply transformations, implications, boolean operators, and arethmetic sequences.
But the idea that it provides some insight into the innate nature of a mind is preposterous. You CAN study for an IQ test: exactly the 4 things I mentioned are things you can study, and once you've mastered you'll be sitting on a 160+ result.
So, the base underlying assumption that these things are not learnable. That is wrong.
But, the idea that mastery of implication, transformation, boolean operators and arethmetic sequences don't provide a foundational system for certain tasks is also maybe not quite right either...
A 100m dash time probably loosely correlates to some abstract measure of "athleticism", which may correlate to success likelihood for certain tasks. IQ correlates to some abstract measure of pattern recognition, which may correlate to success in certain tasks.
To your point that the designers intended it to be a measure of the abstract notion of innate intellectual capacity, yeah maybe that was the attempt. Maybe that's how they pitched it. It isn't. Tough shit.
But that doesn't suddenly imply it's nothing.
Like most things (a degree, years of experience, SAT score, story points, Myers-Briggs etc etc) capitalism has completely fucked them. Business is so fucking lazy they just want to boil down assesment for suitability to enumerable values on a form. Just because metrics are inappropriately used and abused by capitalism doesn't mean they're not measuring something.
So, this was a super lengthy reiteration that IQ tests measure something, but it isn't "innate general intelligence". But to say it's as irrelevant as "freshness of breath" is maybe hyperbolic.
Myers-Briggs manages to go way beyond in the levels of bullshit compared to even these other items.
My favorite story about corporations using these kinds of tests is when some engineer I knew was interviewing at a few different major engineering firms. One of their HR people told him after one of of several interviews that the next time would also involve a personality test! He knew he had at least 2 other roles in the bag, he was just finishing up this company. He asked her - "are they also going to read my tea leaves?" - and declined to proceed further with that company. Because the notion that HR were gatekeeping for...checks notes....engineering positions at an engineering firm by using such debunked horseshit was something that instilled zero confidence in how the rest of the place might be getting run, and I absolutely don't blame him. I never had that as part of anyone's hiring "process" - it was always something introduced later as part of some "team-building exercise".
My favorite direct experience was when another co-worker who was awake and fine with asking pointed questions asked one of the people administering some "personality test" if she knew if they had done any tests where they gave the "results" to the wrong person, and see how they reacted (he was basically asking if they tested for the Barnum effect). Answer: no. (Of course)
Anyway, I suggest reading The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves
Hard to argue that careful statement!
Hey thought of how it could be used for good, to support:
I imagine a school administrator examining the tails of their school‘s distribution and using the knowledge to personalize education. Say, a bright kid isn’t being challenged and achieves straight Cs. (Privacy and fairness implications, I know)
Yeah I think using a renamed version of the test could be a good way to try and find gaps between aspiration and current state of foundational skills, for certain aspirations.
If a kid dreams of being a lawyer, but their scores are on the tail end, that's a perfect opportunity to revisit the foundations of formal logic. Just because some kids have managed to grok those foundational concepts independent of school doesn't mean others are incapable. Because let's face it, secondary school isn't teaching formal logic.
That being said, real tailored mechanisms would be superior to finding gaps. But, in the absence of such mechanisms, an IQ test could be an accessible stand-in.
The 100m dash measures exactly what it says; the ability to dash 100m. Intelligence Quotient does not measure what it says. That's the issue. It's isn't what it claims to be, so is BS.
That’s a useful comparison. I like it. There are plenty of popular anecdotes of the world’s best athlete in a particular sport attempting another and being terribly mediocre, so it probably resonates with the average person better than my usual many-types-of-intelligence argument.
If the 100 meter dash was called tetranlon it would be bs! If the intelligence test were called pattern recognition test then it wouldn’t be bs!
I agree. Its also super biased. I wouldn't be surprised if it correlated with financial success in certain demographics in certain locations/communities, but like you say, it's not an objective measure of intelligence.
Full-scale cognitive batteries (sophisticated IQ tests) are great... for diagnostics. If someone has difficulties identifying the domains where the need extra help, accommodations. I order them all the time and they guide me on how to manage patients. The most telling thing about IQs is that I've never seen it in on a resume, not even mensa memberships.
But surely you are aware that companies are trying to sell it off as objectively measurement of int, successfully so since most of the population regards them so? This lil part is my issue!
of course. they do it because people are insecure.
Being interested in an objective measurement of your intellect? Silliest fucking thing I have ever heard!
The belief that an commercial IQ test is an "objective measure of your intellect" is a pretty good subjective measure of your intellect.
I am sorry, it is silly to think that in intelligence test measures intelligence
people fall for unvalidated tests, often even totally fake ones that offer "training" to increase your "IQ". Generally IQ tests are a very good measure of how well people take standardized tests. The problem is, scoring high on those tests might correlate with one's capabilities, but it doesn't mean real-world competence. In medicine for example, it's not the people with the highest scores tend to be the best doctors, but the ones who follow up on issues, and that habit compounds. etc.
I don’t even know what you are talking about, I honestly don’t even know what you are talking about…
So, you know how there’s a button on the top-left of your keyboard for ending sentences? Believe it or not, there’s also one on the bottom right as well! It looks like this: .
Perchance you should demonstrate it in your own sentences?
If you meant the dot(?) as a demonstrative then you yourself have not ended your sentence! If you meant the empty before the dot(?) as the demonstrative then you make no sense!