Actually IQ test are not about factual knowledge but problem solving skill and pattern recognition. The real problem.lies in that not all intellect involves these basic skills and they don't account for people with disorders having nothing to do with intellect like color vision or dyslexia.

That is an interesting topic. There is indeed different kind of intelligence, like the IQ or the emotional intelligence.

I work with kids that have intellectual disabilities and/or autism spectrum, so that includes high level autism or commonly known as the Asperger syndrome. To measure their abilities, intelligence, there are a lot of tests but to accurately give a general idea if one will do well in the society, his degree of independence, we use different kind of tests, such as the EQCA, which analyzes IQ but also your adaptation behaviors, as someone with a really high IQ doesn't mean that he will use it better than someone who has a much higher level of emotional intelligence, like the way to behave in public: what today in front of others, how to say it, how to react to others' thoughts, and so on...

So, yes, IQ is a very small piece of the puzzle that intelligence is.

You're always going to run into problems when trying to assign an empirical value to an intangible concept such as intelligence. Modern IQ tests (accounting for cultural bias and disorders as Draugnar mentioned above) is as close as we're likely to get.

A very small portion of intellect involves problem solving and pattern recognition. There's a lot more to it than that and that's what it doesn't catch. That's what the non-applicable is saying. Yeah, there are some things in there that are useful, but nothing that makes you realistically better than anyone else.

Also, is the (mental age/chronological age)*100 = IQ formula still used? I didn't think so but I'm not sure. Such a formula would be biased towards young people, obviously.

That would be a silly formula as someone who is 70 and retired is not likely to have learned Mich more related to those tests than they knew at half their age.

Marilyn vos savant has ( or had when she was still writing the ask Marilyn column years ago) the work record for highest IQ. She took the test when she was ten! She then made a career out of the fact that she was a smart ten year old. That's the equivalent of Arafat winning the peace prize (meta threading!). The iq test lost all credibility.

There are inherent limitations in measuring mental ability, but IQ tests do a pretty good job all things considered. People tend to get pretty consistent scores on any individual IQ test (aside from practice effects obviously), which indicates that the test is a reliable measure of the abilities that are relevant to that specific test. Of course if you take a different test, you'll get a different score. Which test is right? There's no objective standard for determining that, and so IQ tests can only give you a fairly rough measure of your "overall" mental ability. You could just average the two scores together, but that probably wouldn't be as useful as knowing which areas you're strong in and which areas you're weak in.

As for whether they measure anything useful, I can assure you that they do. A longitudinal study of gifted children showed that those scoring in the top quartile of the sample (all the children had scored in the top 1% of the population, so this would be the top quarter of a percent) were significantly more likely to go on to earn advanced degrees, have papers published in academic journals, etc, than the bottom quartile of gifted children. No IQ test can perfectly define the traits that allow you to excel in real-world intellectual endeavors, let alone measure them flawlessly, but they do a good enough job for correlations like this to emerge.

@ Draugnar

That's the original formula used by Binet.

Marilyn vos Savant was pretty smart, though.

I do think IQ tests are pretty low-grade in terms of saying anything useful, though.

The flaw in measuring something like intelligence is that you need to set out what is 'good' and what is 'bad'. For example if we say pattern recognition is 'good' then people who recognise patterns well are intelligent. But lets look at the the stock market. Pick a period at random, cut off what happened prior and what happened since and show this to a high IQ student. Is pattern recognition a 'good' skill now or a 'bad' skill now?

My wife and I are polar opposites in our interests. She likes the soaps Corry, Eastenders, Hollioaks etc - if it wasn't for Emmerdale she'd never get any fresh air. I, on the other hand just can't see the point. When she cooks our evening meal (I cook weekends, I tend to sit in the kitchen talking to her. A quiz show is on in the background. She always does better than I do. Yet, and this is no disrespect to my wife, if you asked 100 of our family and friends who is more intelligent I'm guessing I would win that one 100-0.

@GF - So? It is still a stupid formula for adults of a certain age. Cognitive pattern recognition is either there or not by a certain age and reflexes, both physical and mental, slow down as one gets older so penalizing someone for not being as fast and for having a mental age of 45 when they are 90 is beyond stupid. It throws the scale off for mature adults. You think Daimler perfected the car in 1891? Did the Wright Brothers fly afrom Kitty Hawk home to Dayton in a few hours? Jist because the designer designed it that way doesn't make it perfect.

Do remember that IQ is simply a statistical measure, a superficial 'scale' where 'achievement' is ranked. Intelligence is more about the broad range of cognitive and behavioural abilities than the mark achieved on a pattern recognition test.

However, do bear in mind that people in different IQ ranges respond differently to stimuli. We cannot simply rank people based on IQ, because intelligence is not a linear measure.

I *know* it's a stupid formula for adults. I was just openly asking if that particular IQ formula was still in use.

One issue that I have with IQ tests is the idea of multiple intelligences. Dr Garner wrote about this stating 7 different intelligences, only a fraction of these were logic and problem solving based. Other intelligences included bodily kinesthetics (dancers and athletes) and a broad range of others whose intellect makes them more keen to things like sports or the arts and the like tht rely I coordinated movements as opposed to pure rationale. IQ tests are great if you're looking for a specific type of person.

@ Tru Ninja

Are you a proponent of Gardner's Seven Intelligences, or do you favor a more generalized approach to intelligence?

intelligence = size of skull.

duh. we've sorted this out over a century ago don't know about science bro

Seem to remember the IQ test ceases to be meaningful/used after the age of 16.

Anyway, your IQ score only assesses how well you do on IQ tests.

@Thucy - Then Joseph Merrick must have been the most brilliant man ever. Him or Roy 'Rocky' Dennis. But of course I know you are just being funny and trolling. :-)

@gunfighter: I really liked what I read. I agree with most of it, although I'm unsure as to whether or not to call something an intelligence, unless you're entirely redefining the word itself.

I find IQ tests very interesting because they measure pretty much everything I'm terrible at. I am completely incapable of doing any form of even the most rudimentary mental math. This makes most of their pattern recognition problems a nightmare for me. I'm also a fairly poor speller, meaning anything involving letters is rather hard, too. Finally, when I solve problems, I do them slowly and deliberately as I am very prone to typographical mistake.

While all this made grade school rather unpleasant, it hasn't affected me much in the real world.

IQ tests were meant as a measure to judge mental deficiencies for better diagnoses. Anything over 120-130 is in a gray area, and difficult to rank.

@ Tru Ninja

I agree with that. Gardner's Seven Intelligences should not be referred to as "intelligences". Perhaps "Competencies" is a better word to use instead of "intelligences"

Just because an artist has high spatial "intelligence" doesn't mean he has the capacity to learn rapidly.

We should have a "Psychology Weekly" thread. After all, "Philosophy Weekly" was a thing for a while.

And just because someone can learn rapidly due to an eidetic memory doesn't mean they can apply what they learned for practical purposes or that they have any analytical skills.

@Gunfighter: "Psychology Weekly" is a good idea.
Now the "Philosophy Weekly" crew can start squabbling over the meaning of 'good' in this context.

Well, there's stuff you can measure. You can measure a person's ability to solve a mathematical equation or a chess problem. There's simply one solution to any chess problem given sufficient constraints and the same for math.
Despite being a capitalist, I think it's perfectly possible to give an intelligent speech praising communism and a stupid one that praises the market economy.
There's lots of things you can do to measure intelligence. And then the measures determine what intelligence is, and not vice versa.

@gunfighter: Yeah, that's pretty much my sentiment. Now if science decided to redefine the word "intelligence" to something dealing with the interactions with the brain and cognative thought, then his work has more bearing to it. After all, there's a lot of thought that an athlete uses before taking action. We take for example, a competent quarterback. He has to accurately do a pre-snap read of the defense, after the snap, continue to read coverage and look for the open receiver, look opponents crossing the line, know the location of the checkdown receiver, etc, all within split seconds.

Songwriters put together song stanzas with rhyme pattern and complex music composition, etc.

Each of these could be the measure of a different intelligence if we redefine the word. As it stands, though, it's a bit tight.

Why isn't that scale on 365.01... instead of 200, anyways?