Saturday, October 13, 2012

My problem with IQ tests

Isegoria points us to what I think is precisely the problem.  It's not that the tests don't identify smart people (they do).  It's that they fail to identify other smart people.

Isaac Asimov (a smart guy) once did an article about how IQ tests have been historically stacked to exclude "undesirables".  I can't find it, but the gist was that much of the "what you're expected to know to be considered smart" is culturally selected.  Isegoria's find demonstrates that in spades.

And really it all boils down to smart is as smart does.  The world is filled with useless "smart" people and useful "dumb" people.  This is why I find the whole IQ game more than a bit tiresome.  And I say that as someone who would probably score decently well on their dumb little tests.

4 comments:

John said...

My late father was a Dr. of Psychology. He told me about the variability and bias problems with IQ tests when I was a teen-ager (in the 1960's). This is one of those things people keep having to rediscover. As P.J. O'Rourke said, ignorance is a renewable resource. There's a new crop every year.

David said...

Back in the late 70s I was applying for a position right out of college. Part of the application process included a four page 80 question IQ test that they called a "personality/compatability evaluator". Most of the questions dealt with logic, problem solving, pattern and spacial recognition.

I was taking the test, late at night and I was very tired. About half way through I decided I really didn't want to work for this company anyway and I stopped really thinking about my answers to the questions. Then at the end of the test where there were several short answer questions, my answers definite crossed a line into smartassery.

Later the next afternoon I was looking around for that test and job application so I could toss them out, when my roommate came home and informed me that he had mailed them for me that morning. He knew I had been up very late working on them and then had an early shift at work. He was afraid that I would miss the 24 hour deadline that was noted so clearly at the top of the application.

Two weeks later they offered me a job. The manager I was speaking to told me that my test scores showed that I had the perfect blend of high intellect and humor to work for their company.

He was a little put off when I asked him "You like your engineers to be apathetic smartasses?" But he didn't recind the offer. Since I had another offer that I really liked in my pocket, I turned them down.

Angus McThag said...

A classic example of how wrong IQ tests can be are some chapters of Mensa.

Imagine a room full of tiresome boors who really should have that score tattooed on their foreheads!

A friend exhorted me to take the test and join up. I passed the test and was offered membership, but I declined. Not my kind of crowd.

Despite passing that test I've often felt I was not all that smart. That I was fooling everyone around me who'd gotten the idea I am smarter than average.

That's a feeling I get amongst my friends, a feeling absent from among my fellow students when I was getting my business admin degree. I grokked "opportunity cost" three seconds after it was explained in class. The teacher had allocated an entire week to the concept and most of the class needed it. Wow.

Jon said...

Asimov: "What is intelligence, anyway? When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me. (It didn't mean anything. The next day I was still a buck private with KP - kitchen police - as my highest duty.)

All my life I've been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I'm highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think so too. Actually, though, don't such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests - people with intellectual bents similar to mine?

For instance, I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.

Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I'd prove myself a moron, and I'd be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.

Consider my auto-repair man, again. He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me. One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: "Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand. The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?"

Indulgently, I lifted by right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers. Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, "Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them." Then he said smugly, "I've been trying that on all my customers today." "Did you catch many?" I asked. "Quite a few," he said, "but I knew for sure I'd catch you." "Why is that?" I asked. "Because you're so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn't be very smart."

And I have an uneasy feeling he had something there."