What? In your estimation the Silicon Valley tech companies are populated with folks of 70 IQ? Huh?
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Population of Male/Female by IQ
- Thread starter George S
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What? In your estimation the Silicon Valley tech companies are populated with folks of 70 IQ? Huh?
Shadowy Man
Contributor
No, from what he said you can say that Silicon Valley tech companies are populated with folks of 70 or higher IQ. That is very likely to be true.
Since "intelligence" does not have an easy to pin down definition, and it is unlikely that whatever "intelligence" is it can be quantified by a single number, it's not clear to me what IQ is really measuring in a person.
Whatever it is measuring, the correlation between it and intelligence is indisputably strong. I really cannot imagine that there are any computer programmers working for the Silicon Valley techs with an IQ less than 100. I understand that contemporary politics prefers to downplay the notion that intelligence is not equally distributed because, well, that makes some uncomfortable. But if IQ is to be cast aside as insignificant, those casting it aside ought to be able to explain why the correlation is so consistent. Indeed, IQ is one of the most reliably replicable findings in psychology.
Shadowy Man
Contributor
What is "intelligence" and if you are correlating it with IQ how are you measuring it?
Whenever I look into psychological definitions of 'intelligence' I find that there are multiple kinds of intelligence, therefore it's not something that is easily measured by a single value. Furthermore, it's not clear that someone who excels in one kind will necessarily excel in another. And if IQ correlates with intelligence, is it correlated with all kinds of intelligence or only certain kinds?
Why are scores above 70 equivalent? Why, for example, is a score of 80 equivalent to a score of 130?
Well, there probably are different areas of intelligence. The way it seems to me is that IQ is measuring the brain's ability to identify patterns and use information. We are not all equal in that regard. The brain is, after all, just a muscle. And my understanding is that in current intelligence research, intelligence can be viewed as fluid, i.e., innate, and crystallized, i.e., acquired.
DrZoidberg
Contributor
Because it's the same statistical population (according to the designer of the test, Binet). And all research on IQ has shown that Binet is correct. People with 80 IQ are sometimes better at problem solving than people with 130.
There's also the little issue of science still arguing about how to define intelligence. It is highly culturally dependent. 2000 years ago "intelligence" was equivalent with "memory". Today we think memory is just a tiny aspect of overall intelligence. Today we see "creativity" as a major aspect of intelligence. And boy is that a bitch to measure.
I think the basic problem is that the human brain is a Swiss army knife. As anybody who have worked with computers can attest to, the human brain mostly sucks, and is a half-arsed compromise, gets stuff wrong distressingly often, but it can solve pretty much any problem we throw at it, given enough time. Especially groups of humans. And I think that's the thing. We're social beings. Our brains haven't evolved for singular excellence. We've evolved to be part of a collective, and we think better in groups. But our personal input will be small as well as one-sided. Humans specialise. Something an IQ test can never catch. So I think the basic idea of measuring intelligence on single humans is a fundamentally flawed concept.
I don't know what you mean by that. (I know what populations are in statistics--I just don't know what you mean in this instance.)
So an IQ test result should only be interpreted as 'retardation' or 'not retardation'?
DrZoidberg
Contributor
In statistics, a population, is your sample. Every dot on the chart together is your population. When doing statistical analysis you group the dots in meaningful ways to learn stuff. "Meaningful" is the critical word here. You can do statistics on anything without proving much at all. Pick up any random nationalist/racist publication and see how statistics can be used to prove, litteraly, anything. Context matters.
Yes, but in children. Technically retarded children who grow up might very well score above 70, without really proving anything. They're not necessarily smarter as adults. But they are often better at scoring higher on IQ tests.
The test was designed to figure out which children should be given extra tutoring support in school. Binet quickly learned that above 70 IQ the students didn't necessarily imporove when given extra tutoring. But under 70 IQ, every time.
It was the Nazis (yes, it was) who came later (after Binet had died) and tried to pretend like the IQ test measured real intelligence in adults. Any visitor to Mensa can attest to the tests failure to do so. That is one boring crowd. Boring = stupid IMHO.
I think I understand where you're coming from: IQ scores above 70 may measure something, but it isn't equivalent to intelligence, for if it was then Binet would have found a gradually decreasing amount of improvement as IQ increases.
Don2 (Don1 Revised)
Contributor
Haven't you ever worked in a tech field and had a dumbass co-worker?
Shadowy Man
Contributor
High IQ doesn't guarantee not a dumbass. IQ only measures one's ability to take IQ tests. IQ tests only test a subset of all kinds of intelligence. The Wikipedia article on 'intelligence' states that one kind is 'emotional intelligence'. I can tell you that after spending a couple of decades around scientists with PhDs, there are many who would get low IQ scores on an IQ test written to test emotional intelligence. Other areas of intelligence where some of these people would score low would be: self-awareness, planning and creativity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence
Don2 (Don1 Revised)
Contributor
You're right. I should have used a different word, like "not-so-competent."
ronburgundy
Contributor
High IQ doesn't guarantee not a dumbass. IQ only measures one's ability to take IQ tests. IQ tests only test a subset of all kinds of intelligence. The Wikipedia article on 'intelligence' states that one kind is 'emotional intelligence'. I can tell you that after spending a couple of decades around scientists with PhDs, there are many who would get low IQ scores on an IQ test written to test emotional intelligence. Other areas of intelligence where some of these people would score low would be: self-awareness, planning and creativity.
While one can be a "dumbass" with a high IQ, that is not because there are "all kinds of intelligence", but because there are all kinds of non-intelligence factors that impact cognition and behavior. There is no such thing as "emotional intelligence". As the Wiki on it will tell you, the criticisms and evidence against such a construct are vast. Basically, the issue comes down to the fact that both the theoretical concept of "emotional intelligence" and the ways it is measured make it clear that it is not a form of "intelligence" in any meaningful sense of that term, but rather a combination of non-intelligence factors which include personality traits, baseline emotional disposition differences, whether one was taught the "proper" norms of social interaction, and whether one has the motive to be a conformist to those norms either in actual action or just in what one says is the "right thing to do" in the hypothetical situations on the assessments. Measures of "emotional intelligence" correlate strongly (.50 to .70 range) with being lower in neuroticism and higher in extroversion, which do not refer to any kind of intellectual skills or abilities, but rather to one's own chronic mood and emotional state and one's feelings towards other people and personal preferences about being in social situtaitons.
They are no more a "kind of intelligence" than a preference for chocolate over vanilla is a kind of flavor "intelligence".
IOW, both conceptually and in terms of empirical measurement, "Emotional Intelligence" is less about the abilities people have in being able to accurately process emotional and social information and more about people's own emotional states that color their social judgments and their preferences for how they interact with people.
Similar issues surround every other "kind of intelligence" besides the general fluid intelligence captured by g and tests like the Raven's.
Creativity is not a type of intelligence. In fact, it doesn't have any particular definition in meaningful scientific terms. Producing something that other's find "creative" appears to have more to do with personality traits and desire to violate convention versus "color within the lines", than reflecting any ability to produce such products if one were motivated to do so.
When "creativity" is formally studied in cognitive science, it is not treated as a particular thing but rather as a vague collections of largely unrelated variables. Research shows that people the choose more "creative" fields (such as "arts" majors vs. natural science majors) are not more capable of producing creative products when the situation requires it, such as when given a tasks requiring divergent thinking and novel ideas and solutions). Rather those in "creative" fields just think they are more "creative types" and to choose to engage in personal activities typically thought of as "creative" (design their own website, play music, paint, write stories, etc..). Also, while IQ was not related to either choice to engage in creative acts or performance on a test of creativity, what was related were (again) classic measures of personality dispositions like those related to "emotional intelligence".
IOW the variance in creative performance lies in preferences, emotional dispositions, motivations and choices of what one likes and wants to do, and not in differences in any intellectual capacities that determine how creative one can be when one tries to be.
In sum, like virtually all "kinds of intelligence" that are not highly correlated with g, neither creativity nor "emotional intelligence" are actually anything to which the word "intelligence" meaningfully applies, because they do not reflect people's capability to perform various intellectual tasks when they required/asked of them. Instead they reflects a combination of preferences, goals, emotional states, personality traits, and specific knowledge acquired via particular experiences. They are still important to what people do, but unfortunately too many ideologues want to slap the label "intelligence" onto any psychological variable that they think people should consider important.
untermensche
Contributor
Of course there is.
The ability to understand the emotional state of another.
Something some people are better at than others.