
Further Evidence That IQ Does Not Measure Intelligence - ColinWright
http://io9.com/5959058/further-evidence-that-iq-does-not-measure-intelligence
======
yoran
In my own life, I see more and more "evidence" that IQ, or academic
achievement, is the wrong metric for intelligence. When I grew up, everyone
was telling me that intelligence is in direct relation with how you perform at
school. Someone who performs well at school is by definition intelligent,
someone who is not good at school is not intelligent. Simple.

This went on after high school. Here in Belgium, the better students go to
university while the less achieving students go to something directly
translated to English as "high school". A "high school" in Belgium is a more
applied type of study. For instance, you won't see any theoretical computer
science course (decidability, complexity theory) taught at a "high school".
Again, it was assumed that universities produce the intelligent people and
"high school" the less intelligent people.

During the past few months, being part of a startup, I've worked with several
people who in my eyes are intelligent. These guys can come up with creative
solutions to problems, well into the realm of out-of-the-box thinking.
However, they don't all come from universities. Some have a "high school"
degree, or no degree at all. It made me realise that academic achievement is
not a good measure for creativity. While for me, creativity is an important
factor in intelligence. Many fellow students in my university computer science
course were "intelligent" by academic achievement (after all they were able to
finish an engineering university degree) but I wouldn't call them intelligent,
just because they lacked this creativity. They were good when they were being
told what to do but had a hard time thinking out-of-the-box. And I think that
creativity is so important in the definition of intelligence.

I'm not saying that intelligence is all about creativity. Someone who can
think creatively and think analytically is more intelligent than someone who
is just good at thinking creatively. But I'm saying that academic achievement
(typically related to IQ) is not a good measure for intelligence because it
lacks that "creativity" factor. "Ken Robinson says school kills creativity" is
a great TED talk about this
([http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_crea...](http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html)).

~~~
ars
> IQ, or academic achievement

> When I grew up, everyone was telling me that intelligence is in direct
> relation with how you perform at school.

Your mistake is equating IQ with academic achievement. That's not what it is.
It helps. But it's neither necessary nor sufficient. Academic achievement is
something else.

------
ars
"You Are Probably Not Much Smarter or Dumber Than Anybody Else"

I've noticed that people seem to be completely unable to really understand
that some people are actually smarter than them. Most commonly they will
confuse aptitude for intelligence. i.e. they easily acknowledge that this
person just likes intellectual activity. But can't seem to grasp the
difference in intelligence.

The same [relative] lack of intelligence also robs people of the ability to
understand intelligence in others.

It's easy to see when someone is less intelligent - it's much harder to really
grasp that someone people are smarter. It's like trying to explain a red to a
colorblind person who can't see red. They kinda get that it's another color
like others they've seen before, but they just can't grasp that it really
exists.

You also (less commonly) get the reverse - someone really smart doesn't
understand why everyone can't do it.

An example: Srinivasa Ramanujan heard the number 1729 and instantly thought of
an interesting property for it. This ability to do that for a number just
doesn't exist in most people. It doesn't matter how hard they try or study -
they just can't do that.

~~~
einhverfr
There are two problems though with this view. As a disclaimer, there are
people who I consider much smarter than I am at certain things, and many
people regard me the same way. Some of that may be my attention deficit and
the effort I have had to put in to being successful despite it. I think the
problem though is different, however. I am going to say two things:

1\. Intelligence is not definable to the point where it can be tested, and

2\. Attitude > innate intelligence.

I expect both these will not be so welcome in the HN community as such, so I
am prepared for downvotes, but I also dont think these are wrong either.

On the first, the fact is that people process information differently.
Ramanujan processes a number a certain way. Someone else might associate it
with a year and immediately make historical connections. Someone else may
factor get fascinated and factor it. There are bunches of ways a piece of
information can be processed and the weighing of one as better than another is
ultimately a cultural judgement and ultimately what proves to be an
interesting property depends on what we find fascinating (which brings me to
my second point).

On the second, I have found all my life that the smartest people I have known
have always been the most humble, and to regard everyone else as being worthy
of learning from.

I have consequently come to regard intelligence as a two-fold habit. The first
part is the habit of finding everything interesting in life, what I call an
unwillingness to be bored (something that really comes through in Feynman's
memoires). The second is regarding everyone as someone to learn from
(Heisenberg btw comes across this way very much in "Physics and Philosophy").
If you go around learning from everyone, and refuse to be bored, you will
quite quickly become smarter than everyone else if they refuse to do the same.

~~~
regal
Wikipedia cites numerous studies on heritability, showing that IQ starts off
largely environmental (0.2 heritability at birth) but ends up eventually
moving to what its been genetically predetermined to be (0.8 heritability in
adulthood).[1] IQ seems to accurately measure abstract reasoning abilities,
pattern recognition abilities, and memory retention. That's what most people
think of when they say intelligence (though there are always efforts to
"redefine" intelligence to make it a more politically correct / egalitarian
term - at which point, you're not really talking about "intelligence" but
rather "semantics" and how you want to define a word in the English lexicon).

The IQ "debate" reminds me very much of the race debate, that race "doesn't
exist" and is purely a social construct with no genetic basis. I keep waiting
for someone to take a black or Asian baby and place it with white parents for
it to grow up and have white skin and a pointy nose and blond hair. So far I
haven't seen it.

We have no trouble understanding that the differences between, say, a sheep
and a cow are due to genetics; why is it so hard for us to wrap our minds
around the fact that most of the differences between one another come down to
genes, too?

Methinks it comes down to the old philosophical debate of free will vs.
predetermination, and the innate fear many people have of the idea that you
can do anything or be anything if you only work at it hard enough.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Heritabi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Heritability)

~~~
einhverfr
> Methinks it comes down to the old philosophical debate of free will vs.
> predetermination, and the innate fear many people have of the idea that you
> can do anything or be anything if you only work at it hard enough.

For the record, I don't think it works that way either. I am largely a fan of
the idea that F. M. Cornford reconstructed from Greek myth ("From Religion to
Philosophy"), that we have free will within a granted partition of fate, or
lot of life, which is limited in various ways and repaid when we die. From
this view, fate is a domain we must strive to achieve, and thus not
inevitable.

> The IQ "debate" reminds me very much of the race debate, that race "doesn't
> exist" and is purely a social construct with no genetic basis. I keep
> waiting for someone to take a black or Asian baby and place it with white
> parents for it to grow up and have white skin and a pointy nose and blond
> hair. So far I haven't seen it.

Race is problematic in a number of levels. Yes it is a social construct with
no real genetic basis, at least as we have constructed it. This doesn't mean
however that you can't identify genetic commonalities among different groups.
We could, for example, just as easily say that the racial test is drinking
milk as an adult, and therefore Mongolians and Scandinavians are of the Milk-
Drinking Race, while Italians and Chinese are of the Cheese-Only race. And
before you say "but skin is more visible" it is worth noting that eating
together and food taboos are historically much closer to ethnicity than skin
color is.

The problem though I think isn't a question of mere egalitarianism. There are
people who are for all intents and purposes, greater visionaries, better at
recognizing patterns that will change the world, and so forth than others. IQ
tests, IMO will never be able to capture that for very fundamental
epistemological reasons.

This isn't to say that IQ isn't useful but as long as you are weighing
different skills against eachother, assuming the only pattern that works
(regarding pattern recognition) is the one the testers think is right, and so
forth, what you have is a number which is fundamentally culturally constructed
_and_ fails to capture real genius.

~~~
omonra
"Race is problematic in a number of levels. Yes it is a social construct with
no real genetic basis, at least as we have constructed it."

Sorry, what? Are you talking about how things are on Earth or some other
planet? Perhaps a cursory look at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_genetics> might help.

~~~
einhverfr
So if race is fully based on genetics would it be equally correct to say
"Barack Obama is white" as it is to say "Barack Obama is black?"

Why or why not? And which matches our social constructs?

~~~
ars
> So if race is fully based on genetics would it be equally correct to say
> "Barack Obama is white" as it is to say "Barack Obama is black?"

Yes, of course. He's a mixed race. I don't know why people call him the first
black president - he's exactly half and half, with equal claim to either race.

Unless you subscribe to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_drop_rule>

~~~
einhverfr
> Yes, of course. He's a mixed race. I don't know why people call him the
> first black president - he's exactly half and half, with equal claim to
> either race.

You have just shown that social construction of race is not the same as your
biological base. If most of the population agrees "he is black and not white"
and biology says otherwise, then the social construct is unmoored from
biology.

I don't think one has to go as far as a one drop rule, though that was a
construction that has existed in some parts of the country at some times (as
have other tests, like the brown paper bag test). Things are more nuanced
today and it would be more accurate to say he is black because:

1\. He claims to be black, and

2\. Society recognizes his claim as legitimate.

Since these are organic social constructs, they don't need hard, strict,
articulable rules any more than English grammar does (I suppose someone,
probably me (note the case shift contrary to formal grammars), will have to
point the reader to actual articles by linguists on this topic).

~~~
omonra
I decided to respond to this part of the thread to keep discussion in one
place.

\---

So your point is that since 2.9% of US population are not single-race
(estimate of mixed race in the US [1]) the other 97% aren't either?

By the same token you could also say that there are no heterosexuals in the
world since roughly 3% of people are gay.

I remember some Hispanic comedian who said in the 90s - "In the future
everybody will look Filipino". He had a point - if humans spend a few thousand
years mixing it up, the end result will look Brazilian of Filipino. But for
now the majority of Earth population is of a specific definable race (which
have many differences deeper than skin tone).

[1] [http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/mixed-race-
amer...](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/mixed-race-
america/?pagewanted=all)

~~~
einhverfr
> So your point is that since 2.9% of US population are not single-race
> (estimate of mixed race in the US [1]) the other 97% aren't either?

From a biological perspective, I am not sure you can biologically define
"single race" vs "mixed race" to the point where such a categorization makes
sense.

I think what you _can_ do is specify identifiable populations which share some
identifiable genetic markers (say, Chinese vs Mongolians, or Scandinavians vs
Mediterraneans).

So what I am saying is that 2.9% of Americans are _socially_ of "mixed race"
but population groups are much more porous than that, and that does not match
the _biological realities._

This doesn't mean one cannot come up with a biological definition of race, but
I don't think it will match our social definitions very closely.

~~~
omonra
"I think what you can do is specify identifiable populations which share some
identifiable genetic markers (say, Chinese vs Mongolians, or Scandinavians vs
Mediterraneans)."

Yes, and likewise you can further extend it - grouping Mongolians & Chinese
into one group and various sub-Sararan tribes into another. And voilà - you've
got yourself nice Asian and African races. Because they will still share these
distinct identifiable genetic markers.

"This doesn't mean one cannot come up with a biological definition of race,
but I don't think it will match our social definitions very closely."

Our social definitions are pretty spot on, if you don't try to come up with
exceptions (ie Barack Obama et al). Jay Z is black and Seinfeld is white - how
complicated is that?

------
aaron695
I always find it bizarre the consistent need for a certain types of people to
believe IQ tests are not real.

It's pretty much conspiracy sort of stuff.

A. It's quite a stretch that a whole scientific community can't create a test
for IQ and get past the tired issues brought up 50+ years ago.

B. The concept brains unlike heights, hair, body shape etc etc etc are all the
same is pretty ludicrous.

There is lots of stuff on the Flynn effect, I'm sure people can google it for
themselves. But at the end of the day why is it so strange a test given to
people in the 1960s scores differently for people in the 2010s. It is such a
strawperson argument.

IQ's about relativity and ability in the current environment.

~~~
strangestchild
Scientists definitely do have a test for the so-called IQ, and it's called the
IQ test – but 'Intelligence Quotient' and intelligence are not synonymous. One
need only read Mensa magazine to realise that IQ does not constitute
intelligence in a meaningful sense.

It's clear that brains vary, of course, but 'intelligence' is too broad a term
to say, quantitatively, to what degree a person possesses it. The term
encompasses:

\- The ability to acquire new knowledge quickly, or to learn difficult things
at all.

\- The ability to, given time, make nontrivial deductions from given data.

\- The ability to make rapid deductions in short periods of time about given
data.

\- The ability to generate multiple unrelated solutions to a problem.

\- A high level of verbal proficiency.

We mean all these things to different degrees at different times when we use
the term; and although these are not orthogonal concepts, they clearly do not
exist in a one-dimensional space.

Certainly if IQ is taken to mean 'the raw, unchanging potential of a mind',
the Flynn effect is inexplicable given that the timescales involved are far
too small for our neurobiology to have adapted evolutionarily. Given that it
means very little other than 'the ability to pass IQ tests', the Flynn effect
is perhaps not surprising at all.

------
hackinthebochs
Yet more overreach in the conclusions people take away from studies such as
this. So there is an environmental factor in what IQ tests measure; this
should not be a surprise to anyone. The study suggests that one's environment
growing up affects your abstract reasoning ability. This in no way suggests
that it is completely environmental. Height is largely genetic, we all know
that. Yet height is also strongly affected by environment. In fact, if you
don't feed a kid, they don't grow _at all_. This does not mean that height has
100% correlation with nutrition and thus zero correlation with genes! People
need to be careful with drawing convenient conclusions from a small amount of
data.

~~~
netcan
Here's the weasl-ey straw man (sort of):

 _"..some thinkers cling to the idea that IQ measures an inborn intelligence
that transcends culture and schooling. If that's true, one would expect that
the most abstract, "culture free" elements of IQ testing wouldn't be subject
to."_

The evidence supports common sense on the idea that environmental factors
influence IQ (and intelligence) substantially. I doubt many "thinkers"
disagree.

~~~
Ygg2
The evidence also support that IQ test are really hard to do correctly.

Some IQ test are better done by urban vs rural children and vice versa and it
comes to what knowledge does IQ test verify and what method does it use. It's
not as easy as saying its environment. Test makers suck at thinking outside
their head and disabling their own knowledge expectations and biases.

~~~
einhverfr
I would question the premise actually that intelligence can be represented
adequately by a single scalar quantity. a much better approach would be an
n-dimensional vector.

The problem you get with a scalar measurement is that you end up with weighing
one component of intelligence against another. IQ tests don't spend all
questions measuring the same exact skills of course, so you have to have a way
of weighing one skill against another. That weight itself can only be
culturally derived, and therefore IQ tests in their current form have no hope
in measuring innate abilities on an apples to apples basis because in the end
we are comparing apples to melons.[1]

[1] Hats off to you if you got the pun, which will only be found through
careful study, knowledge, and reading slowly.

~~~
Ygg2
You mean the weighting apples vs melons? If so, the box was a dead giveaway.

~~~
einhverfr
To explain, "melon" means "Apple" in Greek.

So you can either compare two different languages, or two different fruit but
you can't do both at the same time ;-)

~~~
Ygg2
Sadly I was never good with Ancient Greek or latin for that matter.

------
nnq
Well, it still measures relative intelligence for people with similar
education, and in our globalized society our educations and exposure to
information get more and more similar, so it's very good at what it's suppose
to do and my guess would be that is getting even better as "cultural
homogenization" in the global village increases... Now, we all know that
intelligence is just a variable, it does not singly predict suitability for a
certain job and it's very bad at predicting things like "success in life", but
it is a _useful_ variable!

------
luxpir
It is refreshing to see this kind of research promoted, particularly by an
'extremely learned person'. The submission reads to me as a sort of call to
arms, as someone who feels that education has been a great privilege and bonus
to their life. A privilege which is now unfortunately being sold off to the
highest bidder in most countries.

From my own experience, learning second/third languages has had a noticeable
broadening effect on thinking processes. Not in the proud sense of being
'broad minded', but noticeably better able to engage in abstract concepts.

Basically the ability to compare seemingly unrelated notions felt tangibly
improved after learning how my speech in English was actually constructed, and
how my words and phrases were just $variables for actual concepts. And I'm
quite convinced that given the right chances in life, anybody can learn any of
a thousand subjects that would have a similar effect.

The end benefit to society? Impossible to say for sure, but you can bet good
money on the additional creativity being an improvement on the previous
generation in terms of progress.

This article, and others like it, are great to read but one aspect I would
like to see further developed would be the effect of role models and the
origin of aspiration in a person. Is it even possible to give more people the
desire to want to learn more? Are some people just naturally more
'competitive'? What role does gender play?

On a final note, Radio 4 this week interviewed a panel on women going into
Physics, in particular. It was a ridiculously low amount, and one of the
female panellists excused this with the reasoning that 'girls often prefer
biological sciences'. These kind of assumptions, and a complete ignorance of
any potential underlying social issues, are what get my goat. So many thanks,
Colin, for submitting this.

------
WalterBright
Why do people breed dogs for all kinds of absurd characteristics, but nobody
has tried to breed dogs for intelligence?

I've seen reports that some dogs achieve a vocabulary of 400+ words. What
would happen if one selected for that? Could you conceivably get a dog you
could have a conversation with?

~~~
einhverfr
If you ever spend much time in a foreign language learning a very different
language (bonus points for it being non-Indo-European), you will note that
there is a huge gap between understanding hundreds or thousands of words and
being able to carry on a conversation.

~~~
WalterBright
Of course. But it's a good starting point.

------
einhverfr
I think that one of the huge problems is that there has never really been to
my knowledge a systematic look at the epistemological limits of IQ tests.
However just looking at it quickly I can spot two _huge_ epistemological
issues which make IQ tests more or less worthless for objective study, and
more or less cultural artifacts.

The first, which I have mentioned in a few posts is that at some point you end
up comparing apples and melons (the pun for those of you who didn't get it is
that 'melon' is Classical Greek for 'apple'). These things may be things where
we can make connections but any cultural weight we place on one relative to
another is just that, a cultural weight. For this reason intelligence, even if
IQ tests measure what we expect them to (and I am not sure of that, see
below), the results cannot be objectively reduced to a single number. You
would really need to look at intelligence as a multi-dimensional vector with
the understanding that we might be missing some aspects anyway.

The second problem though that I can spot immediately is that some skills they
want to test cannot be objectively tested. The big one that comes to mind is
pattern recognition. If you haven't read it, I think Heisenberg's "Physics and
Philosophy" is a must read here because his discussions of the relationship
between data and theory are directly relevant to this.

When we recognize a pattern what we actually do is we project assumptions onto
the data and find a pattern which fits both the assumptions and the data. This
is the process Heisenberg articulates regarding the formation of scientific
theories. The pattern recognized is _both_ a product of our assumptions and
the data and therefore patterns are at once recognized and created. Of course
Heisenberg was talking about his forte (theoretical physics) but the same
applies here because this is a human process.

The simple fact is that several competing sets of patterns can be made to fit
the data. For example, take the following set of items:

Hammer, log, ax, saw

Which one doesn't belong?

One pattern might be to that "hammer, ax, and saw" are the pattern and log is
the outsider. Another pattern might be "I can build something with the hammer,
the log, and the saw, much more than I can with any other combination so the
ax doesn't belong." Therefore such a question has at least two legitimate
answers because two different set of assumptions can be projected onto the set
with very different results. Now typically we are going to say one of those
(the first, "log" doesn't fit) is correct and the other is wrong, but that
doesn't actually test the ability to recognize patterns so much as it tests
the ability of the test taker to figure out the answer that the author wants.
This makes pattern recognition _fundamentally_ culturally determined and if
you can't get away from this you can't quantify this through standardized
testing.

But let's take this further. We typically refer to a genius as someone who
finds useful patterns that nobody else does. The IQ test then, if we accept
Heisenberg's epistemology, should actively select _against_ genius in these
areas-- either the patterns must be trivial, or they must be sufficiently
complex you cannot be sure whether a "wrong" answer in fact does not have a
recognizable pattern to it. So you end up having to throw out a good chunk of
the test here as being very closely culturally determined (and basically an
exercise of mind-reading the author).

The first problem could be solved by expressing intelligence as a
multidimensional vector, but the second is much more problematic. How do you
know that the test answer is right and the test taker is wrong when it comes
to two competing patterns seen in the question?

~~~
jacques_chester
IQ tests are pretty sophisticated and, as the theory of intelligence or more
correctly _intelligences_ has evolved, the tests have evolved alongside.

Each test is really a suite of dozens of subtests, each of which tries to
tease out some aspect of mental function. Some of it is pattern matching. Some
of it is memorise-and-recall. Some of it is tests of "general knowledge". And
on and on. Think of what you consider to be a distinct kind of mental
performance and somebody, somewhere, has built a test for it.

I think it's important to distinguish between three things in discussions of
IQ:

1\. Are some people "more" intelligent than others?

Taking the fuzziest, least precise view of what "more intelligent" or "less
intelligent" means, I think yes. It would be very strange that the
architecture of the brain and environmental factors would lead to perfectly
equal outcomes in all subjects. And it doesn't seem to fit what we can
casually observe around us.

2\. What is intelligence, and what are the components of intelligence?

A very large body of research discusses, explores, argues and delves into
these simple questions. In general a single "IQ" figure is merely a
statistical index of the subtests. The sub-category indices are much more
revealing.

3\. Can the tests actually accurately sample these components?

Also hotly contested. The closest we can come is to compare the test scores
statistically to other outcomes, or to other tests. IQ tests which correlate
highly with life achievement (factoring out stuff like socioeconomic
background, sex, race and mental health) are preferred over those that don't.
You can argue that it's circular, and you'd be right.

Welcome to psychometrics, where there is no outside world available for
objective instrumentation.

~~~
einhverfr
> Taking the fuzziest, least precise view of what "more intelligent" or "less
> intelligent" means, I think yes.

No argument there.

> In general a single "IQ" figure is merely a statistical index of the
> subtests.

Which is why I point out that any weighing between subtests are relatively
problematic in generating that number.

> The sub-category indices are much more revealing.

100% agreed there.

> The closest we can come is to compare the test scores statistically to other
> outcomes, or to other tests.

But the problem is, the ability to accurately sample these components may not
be the same for each component. For example, if you want to measure
coordination of multiple pieces of information short term memory, the problems
are very different than if looking at pattern recognition. So I would caution
against a single answer. However if we don't understand _which_ subtests are
particularly problematic and what the epistemological problems look for each
subtest, then many of the really interesting questions about these tests (for
example why do Asians score higher than whites) are forever out of reach.

> Welcome to psychometrics, where there is no outside world available for
> objective instrumentation.

Yep.

------
Tenoke
This is not evidence for anything - the theory kind of checks out but it can
be argued that there are other confound variables and that the direction of
causality is not as simple as they make it out to be. Also just because IQ can
be (slightly) trained it does not mean that it does not measure 'intelligence'
- what is the problem with intelligence being trainable (not that IQ is
perfect or anything)? And lastly - yay for meta.

------
arethuza
Does anyone here really believe that IQ tests have any value?

~~~
grey-area
I've never liked the idea of IQ tests, but they do correlate quite well with
future achievement like jobs, income, incarceration rate etc. That is why they
are still used:

<http://www.iq-tests.eu/iq-test-Practical-validity-800.html>

~~~
arethuza
I'm in the UK and I've _never_ encountered IQ tests as part of education or
any work environment.

[NB For my own amusement I did sit a test as a teenager and got a stupidly
high score, which I can actually explain pretty easily, that rather
demonstrated how shallow the tests seemed to me]

I've also never directly encountered anyone discussing their IQ - which would
strike me as very silly indeed.

~~~
iopq
It's probably illegal to give IQ tests to potential employees. It is illegal
in the States.

~~~
einhverfr
Under what theory? Disparate racial impact? Before I get downvotes for that it
is worth noting that racial groups do have remarkably different IQ test
results in the US. Whether that says anything about intelligence or genetics
is hotly debated in some circles. It isn't clear how much is cultural, whether
there are subtle cognitive differences between racial groups, and even of so
whether this corresponds to any intelligence difference.

------
scotty79
People who had learned maps to become proper London cabbies tend to be better
at memory tests later on. So should we conclude that culture of memorizing
stuff they experienced is responsible for their high marks? And somehow that
biology determining their physical aptitude isn't involved?

This does not follow. Their brains changed visibly on MRIs over the course of
map learning.

Of course that's the culture that makes people more intelligent. But you can't
dismiss this gain of IQ as not real or non biological. That's probably the
only real IQ gain that we ever got since our animal ancestors decided that
it's better to live in groups, and they themselves became their smartest
competition. Culture is just a fancy name of all of human interactions.

------
dgellow
I always considered the intelligence as an abstract concept. Like a way to
named the group formed by curiosity, flexibility, adaptation and others
capacities to understand relations and interactions between elements.

By the abstract nature of that set of attributes, I don't understand how it
could be measured.

By the way, what is your definition of intelligence ?

------
lemonfreshman
This actually confirms that IQ measures intelligence, just not merely innate
intelligence. Which we already knew.

~~~
mc-lovin
Well the article claims IQ measures the capacity for abstraction, which isn't
necessarily the same as intelligence: the best programmer isn't the one who
always starts with a UML diagram.

~~~
iopq
Huh? Programming is basically abstraction taken to the extreme. It's writing
repetitive code and then going "you know what would make more sense? If I
could abstract this repetitive part into another construct and then reuse it".
A programmer who has bad abstraction skills will just copy paste a few times
and modify the necessary parts. And forget to change stuff in a few places
probably.

------
egiboy
I don't think IQ tests are immune to grade inflation
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_inflation>), so I am inclined to think of
Flynn effect as a special case of it.

------
circlefavshape
The only definition of "intelligence" that matters is "whether you seem
intelligent to other people". _That's_ what an IQ test attempts to measure,
not the raw processing power of your brain

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zachlatta
I'm glad that there's further evidence that IQ doesn't correlate with
intelligence. I've never been a fan of quantifying intelligence or other
characteristic attributes.

