Drawing a clock has nothing to do with intelligence.
Drawing a clock is a classic test for the mental disease Alzheimer’s. And the relative ability to perform this task illustrates a strict, measurable change in cognitive function. The disease physically destroys your capacity to perform these mental tasks. The ability to recognize shapes, decompose images into their component parts, and manipulate instruments for the purpose of reproducing mental images are all absolutely applications of human intelligence. And they can be improved, degraded, or destroyed through physical changes to the brain.
Incidentally, as small children develop increasing cognitive capacity and improved fine motor skills, we can see this ability improve over time. Babies quite literally get smarter as they get older and develop more complex brain functions. That’s one reason why things like infant malnutrition, disease, and extreme stress can cause long term cognitive damage. If you’re harmed during the critical period of mental development, it quite literally r-slur’s your cognitive ability (the strict medical origin of the term) and forces you to dedicate significantly more effort later in life to catch up (assuming you aren’t permanently harmed).
Recognizing the symptoms of this damage early can let a physician know a problem exists and present treatment before the damage becomes too difficult to heal. It also helps to remove the moral component of misbehavior, by tying it back to a material condition rather than some ethical or spiritual deviancy. Your kid isn’t acting out in class because the kid is “bad”, its because the kid missed a milestone and needs help to repair/compensate for the difficulty. In that sense, measures like IQ are extremely useful in the same way that eye-exams and hearing tests are useful when diagnosing other physiological conditions that impact quality of life.
The only place IQ even remotely makes any sense as a measure is for the development of children. If you’re 12 years old and have an IQ in the 150s, you’re going to be measurably cognitively ahead of your age peers in at least some ways. That’s important and relevant to education, but it’s the kind of disparity that generally evaporates in adulthood. Insofar as high IQ kids become high-achieving adults (which isn’t very far, as a general rule) it’s because they got a head start and developed a love of learning (and were rewarded for doing intellectual things, both intrinsically and extrinsically).
The difference between an average IQ 14 year old and a 140 IQ 14 year old is extremely stark and obvious even to a casual observer. The difference between an average IQ 40 year old and a 140 IQ 40 year old is much, much less significant. The idea that it’s capturing some immutable and durable part of your intrinsic intelligence and ability is nonsense. It’s not even that tightly correlated to adult achievement: very very high IQ children almost never become brilliant, world-changing adult thinkers.
Then you’re ahead of the curve. But IQs over 100 simply aren’t that interesting, outside of the handful of savants (and even those are heavily overstated). The sociological purpose of studying IQ goes back to the idea of eye and ear exams and general physical fitness tests. The point is to find kids who are suffering some kind of physical impairment and alleviate it, not to pick a few mega-minds out of the crowd and put them on pedestals. Are you underperforming the crowd because of your diet? We need to get you more food. Are you underperforming because of an injury? We need to get you medical relief and rehabilitative therapy. Are you suffering from a congenital disease? We need to provide you with care to accommodate your needs. Can you not read the blackboard? We’ll get you some glasses.
Are you batting 140 in a field of 100? Good for you. Now piss off, you’re not important.
The difference between an average IQ 14 year old and a 140 IQ 14 year old is extremely stark
By the nature of statistical analysis, sure. Even then, the action you take in this case is to simply provide the kid with the next rung of activities, consistent with someone more fully developed. That’s easy to the point of being trivial and not terribly interesting from a policy perspective.
The difference between an average IQ 40 year old and a 140 IQ 40 year old is much, much less significant.
At the “mean standard” of adulthood, you should be able to operate independently as a fully mature adult. The ability to operate a little faster and more nimbly doesn’t change anything for you. Its the folks who fall under the normative threshold that need attention, because they’re the ones struggling with the existing societal layout.
If everyone needs to climb a staircase to come and go from the city center, and the stairs are 10 steps high, the guy who can comfortably climb 12 steps isn’t any more interest than the guy who can do 10. Its the guy that can only do 8 that needs support. And the degree of the disparity is less important than clearing the base threshold, because tripping over the hurdle is more of a general social problem than clearly it by a little or a lot.
There are real policy implications to the “everyone in this cohort operates at an 80 IQ”. But the folks making these claims more often than not don’t actually want to implement public policy friendly to this cohort. What they want is to segregate them and exploit their perceived weaknesses. In the same way that we target the elderly with phone scams and spam quack medical cures at folks with chronic conditions, the conversation around IQ inevitably departs from “how can we make a more equitable and functional society” into “how can I benefit from others’ disadvantage”.
Implicitly assigning IQ by race, gender, and other phenotypic characteristics tends to be about justifying the degradation of conditions of exploitation. It has nothing to do with their actual intelligence, save perhaps that the more predatory and gullible will aggressively target this group.
very very high IQ children almost never become brilliant, world-changing adult thinkers.
We like to apply the IQ metric after the fact. So everyone in the top income brackets and the highest positions within public and private bureaucracies get to receive some “High IQ” or equivalent merit badge. Nobody is actually out there sitting Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, Magnus Carlsen, and Ken Jennings down to confirm whether or not they’re in the top 1% of pattern recognition solvers. (Carlsen pretty explicitly refused to take one, leading to endless internet speculation) That’s in no small part because scoring high on pattern recognition tests doesn’t tend to track well with social aptitude, and so “High IQ” doesn’t actually lead to rapid climbs in bureaucracies.
Yep, agreed on all counts. It matters for kids, but only as a measure for how quickly you’ve developed some skills. That has implications for educators, but the relevance outside that is minimal. The fetishization of IQ outside that context is almost always just a proxy for
Drawing a clock is a classic test for the mental disease Alzheimer’s. And the relative ability to perform this task illustrates a strict, measurable change in cognitive function. The disease physically destroys your capacity to perform these mental tasks. The ability to recognize shapes, decompose images into their component parts, and manipulate instruments for the purpose of reproducing mental images are all absolutely applications of human intelligence. And they can be improved, degraded, or destroyed through physical changes to the brain.
Incidentally, as small children develop increasing cognitive capacity and improved fine motor skills, we can see this ability improve over time. Babies quite literally get smarter as they get older and develop more complex brain functions. That’s one reason why things like infant malnutrition, disease, and extreme stress can cause long term cognitive damage. If you’re harmed during the critical period of mental development, it quite literally r-slur’s your cognitive ability (the strict medical origin of the term) and forces you to dedicate significantly more effort later in life to catch up (assuming you aren’t permanently harmed).
Recognizing the symptoms of this damage early can let a physician know a problem exists and present treatment before the damage becomes too difficult to heal. It also helps to remove the moral component of misbehavior, by tying it back to a material condition rather than some ethical or spiritual deviancy. Your kid isn’t acting out in class because the kid is “bad”, its because the kid missed a milestone and needs help to repair/compensate for the difficulty. In that sense, measures like IQ are extremely useful in the same way that eye-exams and hearing tests are useful when diagnosing other physiological conditions that impact quality of life.
The only place IQ even remotely makes any sense as a measure is for the development of children. If you’re 12 years old and have an IQ in the 150s, you’re going to be measurably cognitively ahead of your age peers in at least some ways. That’s important and relevant to education, but it’s the kind of disparity that generally evaporates in adulthood. Insofar as high IQ kids become high-achieving adults (which isn’t very far, as a general rule) it’s because they got a head start and developed a love of learning (and were rewarded for doing intellectual things, both intrinsically and extrinsically).
The difference between an average IQ 14 year old and a 140 IQ 14 year old is extremely stark and obvious even to a casual observer. The difference between an average IQ 40 year old and a 140 IQ 40 year old is much, much less significant. The idea that it’s capturing some immutable and durable part of your intrinsic intelligence and ability is nonsense. It’s not even that tightly correlated to adult achievement: very very high IQ children almost never become brilliant, world-changing adult thinkers.
Then you’re ahead of the curve. But IQs over 100 simply aren’t that interesting, outside of the handful of savants (and even those are heavily overstated). The sociological purpose of studying IQ goes back to the idea of eye and ear exams and general physical fitness tests. The point is to find kids who are suffering some kind of physical impairment and alleviate it, not to pick a few mega-minds out of the crowd and put them on pedestals. Are you underperforming the crowd because of your diet? We need to get you more food. Are you underperforming because of an injury? We need to get you medical relief and rehabilitative therapy. Are you suffering from a congenital disease? We need to provide you with care to accommodate your needs. Can you not read the blackboard? We’ll get you some glasses.
Are you batting 140 in a field of 100? Good for you. Now piss off, you’re not important.
By the nature of statistical analysis, sure. Even then, the action you take in this case is to simply provide the kid with the next rung of activities, consistent with someone more fully developed. That’s easy to the point of being trivial and not terribly interesting from a policy perspective.
At the “mean standard” of adulthood, you should be able to operate independently as a fully mature adult. The ability to operate a little faster and more nimbly doesn’t change anything for you. Its the folks who fall under the normative threshold that need attention, because they’re the ones struggling with the existing societal layout.
If everyone needs to climb a staircase to come and go from the city center, and the stairs are 10 steps high, the guy who can comfortably climb 12 steps isn’t any more interest than the guy who can do 10. Its the guy that can only do 8 that needs support. And the degree of the disparity is less important than clearing the base threshold, because tripping over the hurdle is more of a general social problem than clearly it by a little or a lot.
There are real policy implications to the “everyone in this cohort operates at an 80 IQ”. But the folks making these claims more often than not don’t actually want to implement public policy friendly to this cohort. What they want is to segregate them and exploit their perceived weaknesses. In the same way that we target the elderly with phone scams and spam quack medical cures at folks with chronic conditions, the conversation around IQ inevitably departs from “how can we make a more equitable and functional society” into “how can I benefit from others’ disadvantage”.
Implicitly assigning IQ by race, gender, and other phenotypic characteristics tends to be about justifying the degradation of conditions of exploitation. It has nothing to do with their actual intelligence, save perhaps that the more predatory and gullible will aggressively target this group.
We like to apply the IQ metric after the fact. So everyone in the top income brackets and the highest positions within public and private bureaucracies get to receive some “High IQ” or equivalent merit badge. Nobody is actually out there sitting Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, Magnus Carlsen, and Ken Jennings down to confirm whether or not they’re in the top 1% of pattern recognition solvers. (Carlsen pretty explicitly refused to take one, leading to endless internet speculation) That’s in no small part because scoring high on pattern recognition tests doesn’t tend to track well with social aptitude, and so “High IQ” doesn’t actually lead to rapid climbs in bureaucracies.
Yep, agreed on all counts. It matters for kids, but only as a measure for how quickly you’ve developed some skills. That has implications for educators, but the relevance outside that is minimal. The fetishization of IQ outside that context is almost always just a proxy for