Tuesday, December 16, 2014

IQ Hijinx Ahoy!

People who design IQ tests keep making them increasingly tougher to master due to the Flynn effect.

The subjective effect of this policy on the population over time is that your tested IQ* will usually keep falling after you reach optimal brain function (circa 22), the shrinking number flying in the face of everything we know regarding experience & long-term cogitation as enhancers of intelligence. Also note that we know that at least in children, the social self-image developed in school - brainy nerd or dumb jock - has a real corresponding effect on their subsequent development of intelligence. IQ isn't just controversial - for a growing elderly demographic it may be becoming literally toxic.

Average IQ is a value with no net numerical accuracy over time.

This contradiction appears insoluble.

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* Mine was 187 as a wee sprog circa 1972, burned down to thirty points less by the last test I took, circa 2000. Makes for a jocular little thought-experiment to work out that long before my 500th birthday, my IQ would inevitably reach zero.

2 comments:

jim said...

LOLgasm = consciousness & intelligence are the territories of science marked with the richest ratio by far of "HERE BE MONSTERS" or "TERRA INCOGNITA" labels.

We know more about what happens inside a hydrogen atom or the average supernova than what happened inside people's heads to enable them to figure that (or any) very complex obscure stuff out.

The silver lining is that right now neurology is getting an epic boost from the Connectome Project - a complete human neural map that may give the same vast harvest of innovation & discovery in brain research that the HGP did to genetics. Already the ongoing project has produced the revelation that our brains are far more structurally orderly & symmetrical than we had previously believed.

jim said...

DUbious online test put my 2020 score at 119 / upper 18%, which checks out.

OOH LA LA.

Die, neurons, die!