SimuLord said:
Point of the matter is that the IQ test's variability (even among individual subjects over multiple tests), its rather narrow and foolhardy definition of "intelligence" (where an idiot savant like myself can score astoundingly well whilst simultaneously frequently being the dumbest person in a room), and the tendency of people to ascribe some sort of gods-given caste system placement to it makes me not just skeptical of it, but of the belief that the statement "The IQ test is a valid measure of intelligence" is a Type II statistical error: failure to reject a false hypothesis.
Properly standardized IQ tests actually do not vary significantly in their estimation. Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, for example, correlates on a level of 0.9 with the Figure Reasoning Test if I remember correctly. The margin of error for a standardized test is in the vicinity of 4 points Wechsler... And even then, that variation is very rare.
The Savant syndrome is actually an interesting point. It is one of the few valid criticisms I have seen towards the G-factor. However, I would like to claim that the Savant syndrome doesn't really
contradict the theory, but merely means there's a part of the equation that's missing. One could say that the Savant syndrome is a representation of when you have all your eggs pooled in one basket, so to speak. Your general aptitude will still be very high, but your mind is specialized in a certain area to such an extent that other abilities suffer as a result. If I have ten pieces of candy in one hand, and two in the other, I still have more total pieces of candy than if I had had five in each hand. The Savant syndrome happens to be one of my blind spots, however, so I can't go into detail as to why the resources have been pooled. I do know that this matter is something that has caused some confusion in the world of psychology, though. But remember - a strong G-factor doesn't mean you'll excell in everything you do, it only increases the statistical likelihood.
One could put it this way - IQ correlates heavily with intelligence and general aptitude, but that is not implying it is the
cause of it. The causation is, however, largely irrelevant when deciding the validity of the IQ concept - because as long as the correlation is there, it remains a useful instrument. And the correlation has been proven time and again to be very high. There might very well be another factor that
does impact on the causation, however, that explains the Savant syndrome.
I fully agree that the tendency to ascribe human value to IQ is laughable at best. Intelligence is one attribute among a multitude. I have never encountered anyone who believes people have less human value if they're bad at football, so I've never understood why you would have less human value if you're bad at abstraction.
Omikron009 said:
I was formally tested by the British Columbia ministry of education over the course of many, many weeks, and the final average of all of the various tests was....
151. Yeah, I'm a goddamn genius.
I like to say this, even though I know that IQ is by no means an accurate representation of how intelligent someone truly is.
"All the various tests"? There really aren't that many standardized tests out there, because as I mentioned previously, it's a financial and organisational hell to assemble a sufficient test population and properly evaluate the questions. I also know of no standardized test that takes several weeks. The most time-consuming test I know of is RAPM, which takes a couple of hours at most. Extending the test over a longer period of time would simply make no sense, as the nature of IQ tests is that you're supposed to "instantly" know the answers upon seeing the question. As a general rule of thumb, if you don't know the answer after 15 seconds, you never will. Each question is a form of "stepping stone". Either it's above your ability, or beneath it.