How Useful are IQ Tests?

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Red
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How Useful are IQ Tests?

Post by Red »

Personally, I believe that IQ does exist, and is important to intelligence, but there are other things that play into it, such as knowledge, memory, and critical thinking. IQ by itself isn't worth much.

But to what degree is it useful? And if you just had high IQ but nothing else, can you still be intelligent?
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Jamie in Chile
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Re: How Useful are IQ Tests?

Post by Jamie in Chile »

I think there is a strong correlation between IQ and intelligence. I don't think knowledge is a part of intelligence. I think that's something separate.

Perhaps intelligence + knowledge = wisdom.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: How Useful are IQ Tests?

Post by brimstoneSalad »

Knowledge is often called crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence tests are better, but even those IQ tests also do a poor job of capturing creative thinking. They're mostly certain complex/quantifiable pattern recognition or assessment in the way of logical reasoning.

IQs of certain thresholds (and even what can be captured with a test) may be necessary for some important tasks (like understanding certain advanced concepts), but often are not sufficient in themselves.
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Re: How Useful are IQ Tests?

Post by teo123 »

My IQ is 125, and I don't think that tells much about me. People with much lower IQ didn't end up believing the Earth was flat or that airplanes didn't exist, and I somehow did.
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Re: How Useful are IQ Tests?

Post by NoOrdninaryWords »

Actually, I give a sh... on IQ tests. I mean: what does an IQ tell about the person? The IQ might be extremely high, but the person might be emotionally bad or something. Also to be honest, when I once tried such a test I thought: what is this worth for? I mean I don't care about cubes, squares and stuff in my daily life, I am more the creative type of person. Also why should we measure and value other people or ourselves like this? Is a person less meaningful when they work for the garbage collection or as a cleaning worker? Also smart people can do this as long as they want to. While smart ideas are good, but usually there is not only one true answer to things. That's my 2 cents ;-)
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Re: How Useful are IQ Tests?

Post by carnap »

IQ tests are intended to capture general intelligence and therefore include things like reasoning, creativity, memory, etc.

What does it mean to have "high IQ but nothing else"? Higher IQs are associated with success in school, better life outcomes and so on. But the tests are mostly useful in the context of research and education. For example to track the success of some social or educational policy you can look at whether it has any impact on aggregate IQ sources. In schools IQ tests are used to help diagnoses children with learning disabilities and its important that these kids are distinguished from those that are simply unintelligent.
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Re: How Useful are IQ Tests?

Post by gottabesaid »

IQ shows the result only in the case of low or medium intelligence. People with high IQ do not have high mental abilities. In addition, I read that there are a lot of errors in the tests themselves. I believe that a person who is able to solve the test tasks correctly, on this basis should not be considered less intelligent than a person (or even six hundred people), solving the same tasks incorrectly. A person who can distinguish between incorrectly posed questions is usually smarter than a person who can not to.
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