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The value of IQ

ZenRaiden

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when it comes to assessing the validity of a metric like IQ, one obviously has to talk in terms of all-else-being-equal. Someone with 85 IQ can become, say, a better mathematician than someone with 115 IQ by studying harder, but all else being equal I would sure as hell bet that the 115 one will be better.

and that holds for any statistical predictor unless you have a situation where this one predictor explains 100% of the variation in outcome

Well duh!

But what is all else in this case?

My point was mostly that IQ doesnt predict things the way people think it does. When people say IQ is single best predictor of a thing they often use misleading language and people gobble it up. They listen to phrases like this and assume that it means IQ is most important factor in intelligence.
When in reality if you did a hypothetical test lets say you want to choose the best test fighter pilot for a job and you can administer only a single test to that person, all people would probably agree IQ is the single best thing to test them on. Ergo the guy with highest IQ will be best fit for the job. So you give 100 000 people a test and the guy with highest IQ will go to train as test pilot. Problem is in reality the guy with highest IQ might be the worst fit out of that simple still. While if you averaged out the sample study and picked a handfull of people you are most likely to find the best test pilot in reality you might come across a high IQ guy who is not fit for the job worse yet he might completely be unfit by virtue of other dozen of criteria.
 

Rebis

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when it comes to assessing the validity of a metric like IQ, one obviously has to talk in terms of all-else-being-equal. Someone with 85 IQ can become, say, a better mathematician than someone with 115 IQ by studying harder, but all else being equal I would sure as hell bet that the 115 one will be better.

and that holds for any statistical predictor unless you have a situation where this one predictor explains 100% of the variation in outcome

Well duh!

But what is all else in this case?

My point was mostly that IQ doesnt predict things the way people think it does. When people say IQ is single best predictor of a thing they often use misleading language and people gobble it up. They listen to phrases like this and assume that it means IQ is most important factor in intelligence.
When in reality if you did a hypothetical test lets say you want to choose the best test fighter pilot for a job and you can administer only a single test to that person, all people would probably agree IQ is the single best thing to test them on. Ergo the guy with highest IQ will be best fit for the job. So you give 100 000 people a test and the guy with highest IQ will go to train as test pilot. Problem is in reality the guy with highest IQ might be the worst fit out of that simple still. While if you averaged out the sample study and picked a handfull of people you are most likely to find the best test pilot in reality you might come across a high IQ guy who is not fit for the job worse yet he might completely be unfit by virtue of other dozen of criteria.

It's important to note that 10% of people have an IQ of 119, 15% above 115. So when you consider those measurements compared to a trait that makes use of IQ, such as self-discpline or a obsession for acquiring knowledge, I think anyone can see right away that self-discpline and obsessions are rarer, and tbh they take the biggest slice for success. The reason we can't use self-discpline and obsessions as a predictor is because self-discipline is hard to quantify, as is the weight of an obsession.
 

Ex-User (14663)

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when it comes to assessing the validity of a metric like IQ, one obviously has to talk in terms of all-else-being-equal. Someone with 85 IQ can become, say, a better mathematician than someone with 115 IQ by studying harder, but all else being equal I would sure as hell bet that the 115 one will be better.

and that holds for any statistical predictor unless you have a situation where this one predictor explains 100% of the variation in outcome

Well duh!

But what is all else in this case?

My point was mostly that IQ doesnt predict things the way people think it does. When people say IQ is single best predictor of a thing they often use misleading language and people gobble it up. They listen to phrases like this and assume that it means IQ is most important factor in intelligence.
When in reality if you did a hypothetical test lets say you want to choose the best test fighter pilot for a job and you can administer only a single test to that person, all people would probably agree IQ is the single best thing to test them on. Ergo the guy with highest IQ will be best fit for the job. So you give 100 000 people a test and the guy with highest IQ will go to train as test pilot. Problem is in reality the guy with highest IQ might be the worst fit out of that simple still. While if you averaged out the sample study and picked a handfull of people you are most likely to find the best test pilot in reality you might come across a high IQ guy who is not fit for the job worse yet he might completely be unfit by virtue of other dozen of criteria.
I'm not really sure which part we agree/disagree on, but my stance is quite simple: it's a statistical variable which explains a certain % of variation in certain things like academic achievement, income etc. And yeah, most people don't understand how to interpret statistical variables like this. It's like with height; there's a correlation between a man's height and no. of sexual partners, so this inevitably leads to some people to say: I'm short, therefore I'm destined to be a virgin. And most people are prone to reduce these things to black/white – either people say "it's shit and it doesn't count for anything" or people say "it's what determines everything". In the end it has some explanatory and predictive power, so it does have some validity, but on an individual level people are not random variables with a certain IQ + some random noise. They have an IQ + a bunch of complex decisions to make. Maybe 5% of the outcome is explained by IQ (from eye-balling those scatter plots from earlier in the thread, I would say it explains about this much of income) and 95% is explained by all kinds of other stuff which the individual is control of to varying degree.
 

Ex-User (14663)

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Here's one example of the use of IQ as an explanatory power vis a vis things like motivation in school:


table 3 contains regression weights for educational attainment 11 years after measurement. "Resp student" is a factor measuring behavior in school, and then we also have "interest in school", in this case controlled for IQ, race, sex, family situation etc. Here, apparently, although responsiblity and interset in school remain as significant after controlling for the rest, the decidedly biggest factor is neverthelss IQ.
 

ApostateAbe

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when it comes to assessing the validity of a metric like IQ, one obviously has to talk in terms of all-else-being-equal. Someone with 85 IQ can become, say, a better mathematician than someone with 115 IQ by studying harder, but all else being equal I would sure as hell bet that the 115 one will be better.

and that holds for any statistical predictor unless you have a situation where this one predictor explains 100% of the variation in outcome

Well duh!

But what is all else in this case?

My point was mostly that IQ doesnt predict things the way people think it does. When people say IQ is single best predictor of a thing they often use misleading language and people gobble it up. They listen to phrases like this and assume that it means IQ is most important factor in intelligence.
When in reality if you did a hypothetical test lets say you want to choose the best test fighter pilot for a job and you can administer only a single test to that person, all people would probably agree IQ is the single best thing to test them on. Ergo the guy with highest IQ will be best fit for the job. So you give 100 000 people a test and the guy with highest IQ will go to train as test pilot. Problem is in reality the guy with highest IQ might be the worst fit out of that simple still. While if you averaged out the sample study and picked a handfull of people you are most likely to find the best test pilot in reality you might come across a high IQ guy who is not fit for the job worse yet he might completely be unfit by virtue of other dozen of criteria.
Is anyone suggesting that IQ is the only thing that matters? Would anyone really use IQ as the only predictor of an effective employee? I think everyone knows that hiring the most intelligent person is a bad idea if he is a habitual sexual harasser. I have not encountered the claimed delusion even once, but I have encountered the opposing delusion that IQ is absolutely worthless very many times, including many times early within this thread.
 

Rebis

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Is anyone suggesting that IQ is the only thing that matters? Would anyone really use IQ as the only predictor of an effective employee? I think everyone knows that hiring the most intelligent person is a bad idea if he is a habitual sexual harasser. I have not encountered the claimed delusion even once, but I have encountered the opposing delusion that IQ is absolutely worthless very many times, including many times early within this thread.
Pretty sure I said something along those lines in this thread or the other one.

Plus, it isn't considering Intelligence with IQ being a proponent along with other qualities, which would make the decision of recruitment to not be reduced to the singularly highest IQ, but probably one higher than average with other perceptible qualities immeasurable in standardized tests, like discipline, punctuality and motivation.
 

darque

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I feel so INTJ when I bring up data from the real world :smoker:
You go Serac make us proud, sweat that Te!

Has anyone looked at a serious psychological IQ instrument to see which functions it favours? I suspect TiNe as logic and intuition are easier to test, short term memory is also there so thats Se. So INTP has a distinct advantage in questions that require the TiNe and a distinct disadvantage with anything Se related.

Do any questions consider Fe/Fi ethical and moral based judgements or because these are too subjective they cannot be reliably tested? It seems to me that as the functions are not taken seriously outside Jungian circles, any test of human cognitive capacity is void until we generate questions that can isolate the functions properly.
 

Hadoblado

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I've looked through IQ tests, but don't believe in functions really. Nevertheless, there is no social or emotional component. They're generally aimed at capturing the core processing speed, flexibility, reliability, max complexity of computation/operation, and pattern recognition. IQ tests don't give an F :)

If functions exist, then IQ tests would measure the underlying and overlapping components of both introverted and extroverted thinking functions. There's also room to argue for sensing and intuitive aspects too, but I think you're grossly oversimplifying if you map IQ onto any one function.
 

darque

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@ Hadoblado, I respect your opinion and agree the Jungian perspective lacks structured support so leaves it on the fringe. I also appreciate that you adopted some of the language to assist in communication.

I agree it is not simple, or even practical to give ratings against each function as our objective to function in the world is a wholistic being. However we do know from medical science and lesion studies in particular that a lost of a specific area of the brain does cause a loss of function.

How the brain groups these sub functions into larger groups is not completely clear but the loss of a hemisphere through stroke for example does not cause death but can be predictably measured so the grouping of minor functional sets is known.

After reading Iain Mcgilchrist's book: The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. The effects of these widespread losses of neural tissue does appear to map to the functions quite well ie.

left hemispheres desire to 'close down to certainty' is atomistic in nature and would give rise to what we understand as Sensation perception and Thinking judgements as both these functions seek and create isolated entities.

right hemispheres desire to 'open up to possibility' is holistic in nature and seeks to see entity in context. Again this is consistent with Intuition perception and Feeling judgements; which is value based judgements, not emotional response or introverted sensory awareness as all three of these are different but often confused.

I'm not saying that this is the case as it my own conjecture and the field lacks serious study but analysis requires a starting point and these are a reasonable starting point to use as a model. Also diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is showing gross axon pathways between the sensory and cognitive areas of the brain and the corpus callosum does provide justification for the axial link we see between judging and perception functions; if these do in fact exist in seperate hemispheres; and that has been proposed through statistical testing.

A little of a sideline but I thought useful to follow. It is always a pleasure to discuss thinking with an INTP as we are generally not precious or offended by alternative viewpoints as we like to play with logic and generally like to avoid value based judgements where possible; back to the main game.
 

darque

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Google give me the the following definition:
  1. the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.
As many of the major decisions humanity makes are ultimately value based, it seems quite limiting to not consider these in our assessment of intelligence. In fact I know a number of people who register very high IQ levels but are fundamentally non-functional in society because they lack social awareness, skills; therefore fail that definition. As such its value as a tool has to be questioned, at what point is a high IQ too high?
 

Hadoblado

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Hey Darque, I appreciate your approach. It's been a while since I trawled through the literature on this, and I cbf doing it again right now, but I'll give the general conclusions I arrived at (so just the conclusions/impressions, not the evidence or argument).

I agree that in a sense, functionality is local and structuralised (though differs to some extent brain-to-brain due to neuroplasticity, indi difs, and whatever else). My take on hemispheric differences is that for the most part these differences are mostly exaggerated outside of language/communication, and of course motor control and sensation.

Within the scientific community, leftbrain/rightbrain thinking is not taken seriously. Everyone uses all of their brain, and there are executive functions and deterministic mechanisms which dictate which processes are dominant over others. Most of the differences in hemispheres are statistical in nature, and often propped up by spurious studies (p fishing for small differences in hemispheres, then overstating the importance of that difference).

Then, looking at MBTI and Jungian psychology, even the criminally statistically liberal practices of psychologists desperate to get published in the book-sale highway of the most popular corporate HR pop quiz junky personality inventory could not prop up evidence for this theory (soz got carried away there). It's not that MBTI captures zero reality, it's that it doesn't do as good a job as statistically derived models. It fundamentally works back from its own conclusions.

So just on the surface of it, I don't think it's a great place to start off, because I think it's empirically pretty shaky ground to build on (as is, quite frankly, a lot of psychology).

Sorry this one was a bit rushed cos I gotta go - probably comes off more hostile than I intended too. Forgive me?
 

sushi

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I've looked through IQ tests, but don't believe in functions really. Nevertheless, there is no social or emotional component. They're generally aimed at capturing the core processing speed, flexibility, reliability, max complexity of computation/operation, and pattern recognition. IQ tests don't give an F :)

If functions exist, then IQ tests would measure the underlying and overlapping components of both introverted and extroverted thinking functions. There's also room to argue for sensing and intuitive aspects too, but I think you're grossly oversimplifying if you map IQ onto any one function.

brain and neural mapping will probably replace functions in the future and use it as an estimation of your personality, behavior,preferences but then i dislike the intrusion
 

darque

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Sorry for taking my time to respond Hadoblado, its been a busy week and I wanted to do a bit of study before I responded.

There is also a thread going on with scorpiomover, over here that you may be interested in.
Forgive me?
Just hang onto it, I will only need to give it back to you later.
even the criminally statistically liberal practices of psychologists desperate to get published in the book-sale highway of the most popular corporate HR pop quiz junky personality inventory could not prop up evidence for this theory (soz got carried away there)
INTP poetry, I joined the forum to see eloquent strings of cynically loaded euphemisms; it makes my day!
Within the scientific community, leftbrain/rightbrain thinking is not taken seriously.
No, but lateralisation of function in hemispheres still is. It is well understood that a Hemispherectomy will loose function and as such the procedure is predominately performed on children to ensure neural plasticity will allow the remaining hemisphere to develop capacity for lost functionality.

At a gross morphological level, I agree there is high level of symmetry. I also agree the popular assumptions of hemisphere functions were oversimplified.
brain and neural mapping will probably replace functions in the future and use it as an estimation of your personality, behavior,preferences but then i dislike the intrusion
I also agree with sushi, including disliking the intrusion and accept that my theory is oversimplified but I am just seeking something to use as the basis of further research. I'm happy to modify as more information comes to light.

However, my theory is more concerned with the how than the where. So if we review some of the basic understanding of lateralisation through right brain lesion/stroke studies, we can expose some of the lost functionality:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_hemisphere_brain_damage
Visual Processing
It appears as though they are only able to recognize the parts of a picture, symbol, etc. rather than seeing the image as a whole
Thinking requires an entity to be isolated from its environment in order to identify specific attribute and object. The left is dominant in predator/mating function as seen in the avian brain studies. It seeks to reduce available options to a single certainty or a set of isolated entities with similar attributes .
Cognitive and communicative
This lack of ability to recognize emotion suggests individuals have an impaired theory of mind, the ability to recognize the thoughts and feelings of others outside of one’s self.
The left lacks the capability to perform a wholistic assessment of body language, facial expressions and tone in the context of the current experience. This is a loss of Fe, which is an objective value based ethical judgment of subject in context.
Tasks involving convergent semantic processing (“relatively straightforward linguistic tasks in which the number of responses is limited”), which involve the most straightforward meanings of words, are not nearly as difficult for RHD patients as tasks involving divergent semantic processing (tasks that “elicit a wide range of meanings which may diverge from a single semantic concept to include non-dominant meanings that are alternate, connotative, and/or less familiar”).
This is a loss of iNtuition. Intuition utilises relational information to provide convergence; ie. it identifies multiple possible outcomes or potential associated entities from a seed concept.
in an experiment in which RHD-affected individuals were asked to name items within a category, they tended to suggest objects connected in more ways than one (with many characteristics in common). For example, when asked to name vegetables, people with RHD would name spinach, cabbage, and lettuce, which share the attributes not only of being vegetables but also of being “green and leafy.” Such results “support a model of semantic processing in which the [right hemisphere] is superior in generating multiple, loosely connected meanings with little overlap,” a function clearly affected by right hemisphere damage
Ok, this is a loss of sensation. Sensation provides pattern matching of attributes, therefore the patient identifies the vegetables with the highest correlation of similar attributes. Thinking would deem this as the best match to the question. So, no value based judgement against preference, and no intuition to identify novel results that create a more distributed representation of answers to increase the possibility that may achieve the questioners preference better.
As a result of pragmatic deficits, individuals with right hemisphere damage have a hard time understanding the figurative cues in language and tend to simply understand sentences from their literal meanings. For instance if someone were to say, Joey took the lion’s share, they would assume Joey took the portion that belonged to the lion as opposed to the colloquial meaning-the majority.
Again no intuition. Another common reference I have seen is hot-dog which produces results of a panting dog not a fast food product. The answer was a pure logical response based on sensory attributes of the two words.
They also tend to show a lack of awareness for the knowledge they share with those they are communicating with and will mention people or things for which others do not have a reference.
A loss of relational or intuitive information and only the literal, localised reference remains. I’m sure if you gave them additional attributes, time, date, location when they had shared this information with you, they would remember. The issue is a loss of contextual information.
and, most significantly, in compiling information about the individual elements together to understand the situation at-large.
Big picture, this is the purpose of value based judgements and intuition. Back to avian brain studies, the right hemisphere has evolved to identify predators. It expands to seek possibility. As the avian brain lacks a corpus callosum, the left eye will scan the surroundings for predator, the right eye will be scanning the ground for seeds amongst the pebbles.
Beeman (1993) cites a patient who mentioned his ability to read “straightforward texts” but noted that he had stopped reading novels with multiple characters as, in the patient’s words, “I can’t put it all together.”
Same issue as above. The capacity to construct complex environments, including moving objects and entities with personalities has been lost. The capacity to assign intent to an object is critical for survival. A stick and snake could share the same attributes. However, the right hemisphere can associate movement with predatory intent.

Ok, so that was cherry picking and it is Wikipedia, but I’m just trying to establish reasonable doubt. Iain Mcgilchrist's book: The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, goes into much greater detail of hemisphere lateralisation and cites many papers. It is a good read that I would recommend.

So it is not so much that the hemispheres are performing different functions; they both seperate / combine, store / recall the same subjective and objective experience; just in different ways. The left: objects and attributes (nodes, vertices, edges), the right: networks and relationships (edges, links, lines); as in a graph.

It makes for a very neat error tolerant system as a complete relational network without objects, or all the objects without relationships will still allow you to decipher much of the other hemispheres information to make a very neat error correcting stripped array.

I went looking for this array style but it does not appear to be in use… could be a nice patent opportunity.

Just one last thing. The cerebellum does have many functions that are Sensory in nature so I suspect there is a higher alignment between the left and this structure. Likewise, Feeling is intertwined with emotion, so the limbic system and other deep structures is probably more closely aligned with the right. If that is the case, there should be evidence to support this.
 

walfin

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I guess the value in IQ is that all intelligences seem to be correlated to some degree, so there is a statistical basis for g.

The exception to this appears to be the visuospatial / verbal split in East Asians, but that could be due to nurture as well (verbal tests usually being conducted in Caucasian languages - I have yet to see research on verbal IQ tests conducted in Chinese).
 

Rebis

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I guess the value in IQ is that all intelligences seem to be correlated to some degree, so there is a statistical basis for g.

The exception to this appears to be the visuospatial / verbal split in East Asians, but that could be due to nurture as well (verbal tests usually being conducted in Caucasian languages - I have yet to see research on verbal IQ tests conducted in Chinese).

One theory for the visuospatial intelligence of East asians was attributed to genghis khan and his conquest of the world at the time. They were nomadic so they were constantly moving from different sets of terrain. Harsh climates and less security or centralization. Even before Khan most of Asia were nomads so they needed visuospatial intelligence to seek food and shelter, they were less adept at agriculture during these centuries. Given that the empire lasted 200 years, preceded by nomads for a significant period of time (1000+ years), it makes sense they had a superior visuo-spatial intelligence than that of farmers and agriculturalists.
 
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