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My IQ is higher than your.

#34
apart from other troubles IQ-tests have - this one you can all understand:
It is all about "how much can you solve within a specific time?".
Example: find as many animals that start with the letter "D" within one minute.

As you all know, some chess-players can be very good in Bullet, but are astonishingly weak in rapid chess.
IQ-tests reward people more who can think quickly. But is that "intelligent" in real life? Hardly.
You see, most problems that will happen to you in life - most of the time you do not need to decide/find the solution in a few seconds. Problems you solve within 3 instead of 5 seconds are hardly worth being solved at all. Or 5 seconds is usually good enough in real life, too.

IQ-tests are somehow pretty one-dimensional, and being able to read the question fast can give you an advantage of a few seconds. So it tends to favour fast readers and people who are adept to words.

Well, with such flaw in IQ-tests, I wonder what they actually measure? The way they are used in USA university or some other countries is "stupid" (quite a contradiction to: they want to seek for "intelligence"). High IQ - so what?
What about deligence? Ok, some students might need twice as much time compared to a fast thinking student. But the fast thinking student got it half wrong, and the slow-thinking student double checked and got everything right?
Compared with chess: What about stamina to work on a puzzle? If you can solve a chess puzzle within 3 seconds, are you then the type of player who cant solve it in 3 hours? ("If I cant see the solution in a few seconds, then I will never find it" - true for some chess players).
#36
@Munich said in #34:
> apart from other troubles IQ-tests have - this one you can all understand:
> It is all about "how much can you solve within a specific time?".

The real problem is that the very term "intelligence" still has to be defined properly. It is in fact easy to see that one cannot measure exactly something he doesn't know equally exactly what it is or constitutes.

Second, another problem is the misconception that "IQ" is a measurement at all. In fact it is a statistical device - similar to chess ratings. Having a higher rating says that - on average - one has a higher expectation to win games, but is says close to nothing about a specific game. Similarly, having a high IQ says that it should be easier for you to pick things up, but someone with a lower IQ could be faster in a particular case than you (sometimes the lower-rated player will win).

Lastly, to "pick something up" not only requires the capability to do so but also the willingness to undergo the effort. This combination actually - aptness for picking information up combined with the continued willpower to do so - is what is called "talent". Laszlo Polgar proved that with his daughters learning and playing chess quite impressively. If, in a chess game, one opponent treats it like bullett and only makes "automatic" moves, while the other is carefully calculating and planning, the second has a good chance to win - even if lower rated. Is Andrew Wiles (the man to prove Fermats last theorem, Pythagorean triples do not exist in powers 3 and above) an extraordinary mathematician? Not so much, but he had the stamina to do nothing else than work on this problem for mor than 20 years. A lot of nominally bigger mathematical geniuses (Euler, Gauss, Lagrange, Legendre, Dedekind, Dirichlet, ...) put in a lot less effort in solving this particular problem (and/or were maybe less fascinated by it) and failed.
#37
@Nomen-Nonatur: True

Effort is likely more "valuable" than a high IQ.
I think that average brain capacity paired with effort and dedication will work wonders. The influence of "high IQ" is likely negligible. The movie "Forrest Gump" is an exaggeration, but there is some truth in it: effort and dedication beats high IQ for sure. Though you do not need to have a "low IQ" - it is just not that important how high it is, as long as it isnt super-low (a cat will never be able to study at university, no matter how well you train it and no matter how you manage to keep the cat motivated).

I think there is some correlation with "high IQ" and an "interest" for the wish to know how things work.
If you keep working on your education your IQ rises, too. The average Joe who has studied at university has a higher average IQ than the average person, who does not read anything at all, left school early.
(still, without high IQ and especially without academic education, you might still be able to achieve a lot. In an extreme case maybe like Forrest Gump. But I am not talking of "successful life", but really just about the correlation of
"reading a lot and show a lot of interest in many things" and a rising "higher IQ").

By the way: only people who have a high IQ are likely doing an IQ test in the first place. (which is strictly speaking a waste of time - why doing an IQ test at all, what is it good for?).

In the Mensa Club, 25% are Aspergers or so. Tells us also something about the value of IQ-tests: Likely its something for geeks.

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