For mensa members only (page 8)

myself

* note to self, get a better dictionary! Tomorrow I will practice my new word.

Farkel

hmm,

Will Rogers gets the credit for saying "if you can do what you say you can do, you ain't bragging" before the other guys you mentioned. He probably stole it from someone else himself, though

Granny,

: I wouldn't want to know what my I.Q. is...probably too depressing when "comparing" myself to other's that have qualified with years of book learning. I'm one of those who learned about life the hard way.

IQ tests are not centered on what you've LEARNED, but obviously that has something to do with it. The tests are about reasoning abilities and they are stimulating for those who think they mean anything. They don't.

The tests are about how you can think, not about what you know. Jeopardy is about what you know. So is Trivial Pursuit. People with photographic memories can ace Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit. That doesn't mean they will score well on IQ tests.

Any test that "ranks" me (or anyone else) as a human can go fornicate itself. I'm putting this mildly. In that, we agree.

Farkel

Edited by - Farkel on 8 November 2002 23:17:7

Farkel

Dave,

If I was dropped in the Australian Outback with you, I'd place a call for help on my cellphone. If it looked like it would take a while for help to come, I'd have to kill you and eat you.

No more of this "Waiting on Jehovah(tm)" shit for me. I'd bet money you wouldn't taste very good, either.

You said:

: I taught, was the nine dot problem. It is where the concept of "thinking outside the box" came from.

Never saw that one on any Mesa test. I told you months ago that I can solve that one using only ONE straight line, remember? (The rules don't say how wide a swath the pen can take, do they? )

For you newbies: Dave is my bud. I would only eat him in a pinch.

Farkel

Edited by - Farkel on 8 November 2002 23:28:7

plmkrzy

IQ tests are not centered on what you've LEARNED, but obviously that has something to do with it. The tests are about reasoning abilities and they are stimulating for those who think they mean anything. They don't.

LOL!

I can attest to that! I never understood why I always scored high on IQ tests because I dont know anything. I guess a lot.

seven006

<<<Seven, if you dropped two people into the outback, one who had read books and had an above average IQ, and one who had not read books and had a below average IQ, which of the two, on average across a number of pair wise experiments would be most likely to survive. I have great appreciation for your intelligence, but not for your hypothetical.>>>

Larc,

Circumstance and context, that is the key here and in most problem solving exercises. Given the thin level of information on both people, one with a high IQ and one with a low IQ and leaving the total amount of information about the two individuals at that, then I can see where you might not appreciate my hypothetical situation. If you add more information about the two individuals you will then begin to see how important circumstance and context are.

Since I did not give more of a detailed explanation about what I was thinking it was impossible for you to come up with anymore possible variations of an outcome. Here is what I was thinking when I made that statement. You take one man with a very high IQ who has read and studied in an ivy league school who has taken that education and spent the last twenty years working in the field of his expertise and higher education and drop him in the middle of the outback. This person with this high IQ is a lawyer.

Now you take another individual who hasn't ever read more than a few of the most simple books, could not even finish grammar school and could not do a simple algebraic equation and you drop him in the same place in the outback with the lawyer. This person is a native Australian Aborigine that has grown up in the outback.

Now, with that added information that better describes the circumstance of the situation which one would you now say would survive? The highly intelligent lawyer or the not so intelligent Aborigine?

Fark,

Bite me!

DannyBear

Dave,

I will go you one better........IQ be damned......it's the guy who decides to survive, does everything within his/her power to do so. In other word's it is the individual willing to work at it, however meager or uneducated his efforts.

I don't buy into the fact that IQ has one iota to do with someone's tenacity or inner strength.

Danny

edited for this Ps. Even very small childern (almost babies) have been left to survive in the wild, and done so very well. Who was that kid in the early 1900's who came out of the 'outback' here in the state's? Or am I thinking of dramatized Hollywood story?

Edited by - DannyBear on 9 November 2002 12:34:7

rem

Dave,

I thought I read in one of Jarred Diamond's books that the Aboriginal people of the Australian Outback are actually quite intelligent and have excellent memories - I would imagine they would score quite well on a culturally fair IQ test.

To me the example you gave is more a difference between dissimilar specialties. Put that Aborigine in a court of law and he'd probably be lost - unless he was trained in that field. IQ isn't so much about what people know, it's (if I'm not mistaken) more about how people reason. I'm not so sure that specialized Aboriginal knowledge is "common sense". I think it's more a specialized field that takes years of learning. For an Aborignie, that would be called "growing up" in the Outback.

There are probably dumb Aboriginies and smart ones. Intelligence is probably more of a survival factor there, so maybe there are more smart ones than dumb ones. I dunno.

rem

Matty

Oh lord, I've stirred up a hornets net here haven't I? I must admit to being a fully paid up sandal-wearing Guardian-reading type, and I have read many reports that seem very convincing to me that IQ tests are deeply flawed. I also perhaps have too many lefty-intellectual friends for my own good, but I guess this is a reaction against my witness upbringing. I am not a person to be closed minded about anything and I certainly would be happy for someone to give me convincing argument disproving these assertions, unburdened by emotion or prejudice and free from insults and patronising language.

seven006

Danny,

Survival is what we all try to do. How we do that in relation to our individual environment is how IQ's should be looked at. Not by some written test put together by people who "think" they know how to gauge an individuals intelligence in all things. Specifc things yes, all things, no. My scenario tried to show that. Where we live and how we live in relation to survival differs from person to person depending on their individual "circumstance" in life.

Rem makes a good comparison in a specific "context" as an example of what I was saying. Throw an Aborigine into a court house and he is going to be totally lost. He may be the brightest Aborigine in the outback but change his "circumstance" and he is a blithering idiot. Same with the lawyer in the middle of the outback. IQ is relative to ones environment and circumstance. Once you are given the exact context of a scenario you can then and only then judge an individuals intelligence.

IQ tests as we know them are only good to determine a persons level of competence in specific environments and applications, not overall survival ability in all circumstances. For gathering specific information for a specific agenda they are very useful. To determine if a person is intelligent in all aspects of life and in any given circumstance they are quite useless.

A few other people have brought another element into consideration and that is ones mental or physical circumstance. You can be the brightest candle on the cake but if your personal life is so incredibly fucked up what's the difference if you are highly intelligent or not? In the context of secular working environment you may be aces, but once you go home if you beat your wife and kids because you think you rule the damn planet you are definitely a stupid asshole.

I would take a more balanced person in both their secular and personal life over some paper proven genius who is an ass in his personal life any day. Unfortunately I don't think they have developed an IQ test to judge whether you are an asshole or not.

REM,

I couldn't agree with you more. What I was trying to point out is that intelligence should be based on ones ability to survive in their own environment. A lawyer living in New York City has very different survival needs and techniques than an Aborigine living in the outback. Both can be very intelligent in their particular environments but total idiots in the other ones. Their intelligence level is relative to the environment and I have never agreed that a persons "overall" intelligence should be judged by a score on a written test. Depending on what kind of test it is tells you what specific information they can recall on specific subject matters. To me personally and in relation to my own environmental needs, creative thinking and problem solving is more important than information recall.

Dave

Robdar

Unfortunately I don't think they have developed an IQ test to judge whether you are an asshole or not.

Is there a personality test that can identify an asshole? Since I have known assholes from all walks of life, intelligent and not so intelligent, it would be interesting to see how the statistics turn out.

Robyn

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