“IQ” and other intelligence tests are incredibly flawed. The biggest issue is that intelligence is very hard to define. Not to mention the IQ test comes from racist origins and was used for immigration testing for a long time.
Well the origins were laudable, it’s just that it was shortly thereafter extended for racist means. Binet and Simon wanted to see if they could devise a test to measure intelligence in children, and they ultimately came up with a way to measure a child’s mental age.
At the time, problem children who did poorly in school were assumed to be sick and sent to an asylum. They proposed that some children were just slow, but they could still be successful if they got more help. Their test was meant to identify the slow children so that they could allocate the proper resources to them.
Later, their ideas were extended beyond the education system to try to prove racial hierarchies, and that’s where much of the controversy comes from. The other part is that the tests were meant to identify children that would struggle in school. They weren’t meant to identify geniuses or to understand people’s intelligence level outside of the classroom.
This is a good and nuanced take, thank you for taking the time to write it down. Piggybacking on this, if anyone wants to dive more deeply into the subject of psychological measurement, there’s an excellent book by Derek Briggs about this: Historical and Conceptual Foundations of Measurement in the Human Sciences: Credos & Controversies.
I think labeling kids as slow can be problematic depending on the context. We are all good at different things. If a kid needs help in math get them help but don’t treat them as inferior. If a kid has no self worth then they have no motivation to get better. Separating them from there pears is incredibly humiliating and can cause trauma.
Anyway this is a very complex subject that goes far beyond the IQ test.
Let’s not pretend verifiably ‘slow’ people with intellectual disabilities don’t exist please. Pretending these people don’t exist or acting like the severity of their symptoms aren’t absolutely something that they need help with doesn’t make these issues go away. It makes them worse. It hasn’t worked for any other issue where people didn’t want to call a spade a spade.
It hasn’t worked for any neurodivergent people for the last 40 years where parents and society wanted to pretend everyone was the same despite people drowning and needing help for fear of being ‘different’ or oh no their brain and body work fine no medications or doctors for us thanks!
Being different is okay. Everyone needs help in different ways. It’s shit like the above that causes these kids to think they are.
We know this, the issue is until a more comprehensive test comes around, the IQ test is the best we have, also measuring general pattern recognition can be pretty useful as a “quick and sweet” measure since pattern recognition is the base for all other forms of intelligence
Why do we even need such a test? It seems like you shouldn’t place people into arbitrary categories. Intelligence can’t really be defined. A test that looks for intelligence is always going to be biased and discriminatory.
It reminds me of social scoring and even of ethnic cleansing in the worse case. People shouldn’t have there lives defined by a test.
I can see where your coming from but i have to say, intelligence is definitely not arbitrary, it’s just very wide and can be difficult to define exactly. Kind of like consciousness, we know it exists but we can’t really place a finger on it
Some people are 100% stupider than others and some are definitely smarter than others. I’m sure we can all agree Einstein is smarter than a hair stylist, and while yes thats an extreme example, it’s necessary to get the idea across
The real issue of measuring intelligence (in my opinion) is that there’s so many different types of intelligence which is why the IQ test is flawed, it boils down hundreds of different spaces into a single number
I imagine it’s because the attributes that IQ measure could be the same as we use to measure success.
Effectively if your test is based on the skills needed for STEM, and the STEM fields have jobs with high pay and respect, then you’re likely to be considered “successful”. But the same person could be awful at communication, politics, the arts, and just be ignorant at large to how the world works. They may even be hyper specialized to their field but lack the flexibility in their intelligence to understand other STEM fields (I hear physicists are guilty of this).
Another, simpler answer, could just be that already wealthy people have better access to stable education, so they were already successful in many ways.
Just to continue to throw wrenches into the preconceptions, let’s not forget that a huge part of what we consider success in the modern world can be attributed to emotional intelligence as much as spatial awareness and logic.
A lot of CEO’s and people who climb high in the world are excellent at understanding how others feel and using emotion to communicate, share and inspire people to follow. Sometimes it’s the only thing leadership figureheads even know how to do. It’s also very, very hard to manage teams effectively if you don’t have a good understanding of how people feel at different times, how best to address those feelings and an idea how to manage the emotional atmosphere in a workplace. Yes, having good logic and reasoning is massively important, but rarely alone.
Because it also correlates with parental wealth, better access to education, etc.
Kids with better off parents get better school/tutoring from a young age > get better IQ scores > go on to better colleges > have better creds and connections> success.
Intelligence has a genetic component. Smart parents tend to have smart kids. It’s not the only factor certainly, and it’s not clear how big of a factor it is, but it undoubtedly plays some role in it.
