A Note on IQ

Briefly

I don’t really like talking about IQ—really! But someone asked me recently what I thought with the question, “What do you think IQ is?”, so I answered them with the following. Hopefully, forgiving my ignorance on the subject, this note is at least anecdotally noteworthy and sardonically entertaining if not even completely and utterly untrue.

The Note

Take IQ to be a measure of intelligence and intelligence to mean after Piaget, “...what you use when you don’t know what to do: when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for a particular situation.” In other words, intelligence is what you use when anything puzzles you, when you find something confusing, baffling, ambiguous, difficult, obscure or just downright incomprehensible and IQ is an operational measure of such an endowment or talent of handling that said bewilderment. For the standard IQ test, this represents a presentation to the tester of a series of questions generally administered under some acceptable time constraint. In other words, the IQ test is a delimited or truncated microcosm of perplexity (at least it should be), if properly constructed and suitably administered, designed to present an unclear and mystifying experience to its test taker. If it does not, then what it is measuring is not intelligence and hence not IQ. For instance, if I take a test on the meaning of words, I am not exercising intelligence, I am merely, and for arguments sake, parroting something I memorized from a dictionary—recalling by rote as it were, what’s already digested. If, however, I take a test of those same words recombined in a creative manner such as the following:

geese : gaggle :: quail : _______

then I am being asked to evaluate a relation of those said words on multiple levels of meaning, i.e. the meaning of the words, the meaning of the inner analogies (:), the meaning of the outer analogy (::) and finally the explicit recall of a word that logically fits in meaning the blank space provided after all else is evaluated—bevy. Whether this taps into our intelligence is another question. If we’ve a history of solving such analogies, of learned behavior regarding as such, then the answer might be and probably is no, it does not tap into our intelligence. However, provided the same mechanisms, but with much more difficult and puzzling analogous machinery, with more subtle relations and meanings so to speak, well, then it could be said to tap into intelligence even in the most learned way.

Of course, an overt obsession with IQ and IQ testing greatly tips the equation in the testers favor. That’s why people who constantly take IQ tests, are consistently involved with material related to IQ, etc. do so much better than those that aren’t. Think about it, if I continually go online and practice IQ test after IQ test, then, by definition, I am not exercising intelligence when later taking a truly proctored test and hence, not accurately measuring my intelligence and IQ. What I am measuring is some “learned” or “modeled” experiences, something(s) I’ve acquired by mentally modeling several iterations of IQ testing online thus conditioning and patterning my behavior toward success on future tests. In other words, there is nothing puzzling henceforth about what I’m encountering on any IQ test, nothing presents itself that I’ve not already learned or encountered, unless, and again, the stakes are raised and most drastically in this case! Of course, this idea greatly limits the idea of the so called, power test—the test that has no time limit, compensating thus by making huge resource, e.g. temporal, and cognitive demands on the tester of which the tester is liable to conduct a his, hers, or otherwise cost/benefit analysis, if simply for increasing time demands. However, it cannot be a test where one simply utilizes their favorite search engine, accordingly easily obtaining the results and thus greatly inflating that cost/benefit ratio. If, for instance, I design an at home test with questions like the following:

1, 2, 4, 6, 10,...

asking the tester to fill in the next three values of this infinite sequence, the tester is not exercising intelligence if they simply go online and use an integer sequencer to determine the answer (my favorite, {for all k : k2 + 1 is prime}). Granted, one’s ego might get a boost from getting a high score on the test by utilizing said mechanisms, but, and I must be emphatic, it does not test their intelligence! I’ve seen some tests online that do a good job at circumventing this problem. However, even these have their weaknesses; generally resulting in a sort of clustering or networking effect developing around the test over time and within a relatively short period the test becoming obsolete, the answers being posted for one’s viewing pleasure on countless social media gatherings and such. Indeed, we may be testing hive or crowd mentalities, but we are not testing individual intelligence and hence an individual’s true IQ.

Provided though, one has taken a supervised or proctored IQ test and scored high controlling for all other said factors, then, what does it all mean? Well, for starters, it means you have a high IQ. And as IQ is a most likely more or less correct measure of intelligence, intelligence being a talent for what you use when you don’t know what you are doing or more concisely what to do given a puzzling or confusing situation, well, then—that means you have an endowment, natural or otherwise, for making up your mind, as a rule quickly and successfully, in the face of these rather abstruse situations. That is all! It does not mean you’ll play the piano at concert level, it does not even mean you’ll be great at mathematics or physics although, and all other things being equal, you will on average have a better chance of doing so. Of course, and this is agreed, given all the tools at your disposal in some puzzling or perplexing situation, you will, on average, do better than let’s say, 98% of the population if your IQ meets or exceeds 130.

I hate to break the news to you, but having a IQ does not necessarily mean you will win the Nobel Prize or even get a university degree, although, as said, all other things being equal, you have a better chance of doing so. Still, though a minimal IQ may be necessary for such accomplishments, it is definitely not sufficient. So, sitting on the laurels of high IQ is a definite NO–NO. What’s required in most cases is a good knowledge of some subject matter, hard, sustained mental concentration (really the sine qua non of genius), a resilience to the many blind alleys and absurdities one will encounter, a realization of the loneliness of some subjects, e.g. try explaining tensors to your dog or possibly your boss and see where it gets you; and a spirit to keep going even when the best of efforts releases but meager or trifling results. However, and I say this to end, high IQ will give you something, and that something is a rare talent for accurately appraising what to do even when not knowing – what to do.

Kenneth Myers