[hackernewsacct]

IQ test results are not completely valid in all cases. Feynman was tested at 125. He wouldn't qualify for MENSA. It is thought by some Feynman may have done exceptionally well in the areas that deal with numbers, logic, pattern matching but poorly in the verbal areas of the test, thus suppressing his overall score. How many people here have a tested IQ higher than 125 want to say they're smarter than Feynman?

IQ test are also not completely accurate for those that are gifted and have a learning disability. Kids that are gifted + LD'd may not even be put in gifted programs because their IQ scores are too low, but too high to put in an LD program, so they are stuck in normal class rooms where it isn't a good fit for them. Imagine being just as intelligent, if not more so, as the students in the gifted classes but denied access. That's what IQ scores do for some of those kids.

IQ test tend to work for gifted people that answer questions quickly and those without lopsided talent. If you are gifted + LD, or gifted but have really slow processing speed, then IQ test will not identify you as really that gifted, despite being so.

[inputcoffee]

They aren't "completely" valid, but we have all seen large cognitive differences between people we know. What is that phenomenon? How do we measure it?

IQ tests are (imperfectly) correlated to grades, and income, but these things are also correlated to, for example, how quickly you can tap your finger. You could probably use that as a measure as well.

There are some people who might have a joint problem, and they would do horribly on finger tapping.

The point I am making is that all we have are imperfect measures. There is some underlying matter of fact. Maybe we need a better understanding of what intelligence is.

[gwern]

The Feynman anecdote is irrelevant. I've discussed this before, on HN even: it was a single unspecified test as a kid for middle school. For all anyone knows (and I have looked into all discussions of this, finding no sources beside the brief mention in Gleick), 125 IQ was the ceiling of that test - school tests, starting from the original Binet test, are often not intended to measure gifted children but in the normal or low range.

[Will_Parker]

Feynman at 125 on an IQ test is bullshit. You know this if you've ever taken a test and read his books.

Douglas Hofstadter describes Feynman as acting out a sort of deliberate "village idiot" in a lecture on intelligence and patterns, by giving deliberately simplistic answers. With no proof, I think this is what Feynman must have been doing on the IQ tests, being deliberately but defensibly pedantic. I know that scoring 125 on an IQ test requires no skill that Feynman wasn't near the limits of human capability at.

The passage I'm talking about, from Hofstadter's amazing "Metamagical Themas": https://books.google.ca/books?id=NSpMDQAAQBAJ&q=feynman+sat

[mowenz]

The most amazing thing about IQ tests are that some social (really pseudo--they cant really experimentally test theory) scientists convinced the world these things matter.

If you go and read the literature the idea is that thete is a concept called g, general intelligence, and that IQ tests dont test that, but produce a result which correlates with g. In this framework it is acceptable that Feynman's g is different from his IQ score--they were only ever meant to be correlated.

[pas]

Things progressed a bit since then, and [IQ, but let's say SAT] test scores correlate very well with a lot of things. Even after controlling for as much socioeconomic and other confounding factors as you can. (Sure, that's still not a conclusive experiment.)

[mowenz]

We agree they do correlate, but there is actually some debate about just how well intelligence tests do correlate with success, but the general idea of them remains the same as described above afaik, unless you'd like to point what has changed?

Many things correlate with successful life outcomes. Height for instance correlates with income.

[Obi_Juan_Kenobi]

IQ is a perfectly valid population metric that correlates very strongly with many traits that we associate with general intelligence.

Unsurprisingly, a single metric does not encompass the entirety of human intelligence. Failure to identify a particular gifted individual does not in any way make it an invalid metric. It means that you don't understand what a population metric is and what it's useful for. To be fair, many people don't understand this and the layperson understanding of IQ isn't valid, but that has no bearing on the 'proper' IQ.

Generally, whenever considering methods addressing evolution or heritability, you cannot confuse individuals and populations.

[TheCoelacanth]

It's kind of like BMI. There are some outliers who are incorrectly classified as overweight due to being unusually muscular, but if the whole population's average BMI goes up, it's almost certainly because of people being fat.

[wmil]

IQ tests have improved since the 1930s when Feynman took one. They aren't everything, but they aren't nonsense.

[Balgair]

So, I have heard the exact opposite from a LOT of sources. How have things changed recently?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/9755929...

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-IQ-tests-test-the-wrong-values

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fund...

http://listverse.com/2013/05/19/8-reasons-the-iq-is-meaningl...

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2014/08/27/ignore-iq-...

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2009/07/the-tru...

[wmil]

It's a little tricky to answer without knowing what your specific problem is.

It's a politically sensitive topic, so articles play up problems with IQ while playing down it's predictive success.

But even one of the articles you quote admits "The difference between a 79 and a 69 is highly noticeable, and the test can determine which is which and the reasons why."

Tests like ACT and SAT are highly correlated with IQ. As is the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) that the military uses. So when Google checks applicant's SAT scores, they're checking their IQ.

One important thing to note is that it's a better prediction of performance of a group than an individual.

Anyways Feynman's purported 125 IQ score translates to an expected SAT score (V+M) of 1210. Which won't even get you into any of the schools he excelled at.

If your issue is my comment about IQ tests in the 1930s, I can't actually back that up. I have no idea what test he took. But psychologists have done a lot of work on the tests since then.

[millermp12]

And with another nail in the blank slate coffin, let the prevarications begin, e.g.

"Feynman was tested at 125"

and yet

There are some points to consider. There are and have been various publishers of IQ tests over the years and various forms of test. We don't have any clear idea what IQ test Feynman took or what it emphasized.

The IQ test that Feynman took was probably scored by the quotient method, meaning that an attempt was made to estimate his 'mental age' and the result was then divided by his chronological age and, finally, multiplied by 100.

IQ tests aren't scored that way any more—instead, a distribution of test scores is formed by giving the test to a large sample of test takers. A result one standard deviation above the mean of the sample group gives an IQ of 115, and so on.""

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/11/08/richard-feynma...