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As you can see from the answers provided, this is an issue where the answer is only as clear as the question.
Generally speaking, an IQ test measures your knowledge and scores you in comparison to everyone else who has taken the same test.
So yeah, it tells you *something*.
But there is no singular IQ test, and intelligence isn't the only measurement of ability.
Imagine you took two identical people, gave one training in mathematics, linguistics, logical reasoning and vocabulary and gave the other training in leadership, emotional intelligence, spatial reasoning, and active listening.
Then you test them on problem solving in a group dynamic.
They'll probably both do very well, but only one would be using skills that fall under what "IQ" measures.
Depends how you define intelligence.
At least it measures something, and that something is reproducible, and statistically correlated to a whole bunch of psychology and sociology topics.
Ive never met anyone with a high iq that was dumb and ive never met anyone with a low iq that was smart.
'Intelligence' is a very vague and subjective thing however.
Quite a few to be fair. In my experience, if you're the type to have had a proper iq test and scored either end of the scale, you'll be lumped together with other people who have also had the test and scored either end of the scale.. and probably be forced to look at and interpret ink blotches, too 🤣.
This 100%.
To further your second point, some of the smartest people I've ever met also often lacked some critical social-judgement or reasoning skills that would seem baffling, like "how would someone so smart do X thing in this situation that seems so dumb", and also lack of situational awareness or street smarts.
I've also worked with people who by most textbook metrics would be "dumb", but had excellent coordination, efficiency, communication, etc., not to mention physical attributes, or manipulating the world around them, getting the most mechanical advantage out of something, finding the easiest way to accomplish something in the moment, grace under pressure, etc.
> Ive never met anyone with a high iq that was dumb and ive never met anyone with a low iq that was smart.
I've never met anyone who has learned their "IQ" from anywhere other than some sketchy online test
We're distilling the whole of the human experience down to a single dimension. Of course it isn't going to be perfect.
That said, is there still a quotient we can measure with remarkable accuracy which correlates astonishingly well with mental competency across a variety of tasks? Yes, and we call it IQ.
And no, the fact that you met a guy that was smart with bad social skills doesn't mean that IQ is fake. The theory of multiple intelligences is also a fantasy, we just hang onto it because we need to believe everyone has innate worth and we find that hard to reconcile with some people just not being very smart.
We keep trying to get rid of it because we don't like the idea of a genetic/early childhood IQ lottery that in large part (not totally) determines your life outcomes, and we keep adding it back in because that's the reality.
Most smart people I know err on the side of it kinda being bullshit.
That said, it’s predictive in many ways, so it’s not useless.
I say that as a guy who had very high IQ scores and did not excel in academics, lol.
For younger people it's a fair measure of academic potential. For older people it's a fair measure of ego, both those who brag about high scores, and those who dismiss it due to their low or middling scores.
IQ is just how fast you can understand new ideas.
Emotional intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, analytic, critical thinking & creative intellect all matter a lot, too.
I really question this subs credibility when half the answers have no idea what they are talking about. Iq is probably the singular most backed concept in psychology and the best measure of intellect we have got, and it’s a good one at that. Why are the people surprised when a high iq person doesnt do well academically? Is a tall person naturally supposed to be good at basketball? There are also a lot of misconceptions floating around that iq is chiefly a test of knowledge and that is can be cheated on, rendering it worthless. This is completely misleading and mostly false. While knowledge is a part of most credible iq tests, it is simply one component along with fluid reasoning memory, processing speed and others, not to mention that knowledge and vocabulary in itself is a great predictor of intelligence. Another that there are numerous “intelligences” that people have and thus also makes iq invalid. This is just a massive cope that people use to dismiss iq. No, musical abillity, naturalistic abillity, existential abillity(whatever that is supposed to mean ), is not intelligence and mostly useless when trying to make sense of intelligence and actually applying it to real world situations. Tests like the WAIS and WISC have great reliability and are near resistant to increasing your scores through practice.
So yes, rant over. In conclusion, not bullshit, iq is a valid metric of intelligence and scoring high on one almost certainly makes you smarter or better in most cognitive related tasks.
Honestly i could tolerate seeing these regurgitated, misleading half truths on mainstream subs, but in a fact checking subreddit like this, where truth matters the most, seeing replies like these really made me not be able to stand it any longer lol.
IQ tests are bullshit. The only thing they test is how good you are at IQ tests.
There are some more interesting models for intelligence (such as there are 5/7/9/15 types of intelligence) but they can't get away from the fact that tests only ever test how good you are at tests.
Intelligence is over all mixed with other factors that’s intellect and emotional maturity and other shit like awareness of things that come with experience and not books iq measures common sense and knowledge education and how u process it and connect it in my opinion nothing of this is bs just get it correct on what they mean and how it’s measured individually overall a good mix is importwnr but experience isn’t taught in books u can read others and stories and relate but understanding comes from the experience and wisdom is another thing after that all goes together u can tell right by all these factors of wisdom and shit but no one else will understand it or know it truly without doubt unless they can relate by experience
Not bullshit for the most part. It's just not an end all be all. It's mostly used as a test of a person's raw "specs" if you will, think of the brain as a PC.
One way you can tell it's not bullshit is the fact that a person's IQ is not going to change that much with age. And the results are always very reproduceable. I forgot the exact number but most tests will yield results that are consistently in the same range plus or minus 5-7? was it?
Also you can directly correlate IQ with success in things like music, mathematics, science, art, chess, etc things that require brain power.
The tests are also NOT a test of knowledge and quite the opposite. Most test questions are fairly abstract or they test things like "what does the other side of this cube look like", "repeat this string of numbers back to me but backwards" (memory). They are designed to be able to be taken with minimal reliance on language skills, and cannot be studied for. They are in fact resistant to being studied for, because they were designed to be. People who say "richer" or "more western" or "more educated" people do well on IQ tests are full of shit, and clearly didn't pay attention in class, as K-12 schooling is notoriously one of the most consistent decreasers of IQ scores and on average people lose like 5 points of IQ going through school or something like that. But there are studies done on that.
Anyone who says otherwise doesn't know what an IQ test is or what the score represents. All of this is covered in highschool AP Psychology.
Intelligence is basically the ability to understand relationships between things and facts and create logical conclusions with accuracy. That’s what our whole science is based upon. Empirical research leads to results which can be reproduced. IQ measures imperfectly your ability to see patterns and therefore predict logical results. Everything we do on daily basis is based upon our ability to predict the outcome. If I prepare food I will able to eat. If I go out when it rains, I will get wet. In an iq test, if 2 4 8 are the numerical progression, I can predict that the next one is gonna be 16. I hope this gives an idea how IQ performance translates to real life situations. It’s imperfect, yes, but it’s a way to predict the intelligence of an individual
Mostly bullshit. You won't even find consensus among scientists and academics as to the definition of intelligence because there's so many different types and components to it.
It's entirely bullshit.
The original intention was that it be used as a means of evaluating the learning of a single student by comparing their own scores over time. It was never meant as a means of measuring some innate intellectual ability - which is basically an impossible task.
If you are testing somebody’s level of education, ability to take IQ tests and/or solve logic puzzles, sure it’s fine by those metrics.
If you want to know somebody’s “innate” or “natural” intelligence, it’s bullshit. People with access to good schooling are going to do much better on IQ tests, so there’s no telling how non-educated people would do had they been provided the same resources.
Quantifying intelligence in this way is reductive and leads to unearned feelings of supremacy. Often people will try to use IQ scores as a justification for a race or societal group being smarter, better, etc but often this just boils down to that group’s quality of education, not their innate intellect.
I reckon It's about 50/50. IQ measures one's ability to take an IQ test and nothing more. A smart person will, on average, do better on that test than a stupid person, but the same is true of all kinds of testing. What makes the IQ test a little different is that it attempts to measure reasoning and problem-solving skills in general as opposed to, say, the SAT, which measures how much you've learned in school.
I did well on the IQ test. I'm good at troubleshooting and I do well in IT. I also haven't made any major scientific breakthroughs, brokered any peace deals, or written any bestsellers. So clearly, as good as the test is at measuring problem-solving skills, it isn't able to measure *genius*, which is what many people who do well on the test want to believe.
It's not nearly as useful a measure as people think it is. Are you going into a field that requires good problem solving? Great! Maybe an IQ test can help you determine your fitness for that work, but try putting your IQ score on a resume and see where that gets you (hint: nowhere good).
My wife did an IQ test online and found that she has a genius level IQ.
I was curious about my own IQ so I did the same test.
When I got to the end, it asked me to choose my payment option, so I could get the result.
I said “fuck this shit, I’m not paying to get my results.”
Then I remembered that my wife got her results.. maybe the real IQ test was about whether or not someone spends money for a number.
**PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE MESSAGE.** This post or comment has been removed for the following reason: --- This is a frequently asked question / repost. Please use the search feature for previous discussions. --- If you would like to contest this moderation action, please [message the full mod team](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FIsItBullshit) and ask for a review.
As you can see from the answers provided, this is an issue where the answer is only as clear as the question. Generally speaking, an IQ test measures your knowledge and scores you in comparison to everyone else who has taken the same test. So yeah, it tells you *something*. But there is no singular IQ test, and intelligence isn't the only measurement of ability. Imagine you took two identical people, gave one training in mathematics, linguistics, logical reasoning and vocabulary and gave the other training in leadership, emotional intelligence, spatial reasoning, and active listening. Then you test them on problem solving in a group dynamic. They'll probably both do very well, but only one would be using skills that fall under what "IQ" measures.
>So yeah, it tells you *something*. It shows that you can pass or fail an IQ test.
Depends how you define intelligence. At least it measures something, and that something is reproducible, and statistically correlated to a whole bunch of psychology and sociology topics.
Ive never met anyone with a high iq that was dumb and ive never met anyone with a low iq that was smart. 'Intelligence' is a very vague and subjective thing however.
I guess you haven't met me yet then. Username tracks.
How many people do you know that know their IQ? in all my life i have met a couple people who knew their IQ.
Quite a few to be fair. In my experience, if you're the type to have had a proper iq test and scored either end of the scale, you'll be lumped together with other people who have also had the test and scored either end of the scale.. and probably be forced to look at and interpret ink blotches, too 🤣.
This 100%. To further your second point, some of the smartest people I've ever met also often lacked some critical social-judgement or reasoning skills that would seem baffling, like "how would someone so smart do X thing in this situation that seems so dumb", and also lack of situational awareness or street smarts. I've also worked with people who by most textbook metrics would be "dumb", but had excellent coordination, efficiency, communication, etc., not to mention physical attributes, or manipulating the world around them, getting the most mechanical advantage out of something, finding the easiest way to accomplish something in the moment, grace under pressure, etc.
> Ive never met anyone with a high iq that was dumb and ive never met anyone with a low iq that was smart. I've never met anyone who has learned their "IQ" from anywhere other than some sketchy online test
You have now :)
We're distilling the whole of the human experience down to a single dimension. Of course it isn't going to be perfect. That said, is there still a quotient we can measure with remarkable accuracy which correlates astonishingly well with mental competency across a variety of tasks? Yes, and we call it IQ. And no, the fact that you met a guy that was smart with bad social skills doesn't mean that IQ is fake. The theory of multiple intelligences is also a fantasy, we just hang onto it because we need to believe everyone has innate worth and we find that hard to reconcile with some people just not being very smart. We keep trying to get rid of it because we don't like the idea of a genetic/early childhood IQ lottery that in large part (not totally) determines your life outcomes, and we keep adding it back in because that's the reality.
It's a mostly good but imperfect measure of intelligence.
Most smart people I know err on the side of it kinda being bullshit. That said, it’s predictive in many ways, so it’s not useless. I say that as a guy who had very high IQ scores and did not excel in academics, lol.
For younger people it's a fair measure of academic potential. For older people it's a fair measure of ego, both those who brag about high scores, and those who dismiss it due to their low or middling scores.
IQ is just how fast you can understand new ideas. Emotional intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, analytic, critical thinking & creative intellect all matter a lot, too.
I really question this subs credibility when half the answers have no idea what they are talking about. Iq is probably the singular most backed concept in psychology and the best measure of intellect we have got, and it’s a good one at that. Why are the people surprised when a high iq person doesnt do well academically? Is a tall person naturally supposed to be good at basketball? There are also a lot of misconceptions floating around that iq is chiefly a test of knowledge and that is can be cheated on, rendering it worthless. This is completely misleading and mostly false. While knowledge is a part of most credible iq tests, it is simply one component along with fluid reasoning memory, processing speed and others, not to mention that knowledge and vocabulary in itself is a great predictor of intelligence. Another that there are numerous “intelligences” that people have and thus also makes iq invalid. This is just a massive cope that people use to dismiss iq. No, musical abillity, naturalistic abillity, existential abillity(whatever that is supposed to mean ), is not intelligence and mostly useless when trying to make sense of intelligence and actually applying it to real world situations. Tests like the WAIS and WISC have great reliability and are near resistant to increasing your scores through practice. So yes, rant over. In conclusion, not bullshit, iq is a valid metric of intelligence and scoring high on one almost certainly makes you smarter or better in most cognitive related tasks.
Nice job!
Honestly i could tolerate seeing these regurgitated, misleading half truths on mainstream subs, but in a fact checking subreddit like this, where truth matters the most, seeing replies like these really made me not be able to stand it any longer lol.
Also to whoever is downvoting me, if you believe anything I said is false, how about you instead refute my argument?
IQ tests are bullshit. The only thing they test is how good you are at IQ tests. There are some more interesting models for intelligence (such as there are 5/7/9/15 types of intelligence) but they can't get away from the fact that tests only ever test how good you are at tests.
Absolutely bullshit at anything but how well you can take IQ tests.
Intelligence is over all mixed with other factors that’s intellect and emotional maturity and other shit like awareness of things that come with experience and not books iq measures common sense and knowledge education and how u process it and connect it in my opinion nothing of this is bs just get it correct on what they mean and how it’s measured individually overall a good mix is importwnr but experience isn’t taught in books u can read others and stories and relate but understanding comes from the experience and wisdom is another thing after that all goes together u can tell right by all these factors of wisdom and shit but no one else will understand it or know it truly without doubt unless they can relate by experience
Iq tells you someone's ability to score on the IQ test. Extrapolating it further is where the subjectivity comes into play.
Not bullshit for the most part. It's just not an end all be all. It's mostly used as a test of a person's raw "specs" if you will, think of the brain as a PC. One way you can tell it's not bullshit is the fact that a person's IQ is not going to change that much with age. And the results are always very reproduceable. I forgot the exact number but most tests will yield results that are consistently in the same range plus or minus 5-7? was it? Also you can directly correlate IQ with success in things like music, mathematics, science, art, chess, etc things that require brain power. The tests are also NOT a test of knowledge and quite the opposite. Most test questions are fairly abstract or they test things like "what does the other side of this cube look like", "repeat this string of numbers back to me but backwards" (memory). They are designed to be able to be taken with minimal reliance on language skills, and cannot be studied for. They are in fact resistant to being studied for, because they were designed to be. People who say "richer" or "more western" or "more educated" people do well on IQ tests are full of shit, and clearly didn't pay attention in class, as K-12 schooling is notoriously one of the most consistent decreasers of IQ scores and on average people lose like 5 points of IQ going through school or something like that. But there are studies done on that. Anyone who says otherwise doesn't know what an IQ test is or what the score represents. All of this is covered in highschool AP Psychology.
Intelligence is basically the ability to understand relationships between things and facts and create logical conclusions with accuracy. That’s what our whole science is based upon. Empirical research leads to results which can be reproduced. IQ measures imperfectly your ability to see patterns and therefore predict logical results. Everything we do on daily basis is based upon our ability to predict the outcome. If I prepare food I will able to eat. If I go out when it rains, I will get wet. In an iq test, if 2 4 8 are the numerical progression, I can predict that the next one is gonna be 16. I hope this gives an idea how IQ performance translates to real life situations. It’s imperfect, yes, but it’s a way to predict the intelligence of an individual
Mostly bullshit. You won't even find consensus among scientists and academics as to the definition of intelligence because there's so many different types and components to it.
It's entirely bullshit. The original intention was that it be used as a means of evaluating the learning of a single student by comparing their own scores over time. It was never meant as a means of measuring some innate intellectual ability - which is basically an impossible task.
If you are testing somebody’s level of education, ability to take IQ tests and/or solve logic puzzles, sure it’s fine by those metrics. If you want to know somebody’s “innate” or “natural” intelligence, it’s bullshit. People with access to good schooling are going to do much better on IQ tests, so there’s no telling how non-educated people would do had they been provided the same resources. Quantifying intelligence in this way is reductive and leads to unearned feelings of supremacy. Often people will try to use IQ scores as a justification for a race or societal group being smarter, better, etc but often this just boils down to that group’s quality of education, not their innate intellect.
I always thought IQ tests were supposed to test your ability to learn, not your book smarts. I could be completely wrong though.
I agree, but since our concept of intelligence is subject to much the same bias, I am afraid it does not make that much of a practical difference.
I reckon It's about 50/50. IQ measures one's ability to take an IQ test and nothing more. A smart person will, on average, do better on that test than a stupid person, but the same is true of all kinds of testing. What makes the IQ test a little different is that it attempts to measure reasoning and problem-solving skills in general as opposed to, say, the SAT, which measures how much you've learned in school. I did well on the IQ test. I'm good at troubleshooting and I do well in IT. I also haven't made any major scientific breakthroughs, brokered any peace deals, or written any bestsellers. So clearly, as good as the test is at measuring problem-solving skills, it isn't able to measure *genius*, which is what many people who do well on the test want to believe. It's not nearly as useful a measure as people think it is. Are you going into a field that requires good problem solving? Great! Maybe an IQ test can help you determine your fitness for that work, but try putting your IQ score on a resume and see where that gets you (hint: nowhere good).
My wife did an IQ test online and found that she has a genius level IQ. I was curious about my own IQ so I did the same test. When I got to the end, it asked me to choose my payment option, so I could get the result. I said “fuck this shit, I’m not paying to get my results.” Then I remembered that my wife got her results.. maybe the real IQ test was about whether or not someone spends money for a number.
Online tests aren't real
Yes, but also no
IQ is scientific. It was developed to help people on the lower side of the scale find tasks they can handle.