what's your iq?

[Rosarium]

You see? You're like my old friend.

He must have be a great guy. Someday, I shall meet him and we shall discuss what it is to be awesome.

I didn't mean you don't have many interests, but that your area of expertise and your preferred work are different from his. He also had a number of interests, but all he wanted to BE was a painter.

I don't have an area of expertise, but I understand.

Sometimes, I say or writer that I want to be a writer, but then I have to clarify that I am a writer and that I want to be paid for writing. I have much written and I hope to get one book published by a traditional publisher. The others I may self publish. I value having my writing being useful more than getting money for it.

[Mhoram]

Satori, I don't disagree with anything you said.  If you prefer, change my third sentence to "Why haven't you written the great American novel or finished any of those canvas masterpieces?"  The point is that if you go around telling people how smart you are, you should have accomplishments to show for it -- whether or not those accomplishments involve monetary gain.  If not, you're naturally going to raise the question of what's holding you back.  Back it up all the way to school: if you always score well above your grade level on your achievement tests, but you turn in shoddy homework late, your teachers are going to assume something's wrong with you: you're lazy, you're defiant, you have a bad home environment, etc.  People who go around waving their big IQ in the air are looking for cheap praise: pay attention to how smart I am, not to whether I've done anything with it.  They're asking to be praised for their potential.

The rest of what you said sounds like what I said earlier in response to Iuvenalis: an IQ of 125 or so makes you qualified for all the high-paying jobs if you want them, so smarts beyond that don't lead to more money; they just allow people to be pickier about what work they do.  A super-genius working in a museum may do outstanding work and get paid relatively poorly for it, but he can afford to make that trade-off for the sake of doing work he loves.  He also doesn't have to worry much about money, because if the museum closes down, he'll be knowledgeable about enough things to go get a job somewhere.  If he really has to, he can grab a Greek textbook and learn enough Greek to start teaching it at the community college.

And as always, these discussions are about group tendencies.  Pick three people off the street, one with IQ 80, another with 100, and another with 120, and you might find that the 80 makes more money than the 120.  Just as if you picked one man and one woman randomly, the woman might be able to bench-press more than the man.  There are always exceptions at the individual level.  But pick 1000 in each category, and the 120s will reliably make more (and have fewer divorces, less time in jail, etc.) than the 100s, who likewise will be more successful than the 80s.  That matters because things like education policy and classroom techniques are written with groups in mind; so when the blank-slate, everyone-can-be-a-B-student-and-should-get-a-degree ideology is applied to those groups, it makes life more difficult than it should be for the 80s and 120s alike.

[Satori]

I agree, Mhoram, but people shouldn't be bragging about their IQs or accomplishments in the first place. Only fools will be impressed, others will be annoyed or tempted to the sin of envy.

[Rosarium]

People who go around waving their big IQ in the air are looking for cheap praise: pay attention to how smart I am, not to whether I've done anything with it.  They're asking to be praised for their potential.

I do not think icecream had such an intent. It was a non-serious thread.

I did not see anyone here bragging or seeking praise for anything.

[Mhoram]

I don't know if Ice Cream was bragging, but I can't think of any other reason to ask people to post their IQ except to try to get a bragging contest going.  If I say my IQ is 160, that has to be bragging or lying, doesn't it?  What other purpose could it serve?  I hope it wouldn't make people like me more, or take my words more seriously.  My words should stand on their own.  Or maybe it was just good trolling, and I got caught.

Anyway, this will be the last thing I write on IQ; it's not like Mensa is paying me for this (no, I'm not a member.):

Think about how wrong we all know the conventional wisdom is on religion, and Catholicism specifically.  It's as wrong as it can be, right?  Whether you're talking about the Crusades, the origins of Scripture, the homosexual priest scandal, or anything else about the Church -- virtually everything people are taught, by textbooks and TV, is wrong.  Often it's exactly upside-down wrong.

Well, that's not an accident, nor is it an isolated occurrence.  If you study other fields, you soon learn that it applies across the board: economics, nutrition, history, psychology, race, climate, etc.  On any topic which impinges in any way on the modern liberal ideology, the conventional wisdom is dead wrong.  IQ is just one example of that.  All the standard bromides you've heard from teachers and people in the media -- IQ isn't real; IQ tests only test IQ testing ability; IQ doesn't affect life success at all -- are simply wrong.  If you want to know anything true about it, you'll have to do your own research outside the mainstream, just as you have to do if you want to know the truth about something like the Inquisition.

For those who might want to do that, here's a good primer: http://www.vdare.com/sailer/071203_iq.htm . 

[Mhoram]

I lied: one really really last thing: if you can invent a test which doesn't show the same variability that IQ tests show -- in other words, a test of mental ability on which the 120s can't outperform the 80s -- call the US Dept. of Education.  Especially if you can get rid of the margin between certain groups that makes IQ such a hot potato.  They have a few billion dollars they'd like to throw at you.

[DeVille]

I don't know if Ice Cream was bragging, but I can't think of any other reason to ask people to post their IQ except to try to get a bragging contest going.  If I say my IQ is 160, that has to be bragging or lying, doesn't it?  What other purpose could it serve?  I hope it wouldn't make people like me more, or take my words more seriously.  My words should stand on their own.  Or maybe it was just good trolling, and I got caught.

Anyway, this will be the last thing I write on IQ; it's not like Mensa is paying me for this (no, I'm not a member.):

Think about how wrong we all know the conventional wisdom is on religion, and Catholicism specifically.  It's as wrong as it can be, right?  Whether you're talking about the Crusades, the origins of Scripture, the homosexual priest scandal, or anything else about the Church -- virtually everything people are taught, by textbooks and TV, is wrong.  Often it's exactly upside-down wrong.

Well, that's not an accident, nor is it an isolated occurrence.  If you study other fields, you soon learn that it applies across the board: economics, nutrition, history, psychology, race, climate, etc.  On any topic which impinges in any way on the modern liberal ideology, the conventional wisdom is dead wrong.  IQ is just one example of that.  All the standard bromides you've heard from teachers and people in the media -- IQ isn't real; IQ tests only test IQ testing ability; IQ doesn't affect life success at all -- are simply wrong.  If you want to know anything true about it, you'll have to do your own research outside the mainstream, just as you have to do if you want to know the truth about something like the Inquisition.

For those who might want to do that, here's a good primer: http://www.vdare.com/sailer/071203_iq.htm . 

Mhoram, if this is true, why do universities require SAT and GRE instead of an IQ test?

I have no idea of how an IQ test is like, but my premise is that universities (graduate school) are after people with innate ability instead of people capable of gaming exams and these other standardized inferences are possible to be gamed. If it is not possible to game an IQ test, I can't understand why it is not used more. And if it is possible to be gamed, it is as useful as a puzzle.

I mean...what is the purpose of a test that ranks people, if not ranking people "well" according to some criteria (related to the success in some tasks) and using this rank to figure out who is more likely to succeed in those tasks? In the case of an IQ test, what are these tasks? You may be right in the sense that one should read the right books and study the issue in order to grasp the logic behind the test and its usefulness in the inference. I  would just like to know at least what is being inferred, defined ex ante, by the IQ test without having to do such research.

[Satori]

I lied: one really really last thing: if you can invent a test which doesn't show the same variability that IQ tests show -- in other words, a test of mental ability on which the 120s can't outperform the 80s -- call the US Dept. of Education.  Especially if you can get rid of the margin between certain groups that makes IQ such a hot potato.  They have a few billion dollars they'd like to throw at you.

Woohoo! Another way for someone really smart to make money!

Does anyone understand the supposed connection between vocabulary and intelligence? Since vocabulary is entirely learned, it seems that there should be little or no correlation -- anybody willing to read lots of halfway decent books should have a good vocabulary, whether they're particularly intelligent or not. But they generally don't. Why?

[Iuvenalis]

Woohoo! Another way for someone really smart to make money!

Does anyone understand the supposed connection between vocabulary and intelligence? Since vocabulary is entirely learned, it seems that there should be little or no correlation -- anybody willing to read lots of halfway decent books should have a good vocabulary, whether they're particularly intelligent or not. But they generally don't. Why?

Such people will often find reading challenging in the first place, and will want to avoid it, and certainly select less challenging material. I really enjoyed a book by Umberto Eco one time, and started promoting it to my friends: none of them got past the first chapter. When I looked trying find out why a couple quit I saw there were several words on each page underlined to look up....several.

They just found it exhausting.

[Rosarium]

I don't know if Ice Cream was bragging, but I can't think of any other reason to ask people to post their IQ except to try to get a bragging contest going.  If I say my IQ is 160, that has to be bragging or lying, doesn't it?  What other purpose could it serve?  I hope it wouldn't make people like me more, or take my words more seriously.  My words should stand on their own.  Or maybe it was just good trolling, and I got caught.

People with IQs of 120 do not brag about it. It is like being a white American male who is 5' 11". Technically above average, but not by much. But even if he is bragging, then why care?