Attorney, journalist, and Elon Musk biographer Seth Abramson eviscerated both Elon Musk and his āfanboysā who have attempted to use the billionaireās IQ as an indication of his intellectual prowess in a series of messages shared on X Thursday evening and into Friday.
The people who have wildly overstated the implications of IQ are the ones who developed and use it. Your analogy would be more correct if the 100m dash was used to measure the freshness of your breath.
Thatās the central problem with IQ. Intelligence as a thing that can be measured is much closer to āfreshness of breathā than it is to 100 meters. Itās subjective and colloquial. You admit as much yourself that IQ tests measure something, but not intelligence.
I think there is and always has been massive contention in even defining intelligence. Is it the same as wisdom? What about being smart? Are these all the same thing? How does experience inform success in general problem solving? What even IS a āgeneralā problem?
I think itās still a valuable tool to assess peoples ability to recognize and apply transformations, implications, boolean operators, and arethmetic sequences.
But the idea that it provides some insight into the innate nature of a mind is preposterous. You CAN study for an IQ test: exactly the 4 things I mentioned are things you can study, and once youāve mastered youāll be sitting on a 160+ result.
So, the base underlying assumption that these things are not learnable. That is wrong.
But, the idea that mastery of implication, transformation, boolean operators and arethmetic sequences donāt provide a foundational system for certain tasks is also maybe not quite right eitherā¦
A 100m dash time probably loosely correlates to some abstract measure of āathleticismā, which may correlate to success likelihood for certain tasks. IQ correlates to some abstract measure of pattern recognition, which may correlate to success in certain tasks.
To your point that the designers intended it to be a measure of the abstract notion of innate intellectual capacity, yeah maybe that was the attempt. Maybe thatās how they pitched it. It isnāt. Tough shit.
But that doesnāt suddenly imply itās nothing.
Like most things (a degree, years of experience, SAT score, story points, Myers-Briggs etc etc) capitalism has completely fucked them. Business is so fucking lazy they just want to boil down assesment for suitability to enumerable values on a form. Just because metrics are inappropriately used and abused by capitalism doesnāt mean theyāre not measuring something.
So, this was a super lengthy reiteration that IQ tests measure something, but it isnāt āinnate general intelligenceā. But to say itās as irrelevant as āfreshness of breathā is maybe hyperbolic.
Myers-Briggs manages to go way beyond in the levels of bullshit compared to even these other items.
My favorite story about corporations using these kinds of tests is when some engineer I knew was interviewing at a few different major engineering firms. One of their HR people told him after one of of several interviews that the next time would also involve a personality test! He knew he had at least 2 other roles in the bag, he was just finishing up this company. He asked her - āare they also going to read my tea leaves?ā - and declined to proceed further with that company. Because the notion that HR were gatekeeping forā¦checks notesā¦engineering positions at an engineering firm by using such debunked horseshit was something that instilled zero confidence in how the rest of the place might be getting run, and I absolutely donāt blame him. I never had that as part of anyoneās hiring āprocessā - it was always something introduced later as part of some āteam-building exerciseā.
My favorite direct experience was when another co-worker who was awake and fine with asking pointed questions asked one of the people administering some āpersonality testā if she knew if they had done any tests where they gave the āresultsā to the wrong person, and see how they reacted (he was basically asking if they tested for the Barnum effect). Answer: no. (Of course)
Anyway, I suggest reading The Cult of Personality Testing: How Personality Tests Are Leading Us to Miseducate Our Children, Mismanage Our Companies, and Misunderstand Ourselves
I can agree with most of this. Capitalism, and society in general, banked rather hard on Galileoās old saying,
They took that to mean, "Give every facet of everything an objective measure in order to determine how make imaginary lines go up so imaginary numbers in our bank accounts go up.
Hard to argue that careful statement!
Hey thought of how it could be used for good, to support:
I imagine a school administrator examining the tails of their schoolās distribution and using the knowledge to personalize education. Say, a bright kid isnāt being challenged and achieves straight Cs. (Privacy and fairness implications, I know)
Yeah I think using a renamed version of the test could be a good way to try and find gaps between aspiration and current state of foundational skills, for certain aspirations.
If a kid dreams of being a lawyer, but their scores are on the tail end, thatās a perfect opportunity to revisit the foundations of formal logic. Just because some kids have managed to grok those foundational concepts independent of school doesnāt mean others are incapable. Because letās face it, secondary school isnāt teaching formal logic.
That being said, real tailored mechanisms would be superior to finding gaps. But, in the absence of such mechanisms, an IQ test could be an accessible stand-in.