Are IQ tests mainly for the bourgeois?

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Growing up, I was always taught that IQ tests are really of no value, especially if you come from a good family. It was considered really tacky to place a lot of importance on IQ .It was a way to make the middle class people (or lower) to feel validated in some way since they had nothing else really going for them. Isn't this partially true? A lot of insecurity seems to be had when people brag about their IQ. Just because you're in Mensa doesn't mean you'll achieve anything important in life either. There are so many of these "gifted" people who don't do anything in life. Not even something charitable. I notice the middle classes tend to be pushier about academics. In my family, it was more respectable to get a "Gentleman C". Then you could finish your courses at Hampden Sydney, where you could play golf on the weekends.

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Last edited by ZachGoodwin on 07 Jan 2018, 4:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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IQ tests are a liberal/capitalist conspiracy to teach their children that they're more valuable than the workers children, even though the workers children will be supermen of labor and the children of the bourgeois are merely the next generation of managers and parasites... unless they join glorious revolution, then they are future commissars and just as valuable as workers.

rva, you might want to look into Charles Murray, also listen to Bret Weinstein and Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan 1006.

When we have a culture that tells people from the conservative side that they need to just not be lazy and get a job and those jobs, increasingly technical, can't be performed by most people with an IQ lower than 90 (not out of discrimination but because those people literally can't hack the complexity or demands) and the the more liberal side of the equation tells people that intelligence isn't real and that anyone can be a doctor, a lawyer, etc., you have the worst kind of faux meritocracy - ie. it's merit on genes, not on effort. By the math 15% of people have IQ's under 85, that's what the number is adjusted to actually mean, and if the necessity for survival rate salaries or payment in a job starts pushing over 100 IQ it means less than 50% of people will have the equipment to survive. Unless we do something to decouple work and right to live we'll be doing little short of coupling IQ as well as conformity to right to live as well - which would make the technological Singularity translate to mass genocide.

If we really enjoy social Darwinism, survival of the fittest, and brow-beating and alienating the weak out of existence (which - quite sadly - it seems there's a good chance people really do want things that way and refuse to admit it because they can't face what lurks at the bottom of the their own beliefs and behavior) then sure - we can do that. The side effect, we get Gattaca or something worse if that's what we really want the future of our culture to be. Otherwise we need to look into these really dark, septic corners of the human condition and the impolitic realities in order to ask ourselves - if we like what we have, if we like freedom, if we like the pursuit of happiness, how do we navigate through these things to keep our hopes and dreams alive? Lying to ourselves, especially keeping these topics prohibited, will only serve us on a plate to those who have fascistic political ideologies because they seem like they're the only ones willing to talk openly about such things - Steven Pinker actually went on the record and blasted political correctness of this sort from that direction recently in a Spiked Magazine panel.

Like television's Sheldon Cooper I like tests (he likes scans of his brain). I have never gamed a test in my life.

I don't believe any test would tell the complete story of an individual. But, in combination, I believe that various tests can tell much about the individual.

IQ tests are at least somewhat depressing for most. a better test IMHO would be a "good to your fellow man" test.

Both tests would have some value but represent only a partial measure of that person's ability to contribute to society.

For once, I couldn't agree more.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/High_IQ_society



I don't think that everyone should be forced into a post-secondary education. I just think that non-intellectuals should trust intellectuals.

When an intellectual spends his/her whole life studying a certain aspect of reality, that matters. People who aren't experts on that topic should trust the judgement of experts.

Getting through university is hard. It can drive you to the brink of madness sometimes. I've had to painstakingly study history and write essays for years. I don't like it when I provide historical knowledge and people just shoot the messenger.

Being an intellectual doesn't make you an expert on everything. It only makes you an expert in your area of expertise. For example, I'm bad at math. That doesn't make me stupid. I never even claimed that I was a math expert. Intellectuals often destroy their reputation when they venture into topics that they know nothing about.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ultracrepidarianism

To be honest, most people have a certain area of expertise. This includes people who don't self-identify as intellectuals. For example, a plumber usually does not typically call himself an intellectual ... but he knows how to fix pipes. That's his personal area of expertise.

Learning about the reading habits of the working class during industrialization I noticed something:
there used to be educated people, interested in all sorts of things, among the working classes - I assume, because social mobility wasn't much of a thing, which kept intelligent people in the lower classes.
Today, at least in my country where education is free, people sort themselves by intelligence.
I know doctors from working class families and children of doctor's who didn't end up going to college at all.

Great. social mobility. But also: if everyone smart becomes a lawyer, smart lawyers will screw over the stupid rest - I hope you cangather my concern from this example...
But I guess IQ is in so far burgeois as it is an indicator for upwards mobility, which not everyone is putting so much emphasis on.


also: IQ measures a particular kind of intelligence- abstract pattern recognition. I know that scientists often get upset about the idea of there being several kinds of intelligences - but I'm a bit dyspraxic, and watching an athletic person pick up a pattern of movement and successfully adapt it, i.e. learning something new like juggling- their brain is doing work, and it's doing that work better than my brain is capable of doing - the pattern the athletic person is able to recognize is just very physical and does not compare well to the abstract patterns measured in IQ tests.

IQ is a measure of analytical intelligence (or something like that). So a high IQ is a good personality trait, just as bravery, empathy, generosity are also good personality traits. It's debatable whether a high IQ helps you in day-to-day life or whether you'd live just as fulfilling a life if you had a lower IQ but there are more specific things you will perform better on like maths, it's just whether your life includes those things or not. Presumably, in the upper classes, if you don't work then your IQ probably won't make much of a difference to your life.

I have heard people starting to say recently that IQ doesn't have anything to do with intelligence and is a meaningless concept, and seeing as a high IQ is the only positive thing I seem to have got from my brain disorder, I feel a bit miffed to be honest!

add some maths to your life, then!

it seems to me, that IQ is an imperfect measure of a combo of nature and nurture- a person's native I/O throughput, and adaptability to one's environment. there is a controversy, however, in whether brighter folks have an easier overall time of life, or if they just have a higher order of problems weighing them down compared to the duller folk. I can say, that I have seen low-IQ folk struggle with the simplest concepts [that are second-nature to the bright ones], and I dearly wished for them to somehow be granted enough extra brainpower so that their struggles should be eased.

I sound like a liberal in my post but I'm actually a conservative. I just don't place much value on IQ tests. My grandfather was a member of MENSA. He was also a compulsive gambler who couldn't support his wife/children and ended up writing training videos for the Army. So what did he ever really accomplish in life? Nothing really.

This is a great example of why science hates anecdote. If one anecdote squares away your doubts and answers your questions conclusively you can stand for almost anything you've seen happen once or twice, without even checking to see if it means much on its own when compared to a much wider body of data.

Perhaps we should stop thinking of people in terms of "How smart are you?" and instead ask "What is your area of expertise?"

Everyone has one ... except for people who are literally intellectually disabled.

I tend to also think that's more of a cerebellum vs frontal lobe thing although I'm sure it's cerebellum proficiency aided by a lot of spacial reasoning skills in the prefrontal cortex. There could be athletes who are also geniuses albeit that would be a lot of caloric demand and nature rarely does both.

As of right now, although my skills in kali, eskrima, and kuntao have gotten a lot better after 9 years of practice I still worry that a real natural fighter (one of those really wide-eyed and wiry guys like some of the drug dealers I used to know in my early 20's) could lay me out flat because their reflex speeds and bursts of aggression are twice my own, otherwise I'd have beat them by a very different game.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 07 Jan 2018, 6:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.