this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
458 points (98.9% liked)
LinkedinLunatics
4273 readers
359 users here now
A place to post ridiculous posts from linkedIn.com
(Full transparency.. a mod for this sub happens to work there.. but that doesn't influence his moderation or laughter at a lot of posts.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Just a friendly reminder that IQ is BS.
A great tool for making broad diagnostics with regard to childhood-to-adult brain development. Also useful for identifying disabilities and neurodivergence.
But useless as a means of stack ranking already demonstrably intelligent people or sifting for "genius" intelligence in a pool with variation in education and experience. Getting a "good IQ score" is like bragging about acing your "Do you have Alzheimers?" cognitive exam. "Oh! He can draw clocks twice as fast as any of his peers! Incredible!"
Sure. Just remember there's a strong correlation between high IQ results and frequency of taking IQ tests, meaning that IQ tests can absolutely be trained. Yet so many treat it as a "general intelligence" measure, when it's more accurate to say it just measures practice at things the IQ test tests, and at some level some ability in the areas it tests.
Example article about limitations, and the this one mentions its roots in eugenics (i.e. racism).
IQ tests can be useful, e.g. for the reasons you specified, but the general public misinterprets them far too often.
The first time I took it, my mom wasn't happy that my score was low, so she demanded that I be tested again, and told me she'd buy me ice cream if I did better. The second time, I was miraculously a genius.