question about IQ tests

[megaplayboy]

So, from what I've read about most of the standard IQ tests, they don't certify accuracy beyond about 4 standard deviations, i.e., around about 160 IQ.  One did say his test wasn't valid or accurate beyond about a 175 IQ.  

So, my question is, where are all these IQ scores above 180 or so coming from?  What test did these individuals take to "certify" their IQ is, say, 225?  And are any of these scores achieved by these individuals as adults?

[Ternaugh]

From the Wikipedia article on Marilyn vos Savant:

 

Quote

Savant was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records under "Highest IQ" from 1986 to 1989^[9] and entered the Guinness Book of World Records Hall of Fame in 1988.^[9][10] Guinness retired the "Highest IQ" category in 1990 after concluding IQ tests were too unreliable to designate a single record holder.^[9] The listing drew nationwide attention.^[11]

Guinness cited vos Savant's performance on two intelligence tests, the Stanford-Binet and the Mega Test. She took the 1937 Stanford-Binet, Second Revision test at age ten.^[5] She claims her first test was in September 1956 and measured her mental age at 22 years and 10 months, yielding a 228 score.^[5] This figure was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records; it is also listed in her books' biographical sections and was given by her in interviews.

Alan S. Kaufman, a psychology professor and author of IQ tests, writes in IQ Testing 101 that "Miss Savant was given an old version of the Stanford-Binet (Terman & Merrill 1937), which did, indeed, use the antiquated formula of MA/CA × 100. But in the test manual's norms, the Binet does not permit IQs to rise above 170 at any age, child or adult. As the authors of the old Binet stated: 'Beyond fifteen the mental ages are entirely artificial and are to be thought of as simply numerical scores.' (Terman & Merrill 1937). ...the psychologist who came up with an IQ of 228 committed an extrapolation of a misconception, thereby violating almost every rule imaginable concerning the meaning of IQs."^[12] Savant has commented on reports mentioning varying IQ scores she was said to have obtained.^[13]

The second test reported by Guinness was Hoeflin's Mega Test, taken in the mid-1980s. The Mega Test yields IQ standard scores obtained by multiplying the subject's normalized z-score, or the rarity of the raw test score, by a constant standard deviation, and adding the product to 100, with Savant's raw score reported by Hoeflin to be 46 out of a possible 48, with a 5.4 z-score, and a standard deviation of 16, arriving at a 186 IQ. The Mega Test has been criticized by professional psychologists as improperly designed and scored, "nothing short of number pulverization".^[14]

 

[Duke Bushido]

ugh....

 

IQ tests are useless.  They are so useless that there is only one nation in the world that still puts some merit into it.  Let's also remember that this is the nation that pretended to shut down for quarantine, then discovered it labeled _all_ wage slaves as "essential," their wealth could continue to roll in while they hibernated in their various palaces around the country, with no risk to anyone but their "essential" minimum-wage employees.   This is also the nation that houses more flat-earthers, more anti-vaxxers, and more Facebook pages than any other nation on earth.

 

If _that_ doesn't shoot the validity of IQ scores in the ass, I don't know what to tell you.

 

 

IQ is _not_ a measure of intelligence, and it _cannot_ be a measure of intelligence, simply because there is no quantifiable way to measure "intelligence" any more than there is a rock-solid agreement on just what "intelligence" is.  What is measures is a strange and sliding ratio of your age, your exposure, and your retention, then compares it to a theoretical "normal."

 

Studies have found over and over that those who are exposed to more things earlier than their peers _and_ manage to remember them will have higher IQ scores than other people their age who were _not_ exposed to as wide a variety of things.  So that's flaw number one:  People living in poor neighborhoods or on farms do not score as well because they tend to have considerably less-varied exposure.  Two working parents seems to reduce exposure as well, because there is no Mom thinking "I should take them to the zoo" or "I should take them to the museum."

 

I should also point out that both television and the internet-- touted as the greatest mass-education tools of all time-- tend to lower IQ scores.  Seriously:  without a structured plan of exposure, you tend to watch what entertains you in both mediums more than what might potentially increase your knowledge base.  They could alter the testing for the internet generations, I suppose, and include more porn-based queries, and I suspect you will see a massive rise in IQ scores, perhaps higher than ever recorded.

 

The results themselves have to be downgraded every few years.  Why?  As newer concepts and technologies become more commonplace, what, just a few years before, only avid readers would have been exposed to (and even then, only avid readers of tech research, engineering journals, etc) will, in just a few years become quite commonplace, meaning that it can no longer be used as a >ahem< "valid" measure of IQ.    And now "Return" button has gone out, so I will be unable to format paragraphs correctly until it comes back.  Forgive me; I will try to wrap this up more quickly than originally intended.   IQs drop, and drop rapidly as a person reaches the age of thirty.  Not because the person is getting stupider, but because he is getting far less exposure to "novel" things, and therefore isn't remembering them.  We all sort of "level off" as we age because we are now being exposed only to those things that one would _expect_ us to be exposed to:  work-related humdrum.    The typical cause of "high IQ" is due to cusping of curbing.  Remember I mentioned that the parameters-- in particular, the "key indicators" that the tests are designed to check your exposure to and retention of?  Remember how they get "more normal" and "more expected" as time goes on?  Those adjustments are made because more and more people, across all age groups, are scoring higher and higher.  The adjustments are made, but at that point, there are _so_ many "geniuses" running about-- and you can't put that genie back in the bottle, I'm afraid.   After the adjustments are made, it's not uncommon for everyone to test as potentially disabled.  So the mean scores are compared against previous mean scores from generations back, and an adjustment is made on percentiles:  the highest ten percentile, no matter how poorly (or well) they scored will be adjusted up X amount, then the next, etc, etc.   This also tends to result in a lot of higher-than-deserved scores.   Again: you can look for yourself to see how these evaluation are made, and it becomes extremely clear that intelligence is _not_ what's being tested, not even remotely.  Memory is being tested in a secondary way-- do you remember what you were being exposed to?  But that-- exposure to things outside the norm for your age group:  _that_ is what's being tested, and that is _all_ that is being tested.  unfortunately, it's being tested in such a messed-up and meaningless way that even that data does no one any good, except in that competitiveness that the last-nation-still-using-the-damned-things fosters in all aspects of daily life.   At the end of the day, the surest test I have ever found of intelligence actually _does_ sort of relate to IQ:  You can bet your ass that _everyone_ you have ever heard making a habit of discussing his abnormally-high IQ is a fecking idiot.  The end, and I'm sorry about the return button issues...

[megaplayboy]

No, I'm aware of the limited utility of IQ tests, the shady historical ties between IQ testing and the eugenics movement, and so forth.  My question was more along the lines of where these extraordinarily high scores are coming from when the standard tests don't really warranty any validity beyond maybe a 180 at most.  Elsewhere I've seen that a 200 is the highest score hypothetically possible, since exactly one person in the entire global population would have that score.  My impression is that there is nobody with an adult score in the 200 plus range, using any of the 6 or 7 standard tests used.  But if I'm wrong, I assume someone out there might be able to tell me.

[Duke Bushido]

As far as a "valid"  >ahem< test goes, you are correct:  in theory, there is only one person on earth who could achieve a 200, and even then, it's not a given that anyone ever will.

 

Reported scores higher than that come from multiple sources:  half-crackpot magazine and online tests, a blurred misunderstanding of some other "intelligence" test, and of course, blatant lies.  The folks to whom this score is somehow self-validating tend to run with other people who have the same issues.  They inflate their scores, and have heard similarly-inflated scores so often that it just doesn't sound unreasonable to them. Amusingly, none of them have ever looked into the testing deep enough to see that it is designed in such a fashion as to not even be able to return the values they claim to have scored.    

 

So much for IQ as a measure of intelligence.  

 

And my apologies both for misunderstanding what you were asking, and again for the short-lived return-button issues.

[Starlord]

I think that how the brain works is something closer to Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Theory myself, but no method is particularly great as I see it.

[Badger]

My IQ is 557.  So, I let you all ponder this, as you are as ants to me.  

 

 

[Gnome BODY (important!)]

13 minutes ago, Badger said:

My IQ is 557.  So, I let you all ponder this, as you are as ants to me.  

Yeah?  Well my IQ is 788 and I say IQ is meaningless.  So either I'm right and your IQ doesn't matter or I'm wrong but that means I'm smarter than you so I must be right. 

[Badger]

That was last hour, I actually got 80% of a crossword puzzle successfully done,  my IQ is now over 9000!

 

Now, I am off to do the sudoku,  and my brain will evolve into its Superbrain form.

 

 

 

[Badger]

On a serious note: I don't think I've ever taken an IQ test.

 

Then, again, I don't really know my blood type  (probably should ask that next time at the doctor's)

[megaplayboy]

I think what we consider "intelligence" is some mix of innate capability and acquired and refined skill at utilizing that capability.  And as has been said, there are likely multiple types of intelligences--social, emotional, verbal, mathematical, problem-solving, physical(how to dance or perform athletically)--and to reduce things to a simple score, while appealing at some primal level, doesn't really capture the complexity of the concept.  We can certainly point to people for whom the terms "bright", "smart", "brilliant" or even "genius" seem highly appropriate, but there's not necessarily a 1:1 correspondence between those traits and IQ scores. 

[Badger]

Yeah, I know in school a lot would depend on the subject.  Mathematical good.  History good.  English bad (though I admit my lack of focus and interest hurt me some still it wasn't an easy subject for me-though I was great in spelling).

 

Social Intelligence?  I'd probably score low on that.  I always felt several years behind my peers.  Partly due to shyness.  But, as a senior I associated more with freshmen than other seniors (had 2 senior friends, who in a lot of ways were also social pariahs like me).  I will say a lot of freshmen that I knew were either met through church or acquaintances of theirs.  In any case, I found when looking back, many nuances of socializing, I only learned 3-4 years late.  

[Cancer]

Taking a sour observation about "intelligence" as applied to studies of nonhuman species ... behaviors seem be labeled "intelligent" when they resemble traits that one likes in one's self.