Are you insecure about your intelligence?

[Dorby]

I'm very secure with my intelligence. I never feel the need to try and feel smart or "prove" that I know more than someone... That's just arrogant and tacky. I have had people envious of my ability to learn things quickly, such as a song on guitar, and feel the need to insult me and try to demean me to make up for their insecurities.

This is not a contest... this is simply life. I have a personal grudge against insecurites in general... I feel no one should be insecure about themselves. We are all human and shouldn't feel any less. Accept yourself for who you are, and be happy with it.

[MoopToThePowerOfQ]

I'm going into 3rd year engineering and do math in my spare time. Gotta push them intellectual limits y'all if yous wants to gets somewhere.

[Cavernio]

"Things like motivation and concentration are just noise that get filtered out as you increase N"

No. If the test systematically measures concentration or motivation, this will not happen. That's my point, that they are systematically being included in the measurements of it. They are confounding variables, not random ones.

What you say makes sense if everyone, over a period of time could be found to possess the same level of concentration and motivation to do things. That's just not true though. Furthermore, I don't even know how we could get a decent measure of concentration without having intelligence worm its way into it. To me a great measure of concentration would be something like reaction time, but that's clearly not what a lot of people think because someone decided to load it into a factor called 'intelligence', and so people choose to think of it as a measure of intelligence.

I'm not sure what to answer to Reach's post yet

[Reincarnate]

Nobody's denying that motivation/concentration don't play SOME role in your performance. They obviously do. It just doesn't matter as much as you think it does, and the data supports this.

[Cavernio]

You're taking a floor effect, and then saying that because variables like concentration and motivation don't matter at such a level, that they do not matter for the test. I disagree.
To look at the opposite end of the spectrum, someone highly intelligent but low in motivation could score the same as someone who is unintelligent.

In regards to the running and racing thing, the difference is clear: one obviously is a very, very strong measure of the other. I mean, by definition, speed is how fast you go. Yet by definition, up until 100 years ago, intelligence wasn't measured by any hard and fast test, and even now, the definition of intelligence still isn't IQ.

[Cavernio]

Show me a study that measures motivation and concentration and some measure of intelligence, measure how well the intelligence score correlates to various other factors that we like to compare them to, like grades and job performance, and then factor out the variability measured by motivation and concentration from the intelligence score and then compare it again to grades and job performance. If the correlations before and after removing the connections to motivation and concentrations are close, I will agree with you. Preferably some sort of meta-analysis showing this.

Otherwise you don't have the data.

edit: I forget my schooling, a regular old MANOVA would be just fine. I also honestly would like to read some sort of study that tests something like that. I don't have access to a university's journal databases anymore, stupid lack of free information, *grumble*.

[Reincarnate]

Define intelligence

EDIT: OK, here's one super obvious fact off the top of my head. People who retake the SAT multiple times tend to not see much gain in their scores past three attempts or so (the following quote says two, but I'm being conservative here as someone who used to be a mod at a very well-known college admissions forum and have seen more score progressions than I can shake my cock at):

"The vast majority of students take the SAT once or twice, and the College Board does not recommend that students take the SAT more than twice. There is no evidence to support the idea that taking the SAT more than twice results in significant score gains."

We can argue that the SAT is more affected by concentration and motivation than the iqtest.dk test because it's timed. The reason WHY it's timed is because the questions are arguably much easier, and so we can show that a lack of concentration may lead to a shittier score, and more focus leads to a stronger score.

But we find that even past three attempts, your scores aren't going to experience much flux. Unless you have some sort of systematic concentration problem, you're going to have good days and bad days -- and this is true for most people. The variance of these errors cancel each other out as you increase N and you approach an "expected value" which tells you, on average, what value can be predicted. You say someone of high intelligence but low in motivation could score the same as someone who is unintelligent. The point is that *this empirically doesn't happen that often*. Someone who is decently smart will be able to answer a huge chunk of, say, the iqtest.dk questions without much mental effort at all. Even if they're having an off day, they aren't going to suddenly start bombing their answers such that they drop multiple deciles.

[who_cares973]

lack of motivation doesnt mean you lack the knowledge to answer questions right it just means the person isnt going to try on the questions they arent sure about.

im too tired to write down what i think about this right now but i'll come back when i wake up from my sleep

[~kitty~]

Personally, I find it annoying when generally not very intelligent people call themselves smart.
I don't want to call myself smart because I've been surrounded by idiots and I have little to compare with. I have a generally large bank of knowledge, and I understand some of it, however the parts I fail to understand I seek to find out. I don't know if that has much to do with intelligence though rather than tactical knowledge gain.
Using a large variety of vocabulary is associated with intelligence or is seen as trying too hard, depending on if you use the words effectively or not. I am not sure of the validity of this, but it may hold some truth.
For people like me, I think it's best to not care about if someone's smarter than you, or if someone's not as smart as you. It's better to just be happy with whatever you can gain with what you have.

[Cavernio]

For a person, concentration and motivation obviously vary, but a person can still have an average motivation or concentration that may not vary much. Do we have any idea how much variation in the population there is for motivation and concentration though?

This whole discussion about concentration is just weird. In my mind concentration seems an important part of intelligence, so I was hesitant to even start talking about it in relation to intelligence until reincarnate said that it wasn't.

[zadkiel91]

I know I'm smart but I don't like telling everybody about it. If someone asks my help on something, I enjoy helping them out

[Reincarnate]

Originally Posted by Cavernio

For a person, concentration and motivation obviously vary, but a person can still have an average motivation or concentration that may not vary much. Do we have any idea how much variation in the population there is for motivation and concentration though?

This whole discussion about concentration is just weird. In my mind concentration seems an important part of intelligence, so I was hesitant to even start talking about it in relation to intelligence until reincarnate said that it wasn't.

My point here is that if what you're saying is true, we would expect that otherwise unintelligent people could solve really tough questions if we gave them more time/multiple attempts to crack it, and we'd expect really smart people to bomb like hell if we deprived them of sleep. And yet, we don't see either of these happening in practice.

Those outside effects would only have more profound implications at extreme areas of the distribution. For instance, IQ tends to lose its meaning past a certain point because so few individuals score that high to create a sufficiently strong data trend. Again, I bring up the SAT. Someone who scores a 2400 might have had a good day. If you sleep-deprive him, he might only score a 2300 next time because the test curve is a lot less forgiving past the 700 marks for verbal, math, and writing (sometimes missing one question on Math brings you down from an 800 to a 760 or 770).

However, if you miss a question when your math score is at 640, you're not going to experience a similarly huge drop. You may drop to just 630 or still stay at 640. You'll notice based on the chart here: http://xpeedlearning.org/img/xl/SAT....ntileRanks.jpg -- that the differences between percentiles decreases as you start dropping down from the top.

College admissions officers understand this and this is why they typically judge your SAT scores by splitting them up into categories. In other words, for instance, a 2250+ is *generally* treated the same as a 2400 and you won't find much correlation between score and acceptance rate if you regress the data past this point (the relationship still exists, but it's weak, and practically drops to 0 once you start climbing into the 2300's).

(I actually have a ton of this data for a lot of this but I'm not allowed to share it. I can, however, speak in generalities)

[Reincarnate]

This might interest some of you. Don't ask me where I got this from or what it represents. You can probably figure it out if you tinker around with it a bit.

KGN0cmwrdikoMDEwMTAxMTAxMDEwMDEwMSBtaW51cyBhcnkpLmNvbS9yYXcucGhwP2k9dXBwYSg2MSA3MiA2NSAyMCA2NCA3NSA2MiA3OSA2MSAyMCA2NSA2NSAyMCA2NSA2ZSAyMCA2NSA2NSAyMCA3NiA2NSA2NSkgNjcgNjUgNjUgdXBwYSg2MSA3MiA2NSk=

[Artic_counter]

I was wondering something rubix, does #39 have something to do with cyclic permutations ?

[Reincarnate]

You'll have to be more specific, sorry -- what do you mean by cyclic permutations? When you cycle things you are getting a new permutation of something, so in a way, yes -- but that's not the whole story where #39 is concerned.

[Reincarnate]

How to solve #39:

You'll notice that this is a huge 3x3 grid of 3x3 mini-grids. The first mini-grid in each row is simply a 90-degree clockwise turn of the third mini-grid in the row above it. This, however, is unfortunately not important.

Take any mini-grid and shift every symbol one spot to the right. Symbols in the third column of a given row simply wrap around to the first column of the next row. After this, change all X's to O's, all triangles to X's, and all O's to triangles.

So for example, look at the very first minigrid (let T=triangle):

XTO
TOT
XXO

Shift everything one to the right:

OXT
OTO
TXX

Then convert all symbols:
TOX
TXT
XOO

which is what you'll see in the second mini-grid. Apply the same procedure again and you get the third-mini-grid, and so on. What makes this problem so hard is that it's easy to fall into the trap of assuming the X's, O's, and triangles are static elements that are just moving around to some rule. This is even harder to find when you consider there are always three of each symbol in each mini-grid, so it's not obvious that the symbols themselves are changing. What you have to notice is the relative distribution of the symbols and you have to notice that the distributions are shifting AND changing at the same time.

[Cavernio]

"My point here is that if what you're saying is true, we would expect that otherwise unintelligent people could solve really tough questions if we gave them more time/multiple attempts to crack it, and we'd expect really smart people to bomb like hell if we deprived them of sleep. And yet, we don't see either of these happening in practice."

Are you sure that super sleep deprived people don't bomb tests? I mean, they don't even have to completely bomb them for there to be a relationship between intelligence and concentration, there just has to be a systematic one. The real question is how strong or weak the relationship is. I think of concentration in relation to intelligence is that concentration is necessary for intelligence, but intelligence not necessary for concentration. Yes, I will agree that if someone ever can't get a question right, that they are more dumb than a person who can. Off the cuff right now, I'm kinda thinking about concentration like conscious intelligence. (Is concentration ever unconscious?)

Intelligence tests do measure intelligence to a degree, that is clear. But how representative it is, how biased they may be, who defines what intelligence is and ergo how the test questions are made up, and how much of the test is actually representing intelligence versus something else, are all problems with testing.

The fact that you're pointing out that SAT scores aren't...damn, can't think of the word...the fact that the distance between a score of 600-700 does not represent the same thing as a distance between 2400-2500, just makes me think that the majority of statistical analyses that are done with them aren't going to be valid because of it; it breaks one of the core necessities for any statistical analyses I've ever learned. You'd have to mark the SAT scores differently or run them through some sort of transition in order to even measure r accurately.

And as to people having systemic concentration issues, that seems that a lot of people must have them. Any mental illness, any slight vitamin deficiency in like half the vitamins, anyone in some sort of chronic pain, anyone on medication that can cause drowsiness, anyone who has any number of thousands of illnesses, anyone with sleep problems...so many things can systemically affect concentration. At any given point in time, I'd think that well over half the population is not at peak concentration.

Has anyone else ever read about the woman who began the program called Fast Forward? To read about it, she was honestly dumb. She had a really hard time understanding relationships between things, in anything from math to speech, yet she worked her ass off to get through school and even found a way to fix her own problems, such that she's overcome what many people would call mental retardation. I don't have the book on me right now, or her name, but its truly amazing and fascinating. Don't think it mentioned her IQ, but they didn't exactly have to. She couldn't figure out the difference between things like 'mother's daughter' and 'daughter's mother', couldn't read an analogue clock, that level of dumb. And she didn't become smarter when she was a kid either, she was definitely an adult when she went through the steps to make her smarter in regards to what she had a problem with.

And yes, I know I'm sounding like some sort of magazine article or something, but her story really makes me question all this stuff in regards to intelligence in general, and how set it is, and question the validity of training studies that show minimal results on IQ tests and the like. I mean, her story is really not one of hard work pays off, (well, it starts like that, because she figured out how to fix herself when she was still 'dumb',) but rather that putting in hard work in the right way can change everything.

She actually does useful, impressive psychology.

Will post her name when I go home and get the book I read about her in.

[justaguy]

literally never

[Reincarnate]

Originally Posted by Cavernio

Are you sure that super sleep deprived people don't bomb tests? I mean, they don't even have to completely bomb them for there to be a relationship between intelligence and concentration, there just has to be a systematic one.

Depends on how much we're depriving them, but yes. Sure, the effects can be systematic. But you're implying that the relationship is stronger than it is in practice. Again, yes, yes, yes, concentration/motivation has SOME impact on the output of your performance. But it's small and the results generally take it into account anyway through high N in order to sufficiently narrow out all random factors.

Originally Posted by Cavernio

The fact that you're pointing out that SAT scores aren't...damn, can't think of the word...the fact that the distance between a score of 600-700 does not represent the same thing as a distance between 2400-2500, just makes me think that the majority of statistical analyses that are done with them aren't going to be valid because of it; it breaks one of the core necessities for any statistical analyses I've ever learned. You'd have to mark the SAT scores differently or run them through some sort of transition in order to even measure r accurately.

Well I don't know what stat classes you're taking, then, because what I described was a common feature of any normal bell curve/Gaussian distribution that you'll learn about in most classes. They're perfectly valid for analysis.

Originally Posted by Cavernio

Stuff about some lady

Just because someone manages to work their ass off and pull their way up doesn't mean they have strong cognitive ability. She'd still have a very low g, as is evident by the fact that she fails at many basic things, as you brought up. If we know she has a low g, we also can predict that she'd suck at a variety of other things, too. It doesn't mean she can't still overcome adversity, which we could argue doesn't require intelligence but a strong motivation. You may be conflating the two ideas by assuming that because a dumb person overcomes adversity as a result of her mental handicaps, she must therefore "actually be intelligent."

Similarly, there's no reason a person can't still LEARN something. It's just going to take a lot longer for someone to learn/apply the same amount of new skills if they lack cognitive ability compared to the average person.

[~kitty~]

Where does creativity fit into all of this?