Are you insecure about your intelligence?

[Cavernio]

Re: Are you insecure about your intelligence?

yes but the facility you had to gain them come from intelligence.

Which would make kids far more intelligent than any adult could ever be, yet I don't think most people define intelligence that way.

[Cavernio]

Re: Are you insecure about your intelligence?

Reliability to re-taking a test? Well, if they never learned the right answer in the first place, or how to get it, of course it's going to be similar.


I would say that I have to read those studies so I can pick them apart mercilessly (as I tend to do with any study I bother to read.) Have you ever 'trained' someone for psychometric tests? I have. Most people didn't give a shit about how well they did, (they were in it to boost their grade for their psyc class,) most people tried to get in and out of the study as fast as possible since it took like 2 friggin hours. Not that every study does this, but unless you have clear motivation for someone to learn something, I'm going to say training doesn't cut it. Especially since about the maximum motivation you could give someone would be to, say, pay them money for getting a higher score, once the study is done, they have no reason to retain the skills they had learned.

I personally think motivation is a huge factor in performance for, well, anything. And that includes intelligence testing, and most of the things you say it correlates with, can all be confounded by one's motivation to succeed. If we could figure out good measures of motivation, I strongly suspect the strength of all the general measures that we say point to intelligence would be weakened. However, I also don't think we have a good measure for motivation, and I think most people would agree to that. (But why should measuring motivation be any harder than measuring any other general idea of a person, like intelligence?)

I remember studies saying that the best predictor of college performance was the amount of sleep someone got, better than SAT's or highschool grades and IQ. You also point this out yourself, that the ability to perform well on tests, in general, correlates with itself quite nicely.

The army retains a bunch of old data from old IQ tests that were clearly based a lot on culture and language, which have since had them torn to shreds by many a researcher. Makes sense that people who score high on those perform well in the army, doesn't mean that it's actually measuring intelligence though.

Regardless of everything else though, the very fact that intelligence testing is not close to 100% in predicting anything, just shows how poor we are at measuring it.
I'm not saying that intelligence isn't important. You can either look at something and say 'it predicts it this well' or look at it and say 'this much variation is left up to other things.'

The essence of G is to try and be what you say it is. That does not mean it succeeds.

I don't think we can really do a debate like this justice without reams of scientific articles about the subject though.

[Reach]

Re: Are you insecure about your intelligence?

I don't think we can really do a debate like this justice without reams of scientific articles about the subject though.

Well, I posted an article with numerous citations in it. Much of what I talked about is cited in the paper.

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson...hygmatters.pdf

Obviously there are databases of research on this topic, but most of the points I'm trying to make here are covered there.

I personally think motivation is a huge factor in performance for, well, anything.

Of course. Some people are not motivated to try to do well on IQ tests, but that's why a professional assessment of your ability should be taken before ever making wide reaching claims about what you can and cannot do. Psychologists are trained to recognize non compliance, especially from youngsters, and that can obviously invalidate scores.

I remember studies saying that the best predictor of college performance was the amount of sleep someone got, better than SAT's or highschool grades and IQ. You also point this out yourself, that the ability to perform well on tests, in general, correlates with itself quite nicely.

I don't see how that could correlate at all, since people sleep different amounts naturally. Obviously getting a good nights sleep is important though; it's well documented that taking an IQ test, for example, when exhausted can decrease your score (though, it appears to have no effect in certain individuals).

With respect to tests; tests can test anything. The crux of g is that I can literally test you on ANY mental task in ANY format and it will have some correlation with your overall IQ.

The army retains a bunch of old data from old IQ tests that were clearly based a lot on culture and language, which have since had them torn to shreds by many a researcher. Makes sense that people who score high on those perform well in the army, doesn't mean that it's actually measuring intelligence though.

Not all sections of the test are based on language. Some of them are spatial and have shown little to no cultural bias. They're also heavily correlated with performance on language tests.

Maybe language tests aren't measuring 'intelligence' as you define it, but whatever they are measuring is a good predictor of your ability to learn and perform any number of tasks. If this isn't intelligence, than what is?

Regardless of everything else though, the very fact that intelligence testing is not close to 100% in predicting anything, just shows how poor we are at measuring it.

How so? No statistical test is ever going to predict anything 100% accurately. Not only is that mathematically impossible within a population, but it isn't the goal of psychometrics.

[Cavernio]

Re: Are you insecure about your intelligence?

You brushed off what I am beginning to see as the most important point I was making.

I wasn't talking merely about motivation and outright non-compliance on tests.

People say that g represents some sort of general intelligence. But it seems to me that it could represent some sort of general motivation among people of good enough intelligence to understand the nature of a test. Someone motivated tries harder at various things like school, their job, and other academic or psychometric tests...all of which supposedly represent intelligence.

g clearly cannot represent some sort of general intelligence anyways, because of the vastness of beings that can have some intelligence who cannot take any sort of test; animals, severly retarded humans, people who have never had any sort of education (well only some tests for those peopl.)

As to the amount of sleep relating to school grades, I will say that I never read any article about it, but I distinctly remember being told that by my first year psychology professors (in more than one class.) Secondly, just because you point out variables in why something doesn't correlate perfectly, doesn't mean that it a relationship doesn't exist. I'm actually kinda surprised you just didn't say something like intelligent people probably sleep more.

"Maybe language tests aren't measuring 'intelligence' as you define it, but whatever they are measuring is a good predictor of your ability to learn and perform any number of tasks. If this isn't intelligence, than what is? "

I'm going to pretend your last sentence is "If this isn't intelligence, than what is it?", because I can say it's motivation.

Lets be real here, if shonin has taught us anything, its that if I work hard, I can accomplish greatness!

My, well, disillusion, at psychometrics is not just in regards to intelligence testing, it's more generalized than that. However, measures of intelligence, and the very fact that people have thought up of the idea of g, means that people think very highly of it.

[Zageron]

Re: Are you insecure about your intelligence?

I'm finding the the questions on TRI52 that go like this > to be extremely difficult. The rest are simple, but these ones are stumping me.

Edit: Correction, nearly the entire second half of the test is extremely difficult. I'm nearly at 50, I wonder what I'll get... :s

Edit 2: O wtf the more you do right the farther it lets you go? This test could take forever. ;_;

[Artic_counter]

Re: Are you insecure about your intelligence?

I'm neither secure nor insecure. I mostly don't give a shit about it. Even though it wasn't always the case.

I've went through both phase. I've once been extremely secure about my intellect at one point because I was literary the best at everything I did (read childhood) but I've also been insecure when I realized that a lot of people were capable of reaching up to my talents with hard work. Especially in math. Which I now consider to be a passionate hobby I'm really interested into compared to something I used to determine how "intelligent" I was.

Nowadays, I just appreciate the fact that I'm a little bit gifted and I do not strive to increase my intellect for the sake of increasing my intellect. I will actually care about it only if I need to work hard on it in order to have fun with my life and achieve whatever goals that I want to pursue. Which is something I find to be a lot healthier.

Of course, that doesn't change the fact that I really enjoy learning things and that I'm curious as hell lol.

[Zageron]

Re: Are you insecure about your intelligence?

Well I ended up with 134. Some of those questions just stopped me in my tracks. Specifically the > ones.

Would really like to know how they are done eventually.

[Cavernio]

Re: Are you insecure about your intelligence?

K, thought about something beside motivation or intelligence g could be measuring: concentration.

Makes the most sense to me actually. It is very heavily tied into the concept of intelligence too, in that I think intelligence, by necessity, requires concentration. Children would still break this mold though, they seem to learn without having to try. Some learn faster because they do try.

Another thing to add to the list in regards to how tests fail to measure intelligence would be computers. Usually not thought of as highly intelligent, but they could ace some of those tests.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Are you insecure about your intelligence?

g is most certainly *not* mere concentration

[XCV]

Re: Are you insecure about your intelligence?

Children would still break this mold though, they seem to learn without having to try

This is very true. I didn't have to take notes or study for a test until I started taking AP classes two months ago. I just retained everything, either that or I already knew it.

Then again, my IQ is somewhere in the 150s, but that probably doesn't play a part.

[Cavernio]

Re: Are you insecure about your intelligence?

g is most certainly *not* mere concentration

It is certainly not mere intelligence either.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Are you insecure about your intelligence?

It's general cognitive ability

[Cavernio]

Re: Are you insecure about your intelligence?

That's the same thing, and its still just theory, and you're not even bothering to argue why anything I mentioned is invalid, which is important because if what I said is valid, the theory that g measures general cognitive ability is a bunch of BS. At the very least, if we could somehow validly factor in motivation and concentration into g's measurements, if my hypothesis is true, the strength of g would be reduced. The strongest case would be for g to become an utterly useless measure of general cognitive ability.

I mean, think about an example of it. For instance, why would you ever consider something like reaction time to be a representation of general cognitive ability? The fact that it would ever be included in a measure of g seems to be that it loads nicely into it. And the fact that it does makes people think 'oh, reaction time is a good measure of general cognitive ability', using circular reasoning to validate it instead of thinking, 'oh, that's odd, why would something as simple and unintelligent as reaction time be loading into a measure of general cognitive ability?'

That's the funny thing with, well, any measures of validity for any psychometric test; its generally a giant circular path that is set up to validate itself. Measures of validity can only be known to truly be valid if they show that the test isn't valid.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Are you insecure about your intelligence?

Because intelligence and concentration are completely different things. It doesn't matter how "hard" an average intellect concentrates on some difficult problem. If they can't solve it, they can't solve it. It's just something you need to account for in assessing how a question was answered. If a high-g person doesn't concentrate at all and bombs a bunch of questions he would have gotten right had he focused, that doesn't mean he's low g. It means his results are invalid.

It's like trying to argue that a 120 MPH-capable car isn't actually fast because you test drive it and never take it above 60 MPH. It's a test error that simply needs correction for the sake of measuring the capability of the thing you're trying to test.

You can call it whatever you want -- I mean any set of positively-correlated variables will necessarily have a factor that explains most of the variance when you perform component analysis. It just so happens that when it comes to intelligence metrics, we slap "g" to the high-variance-explaining element. That element gives a statistical predictive power. If you know something about g, you can estimate what results you'll get on a variety of other metrics.

So like it or not, there are statistical strengths when it comes to g, so I've always found little sense in the "does g exist?" argument. It can predict and correlate to many things, and so in this sense -- yes, it exists. There are simple tests (elementary cognitive tests) that strongly correlate with g, so again, if you know something about the ECT performance, you'll know something about g, and in turn you'll know something about how you'd perform at a great deal of other tasks. A lot of this data is well-supported.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Are you insecure about your intelligence?

"I mean, think about an example of it. For instance, why would you ever consider something like reaction time to be a representation of general cognitive ability?"

Because less reaction time on a simple cognitive test means you spent less time thinking about it.

From the wiki:

Elementary cognitive tasks (ECTs) also correlate strongly with g. ECTs are, as the name suggests, simple tasks that apparently require very little intelligence, but still correlate strongly with more exhaustive intelligence tests. Determining whether a light is red or blue and determining whether there are four or five squares drawn on a computer screen are two examples of ECTs. The answers to such questions are usually provided by quickly pressing buttons. Often, in addition to buttons for the two options provided, a third button is held down from the start of the test. When the stimulus is given to the subject, he removes his hand from the starting button to the button of the correct answer. This allows the examiner to determine how much time was spent thinking about the answer to the question (reaction time, usually measured in small fractions of second), and how much time was spent on physical hand movement to the correct button (movement time). Reaction time correlates strongly with g, while movement time correlates less strongly.[10] ECT testing has allowed quantitative examination of hypotheses concerning test bias, subject motivation, and group differences. By virtue of their simplicity, ECTs provide a link between classical IQ testing and biological inquiries such as fMRI studies.