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I just took another batch of IQ tests for some poor suffering undergrads and felt that they were hilariously swingy.
I've always scored around 130; but one or two questions can drop your right out of/into that bracket , and the pattern recognition questions are easy to get wrong through test format. Eg, in this test there was a sequence of numbers displayed such that the question number looked like it was part of the sequence. I only noticed because it made the sequence all fucky.
This ontop of the other (crapyer) test where you basically play word association half the time, the whole enterprise of IQ testing fills me with doubt. I have no doubt I am "intelligent" enough to be somewhere near where I test on the bell curve, but 97th percentile feels way too high to me. I feel like a better test would be to present my with a piece of broken machinery I've never seen before and timing me while I try to fix it, only that's kinda hard to feed into numpy for pretty graphs.
Are the IQ tests used for actual funded trials different than what is used by starving students, are all of them shakey as hell buzzfeed affairs, or am I just biased against them for some reason?
Were they IQ tests, or were they just researching cognition and making sloppy estimates? An actual IQ test is standardized and normed, and administered by professionals (not, generally, undergrads).
In my experience, it is often incredibly difficult for smart people to truly grasp how stupid most people are. This is an extremely pesky fact because it's almost impossible to discuss without sounding hopelessly pretentious, but the fact remains--a good portion of American college students, who statistically represent the "best and brightest" ~40% of their generation, cannot follow or construct a formal argument without extensive coaching.
And I mean this in the most basic, technical sense of identifying premises and relating them to conclusions. For example, I once made a presentation about LSAT success to a room of undergraduates aiming for law school. I grabbed some sample questions from the LSAC website, that I figured would be easy enough to serve as a clear example of "what to expect" without scaring the audience too badly. In an audience of about 20 upperclassmen, there was one student (a physics major) who was able to answer the questions. Everyone else was totally mystified. For reference, here is a recent LSAC sample question:
Now, the LSAT is not an IQ test, but the point is that I work with university students all the time, and I am actively aware of things like how many struggle to pass the logic classes, algebra classes, etc. But even then I constantly find myself overestimating their ability to just engage in basic reasoning tasks. And no, I'm not an ivy league professor, I'm not teaching our nation's elite, but estimating from SAT ranges most of my students are generally within the 110-130 IQ range. With a bit of coaching and regular study, they can be trained to do things like pass an algebra class, though most will forget what they've learned within a decade or two, especially if they don't put it to use in their professions.
In I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, Scott Alexander writes a bit about the strength of "filter bubbles" that separate the "red tribe" from the "blue tribe." In my experience, there are also filter bubbles that separate people by IQ. I have red-tribe friends running a wide range of apparent intelligence levels. I also have many blue-tribe friends, but all of them are either lawyers or college professors or similar. Low-IQ blue tribers might as well not exist, as far as my social experiences go. I'm sure they do exist--I am reminded of their existence any time I accidentally read reddit without logging in!
If you're testing in the 97th percentile I can't imagine why you'd feel biased against IQ tests, which seem to be telling you something most people want to hear: that you're really special! This may be muted because you don't feel special (possibly as a result of IQ filter bubbles), or because the way in which you are special doesn't amount to much if it isn't paired with some mixture of conscientiousness and luck. But finally it is probably important to remember that, as a statistical measure, IQ is of much greater use when discussing populations than when discussing individuals. Yes, knowing an individual's professionally-established IQ probably gives you some information about them, but IQ ranges in professions are nevertheless quite broad.
TBQH, red tribers don’t segregated themselves by IQ to nearly the same extent as blue tribers.
This sounds intuitively true to me, but I've never explicitly noticed this before. Do you know of a study/source measuring this, or is just obvious anecdotal trends? And why do think it is this way? Is it just that the Blue Tribe places intelligence on a pedestal and so care about it more when selecting friends and relationships, while Red Tribers are more down to earth? Is it because of Blue Tribers congregating in universities and cities and that somehow drives this segregation, while Red Tribers are more likely to stay in their hometown and mingle with everyone else who lives there?
It’s anecdotal trends, but I think it’s driven by education level segregation in the blue tribe more than anything about IQ per se.
In large part red tribe hobbies are things that appeal to people from across the IQ/class/education spectrum(hunting, football, political conspiracy theories, motorcycles, barbecue, guns- these all seem to have fairly equal appeal to smart and dumb, rich and poor, illiterate and learned alike, whereas blue tribe hobbies usually don’t.) Additionally the economic niches red tribers fill tend to put them in touch with both white and blue collar workers while blue tribers are pretty siloed into white collar or service work. Finally red tribers are just more likely to not go to college even when they’re smart, so bubbles based on education are both less likely to form(conservative churches and bars are both probably less segregated by education status than liberal examples of either) and less segregating by IQ when they do form.
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