Just a friendly reminder that IQ is BS.
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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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.
correlation between high IQ results and frequency of taking IQ tests
Oh yeah, because like basically everything else, IQ testing can be a learned skill.
But again, that goes back to factors like education and free time and nutrition and stress, all of which have a bigger impact on your mental capacity than a native aptitude eugenists are looking for.
the general public misinterprets them far too often.
I mean, they don't recognize the Q part. What's the point of chasing outlayers when the median is what matters.
The person with the 100 IQ can be scrounging a subsistence living, pounding widgets on an assembly line, or crafting high art, entirely dependant on the social structure they're born into.
the median is what matters
Sure, but you need to be careful about what the median represents. It doesn't represent the median of all humans, just the humans that have taken the test, and it only reflects performance on the test. This can be useful, but it gets used for a lot of stuff it really shouldn't (e.g. comparing results from one region w/ another, when those regions have very different education systems and thus exposure to different sorts of problem solving).
The person with the 100 IQ
They could also be a professor or other highly educated person. It all depends on how familiar they are with the concepts covered by the test, how well they were feeling that day, how well the questions were worded, how much time they took, etc. There are a ton of variables, and your score on a test could vary quite wildly between takes.
It's just not a good general measure of much of anything. It can be helpful in a clinical setting, though, to diagnose things like neurological divergence and whatnot, but it isn't a particularly good test of "intelligence," whatever that's supposed to mean.
Its conception and first uses were tailored to have data backing up the concept poor people, disabled people, and black people were dumber, thereby justifying forced sterilisation and human rights abuses of those groups.
In fact, the Nazis used a modified version inspired by the american concept of IQ tests to justify their genocide of disabled people.
Well, that's just not true, but the creator was horrified when that's how it got used anyways.
True, Binet, the french psychologist who created the first test of this type was not a eugenicist.
But the first American to popularise the concept, was a radical eugenicist (racist, ableist etc.), Lewis Terman, and it’s his version of the IQ test that got popularised in the US.
And even today it's a bit problematic, because it doesn't measure what a lot of people assume it measures. Leave it to the professionals for the areas it's still useful for.
(And some reactionary intellectual circles still try to use it to justify “scientific” racism, to this day)
You need to have low IQ to believe IQ is real.
I feel like this is satire, right?
Edit: looked up the guy, can't find his post. If anyone can find anything about this being real, they'll be awarded some very real Lemmy silver!
This should be a link to LinkedIn post, but it is deleted along with Medium post. It was 112 not 86 if that makes it better. Or maybe 112 is second attempt after realizing what first result means.
I cannot post a screenshot, but you can see some cached info if you search for ″Ricardo Gabriel David IQ test″ in Bing (Bing shows an image for Medium article).
!lemmysilver
Good call using Bing cache! I can see the same post but with different numbers like you mention. So perhaps this is simply an altered image to make it more funny, instead of satire.
Old ass image. Theory is it was made by the company selling the iq tests to make people talk about it and take a test themselves
Sadly, probably not
I mean, that score supposedingly means you struggle to put together normal sentences... So I'd assume it's satire
86 is still way above an intellectual disability, that limit is set below 70.
An IQ of 86 is not THAT low, the percentile in the pic is right, about 1 in 6 people is below 86.
Oh goodness no, with an IQ of 86, most people wouldn't even peg you as surprisingly stupid, maybe a bit slow. This is still very much in the "slightly below average" column. The 70s are "below average" and only below that do you get into disability territory.
People overestimate the effect a not-even-20-points deviation has in real life. Just like people with an IQ of 114 are a just your average Janes and aren't generally geniuses, people with 86 are still your average Joes and generally not noticeable. 82,2% of all people are between 80 and 120. And you can't tell me that you actually think of every fifth to sixth person around you as exceptional (in either direction).
86 is not that noticeable, as others have pointed out. Also, there's a high chance this post was GPT-produced
Can you really be sure that he actually wrote something himself in 2025? Something that wasn't a prompt?
Exactly my thinking. Too verbose
You and I are just fools, thinking “this has gotta be a troll”, but deep down, we know it ain’t.
That distribution chart is fucky. It says that the IQ is 86, and that's 15th percentile, but the line at the bottom clearly shows that the number is a little under 70. So something is not right here, and I suspect it's because this is a shitpost.
not sure but that description reads like it was written by a LLM
Knowing LinkedIn, it's not unlikely that it was
Pfff, that's nothing. I can easily make it to the top 95% without even trying.
There has literally not been a test where I didn't score in the top 100%. I'm like seriously smart.
To be somewhat fair, that is a very confusing way to present a score worse than 50%.
Who are precisely the people we need to simplify things for.
I mean... He didn't even read the percentile number correctly. How do you get an off by one error reading a number
That's a great system, keeps everyone happy.
The concept of IQ tests is always under fire (for good and bad reasons) so showing results in this way might keep the people in the bottom 50% from getting mad.
How many people think IQ is scored out of 100?
It's a dead giveaway if they say they got a perfect score
Or over 200.
Well, they'd be perfectly average then, right? 😁
7 points higher than Forrest Gump. Probably on par with James Comer.
How the fuck does that graph even works?! Shows the very left of the graph, then says you're in the top? Doesn't make any sense. Edit : clearly I belong in the top 85% too. I guess I confused % and percentile!
It says top 85%. In a room with 100 people the 85th smartest person would be in the top 85% but they'd also be in the bottom 15%.
I am going to believe this is comedy gold.
85% of people have that IQ or higher. Maybe they do it this way so those that don't get it don't feel sad about the results?
i hate how IQ tests use both percentages and percentiles for the results
I just realised that was my mistake yeah -_-;
Top 85% could mean bottom 15% (+-1%)
Where is @Ken Cheng!
I love LinkedIn users like that because they make it so easy for smarter LinkedIn users to stand out! 🤣
Is this Texas?