me_irl

One could say he scored so high, it overflowed and wrapped around.

IQ tests, as I recall, are generally pretty decent at their originally intended purpose of predicting performance in the mainstream school system (at least up through high school, not sure about college), because the skills and knowledge it measures strongly overlaps with the skills and knowledge that match well with the current schooling system.

People have subsequently attempted to take this extremely limited and borderline circular usage (Do well on your IQ test? Do well in school. Do well in school? Do well on your IQ test) to be broadly meaningful, which is deeply flawed in a number of ways. And now, of course, there's attempts to update IQ to reflect a broader set of skills, which is sort of a step in the right direction but still fundamentally flawed in its attempt to reduce an incredibly broad set of different skills and areas of knowledge into a single number that you can rank on a scoreboard against others' like that's remotely meaningful.

And of course, by skills, I mean not just the things it's supposed to measure like math proficiency, vocabulary, etc., but also skills implicit to the nature of the test like focus, auditory and visual processing, ability to actually provide a definition for words vs. knowing how to use them but not knowing how to rattle off dictionary-style definitions, etc., all of which are also skills that are advantageous in our education system as it is currently structured but which aren't really a measure of other areas of intelligence.

Sadly, we as a society, at least in the Anglosphere that I'm familiar with, have a bad habit of prioritizing measurements that give us easy numbers to work with but don't really reflect reality that well over more complicated methods of assessment that might be more difficult to work with but actually work better.

nothing meaningful should be done to you, good or bad, just because of your iq

rougher than asphalt

I dislike organizational psychologists. The whole field. Every time a problematic hr department does something problematic using 'researched methods', the researchers all cry foul and say 'that's not how you're supposed to implement <policy/test>!' But do you not see your own role in legitimizing this behavior? All the research into how to run a happier bee colony is going to be used to justify mistreatment and discrimination by bad actors. Every test and every policy can be maligned, and providing citations just makes that easier. The research field is itself a tool for maintaining capital.

This is literally illegal where I live. There's a few exceptions like airline pilot, police or firefighter, but besides that it's considered discrimination.

the one I’m most familiar with on the commercial market is by wonderlic

This test says I'm going to be a stellar quarterback.

Selection is hard

It's not that hard. People in your field just make up a bunch of shit that over complicates it and gets in the way to justify their existence. Anyone halfway decent at hiring can interview a candidate and have a decent idea of if they're a good fit or not.

I took a “personality” test in 2007 for my first job (union btw). Some pretty obvious basic questions that I imagine only a selfish sociopath would fail but maybe that helped filter at the time.

American (CA) engineer here, I had to take one of these for a job I ended up getting in 2012. It was for a big company too! They might argue that cognitive ability is directly related to engineering.

I actually do have a cognitive disability, ADHD. But I'm like a one-legged stripper... It might seem counterintuitive, but just watch me dance for a minute and then it will make sense.

I don't know they still find ways to sneak them in. I took a "logic" test as part of an application recently for a job with the government. The questions weren't related to anything I would be doing. It definitely felt l like they were trying to suss out intelligence.

Canonical's hiring process is wild. The number of stages is a deal breaker in itself, but the bizarre questions and the tests you mentioned don't do them any favors either.

I lost interest in the first stage with them asking for an essay about things like what kind of student I was in high school. The full email was massive.

I think theirs is the only company I've seen ask for a GPA on the initial application. I've been out of school so long I don't even remember, nor did I particularly care since the knowledge was the actual point.

Yes, I went through this too, dumbest interview process ever but it had the positive result to make me look into how dumb a company canonical is and start using debian rather than Ubuntu. I call it a hard fought win

LLMs are good for something: wasting the time of people who are wasting your time.