This short and well made little video says much of what I wanted to say about IQ, and it does it well, with graphics. IQ scores are a test score, put through a formula. That's it. There are many different tests, that test a couple aspects of intelligence, on one particular day. But these scores have been amplified over time in importance, so people think an IQ score means far more that it really does. At the end, this video turns into an ad for Wix websites, but I'm OK with that, it's a great overview at why IQ scores aren't really as important as so many people make them out to be.
As most of you probably know, I.Q. stands for "intelligence quotient." Your IQ score is supposed to be a measure of your "intelligence." So that's a good place to start. There is no consensus agreement on what "intelligence" is. There are all kinds of ideas, from many thinkers and people who've studied human thinking, intelligence, and psychology. So the first problem with the idea of an IQ score is that the top people in the field can't agree on what intelligence means. How do you measure something that can't be clearly defined? That's a good question.
What we now call IQ tests got their start in 1883, when English statistician Francis Galton made the first attempt at a standardized intelligence test. In 1905, Alfred Binet, Victor Henri, and Theodore Simon came out with a standardized test aimed at finding low intelligence children who should be taken out of school and sent to asylums to live. In 1910, an American Henry Goddard, made a translation in 1910. German psychologist William Stern coined the term "intelligence quotient" in 1912. Then American psychologist Lewis Terman, of Stanford University came out with a revised version, called the Stanford-Binet test, which became the most widely used "IQ test," for much of the 20th century. But it was far from the only test. These days, the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) is the most common now, but there are several other "official" IQ test being used. You can find these facts, and much more in the Wikipedia article on "Intelligence Quotient." All those IQ tests you see on the internet, those are not legit IQ tests, just clickbait for geeks.
The Stanford-Binet test went into widespread use in the United States during World War I (1914-1918). The test was used to find soldiers of higher intelligence who would possible officer candidates. It was very likely also used to weed out soldiers who just weren't considered smart enough to be soldiers at. To this day, the U.S. military can not enlist anyone with an IQ score below 83. The general IQ level considered to be "mental retardation" is 80. So the U.S. military did a lot of the early work on using IQ tests to assess and categorize large groups of people.
In those days, the IQ score would find your "mental age,"the age that you were as smart as, basically. If you took the test at age 11, but you scored equal to a 17-year-old, then your score would reflect that you had the thinking capacity of a 17-year-old. This is also why a few child prodigies scored 250-300 IQ scores, scores impossible for an adult.
After the 1994 book, The Bell Curve, IQ tests have been divided along the Bell Curve. So the median score is 100, and about 68% of people must fall within 1 standard deviation (15 points) in either direction, of a 100 score. So for the last 20-25 years, IQ scores have been judged on a curve, and roughly 2/3 of people must score from 85 to 115. Certain percentages fall above and below those levels, as well. Another aspect that I kept seeing while doing a bit a research, is that the IQ system doesn't work well on the very high, and very low parts of the scoring range. The most intelligent people commenting about IQ scores say we shouldn't take scores above 160, or below about 60, very seriously. The test isn't just very accurate in those ranges.
Here's where we get into more issues. To set the median score at 100, then you have to group all the scores together, which appears to be judged on all the people who took the test that year, or more likely, the year before. I haven't found a good explanation of just how this is done. So your IQ score is judged according to the other people who took the test that year (or the year before), not everyone who's ever taken the test. That means your IQ score can not be accurately compared to scores from people who took the test in a different year. Those would be apples and oranges comparisons. One article I read says that that same is true of countries, so a person in the U.S. is grouped with other people in the U.S. that year, and people in India for example, are judged against other people taking the test in India that year.
Your IQ score is not a one and done thing. You could score a fairly different IQ score on a different IQ test, or in a different year, or in a different country. Very simply, most IQ scores are not accurately comparable with each other, to start with.
In addition to that, much of the initial idea of finding IQ scores was created by people who believed in eugenics. That's the idea that some groups of people, and some races are inherently superior to others, and believers in eugenics (like NAZI leadership in the1930's-1940's) are generally trying to "improve" the human race, often by eliminating the groups believed to be substandard. So in the U.S., black people (largely uneducated in the late 1800's and early 1900's), as well as impoverished due to systemic racial suppression, generally scored lower in the early years. White eugenicists saw this as "proof" that white people were superior. Poor whites also tended to score low. Many wealthy whites, including some that were involved with inventing these tests, believed that intelligence was hereditary, that certain families were just more intelligent than others. So from its very start, IQ tests have been used to reinforce systemic racism, and amplify prejudice against other minority groups. As these concepts have been studied in more detail over the decades, none of these ideas have held up. Heredity has very little effect on intelligence, socioeconomic status means much more. Groups of people who are well fed, and educated as a kids, are likely to score higher on an IQ test.
Another major flaw of IQ tests is found in what is called the Flynn Effect. Over the 100 years since IQ tests began to be widely used, average IQ scores have gone up an average of about 3 points per decade. This is believed to be mostly because fewer people are in abject poverty than 100 years ago, so people generally are better fed, and got more basic and higher education as the 20th century and early 21 century progressed. So if you feed people and send them to school as kids, they get smarter, generally speaking, on IQ tests. Imagine that.
One other trend I noticed in doing the basic research for this post is that the people who tend to talk about IQ the most, and see that score as really important, are almost always highly racial, or prejudiced against one group or another. The people right now, in today's world, who spend a lot of time talking about IQ scores, often still believe in white superiority, or want to use lower IQ scores to persecute one group or another.
So IQ scores do test certain cognitive problem solving abilities, which are good to have in general. The scores have some value in that respect. But peoples IQ scores over a period of time, from different countries, different years, different ages, and taken on several different tests, ARE NOT really comparable to each other. Yes, someone who scored a 135 IQ score on a legit test is better at cognitive problem solving than someone who scored a 103. But that's about all you can say. The 135 person isn't necessarily twice as smart, though the score is more than two standard deviations higher.
Another thing still believed by many people, is that IQ scores predict financial success or achievement in life. Yes, people with 130 IQ's are much more likely to get a college degree, than someone with a 95 IQ score. But there are so many other forms and types of intelligence that play into "success" in life. A person may have an mediocre IQ score, but be good with people, and make a great salesperson, or maybe a great manager of people.
A genius may be exceptional at math, but doesn't understand how to change the oil in their car. I have a higher than average IQ score, but suck at fixing mechanical things that people with much lower scores can do practically blindfolded. We probably all knew a stoner kid in junior high or high school who got C's and D's on tests, but had memorized the stats of nearly every pro baseball or football player. Your IQ doesn't mean you have personal drive, are a self-motivator, can run a business, be a good parent, a good employee, or can do highly creative work like art or writing. One correlation that does exist (at a small level) is that kids that took music lessons as kids tend to have somewhat higher IQ's. So bring back music in schools!
The whole idea of IQ scores started to prove certain groups of "well born" people are inherently smarter than other groups. Over 100 years, those ideas haven't held up. In the "Nature versus Nurture" argument over intelligence, "nurture" (environmental influences) make so much difference, that no serious case can be made for intelligence being hereditary.
By and large, people raised with enough to eat and a good basic education can become highly intelligent. If your family prizes intelligence, then you're more likely to wind up above average, generally speaking. And over all, it's a bit better to have problem solving and good cognitive abilities in life. But it's probably much more important to be motivated and hardworking, when it comes to traditional standards of "success" in life.
Why am I writing this post on a blog that I retired about 10 months ago? Because the whole concept of IQ seems to have had an incredibly negative effect on my own life. Also, this blog has 699 posts, and making it an even 700 makes sense.
In the late 1970's, in 7th grade (maybe 8th), at Willard Junior High School, in Willard Ohio, I scored 132 on an IQ test. I was bummed. Since I sucked at sports and everything cool in junior high, I wanted to make it to "genius" level on the IQ test, which I thought was 145, then. For what it's worth, I didn't finish the test, I completed about 5 out of 7 pages, because I worked really slow as a kid. I also got my braces tightened that morning, before the test, which meant I was in mild pain all day. So that didn't help. I thought a 132 IQ put me in about the 10th or 15th percentile, and out of range of MENSA, the society for people in the top 2% of IQ scores. A couple years ago, I actually looked it up, and that 132 score put me in about the top 2% to 3% of IQ scores.
I went through the next 40 years of my life not thinking much at all about my IQ score, which was 132, as far as I knew. But in 2001, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, things began to get weird in my life. About 3 weeks after 9/11, my bank account got shut down or no apparent reason, and the manager of the bank seemed to be physically afraid of me. It seemed someone had told her something really bad about me. That just seemed weird at the time.
In the months after, I began to get people who seemed to be plain clothes cops, or undercover federal agents, questioning me, every 2-4 weeks. In March of 2000, I was put under surveillance for about 2 weeks, because of an incident involving a taxi driver I knew. So I had experience with undercover officers and agents. In 2002, they started showing up again. Ultimately, I got investigated for every kind of crime. I was questioned about drug use and dealing, sexual perversion, theft, getting prostitutes for taxi passengers, and even terrorism. It was nuts. I'm basically really boring, and don't so any of that stuff. But the investigations, and other weird stuff, kept happening.
I also had trouble finding good jobs, and there just seemed to be some great deal of outside pressure on my life. Back then, I thought I had been flagged as a "suspicious person" after 9/11, because I talked about conspiracy theories a lot back then. Conspiracy theories then were much different than now, they were basically "New World Order" stuff, which is now out in the open, the Globalists' agenda. As I became a taxi driver again in 2003, the undercover types kept showing up to ask me weird questions, time after time. I kept a rough count of the undercover-type people in my life until I hit 600 of them. That was in about 2006, I think. There have been at least that many since. Once I became fully homeless in 2007 (after having lived in my cab for most of the previous 4 years), I got a huge amount of harassment from uniform cops as well, primarily in Orange County, California.
In 2008, while homeless, at the Newport Transportation Center bus stop, an undercover who'd been hanging around, told me that "every homeless person with a high IQ was a potential terrorist suspect." "Great," I thought, like being homeless wasn't lame enough. But at the time, I thought there were millions of Americans with a 130+ IQ, how could millions of Americans be suspect? The whole thing seemed ridiculous. I literally I got so much pressure put on me in 2007-2008, that I just fought to simply survive, day by day, from late 2001 to late 2008. Any level of actual "success" was impossible. Survival against whatever was happening, was the best I could manage.
I could not find any viable job, or get any kind of money making gig going, while homeless in 2007-2008. They even put undercover cops where I panhandled, after a while. So I accepted my family's offer to go stay in North Carolina for a while. I grew up in Ohio, but my parents and sister's family wound up in central North Carolina years later. Moving to NC was the single biggest mistake I made in my adult life.
When I got to North Carolina, in November of 2008, I couldn't find any job. I lived in the spare bedroom of my parents' tiny apartment, and my life hit its worst situation in my adult life. I had no one to talk to, I was an intelligent, creative, entrepreneurial-minded person in North Carolina. The culture there is anti-intellectual, anti-creative, and anti-entrepreneurial. I'd spent my adult life in, and around, action sports world, and that world didn't exist in NC. I went into a deep, nearly suicidal depression, as soon as I got to North Carolina, and struggled with that depression until I escaped NC in 2018.
I left my parents' apartment, and lived in a homeless shelter in Winston-Salem, in 2009. The first week in the shelter, three different local snitches (as informants are called there), followed me around all day. All three, part way through the day, asked out of nowhere, "I wonder what it would be like to have a 170 to 180 IQ?" All three times, I answered, "Why the fuck are you asking me?" I asked the third snitch why he was the third one to ask me about high IQ scores. He said a counselor at the homeless shelter told him to hang out with me, and ask about my IQ score. Since I have a 132 IQ score, as far as I know, that didn't make sense. He said, the cops probably were the ones who told the counselor that I had a really high IQ score.
While in NC, the harassment by uniform cops stopped, and I would occasionally have some random person ask me about world events. But it was just a living hell for me. I couldn't get ANY job, even a cashier or restaurant job. I got hired as a taxi driver from 2011-2012, barely made $200 a week, on a good week, and lived in my taxi for a year. I quit after my dad had a stroke, and realized he was dying.
After an arrest, and three days in county jail for 2nd degree trespassing in 2017 ( I literally got arrested for buying donuts), I left North Carolina, escaped, in August 2018. I landed in Richmond, Virginia, a city I'd never been to. I just had enough money to take a Greyhound to Richmond, from NC. It was totally random.
About a month after I got there, I heard uniformed police officers talking right outside the little porch where I slept at night. One was asking another why they had to keep an eye on me, since I wasn't doing drinking, doing drugs, or any other shady stuff. The second cop said the chief had been told that I had the single highest IQ score in the United States. Night after night, when I got to my little sleeping spot, two or three police cars would roll by me, and park behind the building. Since there was a wall across from my spot, I could hear their conversations, 20-30 feet away, just around the corner. Night after night, one cop would tell the new guy, that I had the highest "legitimately tested IQ score in the U.S.," and they were told to not talk to me, not ticket me, not arrest me. They simply had to keep an eye on me. It took several days to actually realize it was me that they were talking about. The whole scenario was absurd. After a few days, I heard the IQ score, they were told I had a 198 IQ score. Then a few days later, a higher level officer said, "He actually scored a 216, but today that would be equivalent to a 198 score." For reference, Walter O'Brien, the real guy that the Scorpion TV show was based on, claims to have scored 194 on an IQ test at age 9. But he couldn't back that score up with paperwork, which makes sense. Not too many 9-year-olds keep good records.
After a couple weeks of the police talking about me near where I slept homeless, word had got around, and they talked about other stuff. But I started getting woke up there in the early morning, hearing 2 or 3 people walking close in the parking lot. I'd hear one person tell another, "That homeless guy over there has the highest IQ score in the country." This happened every two to four nights, from late September 2018, into December 2018. Yes, I know how crazy this shit sounds. But it happened. The whole scenario is so ridiculous, I was panhandling to eat at McDonald's, and people were coming out to lok at me at night, talking about this absurd IQ score.
I didn't remember taking another IQ test, except in 7th (8th?) grade, in Ohio. It finally occurred to me that I took a whole bunch of tests when I joined the Marine Corps reserves in late 1984, early 1985. I was in the delayed entry program, and ultimately got dropped, and never went to boot camp. The weird thing I remembered about that was that my recruiters told me the CMC made the call on my case. I didn't know what a CMC was, and the recruiter said, "Commandant Marine Corps." I remembered thinking, "Why would the head guy in the Marines look at the file of a pretty normal 18-year-old kid form Idaho?" That never made sense to me.
So one of two things is true. Either I have been fighting some weird force behind the scenes, struggling to survive, for about 19 1/2 years now. Or I'm completely delusional. Hey, I was a taxi driver, I am kind of crazy, no sane person would do that job. Maybe I am completely delusional. But all this weird shit happened, and it's still happening. I don't drink any alcohol, and haven't for years. I don't do drugs, legal or illegal. I 'm smart, and I'm a hard worker. Yet I haven't been able to find ANY good paying job for 20 years. I've lost all my teeth, they've literally broken off, piece by piece, in the last ten years. I struggle to survive every day. And the only explanation is this crazy story I've heard, 2nd hand, that I have "the highest legitimately tested IQ score in the United States." Seriously, that DOE NOT seem possible to me. Look at all the smart people at Google, and other tech companies. I do not know what's really going on.
My best educated guess, is that some group of powerful people on the East Coast started a program to get high IQ people from California to move to the east, shortly after 9/11 happened. This group, is a group that believes IQ scores are very important (remember what I said about how unreliable high IQ scores are), and this group can get federal agents, local cops, and people in other jobs (like my bank in 2001) to do things to make my life hell.
That's the best I can explain the last 20 years of my life. I don't know what the truth is. I've been homeless, in one form or another, for over 12 years, and fully living on the streets for 4 1/2 years, total. I can't live a whole lot longer like this. I doubt I'll ever know what this is all about. I've never been told to my face that my IQ is higher than 132. But if I did score higher on the Marine Corps test, those results could be classified, I guess.
I don't know why all this happened, but it did happened. And I'll just keep plugging along, day after day, trying to survive on the streets of Southern California. That's my story...
I have two blogs going right now:
Crazy California- This blog's about weird, cool, funny, historic, and interesting locations in California.
WPOS Kreative Ideas- This blog's about creativity, writing, art, blogging, and promoting creative work.
