IQ (moved subtopic)

SATs are definitely supposed to measure innate "aptitude," and IQ testing was originally purported to do the same. The GREs are there to test if you actually learned course material.

There are many executive functioning skills mixed in there that don't come with pattern-mapping skills.

IQ isn't only about pattern mapping, it strongly correlates with delayed gratification as well for example

You keep using the word "innate". I don't particularly care whether it's innate or learned, I just want to test it.

Edit: what I think you might mean is that someone who hasn't studied for it should still be able to do well, because it doesn't rely on having memorised specific information. Would that be an accurate characterisation?

such as? pro welfare people constantly decry the fact that many eligible people simply don't do the "very easy" (for the creators of the system) steps to access the free stuff, or mess up in the process.

lower IQ people register to vote less than higher IQ people (in the USA where such mechanism exists unlike in most of Europe where you are automatically a voter if adult and citizen)

I don't know how to best test for someone's ability to fill out forms, but I'm pretty sure it's not by "what comes next in this sequence of numbers: 1,4,9,16,?" type questions.

"best" not sure at all, but it's decent proxy for sure.

just reading numbers without having an headache correlates well enough.

and btw it's the ability to read the rules, understanding how many forms you have to fill and who to give them to and why and when

Basically, yes. If I use my intelligence-o-meter to scan someone's intelligence, the score shouldn't go up if I scan them multiple times. Yet IQ/SAT scores def improve when people retake the test. There's clearly another variable at play, which makes interpreting the results tricky.

tell me what else explains why there are 25m people in the USA eligible for Medicaid or CHIP who don't partake in those programs

https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brie...

if not taking very important free stuff that is given to you and your family isn't proof of stupidity, I don't know how else to use the word tbh

I'm sure. It's not. Not even close.

my point is the people struggling to complete the form will overwhelmingly be almost only low IQ people.

if, say, we tested people and directed help to them depending on the result of the test we could fix a lot of stuff.

and after we test we should write programs that IQ 70-75 people are able to access, using them as the focus group for fulfilment of procedures and so on.

A better test for that would be asking people if they know where to find information on what programs they are eligible for and how to apply for them. Some sort of basic civics stuff. I don't know why you're conflating that with IQ.

Delayed gratification you say, link.

because many of them struggle reading a paragraph and you already knew that if you knew their IQ

Low IQ correlates with low literacy, call the police. Using an IQ test to identify these people is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

He's saying what is being tested for, not what it correlates with. I don't think IQ tests gauge your desire for delayed gratification.

Sorry. I'll try to not get lost in the weeds with the analogy, but I assume it's okay to use poker analogies more broadly?

Why not, if they got better at whatever metric you are using to gauge their intelligence in the intervening period? You seem to want intelligence to be this mythical unadulterated measure, pure as the driven snow, chiseled in stone the day we are born and remaining untouched until the day we die. I would posit that such a measure does not exist, no matter how you attempt to define it. So, assuming we agree on that, the only thing we disagree on is what to call the thing we're actually measuring, and possibly how best to measure it.

I was joking of course, but there did seem to be an imminent danger of the conversation going off on a complete tangent about low pocket pairs vs. suited connectors or whatnot.

Purpose is very different from actuality. If nothing else, all IQ tests are tests, so if nothing else, people who spend more of their life time sitting quiet rooms deeply focused on a piece of paper asking them a bunch of theoretical and not directly-practicable questions are going to score better on them. So unless the less creative the administrators are in modes of testing, the more directly it's going to favor people who went to a lot of school, for example.

For another extreme example, if someone's illiterate, they're going to test as poorly someone with severe mental development issues on most (not all) tests. While I think it's reasonable to assume illiterate people would broadly have a lower general intelligence than literate people, it does not mean you need a caretaker to live a functional life like their test scores might suggest.

As I've mentioned before, how well you've eaten, how stressed/distracted you are (either that day or chronically due to environmental factors), and any other number of things that have nothing to do with how big and beautiful your brain is will (almost inevitably) affect almost any type of testing that can be easily devised and administered on a mass scale, across populations, etc.

For the reasons above, different tests for intelligence exist for different reasons, which will have different implications depending on their application.

Also, the basic mathematical fact of what an Intelligence Quotient score is in the first place is relative (to when the test was taken, your age, etc), so it is necessarily contextual information.

This isn't to say that psychometricians are bad at their job and IQ tests are useless. It is to say that if you use IQ tests to make arguments they weren't made to prove, you can draw very poor conclusions very easily.

Of course, none of this touches the question of whether the general intelligence theory is even valid...

Are you defining intelligence by what you know or have practiced?

I'm really trying my best to avoid defining "intelligence" at all, since it seems everyone has their own pet definition of it. I'm trying to focus on the more narrow topic of the efficacy and utility of IQ testing in its present form, its limitations, and how it could be improved in future. Hence my attempts to steer the discussion away from semantic arguments, fruitless as I know they will inevitably be.

However, if you were to ask me for my definition of intelligence, it would be something along the lines of "proficiency in analytical reasoning and critical thinking, the faculty for recognising common logical fallacies, and the ability and desire to arrive at conclusions through logic rather than emotion or superstition."

Language barriers, unstable housing situation leading to difficulties managing mail, personal organization skills (which probably correlates with income status but I don’t think would fall under most people’s understanding of general intelligence?), ease of access to information, amount of free time and lack of life stressors to put the time and attention necessary to documentation, ease of accessto lawyers and accountants in your peer group to help with documentation, complexities of employment status or other challenges producing necessary documentation, fear or lack in trust of the institutions (either for material reasons like citizenship status or an outstanding warrant for arrest or for less material reasons similar to the reasons for partisan non-response bias in political polling among different groups), etc.

This seems like an especially bad example, to be honest.

If x correlates very well with y, testing x is also testing y