re: #379 cenotaphium

This is a dangerous line of thinking. Their apparent intelligence has very little to do with how well they will score on an IQ test - even a legitimate one. This has always been the problem with IQ tests; essentially they measure how good you are at doing.. well, IQ tests. The only way they become useful is when they are normalized through intense testing and study, as the relative test scores then become the data point (this is why you can’t take an IQ score from one test and compare with another).

Maybe you knew this and I misread you, but it’s a common mistake people make regarding IQ tests. As a personal anecdote, I’ve seen people I’ve thought intelligent fail miserably, and vice versa.

No, I think IQ tests in general are unreliable because there’s no consistency from test to test. The methodology varies between tests, so it’s clear that you are being judged by the subjective standards of the test designers (whom I presume score very well on their own tests).

I think that most of what we perceive as “intelligence” is nothing more than disciplined thinking, which is learned process. Barring some actual mental defect, everyone is capable of it. The people who learned the “rules” early on are just presumed to be more intelligent by the people who don’t really understand that there are actually rules.