> The way human IQ testing developed is that researchers noticed people who excel in one cognitive task tend to do well in others

My son took an IQ test and it wouldn't score him because he breaks this assumption. He was getting 98% in some tasks and 2% in others. The psychologist giving him the test said it was unlikely enough pattern that they couldn't get an IQ result for him. He's been diagnosed with non-verbal learning disability, and this is apparently common for nvld folks.

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Retric 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

IMO g is purely an abstraction. As long as the rate you learn most things is within a reasonable bound spending more or less time learning/perfecting X impacts the time you spend on Y, resulting in people being generally more or less proficient in a huge range of common cognitive skills. Thus, testing those general skills is normally a proxy for a wide range of things.

LD breaks IQ because it results in noticeably uneven skill acquisition in even foundational skills. Meanwhile increasing levels of specialization reward being abnormally good at a very narrow sets of skills making IQ less significant. The #1 rock climber in the world gets sponsors, the 100th gets a hobby.

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WanderPanda 3 days ago | parent [-]

For me it all made sense when I heard that IQ/g-factor basically vanishes in the absence of time pressure (heard if from Richard Haier on Lex).

For a very narrow range of professions, like ATCs, time is absolutely critical but for most it does not really matter that much. Especially in many STEM fields. I think people in a broad IQ range can build abstractions and acquire intuitions about pretty complex matter. From this view-point ability to concentrate for long times, curiosity etc. seem more important than "raw-compute".

"if you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you’re gonna have a bad time" - Ilya

Timeless statement imo, even in the absence of AI

	▲	Jensson 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> For me it all made sense when I heard that IQ/g-factor basically vanishes in the absence of time pressure (heard if from Richard Haier on Lex). That cannot be true as there are valid IQ tests that doesn't have a time component, and people don't all score the same on those. He must have meant something different than you think. For example Raven's matrices was originally an untimed test, how can that be if there is no G-factor in untimed tests?

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moritonal 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just to add an anecdote, as of 15 years ago I had similar scores and was diagnosed with dyslexia.

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technothrasher 3 days ago | parent [-]

My son struggled quite a bit learning to read. He was very slow to do so, and it frustrated him quite a lot. But interestingly, once he did get it, he became a voracious reader, and he's never since scored below 95th percentile on reading tests. So his developmental dyslexia did not carry over into general dyslexia.

One of the interesting things about nvld, at least in his case, is that you would never know he had a learning disability by talking to him. He comes across as a smart, mature, knowledgeable young man. Mostly because this is what he actually is. But when he does struggle with something, it is often interpreted as him not trying or being lazy.

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moritonal 3 days ago | parent [-]

To add a bit more, I didn't really read until later, around 8, but then read at a fairly quick and passionate amount for my age. People thought I'd dodged my family curse but later around 10 it was shown I was quite behind at school. My dyslexia was described as "a defect in one aspect of intelligence", which for most kids is reading comprehension, but for me it showed in a lack of decent short term memory. As you say, learning disabilities are interesting issues to deal with, but I'm sure your son will do great with support like you around him.

	▲	technothrasher 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you for the kind word. He is doing great, and in fact we're dropping him off to begin his college career this Thursday. It's always interesting to hear from people with different cognitive and neurological profiles. It;s fascinating how the brain works similarly and differently with individual people. I can sympathize with your memory issues. I've always had a terrible working memory. It makes arithmetic and spelling difficult, as I cannot keep the letters and numbers in my head long enough.

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whatshisface 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A rule whose exceptions are one in a hundred fails for three million Americans.

	▲	alistairSH 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		And works for 290 million plus…

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marstall 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

my son had similar results! we thought NVLD - now we are pretty certain Kabuki Syndrome.

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erikerikson 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

A term of use for your son is twice exceptional. The GP is correct about the theoretical basis of the tests. Note the use of "tend" in the quote. Even those who fit that better tend to have differential strengths so that has shown to be too simple. Over time the models of intelligence have complected adding EQ (emotional quotient), SQ (social q...), and so on but IQ was first, continues to be considered useful in some ways even as it's also been considered an oppression by some.

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Workaccount2 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

EQ, SQ and whatever other-q, are not really a true thing. They're more feel good tests for Facebook dwellers who get confused on IQ tests.

There are social assessments, but they are for identifying disorders.

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grugagag 3 days ago | parent [-]

Same could be said about IQ..

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pxc 3 days ago | parent [-]

IQ test questions have clear right and wrong answers that can be determined in advance of writing the test. But EQ tests just measure a (not necessarily unanimous) consensus of subjective intuitions by a handful of psychologists.

It's true that EQ tests have all the same problems as IQ tests. But they also have additional problems.

(I learned this when I chatted with a psychologist about an EQ test he administered to me, but I just reviewed it now. See the "Psychometric properties" section of the Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy_quotient )

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hirvi74 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I remember when I took the WAIS-IV. While, I did not have access to how the test was scored, I am not certain that a few sections of the test could not be open to interpretation.

#Story below, feel free to skip:#

One section involved comparing and contrasting two words. I remember one of the questions being "practical vs. pragmatic." For the differences, I really wanted to say, "There is no such thing as a pragmatic joke!" However, I do not know if that would have been accepted or not.

On the symbol matching part of the test, I kind of got into it with the psychologist. In that section, there was a key at the top of the page that presented multiple different symbols all with an associated a number. There was somewhere between 25 and 50 of these symbol questions on the page in random order. For example, question one would be a square, and I would write '3', question 2 would be circle, and I would write '5', and so on.

Upon seeing this section of the test, I figured out, "Why not just fill in all the squares with '3', then do all the circle problems, then the triangle problems, etc.?" Well, I started to do just that, and the psychologist freaked out. "No! The test was not designed to be solved that way. You have to solve all the questions in sequential order." Of course, being the impulsive ADHD person I am, I said, "What do you mean? It's my test. I don't give a fuck how it was designed." After a bit more back-and-forth arguing, it was at that point the psychologist then told me, "Time is ticking!" Well, I started to freak out a bit, because I had no idea the test was timed. The psychologist never even told me prior to that moment. So, I became even more unmotivated after that interaction, and occasionally would give the wrong answer to some questions that were ridiculously easy just to see what would happen -- would the psychologist even notice or care? No, he didn't. But I did realize one thing: IQ is not solely a measurement of intelligence, because clearly I could fuck with it a bit, and the test couldn't measure me lack of earnest motivation. Though, in the end it doesn't really even matter because that test informed me of nothing I (nor anyone else that knew me) already didn't know. Wow, I don't have a severe mental disability nor am I the next Von Neumann. Glad to see over a hundred years of psychometric research has truly amounted to a lot...

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mensetmanusman 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

People tend to tell me I have a high EQ, and I agree it’s hard to measure.

For fun I recently completed a test where they just show eyes and you have to match their emotional state from a list (someone asked me to try this). I got nearly 100% when the average was 60^ or so.

Thought it was an interesting approach to one aspect of EQ.

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pxc 3 days ago | parent [-]

The EQ test I took had a component that was questions like this.

I'm not sure how meaningful it is for me given that I've been visually impaired my whole life. Nowadays, I can rarely see the eyes of strangers.

But I did kinda hate questions like this, found them unpleasant to think through. I scored normal on the overall EQ test, but didn't do as well on the portion related to reading eyes or faces.

It's interesting to imagine being able to intuitively breeze through a test like that, as well as how much information or precision is missing from my perceptual world!

I wonder how the eye test might or might not correlate with a similar test centered on voices. I feel like I can interpret voices much more easily. Maybe I'd do a little better there?

	▲	mensetmanusman 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		They said people like me have a strong cringe response, which I found to be true - it can be vocal response indicated, but definitely a combination of verbal and physical cues. E.g. When fellow engineers start veering far left field in long rambling responses to marketing and business leaders I want to disappear feeling embarrassed for the engineer not realizing what is happening.

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PaulHoule 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I've maxxed out any test or subscale of verbal intelligence that I've taken since I was 12 or so but my schizotaxic brain glitches enough that my problem solving ability in test environments is a bit degraded, still at least an SD above average, but enough that I get an IQ test score that is just high and not off the charts.