Do the thick die quick?

"I still to this day do not consider an IQ test to be an accurate method of measuring intelligence, it is only good for relative purposes and even then for a less biased result, you should average the scores out over several tests."

Alex, IQ is a meaningful construct and strongly predicts academic performance. If you doubt this, why do you think top scientists tend to have IQ's significantly above average? Why do you think physicians tend to have IQ's above average? If they were meaningless, then they could just as readily score below the mean. This doesn't happen.

While general cognitive ability and academic achievement are not isomorphic, the former is necessary for the latter, while the converse is not necessarily true.

If you don???t think I.Q. tests are valid as a way to quantify smartness then what do you think is valid? What methodology would you suggest? Where is your data? What hypotheses have you generated?

See Linda Gottfredson's faculty page for this paper dismissing a number of fallacies used to attack the tests.

Never said an IQ of 102 was genius...just that nature was a stronger effect than nurture. You have said nothing that counters my arguement - (nor did I say that genius' were a result of Genetic mutations). If Nuture was the stronger influence then non-identical siblings would cluster extremely tightly together on IQ tests - they don't - but identical twins do...even when seperated.

Of course intelligent people live longer. The Darwin Awards have been proving this for years.

What does it matter? Everyone is different.Everyone has their own way of doing things.

IQ tests are heavily inaccurate anyways. Most of them are multi-choice where you still have a 1/4 chance of a correct answer just for a random guess. I still to this day do not consider an IQ test to be an accurate method of measuring intelligence, it is only good for relative purposes and even then for a less biased result, you should average the scores out over several tests.

Thankyou Mark and stewart for the laugh and mytery.Is stewart a flaming liberal who feels sorry for mark ? A rich mans son ? A big old positive capitalist who slogged thru to make it and by God we all better !? I love it.

Hey, go read his papers. It's a great study. And he could teach Stats 401 if he was't being an epidemiologist. He's tracked down all the Scots that sat the school test in 1932 (which was *all* Scots 11yr olds still in school - a pretty good sample!). He's retested them with the same test they sat then, to see if they were consistent (they were). He's given them the Stanford-Binet (so the Flynn effect isn't relevant - it's the same cohort). He's given modern kids the Stanford-Binet, and checked how it correlates with the 1932 test (pretty well, is the answer;). He's tracked all those 1932 kids through Scots death records (which are also very comprehensive). He's controlled for lifetime income, for educational attainment, for anything else he could measure in the survivors. And IQ predicts longevity really well...

If IQ is affected by different socio-economic circles, then its because some sectors of society still choose to drink piss and smoke drugs while they are pregnant and in the early stages of nurturing their offspring. And its not just the mothers.

Now, there is a potential link between class and potential IQ.

Well one thing's for sure: the people commenting aren't statistically representative of the general population! I reckon 95% of respondents are males, and 70% of them have done at least seventh form statistics or a first year university course in statistics or psychology.

My 2 cents: (a) I wouldn't question the researcher's ability to make statistical inferences. He's a PhD in statistics, and IQ is purely a statistical output. You could question whether the inferences are material or 'economically' significant (that's what we refer to in econometrics when an estimator is statistically significant but the coefficient is small enough to ignore). (b) IQ measures academic potential, and there's several other types of intelligence too (spatial, social, emotional etc) (yeah I did first year psych too). There are Dr's out there that are otherwise total retards in many common sense ways.

I wouldn't read too much into it, but I wouldn't get upset about it either (as that'd probably be more a reflection of frustration that one's IQ is stubbornly lower than they'd like theirs to be). It will be very interesting to see what all the other research underway suggests.

I find this all quite interesting, especially the revelation that people with higher IQs do better at school. Another recent study has discovered that people with higher IQs do better in IQ tests.