[Thunderhawk]

http://iqtest.dk/main.swf

I rather enjoyed it, but it had little in common with IQ tests I have had in the past.

[humanrights]

I've been a member of MENSA off and on for twenty years. It shouldn't mean anything, but it does. Intelligence should mean something, but you should be able to make an assessment of someone's intelligence from talking to them.

Most IQ tests just test the ability to recognize patterns and think logically. Of course you have to know the language and the vocabulary in order to score well.

I'm more interested in the Dumb Quotient like how quickly a person departs from the rational and logical when he gets angry. Or how a person thinks that he is logical when he is actually in la la land. Or how a person uses a political or TV drama (like Perry Mason or Judge Judy) to source his ideas of the law. IQ is a pretty narrow thing. Most people have a narrow range of IQs, yet the variablity of their dumb quotient is huge. The speciality of a person with a high dumb quotient is the ad hom.

I don't really want to know a person that is continually obscessed with defending his rightness. I would rather know a person with an IQ of 100 that is polite, tries to use logic, listens, doesn't rant, is perceptive and respectul of others.

Sometimes the person that first stops arguing is the brightest. He stops arguing because he knows that he is bright. He doesn't care that idiots think he's an idiot. He knows they will...

[Dr House]

Well, I thought the average IQ of the population (in a technical sense) is 100 by definition - i.e. an IQ score of 100 is defined by the average of a given population.

In other words, you could say a certain group has an average below the world average. But the world average, if you are testing the world population, has to be 100 by definition. It doesn't make much sense to say the world average IQ is no more than 90.

I need to be explained about this.

The 100-point IQ base is normalized to the median IQ in the United Kingdom. Countries with dumber average populations than the UK score less than 100, and countries with smarter average populations score higher.

[Fasces]

IQ tests are imperfect measures of ability or even intelligence, and designing a society around such a meaningless arbitrary score is fundamentally flawed. While academic intelligence is all well and good, the Kalahari Bushmen do not need it - and function perfectly well, and have functioned perfectly well, for generations with their supposed intelligence deficiencies. The very fact that operable human beings can perform at an IQ of 54, which in the West is equatable to mental retardation should be indicative of its cultural biases.

[Dr House]

IQ tests indeed have a Western bias and aren't appropriate to all cultures and lifestyles, but they correlate exceedingly well with success in the industrial society, which also happens to be Western-defined. As a developmentalist, I consider that rather important.

[humanrights]

Given the choice of electing a politician with an IQ of 50 or one with an IQ of 150, who whould you vote for?
Duh - a no brainer.

On the other hand, for me an IQ difference of 20 isn't as important as other qualities.