mercaptovizadeh said:
The IQ tests are written by psychologists who may be intelligent but aren't necessarily in the top 1st, 2nd, 5th, or even 10th percentile. How can someone make a test that tests people of higher intelligence than himself? That makes no sense. I am intelligent as I think I am. If I could see the errors in my thinking, I wouldn't make them. At some point, you lose the capacity to see that an alternative view is logically (or in some other way) superior to your own. QUOTE]
Interesting point. I agree with you on principle, but it is not the case that individual psychologists must be at the IQ level for which they are testing. Those tests are designed by a team or teams of psychologists, which, according to the understanding of IQ as the ability to process information beyond one's expected ability at a certain age, the group arrangement essentially packs a ton of knowledge into one super IQ. The 15 people writing the test act as a single body, and thus have an enormously high capacity for creating chellenging tests for even those above the 200 mark.
Yes, but this doesn't sound like intelligence, it just sounds like 1+1=1. I mean, let's say someone has an idea for a puzzle. Them someone else has an better idea (objectively speaking). If most of the group is at the level of appreciating the lower level puzzle, they will find this one attractive and interesting and the other one will, at some point, become entirely incomprehensible to them. So, the test will reflect the alleged mean intelligence with some scatter aroun that, but it cannot become some sort of absolute standard.
I mean, if you think about it, many of the greatest scientific discoveries were made by people who went beyond conventional logic and into the realm of the "illogical" - or some might even say "stupid." Relativity and quantum mechanics make little sense to conventional thinking. Most people (in fact all, innately) are Aristotelians, not Galileans.
So, at some level intelligence is no longer purely the ability to carry out a logical sequence to its "logical conclusion" but rather involves a creative element. It is this element that is absent in the IQ tests.
Added to that, they often test your knowledge base, which has zilch to do with intelligence.