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@WTP, who pointed out:

Smart people. Smaaaaart. College edjumacated you know. And law school no less. 

I know I keep harping on this, but… I really think we’ve gotten rather too far along this track of “Yeah, actual practical intelligence is what we’re testing for with IQ tests…” and all the rest of the ohsoselect testing regimes we do.

I’ll grant you that IQ testing does work, for a certain limited value of the concept. If you spread out your population far enough, and don’t mention the test results to the victims of it all…

When you use it as we are, what you’re actually doing? You’re institutionalizing a sort of autism, as opposed to real functional intelligence.

The root of the problem is that nobody ever goes back to assess what we might term a “wisdom quotient”: In other words, how well does our supposed genius do, results-wise, out in the real world?

I’m here to tell you this much: Not all that damn well, in far too many cases. I spent the majority of my adult life in an environment where I had easy access to people’s test results, in the form of their ASVAB scores. Said test can serve as a fairly accurate proxy for IQ, particularly in the QT score. You know that score, and you can fairly well predict what the hell your people are going to be doing, when they go to get themselves in trouble. Average intelligence? Your typical problems, involving drink, women, and misconduct involving both. The higher end of that? Oh, sweet baby Jesus… You. Have. No. Idea.

I didn’t do too badly on that test; scored a 94 on the QT, which puts my stupid ass solidly into “high-IQ land”. I performed my share of high-intellect enabled stupidities early on, but I learned. And, I was somewhat more grounded, having grown up on a farm.

Some of the crap I watched the other high-scoring types get up to? Lord. There’s nothing more dangerous than someone who thinks they’re smarter than everyone else around them and who have been getting away with murder all their damn lives because of it… They’ll fly high, then perform some stupidity that causes a Hindenburg event. Usually with such certainty that it’s truly mind-boggling to observe the confidence with which they erred. Anyone with one lick of common sense would have looked at that which they were contemplating and said “Yeah… This ain’t gonna work…”

The thing that’s wrong with how we do IQ is that the numbers are never linked to performance or results. If you’re a person that scores 160 on the tests, but everything that you do turns to shiite, then maybe what we’re measuring there isn’t actually, y’know… Intelligence.

The failure to connect performance to potential is what is creating most of our problems with the so-called “intellectual elite” we’ve put in charge of things. Based on their credentials, they go ever onward from failure to failure, because “They did well on the tests…”

I would like to propose that if you have someone who “did well on the tests”, and they produce disastrous result after disastrous result, out in the real world…? Perhaps you need to reassess your testing regime, and question the very premise it is based on.

This feedback is that which is most lacking in our modern world; the military says it best “F*ck up, move up…”, and I’ve seen that happen all too often. It’s like “Oh, so-and-so has such wonderful credentials… They couldn’t possibly be responsible for screwing that up so badly… Let’s give them another try, somewhere else…”

It’s like that everywhere; have a look at what happened to those EPA folks that poisoned a thousand miles or so of the Colorado River and its tributaries: All were promoted and given performance bonuses.

What we’re getting out of the system, which is in the end based on all too much predictive testing, is a bunch of autistic dolts whose results speak for themselves.

I’m a huge believer in “If it looks stupid, and it works? It ain’t stupid…” and the logical obverse: If it looks smart, and it actually doesn’t work…? Then, it ain’t “smart”…”

@WTP, who said:

Speaking of one of my favorite harps. I have taken the PSAT, SAT, and GRE exams. The SAT a couple of times, mostly because they told me to. I had been a top 5% National Merit Qualifying Somesuchbullshit from the PSAT. While my scores were generally close for each test, they were still different. I was given an IQ test one time. Aside from military people I do not know anyone who took one more than once. If once. And they never told me, nor anyone that I know of our scores. How is the result possibly scientific? The day I took mine I had been rushed back to school following an illness. I was still kinda meh. I distinctly remember looking at series of numbers, knowing that I knew what their relationship was just from experience, but that day it frustrated the hell out of me that I couldn’t confidently answer a couple of those number sequence questions. Brain fog. And this test, given once in seventh or eighth grade, was supposed to assign me one number that no one would ever tell me. Absurd.

I don’t think any of it is valid. At. All. It’s all self-referential BS, circular logic presenting circular answers to circular questions.

My own take on it is that what’s happened is that they’ve gamified the “elite selection process” on a set of bullshit theories that they very carefully haven’t bothered to back-check. There aren’t even mechanisms in place to validate any of this crap; it’s all about “getting the right people” into schools and then positions of authority.

I mean, OK… You do well on the PSAT, the SAT, or whatever. You go on to college, do well there. Then, what? How do you actually perform, once you’re out of the simulation? What are the outcomes, from your inputs, once you’re doing it for realsies?

If you go from university into academia, is there any actual value to your scholarship, or are you just making the rubble bounce?

One thing that’s always disturbed me about all too much of modern life is just how self-referential it has all become: People analyze papers by other people who analyzed papers written by other people six-seven layers down before you get to actual original research or real original thought. It’s not real scholarship, as I understand it, it’s mostly just navel-gazing bullshit that nobody bothers to check out in the reality of things.

The whole thing? It selects, very carefully, for conformists and the sort of person who love filling in the forms, checking all the boxes. As well as the fussy little “boss girl” mentalities that delight in carefully laying out their desks and filing things “just so“…

You’ll note a certain lack of “educational attainment” among many of the actual effective people out there. Bill Gates, Jr. ring any bells? Elon Musk?

I wonder why? And, further… Why don’t more people look at that, take note, and wonder for themselves?

I think the entire premise is flawed, and the process bullshit. I know and believe the tests are bullshit precisely because I can do so well on them. I’ve passed tests on subjects I’ve never studied, which is a depressing thing to consider when it’s something like the pre-test for Engineer in Training. You’re left going “WTF? This isn’t all that hard…”, and then rapidly losing faith in public safety once one considers where that test leads…

Time was, we didn’t put all this reliance in the testing. I think we ought to abandon the entire line of belief, in that regard: Tests tell you some things about a person, but performance and results tell you everything. If you can’t perform, and all your outcomes are bad…?

I don’t care how well you did on the tests; the real world has voted on your virtues.

@pst314, who said:

And yet IQ tests, SAT tests, etc do correlate well with academic success.

And I said before, IQ tests measure abstract reasoning ability, which is necessary but not sufficient for success in anything that requires such mental ability. Someone with an IQ of 100 is very unlikely to be able succeed at a doctoral level in physics or chemistry or etc. Someone with an IQ of 140 or above, yes, IF also possessing the other necessary personality traits AND being trained in how to think well.

All of the above does not refute the possibility that a random run-of-the-mill school teacher or administrator does not properly understand IQ tests (or any other tests) and consequently makes poor decisions.

I judge from results, and actual performance.

Yes, the entire regime of IQ testing, academic testing, and all the rest present the appearance of having some slight validity, in that kids who do well on abstract reasoning tests predicated upon our sort of abstract highly gamified schooling go on to later life and demonstrate “success” for some value of that term.

However, comma… Do you not see how self-referential it has become? You do well on the tests, you get tracked into more and better schooling supporting same, all the way through grad school. Everyone loads you down with laudatory comments about how smart you are, tells you what a great scholar you are, and then tracks you into highly remunerative positions in government, industry, and academia. Where you promptly fail, because you’re actually not all that smart, but instead possess a brittle facile sort of capacity that represents mere faculty for “playing the game” of modern education.

You wonder why “progress” seems to have stalled? That’s it, right there: The truly creative and original intelligent types are winnowed out from the “elite” under this system; they can’t tolerate the bullshit very well at all. They get bored, they go elsewhere in there lives, their potential never realized.

All because of our extremely flawed model of “intelligence”.

Which is why I think the entire self-referential system is invalid. You cannot systematize the human mind or the human spirit; you can merely do your best to help it flourish, and the system today drives all that is truly human out of it, in favor of creating human automatons, machinery on two legs. Mediocrities.

Have you ever noted how few of the truly talented actually live up to their potential, how they rarely work in the fields they are best at? Why so many people start out with enthusiasm for something, then grow alienated from it and do something else with their lives?

It’s the system. The flawed and deranged system, which is mostly run by the fussy sorts of “head girl” types that delight in putting things neatly into boxes for sorting and filing later.

I think there are better ways to manage this whole thing, and one of those ways would be to utterly abandon any pretense at “management” in the first place. The tools that Benet developed have utility, but they present a false path. I think he was right, in that the results of these tests should never have been revealed to anyone, let alone used to categorize and evaluate human beings.

I’ve lost track of the number of people I’ve known over the years whose lives have been warped by all this testing bullshit, and who never managed to put up with all the impedimentia put in their way by our delusional selection/education process. It runs the gamut from the best hands-on instinctive mechanic I ever met being unable to formally attain training through the Army to a guy in high school who was one of if not the best candidate I ever saw for being an actual genius-level chemist. The mechanic was slightly dyslexic, and could not score high enough on the tests to get into the job he was best suited for, and the potential chemist just burned out on all the crap he had to put up with on his way through college, the incessant rote-work that he had already mastered. He left high school prepped for stepping into advanced training, but had to repeat and repeat all over again the same old bullshit he’d already worked through on his own, at home. His father’s tutelage as a working chemist wasn’t “in the system”, so instead of building on a natural bent and his curiosity, he had to be beaten into shape by academia… Which destroyed his interest and actual love for the field. They turned someone who might well have been another genius innovator into an actuary. Which he’s only vaguely interested in, BTW…