this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I recently had a psychological assessment that led to ASD and ADHD diagnoses. Part of it was intelligence testing and it led me to have some additional context I didn't have before. I always knew I was "smart" - at the very least I had the numerical data of always doing really well in school. As an adult I continued to have people tell me I was really smart, and my response was usually (internally) like "Sure, Jan" or "K" like, maybe in some ways but it seemed like kind of a pointless thing to think about. I've never felt any amount of superiority about being smart - my brain is what it is and I didn't really do anything to earn it so it seems weird to feel any certain way about it.

In my assessment, there were 6 intelligence factors that were measured. In 4 of them, I scored 95-98th percentile, one around 80th, but the last one I scored exactly average. That last one was processing speed. According to my assessor, it's more or less true that a brain wants to be similar levels across the board. Otherwise you basically have perceived bottlenecks in your processing. And I thought that was really interesting and resonated, because my brain can do some really cool things, but yeah it always feels like when it comes to actually articulating and thinking in certain ways, I basically have to slam the brakes. It was helpful to explain certain things, and apparently having a discrepancy with processing speed can be caused by unmedicated ADHD. I'm still unmedicated but hopefully that will change soon.

No idea what I'm trying to say about this. Maybe I just want to shout out to the void lol. But the meme definitely resonates. I guess I have some nuance in that, I agree with what I read to be the intent of the meme, that IQ is just a measurement that doesn't mean anything in a lot of ways. But this lense was new to me - that there are several axis of intelligence, and it's more typical that people are similar across all axes (whether low, high, or average), and spikiness on these axis can lead to dysregulation and other issues.

[–] [email protected] 99 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Debating what intelligence is, is such a circle-jerk.

The term is so broad, that it encompasses aspects like motivation, memory retention capacity, memory recall rates, differentiates between verbal, spacial and emotional intelligence, and occasionally veers into scientific racism.

It's a fucking shit show. The comment sections of posts about intelligence are generally toxic because people end up talking past each other.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If debating intelligence is waste of time, imagine what a "shit show" trying to measure it must be. This is the central point: measuring intelligence is just as foolish as measuring beauty or charm.

The problem is that this isn't just a debate on the internet. Your IQ score can still literally be the difference between life and death in the US legal system. So it's pretty important to let people know it's pseudoscience from eugenicists that, by the way, doesn't work!

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

IQ tests are interesting, because they're mainly a test of pattern recognition.

However, knowing how the patterns are formed, can easily net you +10 points on an IQ test.

It's a shit way to determine "intelligence".

Some people might score highly, but are socially inept and unmotivated, meaning they have a lot of raw power, without having the mental capability to channel it productively, which is pretty fucking stupid.

Then you get people like Musk and Trump, who are both highly motivated people, despite being dumb as rocks. Yet, our geniuses can't figure out how to mitigate their stupidity.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

well no, modern intelligence tests specifically test different things, for example the one i took had a section about working memory where i had to recite numbers in various ways.

which was useful because it turns out my working memory is absolute dogshit

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Mensa has long been the benchmark for high IQ societies.

Go take their sample IQ test. It is only pattern recognition.

Unfortunately this is the norm.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Mensa has long been the benchmark for high IQ societies.

Mensa is a social club with an admittance test, which they're free to organize however they want. It holds no weight in the field of psychology

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Mensa is a private society where you pay for membership and take a test which cherry picks from actual standardized intelligence tests and are openly available so you can practice them. Proper ones used in neuropsychology measure more than just pattern recognition. I don't know why Mensa has gotten such a prominent place, but it shouldn't be regarded as the benchmark for anything.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Paying for a "you're smart" placque is definitely a benchmark for stupidity.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

i literally did the test with a registered psychologist, not sure what more you want?

it very much seems like you just want to hate intelligence tests and reality being different makes you frustrated

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

"Occasionally" seems rather generous

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I got a clinical assesment and it took 12 hours spread over 12 weeks. Indeed contained verbal and visual memory tests, verbal and visual ability to fantasize, pattern recognition, logic, social ability, etc

[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I'm just going to point out the irony of using this meme format to make that point.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The meme is about the journey to acquire wisdom, not intelligence. It fits IMO, despite representing the lack of wisdom as low intelligence.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)

So the y axis (IQ Score) is a measurement for wisdom? OP could have easily edited it out but didn't to give it a meta layer

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Not to mention the "stupid = ugly" wojacks

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 week ago (1 children)

People who boast about their IQ are losers ~Stephen Hawking

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Of course Thickie Hawking would say that ~Albert Einstein

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Dear reader, it was Steven Hawking who really said that, not Albert Einstein.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Intelligence is what my sorcery damage scales with

[–] rustydrd 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Isn't that charisma-based?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm going by Dark Souls system

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

I like that to use every spell, you need intelligence and faith; so you just become a walking oxymoron.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Not true. At the end of Contact, Jodie Foster has to admit that her experience through the wormhole has no evidence and therefore her testimony is faith based- due to this, she is now able to cast pyromancies.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I mean, if the stats were actually taken at face value, strength would increase the maximum equipment load instead of endurance

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don't know Dark Souls, but presumably whatever it is you're having faith in, in-game, is provably real. Then, if the object of faith is also demonstrably faithful (which, by the repeatable application of spells, sounds likely), int ought to aid faith.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That isn't always the case, and is one of the driving themes of Miyazaki's games: unreliable narration and corrupted ideals. So, like yes; the "gods" are real but their power or God status isn't always what it appears to be. In some cases, the power people sought through their faith, brought them to total ruin when it wasn't all glitz and glamour as they were told. Like people who tried to become dragons but ended up as weird mutant half dragon things. Or Rosaria's Fingers that eventually turn into giant maggot things. Faith is very often rewarded with body horror in Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring and even Sekiro.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

If only I could be so grossly incandescent.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I think Sean’s video on the Bell Curve is the best way IQ has ever been interrogated and explored on the internet.

The purpose of IQ is to measure some sort of “g factor” which is a model of “general intelligence.” This was based on the idea that people who tend to do good at some kinds of tests tend to also be good at other kinds of tests.

The IQ test is “reliable” - ie its consistent and you’ll usually get the same results +/- an acceptable amount every time. However, there are lots of concerns about its “validity” - whether it measures what it purports to measure - ie, the “g factor.”

Of note is the “Flynn effect” - that performance on the test in the general population has been improving over time, so the test has to be renormalized. (IQ is a “normalized” test - so about 68% of the population needs to be within 1 standard deviation of the mean. I think standard deviation is about 15 - so 68% of people are going to score between 85 and 115.)

The question then would be - are people getting “smarter” or is it just that people are more adapted to taking tests on pattern recognition and mathematics/logical thinking? How would that measure the intelligence of a tribal person who has not seen abstracted geometrical shapes?

You can bring in alternative models of intelligence - like Gardner’s multiple intelligence - but then that doesn’t really have much of the psychometrics behind it.

(In general, I think a huge issue in psych research is a lack of critically examining the validity of psychometric instruments. It seems we often stop at being reliable.)

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago (3 children)

The purpose of a test is what it tests.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago

Intelligence is the Intel core i3 4th gen

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (3 children)

How it called this meme format? I want see more of this examples

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I don't get it? I'm still in the middle of the graph.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

The average person (and to be fair, most psychologists) thinks of intelligence as the innate, fundamental characteristic of a person to think across all cognitive areas. However, this concept is not easily falsifiable and therefore arguably exists outside the realm of science.

For example, say I wanted to come up with a concept called "sportsness" which is the ability to be good at sports. I could test a bunch of people in a battery of sports-related tasks, and I'd probably get a nice bell curve where some people have high sportsness across all tasks and others have low sportsness across all tasks.

But does that prove the existence of sportsness? Or did I just measure a spurious correlation caused by the fact that some people are just more likely to be playing many different sports than others, or that some body types may lead to being better at sports related tasks, or some people are just better at handling the pressure of athletic performance tests, or some combination thereof? Of course most would say the latter, but then maybe some would defend the concept of sportsness by saying sportsness is just an emergent property of those things or something like that. But then is sportsness useful as a concept at all? You get the idea.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yeah sure buddy, sportness is all made up by —let me guess— Big Sportness? Clearly you're just mad that you're not very sportnant. /s

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

That's a great example.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

That's why scientists ( I assume they're supposed to be the right hand side) claiming to measure "intelligence" should pick a more specific term for what they're measuring.

If they use the word "intelligence" I'd be extremely suspicious about why they've chosen that word. I would assume they have a decent understanding of how the word is likely be interpreted by the other 97.5%, if not they need to get out and do some fieldwork.

[–] rustydrd 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The left side is the position that definitions of intelligence are all arbitrary, and that psychologists just make up tests and call what it measures "intelligence."

The middle is the position that there is a real thing that can be called "intelligence," which can be defined in different (meaningful) ways, and that intelligence tests are objective ways to measure it.

The right side is the position that intelligence is probably still real and can probably still be defined in different (meaningful) ways, but that we can never directly measure intelligence and instead observe it indirectly through observable indicators like someone's performance on an intelligence test. This means that any practical statement about intelligence, while probably real and definable, are contingent on the specific test used to measure it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Left side is saying that intelligence is an objective thing that can be measured with the test.

Right side is saying the test is the objective thing that defines what we think of as intelligence. "If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree..."

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Broke: The results of IQ testing are dependent on a person's intelligence. Intelligence is an objective reality that can be observed and measured with IQ testing.

Woke: The results of IQ testing are independent of a person's intelligence. Intelligence is an objective reality but complex and impossible to perfectly measure.

Bespoke: A person's 'intelligence' is dependent on the results of IQ testing. Intelligence is a social construct and IQ testing is a means to reinforce that construct.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Anyone who hasn't listened to the podcast "My Year in Mensa" by Jamie Loftus, do yourself a favor.

Its one of my favorite podcasts ever.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Bro there are different categories of intelligence

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Wow. That means you're thinking really fast!

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

It’s fine, it’s a really long test.

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