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[Frumple]

Have any of you experienced this, or heard of it happening? I'd like to discover what made it 'click' at that time, because I've tried to repeat it as of lately to no avail.

Cognates are wonderful, wonderfully deceptive, things. Etymology in general, when it comes down to it. It's faaaaiiirrrly likely (i.e. almost entirely certain) you actually misinterpreted great swaths of the test, just not badly enough to effect the its outcome too terribly much.

Done similar things m'self a number of times. There's a lot of test (and otherwise, really) formats out there you don't particularly have to entirely understand the question, or the language, or... well, much of anything... to still get a good run of correct answers.

[penguinofhonor]

It's also pretty likely this online test is a poor measurement of intelligence. They're generally designed to fluff your ego and/or get you to buy smart person things. Giving you some freebie wrong answers helps them do that.

[chaotic skies]

Can I just say, Doze, your avatar fits this entire thread perfectly.

Anyway, it could be many things. I know Swedish has a slightly-extended alphabet (around 2 or 3 letters IIRC), but is otherwise very similar to English. I'm fairly sure the sentence structure is fairly similar as well, so it could be close enough to be translated with little-to-no prior knowledge. Assuming you actually translated it, and didn't do what the others already said.

[Starver]

A 'perfect' IQ test would be fully language independent, and also devoid of other mutable cultural 'norms', because otherwise it (as they all inevitably do, anyway) is testing knowledge/education, disadvantaging intelligent people whose knowledge even of their own language is substandard for any number of reasons.

Not that this is ever possible.  You have to convey "which of these four shapes is the odd one out?", somehow, or "given this sequence, which is the next?" and somebody is going to have a problem with a word such as "sequence". Even before dyslexia is considered.  But maybe a good introductary example works, diagramatically and non-verbally.

(The worst (suppised) IQ test that I remember doung had anagrams in it.  And odd-ones-out where reasons clearly existed for multiple odd-ones-out, in the same question. It was a(n allegedly MENSA-produced) page-a-day calendar, that didn't even have a way to check the answers you gave, thus failing in multiple ways to be an IQ test in any practical manner. But it was a present, so...)

[chaotic skies]

Am I the only one that finds it entirely hilarious we are trying to measure intelligence when we're not totally sure what it is? Yes? Okay, I'll go away now.

[Spehss _]

Am I the only one that finds it entirely hilarious we are trying to measure intelligence when we're not totally sure what it is? Yes? Okay, I'll go away now.

That doesn't mean you can't measure it. Measurement is just slapping arbitrary numbers on a reference thing and comparing that thing to other things.

[chaotic skies]

It's all just arbitrary shit we made up to explain other shit to each other, isn't it?

[Spehss _]

It's all just arbitrary shit we made up to explain other shit to each other, isn't it?

Not really. I'm sure once they got enough data from people the so called "arbitrary" numbers became a representation of what the average level of "intelligence" is in people.

Set one quantity to be the scale. Get enough data from people taking these tests made to rate them based on the scale. Get enough data and you can find the average, the median, the mean, you can graph the data to achieve various curves and see how individual people fit on the curve, etc.

<sub><sup>Note that I haven't done any research on how IQ was first implemented, I'm just rationalizing how I'd take a quantity I'd consider otherwise "meaningless" and use it to compare things and therefore give the quantity "meaning".

I personally don't give IQ much credence though.</sup></sub>

[Shadowlord]

And if the "arbitrary" numbers aren't just measuring intelligence? If IQ tests were (or are) racially and culturally biased, like a judge found them to be in '79 or so? (the new york times claims it was 1981, for some reason)

[Reelya]

IQ tests are also arbitrarily calibrated to have their own conclusions built into the system. This disqualifies them as science straight away.

e.g. there are some questions that men tend to do better on, and some questions that women tend to do better on. Regardless of why this is the case, it's a tool that is used by IQ test designers to engineer-in gender neutrality into IQ tests. But that's entirely circular logic when you think about it. The assumption is that IQ is equally held by both genders, the tests are designed to produce results that adhere to that assumption, then the test results are used to make claims about equality of IQ. Which other "science" could get away with such a blatant fabrication of research results, other than the "science" of "psychometry"?

This whole debacle means you should ignore any study that says men or women have higher IQ. It's completely meaningless, and it's subject to arbitrary swings back once they recalibrate the latest IQ tests. IQ test results rise with higher educational opportunities. Men were a little ahead before (back before women had many educational opportunities), but recently women have edged ahead, to great media fanfare. The most likely actual reason isn't "women are getting smarter" in any genetic sense, it's that women worldwide have rising educational opportunities, and this has caused their scores to rise against the older tests (which were calibrated to be gender-neutral at a time when women had less educational opportunities).

There's also the high amount of correlation between the types of questions that are on traditional IQ tests, and the typical middle-class Anglo-Saxon school curriculum of 100 years ago. Knowing obscure English vocabulary and having memorized your times tables was the definition of "IQ". A better name for the test would be the "middle class educational attainment test", and every test since then has been calibrated against the existing tests. Basically an IQ test is purely judged by it's correlation with earlier tests, so if the earlier tests were conceptually flawed, it's hard to see how later "improved" tests are actually any better. I'm pretty sure you could load a test with working-class concepts and questions and make working-class people look much more intelligent, but such a test would be rejected outright because it "doesn't correlate" with the pre-existing "intelligence" tests.

So we can say without a doubt that the IQ test is a good indicator at being good at the things on the IQ test. But it's much more tenuous to say it predicts anything else.  Notice how they hardly use IQ tests at all anymore? They used to be widely used in employee selection. Now, it's mainly online quizzes, Mensa, and used to plead mental incompetence so you can avoid Death Row. The reason for the almost wholesale abandonment of IQ testing as a tool by business and government is that they don't predict anything useful about your level of performance for just about any task possible.

[Starver]

I'm sure once they got enough data from people the so called "arbitrary" numbers became a representation of what the average level of "intelligence" is in people.

The numbers become a representation of the average ability to answer an IQ test, and I'm not sure I'd go further than that. [Ninjaed]

I have tended to get good results, myself, but I'm not sure I would consider that indicative of anything positive.

Like if I'm good at sudokus, and my job isn't to solve sudokus all day, every day. (I am, but indeed it isn't.) Pretty much useless¹ to me, and I don't think I'd trust an employer who took me on because I was good at them.


¹

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Unless I suddenly find myself next to the alien probe/evil geniuses's nuclear bomb/inexplicably relocated Mayan temple, each/all for some reason equipped with a sudoku-like pass-system in whatever level of technology it happens to possess (the mayan temple will be something made out of wood and stone and vines, no doubt, inexplicably still working after all these years, but that'd be the least of my questions, at this point in time) in order to either gain access to its secrets or prevent it (or another, arbitrarily competitive, opponent) from acting detrimentally in some way.

I don't even need to know the numbering system employed (if, indeed, it is even numbers!) as all it is is symbols.  n*m total symbols in an n*m major grid of m*n smaller grids (no reason for that to be 3*3), and it wouldn't need to be numbers even..

And then there's the question of whether it's a 'smart-trap', actually prepared to unleash destruction upon completion of the puzzle, rather than reward...   Naww...  Beyond my paygrade, mate... And how did I get into this situation in the first place, anyway?

[Reelya]

I'm sure once they got enough data from people the so called "arbitrary" numbers became a representation of what the average level of "intelligence" is in people.

I'm sure once enough people fill out my "anime terminology quiz", then the resulting "arbitrary" results will give a good indication of what the average level of "intelligence" is in people.

The above is clear nonsense, because an arbitrary test doesn't magically measure "intelligence" as a group characteristic.

What's so special about maths quizzes that they automatically tap into this elusive thing called "intelligence"?

[Sheb]

Still, I quite like the original approach of Binet, which was "I don't know what intelligence is, so I'll just compile a list of all the tests I can think of, and those that rank higher should be more intelligent.

[Reelya]

But "Binet" never claimed that his test "measured intelligence". That's a myth.

Binet took the French school syllabus and arranged questions from various years. The goal was to estimate what school level children were at. The original Binet score increases as you got older, because you learned more stuff and could complete more of the test. Binet in particular never claimed the test was measuring anything innate about you. The entire point was to pinpoint students who were falling behind so that they could receive extra tuition, so Binet understood that the test was merely reflecting your skills at that moment in time, and that ability is a fluid thing that can be cultivated.

Later, some guy decided to divide your Binet score by your age (the "quotient" part) and sold it as an "intelligence test", with the claim that it predicted some innate quality of a person. This was completely contradictory to what Binet himself designed the test for: which was to pinpoint who needed help. Merely taking the formula: "take your score on this arbitrary maths quiz, then divide by your age" is not a convincing basis for "measuring intelligence".

By dividing your Binet score by your age, then interpreting the result as "innate intelligence" it resulted in the weak being reassigned to the dustbin, rather than getting the academic help that Binet had intended the test for. It also had the unfortunate effect that people older than 20 appeared to "regress" into stupidity, even if their test scores were actually much higher than a young person, due to the "divide by age" part of the IQ score. Binet had not intended the test to be used past school age.

It was bullshit plain and simple, basically. Ever since then, they've been rigorously polishing the turd to make it shinier.

[TheBiggerFish]

Aye...