From: Tennessee Leeuwenburg (tennessee@tennessee.id.au)
Date: Wed Mar 08 2006 - 17:31:19 MST
I like thinking about IQ as being the average height of an undulating
terrain. Whether IQ is a something or a set of somethings, or a
statistical feature of people just happen to be good at lots of
different things is not clear to me.
Cheers,
-T
On Wed, 2006-03-08 at 21:14 +0100, Shane Legg wrote:
> > I find it kinda funny that {IQ/ objective measures of intelligence} is so
> > often hailed around Transhumanist / Technophile circles, when it's so often
> > derided as bunkum in psych circles (to which many cog-sci stuff is
> > connected}.
>
> In pop-science books that's the case, and now most of the population
> seems to believe it. However if you look at the actual research that's
> been done into IQ testing it's solid. Indeed in terms of various metrics,
> such as consistency of results and the ability of the test scores to
> predict future performance in mentally demanding tasks (e.g. future
> academic performance), IQ tests are THE most rigorously validated
> and proven psychological tests that exist. They reliably measure
> something very important, there's really no doubt about it.
>
> And when I say "IQ test" I mean a real one like a modern Wechsler
> that has been applied by a professional, not the pop quiz 10 question
> type in a magazine. Very few people have ever done or even seen
> a real IQ test.
>
> The debate is whether or not what they measure should be called
> "intelligence". On this point there is some debate as different
> psychologists define intelligence in slightly different ways (though
> again most of their definitions are pretty similar). If anybody wants
> refs to research papers on all this I'll email them off list... I have
> about 100 papers collected on the topic as I'm currently writing a
> paper with Marcus Hutter looking at the relation between AIXI and
> intelligence.
>
> Oh an another pet peeve of mine: Don't pay any attention to what
> people say their IQ is unless they have been properly tested by
> a psychologist. Something like 90% of the population believe that
> they have an above average IQ...
>
> ;-)
>
> Shane
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