Personal Science Week -- 240328 Intelligence
Measuring IQ, plus PS Week updates
Personal scientists love tests, especially when it’s something we can optimize. What better to optimize than your own intelligence?
This week we’ll look at IQ testing and some of the consequences.
IQ and Miscommunication
The subject of IQ often brings negative reactions in a way that other quantitative measurements don’t1. But why? People use numbers to express and track their steps, calories, pushups — things we can improve through focused attention. It’s harder to improve those numbers without context, including numbers we can’t change like age or height. Whether IQ is an unchangeable number or not, it certainly seems like something you’d want to know about yourself if only to help understand the context of how to improve the aspects of yourself that you can change. It’s not just about being smarter than other people. A little knowledge of IQ might help you understand other people.
One surprising reason for miscommunication might be IQ. It’s called the psychologists fallacy, the tendency to assume that others act and think the way you do. We find it difficult to understand people whose intelligence is more than 10-15 points different from us.
Here are some examples of how people with low IQs think:
Twitter thread from a first responder who deals with 911 calls from people who don’t know how else to deal with a problem.
Or a long Reddit discussion of examples of problem-solving that appear beyond some people. They can’t handle hypotheticals for example, like “How would you have felt yesterday if you hadn’t eaten” because, well, they did eat so the question makes no sense to them. Some people are in jail because a jury couldn’t believe an honest person could have done such a stupid thing when, well actually…
Some of these examples are fodder for jokes, but the problem goes both ways. How do you know that people smarter than you might think you’re the joke?
It’s relatively easy to understand what it’s like to talk to somebody with a much lower IQ – they look puzzled when you say something that seems obvious. But what’s it like from the other side? What sorts of difficult-to-understand concepts look obvious to somebody smarter than you?
@SpencrGreenberg offers some clues, including this chart which apparently is obvious to somebody with a 130 IQ:
For what it’s worth, I have to think long and hard to answer this question. If you’re one of those to whom the answer is immediate and obvious, then you are probably regularly puzzled by things I say and do.
SAT and IQ
Most of us haven’t taken an IQ test, but if you know your SAT scores you can get close enough with Sebastian Jensen’s useful chart. The median value, IQ=100, corresponds to roughly 1000 SAT or 18 ACT. It’s important to note that there are just as many people below the median as above it.
Incidentally, despite its popularity the online site iqcomparisonsite.com is wrong because it’s based on percentile comparisons. Come to think of it, that site’s popularity might partly be explained by the fact that it appears to seriously overestimate people’s IQs.
One important caveat: Many useful tasks, including perhaps this one, are easy if you know the tricks — another way to describe “education”. Computer science pioneer Alan Kay used to say “Perspective is worth 80 IQ points”. A person using Arabic numerals can do arithmetic problems like a genius compared to somebody who only knows Roman numerals.
It’s useful to know your rough IQ, but whether it’s lower or higher than you think, it’s more important to focus on self-education, to find precisely these sorts of “perspective” increases that make make a much bigger difference.
PS Week Updates
Despite the name “Personal Science Week” we try to keep these newsletters fairly timeless so you can still learn useful items from our extensive archive of back issues. But we regularly run into new items that update and complement issues you’ve seen previously.
We wrote about tests for phantasia and other forms of mental synesthesia in PS Week 240321, but here’s another possible mental condition to add to your list: alexithymia: “emotional blindness”. These are people who are simply unaware of their own emotions. Scott Alexander wonders if there might be a more generalized version he calls preference alexithymia, of people who are unaware that they can or should have individual preferences. I think to ask this question is more a product of the individualism that characterizes Western culture (everyone in Japan has preference alexithymia), but it would be interesting to learn more about tests for this.
In our review of Susannah Fox’s book Rebel Health we noted her reference to data about wearable usage. Well the data source has been updated with Rock Health’s release of their latest Consumer Adoption of Digital Health Survey
Post-COVID, consumers are less likely to share data with their clinician (it’s now 64%, down from 70%). Fewer than half of those under age 34 are willing to share with their doctor. Interesting.
What about at-home testing? COVID got normal people used to testing themselves, but that apparently didn’t spread to other kinds of tests.
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It’s one reason we’ve only discussed this so far in our Unpopular Science series, available to paid subscribers only.