The way human IQ testing developed is that researchers noticed people who excel in one cognitive task tend to do well in others - the “positive manifold.”
They then hypothesized a general factor, “g,” to explain this pattern. Early tests (e.g., Binet–Simon; later Stanford–Binet and Wechsler) sampled a wide range of tasks, and researchers used correlations and factor analysis to extract the common component, then norm it around 100 with a SD of 15 and call it IQ.
IQ tend to meaningfully predicts performance across some domains especially education and work, and shows high test–retest stability from late adolescence through adulthood. It is also tend to be consistent between high quality tests, despite a wide variety of testing methods.
It looks like this site just uses human rated public IQ tests. But it would have been more interesting if an IQ test was developed specifically for AI. I.e. a test that would aim to Factor out the strength of a model general cognitive ability across a wide variety of tasks. It is probably doable by doing principal component analysis on a large set of benchmarks available today.
> The way human IQ testing developed is that researchers noticed people who excel in one cognitive task tend to do well in others
My son took an IQ test and it wouldn't score him because he breaks this assumption. He was getting 98% in some tasks and 2% in others. The psychologist giving him the test said it was unlikely enough pattern that they couldn't get an IQ result for him. He's been diagnosed with non-verbal learning disability, and this is apparently common for nvld folks.
IMO g is purely an abstraction. As long as the rate you learn most things is within a reasonable bound spending more or less time learning/perfecting X impacts the time you spend on Y, resulting in people being generally more or less proficient in a huge range of common cognitive skills. Thus, testing those general skills is normally a proxy for a wide range of things.
LD breaks IQ because it results in noticeably uneven skill acquisition in even foundational skills. Meanwhile increasing levels of specialization reward being abnormally good at a very narrow sets of skills making IQ less significant. The #1 rock climber in the world gets sponsors, the 100th gets a hobby.
For me it all made sense when I heard that IQ/g-factor basically vanishes in the absence of time pressure (heard if from Richard Haier on Lex).
For a very narrow range of professions, like ATCs, time is absolutely critical but for most it does not really matter that much. Especially in many STEM fields. I think people in a broad IQ range can build abstractions and acquire intuitions about pretty complex matter. From this view-point ability to concentrate for long times, curiosity etc. seem more important than "raw-compute".
"if you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you’re gonna have a bad time" - Ilya
> For me it all made sense when I heard that IQ/g-factor basically vanishes in the absence of time pressure (heard if from Richard Haier on Lex).
That cannot be true as there are valid IQ tests that doesn't have a time component, and people don't all score the same on those. He must have meant something different than you think.
For example Raven's matrices was originally an untimed test, how can that be if there is no G-factor in untimed tests?
My son struggled quite a bit learning to read. He was very slow to do so, and it frustrated him quite a lot. But interestingly, once he did get it, he became a voracious reader, and he's never since scored below 95th percentile on reading tests. So his developmental dyslexia did not carry over into general dyslexia.
One of the interesting things about nvld, at least in his case, is that you would never know he had a learning disability by talking to him. He comes across as a smart, mature, knowledgeable young man. Mostly because this is what he actually is. But when he does struggle with something, it is often interpreted as him not trying or being lazy.
To add a bit more, I didn't really read until later, around 8, but then read at a fairly quick and passionate amount for my age. People thought I'd dodged my family curse but later around 10 it was shown I was quite behind at school. My dyslexia was described as "a defect in one aspect of intelligence", which for most kids is reading comprehension, but for me it showed in a lack of decent short term memory. As you say, learning disabilities are interesting issues to deal with, but I'm sure your son will do great with support like you around him.
A term of use for your son is twice exceptional. The GP is correct about the theoretical basis of the tests. Note the use of "tend" in the quote. Even those who fit that better tend to have differential strengths so that has shown to be too simple. Over time the models of intelligence have complected adding EQ (emotional quotient), SQ (social q...), and so on but IQ was first, continues to be considered useful in some ways even as it's also been considered an oppression by some.
IQ test questions have clear right and wrong answers that can be determined in advance of writing the test. But EQ tests just measure a (not necessarily unanimous) consensus of subjective intuitions by a handful of psychologists.
It's true that EQ tests have all the same problems as IQ tests. But they also have additional problems.
(I learned this when I chatted with a psychologist about an EQ test he administered to me, but I just reviewed it now. See the "Psychometric properties" section of the Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy_quotient )
I remember when I took the WAIS-IV. While, I did not have access to how the test was scored, I am not certain that a few sections of the test could not be open to interpretation.
#Story below, feel free to skip:#
One section involved comparing and contrasting two words. I remember one of the questions being "practical vs. pragmatic." For the differences, I really wanted to say, "There is no such thing as a pragmatic joke!" However, I do not know if that would have been accepted or not.
On the symbol matching part of the test, I kind of got into it with the psychologist. In that section, there was a key at the top of the page that presented multiple different symbols all with an associated a number. There was somewhere between 25 and 50 of these symbol questions on the page in random order. For example, question one would be a square, and I would write '3', question 2 would be circle, and I would write '5', and so on.
Upon seeing this section of the test, I figured out, "Why not just fill in all the squares with '3', then do all the circle problems, then the triangle problems, etc.?" Well, I started to do just that, and the psychologist freaked out. "No! The test was not designed to be solved that way. You have to solve all the questions in sequential order." Of course, being the impulsive ADHD person I am, I said, "What do you mean? It's my test. I don't give a fuck how it was designed." After a bit more back-and-forth arguing, it was at that point the psychologist then told me, "Time is ticking!" Well, I started to freak out a bit, because I had no idea the test was timed. The psychologist never even told me prior to that moment. So, I became even more unmotivated after that interaction, and occasionally would give the wrong answer to some questions that were ridiculously easy just to see what would happen -- would the psychologist even notice or care? No, he didn't. But I did realize one thing: IQ is not solely a measurement of intelligence, because clearly I could fuck with it a bit, and the test couldn't measure me lack of earnest motivation. Though, in the end it doesn't really even matter because that test informed me of nothing I (nor anyone else that knew me) already didn't know. Wow, I don't have a severe mental disability nor am I the next Von Neumann. Glad to see over a hundred years of psychometric research has truly amounted to a lot...
People tend to tell me I have a high EQ, and I agree it’s hard to measure.
For fun I recently completed a test where they just show eyes and you have to match their emotional state from a list (someone asked me to try this). I got nearly 100% when the average was 60^ or so.
Thought it was an interesting approach to one aspect of EQ.
The EQ test I took had a component that was questions like this.
I'm not sure how meaningful it is for me given that I've been visually impaired my whole life. Nowadays, I can rarely see the eyes of strangers.
But I did kinda hate questions like this, found them unpleasant to think through. I scored normal on the overall EQ test, but didn't do as well on the portion related to reading eyes or faces.
It's interesting to imagine being able to intuitively breeze through a test like that, as well as how much information or precision is missing from my perceptual world!
I wonder how the eye test might or might not correlate with a similar test centered on voices. I feel like I can interpret voices much more easily. Maybe I'd do a little better there?
I've maxxed out any test or subscale of verbal intelligence that I've taken since I was 12 or so but my schizotaxic brain glitches enough that my problem solving ability in test environments is a bit degraded, still at least an SD above average, but enough that I get an IQ test score that is just high and not off the charts.
IQ is a discovery about how intelligence occurs in humans. As you mentioned, a single factor explains most of the performance of a human on an IQ test, and that model is better than theories of multiple orthogonal intelligences. To contrast, 5 orthogonal factors are the best model we have for human personality.
The first question to ask is "do LLMs also have a general factor?". How much of an LLMs performance on an IQ test can be explained by a single positive correlation between all questions? I would expect LLMs to perform much better on memory tasks than anything else, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was holding up their scores. Is there a multi factor model that better explains LLM performance on these tests?
That may be the case. The personality traits are mostly uncorrelated with one another.
I was trying to give an example of what a successful multi factor model looks like (the Big 5) to then contrast it with a multi factor model that doesn't work well (theories of multiple intelligences).
IMO, the ARC tests & the visual pattern IQ tests (e.g. Raven's) have little difference, especially if the Raven tests require the taker to draw out the answer.
Another component of this theory concerning g is that it's largely genetic, and immune to "intervention" AKA stability as you mentioned. See the classic "The Bell Curve" for a full exposition.
Which makes me wonder what's the point of all the intervention in the form of teaching/parenting styles and whatnot, if g factor is nature and immutable by large? What's the logic of the educators here?
If IQ potential was 50% genetic, then the teaching would potentially raise your actual IQ by affecting the other 50% which is huge. IQs scores in populations and individuals change based on education, nutrition, etc. But even if we hypothesized a pretend world where “g” was magically 100% genetic, this (imaginary) measure is just potential. It is not true that an uneducated, untrained person will be able to perform tasks at the level of an educated, trained person. Also The Bell Curve was written by a political operative to promote ideological views, and is full of foundational errors.
You've made the mistake of thinking that if IQ were 50% genetic (it isn't - it's way more than that, but that's beside the point), then the remaining proportion is completely (non-shared) environmental.
Researchers in this field actually break down the non-genetic component into four major components:
1. Shared environment
2. Non-shared environment
3. Error
Shared environment accounts for so little variance that it might as well be ignored; while non-shared accounts for little more than error.
Note that including error in the non-genetic component, just as you've done in your post above, you are viscerally downplaying the otherwise undeniably predictive link from genes to IQ. In other words, whatever number you give is automatically deflated due to the way a psychometric is measured.
This has never been the source of debate. Back when I was going through grad school in intelligence, people didn't have to overthink how they presented the data. Intelligence was already a mature field, and we discussed the data openly. But in the past couple decades or so, a lot of people such as yourself popped up, attempting to craft irrelevant, statistically incorrect arguments against the results of certain well-established psychometrics that happen to not fit within whatever mental world your brand of politics ascribes.
If you really cared about the data, you'd be discussing the numbers. But your interest in this previously niche topic isn't in understanding reality; it's in justifying your worldview, which is why you deny the established data, immediately present a caveat stating that the data doesn't matter in the first place, appeal to emotions, and finish it all off by claiming those who disagree with you have been brainwashed. None of those four arguments have any merit in a genuine discussion on this topic.
How can research claim the genetic component of IQ is so high when there are so many environmental variables that have to be accounted for in order for the genetic component to even be able to manifest?
For example, if two identical twins are separated at birth. If one is raised in an educationally rich and nurturing environment and the other is raised in a horribly abusive and neglectful environment, then I am not sure the two would probably score the similarly on any given IQ test despite their genetic commonalities. Meanwhile, I imagine things like eye color, hair color, etc. which have a strong genetic component would remain consistent between the two.
Lower and median IQ people still benefit from literacy, numeracy, and art to function in society. The point of education systems isn’t to boost individuals’ dimensionally reduced 1D metrics but rather enrich their lives and contributions to society. There will always be distributions of abilities and means but that doesn’t justify neglecting the bulk of tax paying people.
It used to be that society worked just fine with people of all grades of smarts. But we're rapidly getting to the point that to be able to earn a living wage you need to be above average, especially if you are sole income provider for a while. AI is further steepening that S curve's mid-section.
I think that has more to do with our willingness or ability to value labor in a highly abstracted overseas and automated economy. In addition, there has been a complete disconnect between $1USD purchasing power and generation ability based on capital scale. I don't know what financial crisis or tax policy or free trade agreement or visa program that stems from.
I think that in the knowledge worker class, people tend to confuse their learned skills and inherited starting point to their innate abilities. Illusory superiority is best mocked in prairie home companion's Lake Woebegone, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and the children are all above average" [0].
Give kids a stable home environment with loving supportive parents, three square meals a day, 9+ hours of sleep and opportunity to pursue their creative or sports interests and you'll have a class of highly functioning humans of different abilities.
It does feel like a squeeze just functioning in the current job, housing, and grocery market though. I cannot imagine the stress of being a sole provider. My point is to not conflate genetic superiority to the multitude of factors that go in to making a talented skillful worker, where I think nurture cannot be discounted.
"It does feel like a squeeze just functioning in the current - housing, and grocery market though"
If housing were far cheaper and traded just at the cost of new construction. ($250/sq-ft for new build 6 story, $400/sq-ft for 30 story mass timber, $600/sq-ft steel and concrete). We'd see that people can easily live in the current job market!
The fundamental problem in our economy is the artificial scarcity of housing (through local regulation) in the cities and towns where the economy is booming.
Poorly in the USA or Canada does not equal poorly in Europe and some other countries outside of Europe. Some societies never paid a living wage to begin with. The USA for instance has structurally blocked minimum wage increases on the flimsiest of pretexts for many years now. Meanwhile, inflation is through the roof. The end result of that combination is very predictable.
G is (largely) immutable, but knowledge and skills are not. The economy is not zero-sum and we all benefit from increasing the total amount of human capital. Unfortunately, thinking around education is dominated by people who wrongly believe that the economy is zero-sum.
Throughout 99% of human history, the economy was mostly zero sum. If someone was rich it was because they stole it. If a group was wealthier it was because they stole it. By "stole it" I'm including theft of labor through slavery as well as the usual conquests and raiding. There was little to no innovation over time spans as long as thousands of years.
Most of human culture and philosophy evolved during these periods and bakes in the idea that the pie is finite and that anyone with more of it has stolen it, because that was just an accurate picture of reality.
A growing pie is a rare condition. It has happened a few times during periods of high civilization: Egypt, Greece, and Rome in the West and similar examples exist in lots of other places.
A rapidly growing pie is entirely new. The modern world is an extreme historical aberration built on the scientific method, modern engineering methods, and the discovery of massive amounts of exploitable cheap energy in the form of first fossil fuels, then nuclear power, then (today) learning to exploit things like solar and wind energy at exponentially larger scales. Other innovations that have fed into this unique condition include synthetic fertilizers, antibiotics, vaccines, etc.
Humans have never lived in an environment like this. Everything in our evolution and our accumulated culture is screaming that it's wrong -- that it will either collapse tomorrow (hence the perennial popularity of doomerism) or that it must be built on some kind of insanely massive crime because otherwise where is all this wealth coming from? That's because it's impossible. It cannot be. The idea that wealth can be created at this scale is just... not a thing that has ever existed until maybe 200 years ago max but really more like 80-100. Before that there was only subsistence and theft.
Edit: I'm not arguing that there is no slavery or near-slavery or theft/conquest in the modern world. These things certainly still happen. I'm arguing that it is not the primary source of our massive wealth. Slavery and conquest have always been around and no society has ever been this wealthy or grown this fast. Not even close.
You're ignoring inflation. Real (inflation adjusted) median earnings are up 12%, in total, over the past 45 years. [1] That also understates the problem because many things (education, healthcare, debt costs, etc) are understated or not even considered in inflation measurements. There's also been a substantial increase in baseline necessities for the average person (internet, computing device, etc). Factor these in and it's fairly safe to say that real incomes have declined for the majority of people.
Similarly a lot of our wealth is just a facade. Most of it derives from the stock market, yet the market cap of the stock market is now dramatically larger than all of the money in existence. Consider that the system that created this mess only started in 1971 (the end of Bretton Woods) and it already only being propped up by ever more extravagant financial games. The house of cards is likely to come down without our lifetimes, which will make this one of the shortest lived economic experiments, and failures, ever. 'Doomerism' isn't a response to the growth, but to the increasingly unstable fundamentals underpinning everything, let alone in an era that's also an obvious geopolitical inflection point as well.
> You're ignoring inflation. Real (inflation adjusted) median earnings are up 12%, in total, over the past 45 years. [1] That also understates the problem because many things (education, healthcare, debt costs, etc) are understated or not even considered in inflation measurements. There's also been a substantial increase in baseline necessities for the average person (internet, computing device, etc). Factor these in and it's fairly safe to say that real incomes have declined for the majority of people.
So what your saying even though peoples baseline expectations are higher they got, cellphones, Netflix, and are taking home more money?
No, for the average person the cost of a basic computing device and the rent attached to operate it, is probably eating up the extremely modest gain in income. And in modern times that's not really a luxury so much as a necessity, meaning people today are in effect earning less, significantly less for many, than they did 45 years ago.
I intentionally avoided entertainment, which is of course also greatly increasing costs even further - though that's probably at least partially balanced by the internet which provides an immense amount of entertainment for just the already accounted for baseline cost.
So the change from sleeping on hay and riding horses and subsistence farming to this is just a facade?
I'm not talking about numeric wealth, which I agree is hand wavey, but actual tangible physical wealth as well as our insane increase in knowledge and capability.
I can go watch videos from the surface of Mars and pictures of galaxies from the beginning of time, then go to the doctor and get injected with something that programs my immune system to resist diseases I've never encountered, then ask an AI to explain any concept from the history of science or mathematics. I am middle class and live better than a pharaoh in a lot of ways, and some of the things I just described are available to the very poor. This is simply nuts and it is not a facade or an illusion.
The collapse of the numeric financial industry won't take all this away unless we let it.
It's unusual to repeatedly refer to wealth and economics if you mean technological progress. And yeah we have obviously made tremendous technological strides, though I also would not entirely idealize that either. When you say that you live better than a pharaoh in a lot of ways, would you rather be a pharaoh or middle class, let alone lower, now a days?
Technology is definitely the driving factor behind all changes in society, and it's an absolute requirement for our species to ultimately survive in this universe. It's also made it easier than ever for a larger chunk of those those of ability to live lives that would not have been possible for them in the past. But on a social level, it's overall effects are, in a seemingly large chunk of cases, somewhat sordid.
Economics doesn't measure wealth, it measures money, which is a proxy for political power and social status. In economics those are primary, and everything else is labelled an externality.
Wealth in an anthropological sense means the extent to which a culture is increasing its collective intelligence - its ability to understand itself and the world, and to invent and create more interesting and open possibilities for humans to live in and explore.
It's assumed technology is the only way to do that, but that might not be true. Technology is a harsh medicine with spectacular benefits but terrible costs and side effects.
There might be other processes which get to the same ends in more subtle ways.
This culture certainly likes to believe it's the only possible game in town. But cultures tend to do that - until something changes and they discover it's not true.
Economics measures a lot of things, including wealth. It often uses monetary units as as the units of measure for both stocks like wealth and the numerator of flows like income, but even then its not actually measuring money, its using various techniques to convert things into money-equivalents to have common units.
> which is a proxy for political power and social status.
“Wealth”, “political power”, and “social status” are different ways of saying “the ability to get other people to do things you want them to do”. They are different lenses on the same thing.
> In economics those are primary, and everything else is labelled an externality.
No, in economics “externality” is the label given to a cost or benefit accruing as a result of a transaction to a party other than a direct participant in the rransaction. These are important because they explain one reason why even if rational choice theory did hold (which it doesn’t), markets could produce non-ideal results, because market decisions are based on (and optimize in aggregate, if the assumptions of rational choice theory hold), only those costs and benefits that are internal to the transactions (that is, accruing to direct, voluntary participants in the transaction.)
I think what you are missing is that wealth is actually just "motivation to do work" in quantifiable pieces (we call it "currency", and mark-to-market assets for convenience).
If I could bake a muffin that would make you effortlessly glide through, say, a full day of perfectly laying bricks without taking a break, a warehouse of those muffins would mean I'm extremely wealthy. No money, markets, or currency necessary. It's the purified extract of wealth.
With that in mind, you can see that there is still huge room for more wealth creation. The majority of humans are still doing work that doesn't motivate much work from other humans.
I would hazard a guess that a lot of the so-called wealth is not actual, directly owned material wealth, but immaterial numbers: indirect, abstract proof of ownership — in Baudrillard jargon, simulacra of ownership. Numbers, which, due to their illiquid nature and their disconnect from material ownership, cannot be instantly and fully redeemed without sacrificing most of their purported value.
We haven’t stopped extracting materials or producing goods. In fact, there are about 7 billion more people now than in 1800, dawn of the industrial age. We are hundreds if not thousands of times more productive in terms of work than in the pre-industrial age.
However, most of our so-called ownership begins in a fiat currency that is essentially a company token.
Assuming the assumption it is true (which I doubt) - there obviously is still value in teaching knowledge, so making students know more and practical skills, not produce more intelligent students.
You can have a IQ of over 200, but if no one ever showed you how a computer works or gives you a manual, you still won't be productive with it.
But I very much believe, intelligence is improvable and also degradable, just ask some alcoholics for instance.
IQ of 200 (or higher) do not exist according to the original definitions of this metric. You need a population of 219 billion or higher to have a 95% chance that a sample exists with 6.66 standard deviations away from the mean (assuming mean of 100 and std of 15). Ofc the tests are of limited value and things can be gamed, but it would be silly to try and identify samples that have no chance of existing.
> IQ of 200 (or higher) do not exist according to the original definitions of this metric
Just to expand in this point…
Most IQ tests for adults lose a lot of precision over 130 (2sd), and they are extremely imprecise over 145 (3sd) — almost to the point that a scores over 145 should simply be labeled 145+.
When I did a deep dive into the IQ test literature 20 years ago, the most reliable correlated predictors for 145+ were standardized tests like the GRE. That said, standardized tests like these have high specificity and (relatively) low sensitivity — that is, very few false positives and many false negatives.
“Is unlikely to exist” and “does not exist” are two very different statements, but it really doesn’t matter because GP’s point stands if you replace the exaggerated IQ with something reasonable like 160.
OK. The more precise statement is that when the test was created you would have had about 99.3% to 99.42% chance that such a sample did not exist if you were to test all the population this test was designed for (depending on population statistics of the time that are a bit unclear).
To be clear, I do not endorse the validity of these tests or their interpretation at any level. Learning to be a lifelong learner can take almost anyone a really long way. The analogy to neural nets is that bigger nets dont always make a better model after a point and every human starts at a very priviledged/huge network capacity.
"The Bell Curve" is, let's say, highly controversial and not a good introduction into the topic. Its claim that genetics are the main predictor of IQ, which was very weakly supported at the time, has been completely and undeniably refuted by science in the thirty years since it's publication.
This is misleading. Anyone who wants to learn about IQ should Google it. It's the most replicated finding in psychology, and any questions you have about twins or groups with similar or different genes have probably been investigated. There is a lot of noise online in the form of commentary about IQ, so it's important to look at actual data if you are skeptical/curious.
Why would it not be? It's not like intelligence was some sort of unknown intrinsic discovery that psychologist happened to uncover. Intelligence was defined and the tests were created to support the definition.
I've done quite a lot of personal, hobby-research on this subject, and I remain convinced that IQ deserves to be met with a lot of skepticism and controversy. I do believe the tests measure something insofar that all tests measure something, but I am not certain that either intelligence, or at least intelligence alone, is the only thing being measured on those tests.
Not to mention, with over one hundred years of intelligence research, what good has actually come from the field? Historically, there was plenty of racism, eugenics, and the furthering of certain political agendas that have come from intelligence research. Again, whose life has actually been improved from this research? Has IQ positively contributed to the field of education? Has the research helped increase human quality of life and happiness? Of course, leave it to psychology -- its most "robust and replicated finding" is, essentially, useless.
One that jumps immediately to mind is IQ testing used for epidemiology, such as exposure to toxins and the effects on children. IQ tests were used in the original study (Phillip Landrigan) used to show how leaded gasoline causes cognitive imparement in children. For things that cause sub-clinical imparement, you need a way to test for lowered intelligence, that doesn't rise to disability level.
That's a few million, if not billion people who's lives have been improved by having IQ tests that were used to force environmental regulation worldwide.
> Again, whose life has actually been improved from this research?
IQ showed there were tons of poor people with high IQ and thus it was worth providing higher schooling to poor people, that is a big one. Without IQ research people would just argue all poor people are dumb, but you can't do that now since we have proof that they aren't, they are just uneducated.
Another group it helped massively was women, without IQ tests do you really think women would get into higher education that quickly? IQ tests proved women weren't dumber than men, something people have long believed.
If you think its bad that women and poor people today are allowed to get higher education, then sure IQ just had bad consequences, but I feel most think those are good things.
Not sure what you mean precisely. Yes lots if work in IQ, but that does not mean there is a grand consensus. I am a geneticist who studies cognitive function. The single most common misunderstanding about estimates of heritability is that a high heritability implies full genetic causation without potential malleability. That is total wrong. Heritability is always measured in the context of Environment X. If you change to Environment Y or Z then the heritability will often change greatly.
As a geneticist who studies cognitive function, if you get a moment, do you mind reading this blog [1] and stating if you think it's factually correct or not? My genes are too poor, and thus, my IQ is likely too low for me to be certain I can trust my own opinions on the matter.
Unfortunately most of the malleability is non-systematic (can't be engineered by a third party). Which means it's caused by the nonlinear dynamics between the genes and environment.
> Heritability is always measured in the context of Environment X. If you change to Environment Y or Z then the heritability will often change greatly.
That's not a very meaningful statement. If you took two twins and severely malnourished one of them it would not be useful to say: "See! IQ is mostly environmental!".
You have to assume some kind of baseline environment that nearly everyone will share, and that can be full-filled just by the virtue of growing up in a country like America. Otherwise, you are just concerning yourself with insignificant outliers.
> Anyone who wants to learn about IQ should Google it
This is bad advice because Google returns poor results for most medical questions, including ones about controversial topics like IQ.
IQ was adopted as a pet cause by hard right wing political theorists, for example one of the authors of the Bell Curve.
When I was in grad school for psych, nobody serious studied it. Occasionally one person was still working on it, and everybody in the department whispered about them being a kook. This was at an elite psych department, it may have been different in smaller departments.
Often times if you see someone posting information about IQ it's either (1) they're selling IQ tests, (2) they're selling services that administer IQ tests, or (3) they align with a political faction that politicizes IQ.
If you want to learn about IQ, the best thing is probably to find a recent review article published by a top tier journal that does not specialize in IQ research.
My take the last time I looked into it was that it helps locate people who have learning disabilities, but it's not great at predicting individual outcomes.
The measure most people intuitively think of is correlation of IQ with success, keeping SES constant and throwing out the lowest range of IQ. That is, you want to know the incremental benefit of having a higher IQ given that you're not suffering from a learning disability. And you also don't want to accidentally measure the obvious impact that having more money gives you more opportunities.
When you make these adjustments it quickly becomes clear that IQ is much messier than people in this thread are claiming. For example, heritability varies by SES. And heritability is generally not what people think it is naively.
Do note that The Bell Curve is not considered controversial in general. The part about race and genetics is. Also genes being the sole predictor of IQ is not an accurate description of the book’s premise.
No the whole book is controversial. It's a political argument for dismantling the welfare state disguised as a review of science. They laundered a bunch of work by racial eugenicists along with a bunch of other junk science methodology.
Calling something "controversial" is a total non-argument. The book's science about IQ is solid.
In actuality, the content of the book was simply a collection of mainstream scientific consensus ideas at that time, without specific controversial add-ons. It's only after the book was published, the book unexpectedly was attacked by proto-woke people.
The controversial part is specifically the policy recommendations that we avoid investing resources in certain racial groups because problems in their communities can be explained by genetics.
You can't determine someone's IQ based on their race, you need to give them an IQ test to do that, thus the suggestion that we prejudge people based on their race is seen as racist.
You might feel that the racism is scientifically justified, but that belief is controversial.
I've read the book. I says that aspects of IQ can be heritable, but doesn't ever say "genetics are the main predictor of IQ".
Quoting direcly from the book: "It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with IQ differences” and the book states that "the exact contribution of genes versus environment is unknown."
It's at least mostly BS. Researchers have found certain genes which have a weak statistical correlation with high IQ but the mechanism of action is unknown. And it's not an additive thing: the interactions and relationships between individual genes must play some role but that has barely been studied at all. There's no guarantee that an embryo with those genes will grow up to be intelligent, or that they won't have other problems. But there's enough "dumb money" in Silicon Valley to provide a customer base of insecure suckers for these startups.
One of the dark comedies playing out in the world right now is that if random physical features are correlated with IQ testing due to co-heritability, users of IVF selection will be imprinting them on their own kids.
IQ is largely genetic, even if some people claim otherwise. The evidence for this is now overwhelming: even when different ethnic groups grow up in very similar conditions in the same country, the PISA (which correlates r=0.9 with IQ) scores measured vary greatly. For example, among second-generation children in Germany, there are significant differences in PISA scores. Polish children achieve similar or even better scores than German children. Turkish children, on the other hand, remain at the same poor level that their parents (the first generation of immigrants) achieved in the tests.
Twin studies and studies of adopted children also leave no doubt that there is a very strong genetic component that determines IQ.
Even Wikipedia assumes that heritability can be as high as 80%.
Your first link (Wikipedia) directly contradicts your examples:
> Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis[18][19][20][21]. The scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups.[22][23][24][25][26][27].
I suspect that this is an instance where “the scientific consensus” is wrong because to suggest contrary to that is wrongthink and enough to have one ostracized not only from science, but also society as a whole. I would love to be wrong, so if someone could explain this to me, I’d be very receptive to an explanation of why this logic is wrong:
First, let’s substitute emotionally charged terms for more neutral terms; e.g. imagine rather than discussing intelligence and race, we are discussing something else highly heritable and some other method of grouping genetically similar individuals, e.g. height and family. The analogous claim would therefore be that “although height differences have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in height between families have a genetic basis.” This seems very clearly false to me. It is in the realm of “I cannot fathom how an intelligent person could disagree with this” territory for me. If variable A has a causative correlation with variable B and two groups score similarly with respect to variable A, then they are probably similar with respect to variable B. Of course there are other variables, such as nutrition, sleep, and what have you, but that does not eliminate a correlation. In fact, for something which is “highly heritable” it seems to me that genetics would necessarily be the predominant factor.
It’s a really unfortunate conclusion, so again, I’d love to be wrong, but I cannot wrap my head around how it can be.
> Suggest contrary to that is wrongthink and enough to have one ostracized not only from science, but also society as a whole.
There's many scientists who have published the "contrary". They were not ostracized from science or from society as a whole. These saw next to none negative impact to their position while they were alive. Other scientists have published rebuttals and later some of the originals articles have been retracted.
J. Philippe Rushton: 250 published articles, 6 books, the most famous university professor in Canada. Retractions of this work came 8 years after his death.
Arthur Jensen: Wrote a controversial paper in 1969. Ended up publishing 400 articles. Remained a professor for his full life.
Hans Eysenck: The most cited living psychologist in peer-reviewed scientific journal literature. It took more than 20 years before any of his papers were retracted.
There's a lot of published articles about the "contrary view" that you can read. You can also read the rebuttals by the current scientific consensus (cited above).
> The analogous claim would therefore be that “although height differences have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in height between families have a genetic basis.” This seems very clearly false to me.
But this is not an analogous claim since you're talking about disparities between families. The analogous claim would be: "although height differences have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in height between groups have a genetic basis".
A very simple example for height[1]: The Japanese grew 10 cm taller from mid-20th century to early 2000s. Originally people thought that the shortness of the Japanese was related to their genetics, but this rapid growth (which also correlates with their improved economy) suggests that the group difference between Japanese and other groups was not related to the genetic component of height variance.
> A very simple example for height[1]: The Japanese grew 10 cm taller from mid-20th century to early 2000s. Originally people thought that the shortness of the Japanese was related to their genetics, but this rapid growth (which also correlates with their improved economy) suggests that the group difference between Japanese and other groups was not related to the genetic component of height variance.
Every group grew taller as they got richer, but Japanese people are still short even today when they are rich. So existence of other factors doesn't rule out the genetic factor.
You're wrong. Some of the smartest kids I know are from immigrant children. It is their background - and society's response to that background - that hinders them, not their genetics. More so if they aren't lily white. Note how anything you say about this subject will be used to generalize to much larger groups (of which you can find some prime examples in this very thread) than the ones that IQ tests themselves target: individuals. And you can't say much about how an individual scores on their IQ test without accounting for their environment because that's a massive factor.
All of your arguments more or less equate to 'I don't understand the subject matter, but I'd like to see my biases confirmed'. And, predictably, you see your biases confirmed. But some of the smartest individuals that ever lived came from backgrounds and populations that - assuming the genetic component is as strong as you make it out to be - would have precluded them from being that smart.
Bluntly: wealth and access to opportunity have as much to do with how well you score on an IQ test versus what your genetic make-up is. Yes, it is a factor. No, it is not such a massive factor that it dwarfs out the other two once you start looking at larger groups. Income disparity and nutrition alone already negate it.
And that's just looking at that particular individual, good luck to you if your mom and dad were highly intelligent but you ended up as the child of drugs or alcohol consumers. Nothing you personally can do about that is going to make up for that difference vs growing up as the child of affluent and moderately intelligent people.
IQ tests are a very imprecise yardstick, and drawing far reaching conclusions about the results without appreciating the complexity behind squashing a multi-dimensional question into a single scalar, especially when you are starting out from a very biased position is not going to lead to a happy ending. Before you know it you'll be measuring skull volume.
Specifically, as well stated by [23] there is no such thing as “race.” The premise of racial group differences is not possible; we can’t have racial differences if race is not real. Sadly, a lot of people very much believe in race, especially the ones that shouldn’t!
Geneticist use the word “ancestry” to refer to summarize the historical geographic origins of genetic variants that we are inherit. Ancestry can be reliably estimated by genome analysis.
Race, like the gender, is now considered a social construct.
The meanings of words are defined by a community of users who find them useful in communicating. Race and ancestry are both useful words.
There’s more genetic variation within any so-called racial group than between groups, so race obviously has no genetic justification. That's not semantics. Yes it's real, but for social, not genetic reasons.
> If there's no genetic justification, how would it be possible to trivially determine someone's race just from their DNA ?
Genetic ancestry is determined by correlation with geographic origins and population. In other words, where a set of genetic markers are highly concentrated. It says nothing about race.
The problem is that Human 'races' are not in fact unique, distinguished and separate from other 'races'. Genetically, two sub Sahara African men could be more genetically distinct than one of those men and a random white man even they should be both 'black'.
There’s more genetic variation within any so-called racial group than between groups, so race obviously has no genetic justification. It's real in the way other social constructs are real.
I've been told that there's no such thing as a circle because there's no such thing as a perfect circle. The claim that race does not exist seems to be in that category.
You seem to be arguing that talking about races within humans may be useful even if the reality only approximates the definition of race (similarly to the idea of a "circle", which even though it does not apply in all it's precision to any real object it may still be a useful concept as an approximation nonetheless). However, I don't think that comparison is particularly insightful, and it may even be a bit misleading in my opinion because of the important differences in how those two things are defined (circle and race).
After all, the reason why no real object is an actual circle is because the definition of circle is so to say an "ideal" definition that no real object can fit in all it's precision. It's natural to assume that no real object will have all of it's "points" perfectly distributed according to a circle's equation (without even getting philosophical as to how these mathematical definitions relate to the real world, or if they do at all). If one rejects any "approximate", non exact application of the concept, then it will be mostly useless when it comes to describing or understanding the real world (because you won't be able to use it for anything).
On the other hand, the concept of "race" is quite the opposite to ideal: it's not "ideal" as the circle is, in fact it's more of a pragmatic/working definition. It's more like the definition of "chair": many things may or may not be considered a chair, but usually people don't feel that there's "no such thing as a chair" in the real world. On the contrary, it's more common to feel that anything "could" be a chair because it has a malleable definition based on the context, instead of nothing being "precisely" a chair because there are some rigid constraints to the definition that no real object can actually fit.
When the idea of races within the human species is pushed against, it's not because "race" is an ideal concept that no real thing may implement in all it's precision (as would be the case with the circle). I won't present these actual reasons (which could get quite political) here, but I will say that I definitely wouldn't consider those two claims to be in the same category:
- Saying that X real object is not a circle, or that no real object can be (exactly) a circle has to do with the fact that the concept of circle is ideal and by definition nothing "real" will fit it perfectly.
- Saying that (in the human species) there are no races is, however, not based on a quality of the definition of the concept of "race" (specifically, it's not ideal), but on some quantitative judgements about what kind of thing qualifies as a race an what doesn't (pretty much like the concept of "chair", "food", etc. which are not ideal and there's some room for discussion based on context when it comes to whether some specific object fits the category or not).
Ok, so saying race doesn't exist is like saying chairs doesn't exist, since you can't really say what is a chair, what is a shelf and what is a table, correct? Technically you could say that a chair is a table or a shelf, but people still like to call them chairs, you know the difference when you see it.
Races is like that, scientists can't define it but its still a useful concept like a chair. Scientists can't exactly define what a chair is either, but its still a very useful concept and we can discuss chairs and everyone understand what we mean.
Two sub Sahara African men could be more genetically distinct than one of those men and a random white man even they should be both 'black'.
The thing about race is that it has no biological justification. It's still 'real' of course but in the same way money has 'real' value. It's a powerful social construct.
> The thing about race is that it has no biological justification.
> It's a powerful social construct.
This is 100% correct, and yet progressive academics have yet to figure out how to slot this fact into their ideology without creating incorrigible inconsistencies.
For instance - if race is a social construct just like gender, why is transracialism frowned upon, while transgenderism is lauded? Quoting Richard Dawkins, famous debunker of Creationist and religious bullshit [0]:
Why is a white woman vilified and damned if she identifies as black,
but lauded if she identifies as a man? That's topsy-turvy, because
race really is a continuum, whereas sex is one of the few genuine binaries
of biology.
The most coherent (but unsatisfying) answer I have found in the literature is that society has "intersubjectively" agreed to accept transgenderism and not transracialism, where "intersubjectively" ultimately translates to some level of "because we said so and this is society's new fanfiction head canon:" [1]
What matters, then, is that intersubjectively we have all agreed that
ancestry is relevant to the determination of one’s race.
It's worth noting that intersubjectivity is basically a religious concept, as defined in the Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. [2]
There is no science or biology on the far LGBTQ+ progressive left. Only pseudoscience and apologetics befitting of a Creationist.
That person didn't address the current climate in academia at all. Their examples of "contrarians" are all long-dead professors whose papers were published many decades ago in a different academic climate. That doesn't refute that academia in America has suffered ideological capture since, and questioning the "scientific consensus" on certain politically-charged topics is career suicide.
Also their Japan example seems poor. Japan remains a short a country relative to their prosperity. They're several centimeters shorter than a country with a similar GDP per capita, like Czech Republic. They're about the same average height as Somalians, despite having significantly better food security and a GDP per capita that's over 50 times higher.
especially Germany is a very poor example for this claim as school performance (PISA) in this country correlates with the parents academic background more than anything. if your parents aren't educated you can be intelligent AF and still will fail the German school system while you can be dumb as a brick but still make Abitur if your parents drill you through. in Germany.
and Welt is a media source with a right conservative agenda pushing the genetics narrative.
Surely this is completely logicalal if IQ is largely heritable.
The smarter richer parents are more likely (But not guaranteed) to have smarter children.
So it would be completely expected for the smarted person you know to come from a rich family even if their environment had no effect. (Though it likely does)
Yes. The smartest kid in my elementary school in Blankenese, Hamburg, Germany (a filthy-rich neighborhood) was an asthmatic son of the stable master of Alex Springer. By far the smartest kid.
But he did NOT go to gymnasium. He was my best friend and I was furious at this social injustice. I was 10 and this was my first exposure to rigid class injustice. It still makes me mad. All of the other dumb rich kids from Blankenese went to gymnasium, me included.
This is pretty common. In the 80s (when I went to high school in Europe) the best way to predict whether or not someone would go to Gymnasium or Athenaeum was to look at how wealthy their parents were. It is still exactly the same today.
I had to research what gymnasium meant, in the US that just means P.E. which is a class where you do generic sports for an hour each day.
Are you saying, in Germany, you can't choose to go academic route in primary/secondary school? The teachers and school decide if you will go into vocational school for mechanics, electrician, etc? That seems to imply class mobility is nearly zero in German education.
Remarkable how you jumped from 'IQ is largely genetic' to 'Turkish children remain at the same poor level that their parents achieved in the tests'.
Don't you see your the mistake in your reasoning there?
Probably that too can be explained by genetics or maybe by a failing education system but the point is: there are very dumb Germans and very smart Turkish people who would still score different on an IQ test in German. Especially after going through the German school system (which of course would never discriminate against children with a different ethnic background /s) and so on. The confounding factors at play here make the whole comparison without accounting for those factors utterly meaningless.
Germans have an average IQ of around 100 (it used to be 105 before immigration). Turks have an IQ of 85-90. If you are not biased, you can clearly see these differences in everyday life. With a few exceptions, the intellectual achievements of fellow citizens of Turkish origin tend to be rather low. The situation is different when you look at migrants from high-IQ countries, such as China (who have an IQ of 104). These children often achieve amazing results, for example in the International Science Olympiads. The US is actually only able to achieve top places in the Math Olympiad thanks to Chinese migrants. Almost the entire US team consists of people with a Chinese background. Look at this picture of the US-Team for 2023 if you want to know, what I mean: https://maa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-...
You do understand that these estimates of heritability depend of a relatively stable estimate of the environmental variance. If environment variance goes up heritability goes down.
Sure, genetic variants modulate (not “Determine”) an IQ score and reaction times etc. But this does NOT mean IQ scores are unmalleable by environmental factors.
The brain has pretty high plasticity. A large host of factors contribute to the final outcome, from mental stimulation to training to overall health, stress (both physical and mental), and nutrition.
It has been shown that IQ scores improve significantly just by taking them multiple times (training) [1]. They also vary if the tested person is sleep deprived, sick, or stressed.
You do have to consider that g is the amount of plasticity though, which is mainly genetic. A better way is to think of it is that genetics provides a potential capacity which may or may not be fulfilled. Training helps individuals to varying degrees.
That seems intuitive to me, but lots of other things in science seemed intuitive because I wanted to believe them. If the measured IQ difference in individuals can be overwhelmed by simple factors like “have I taken the test before”, we don’t really have a useful empirical measurement to say these things and we’re just stating our hopes and dreams.
The training effect in test-retest is dependent on g as well. It is intelligent to learn from past experiences.
Measuring g is hard and taking shortcuts is tempting. A reasonable repeatable g factor test takes hours, and is too often replaced by a single test. There are ways around the test-retest issues but they are roads less travelled.
My high school was right across from a branch of a university (UHD) where the PhD candidates developed IQ tests. We (the HS students) could take them for extra credit. My favorite example was a block-arranging test (there was a set of blocks & some pictures). Anyways, they printed the blocks "symmetrically"; once I figured that out, making the picture was limited only by how quickly I could move. (The test normally had you looking at all sides of the cube, repeatedly.) My "IQ" was well over 200 on that test. The candidate said that it was going to set their lab back bag years.
I once took a timed test with a section that had me translating a string of symbols to letters using a cipher, response being multiple choice. If you read the string left to right, there were multiple answer options that started with the same sequence of letters (so ostensibly you had to translate the entire string).
But if you read the string right to left, there was often only one answer option that matched (the right one). So I got away with translating only the last ~4 symbols, regardless of how long the string was. I blew through the section, and surely scored high.
I always wondered: did they realize this? Or did it artificially inflate my results?
And looking at the highest-entropy section felt natural to me, but only because of countless hours as a software engineer where the highest-entropy bit is at the end (filepaths, certain IDs, etc).
Is it really accurate to say I'm "more intelligent" because I've seen that pattern a ton before, whereas someone who hasn't isn't? I suspect not.
If the pattern generalizes to other tasks, maybe the test was right? ;)
Appreciate your post and the post you commented on. Taking shortcuts in test development often ends up being detrimental. There is also an inherent challenge in developing test for people who may well be smarter than you are. It’s like that programmer thing: “If you write the smartest program you can, and debugging is harder than writing code. Who’s gonna debug the code?” Many people have tried developing “smart” tests for cognitive abilities, some realize when they fail, some unfortunately don’t.
“A god-awful complex mixture of genetic variation, stochastic variation during development, and innumerable environmental influences, all interacting in a big recursive hairball.”
>>> They then hypothesized a general factor, “g,” to explain this pattern.
>> what's the point of all the intervention in the form of teaching/parenting styles and whatnot, if g factor is nature and immutable by large? What's the logic of the educators here?
> does not nutrition and education help some people more than others? That’s the g factor which is mainly genetic.
Yes, if you ignore or compensate everithing else, it's mainly genetic.
That is correct. The null hypothesis tested is: if you compensate for everything the result is the same for everyone, given that genetics have no effects on g. Hence, the null hypothesis is rejected. Thus, mainly genetic factors underlie the g factor.
Just to clarify: the prevailing notion in many context were that genetics does not matter and thus given the necessary social and educational interventions every human would prosper. Sadly, this is not the case. We are limited by our biology AND the extend we and our environment manages us to fulfill our potential.
But we are not limited by our biology. With tools and technology we can change our limits. From pharmaceutical tools like adderal to neurolink style brain implants to ai assistants to genetic engineering, the limitations in our cognitive capacity are becoming less salient every day. The importance of g in the future asymptotically approaches 0 the farther out you go, at least in terms of economic outcomes. It will always be important for moral reasoning as I’m frequently reminded. But I would guess that openness to experience and/or conscientiousness will eventually displace g as predictors of economic success, if they haven’t already. G is useful when everyone does paperwork in offices, but when everyone is on UBI and/or living in government camps g won’t matter as much, again aside from the capacity for moral reasoning but that can be offset with a stricter and more draconian legal system.
“It [g] will always be important for moral reasoning as I’m frequently reminded.”
Excellent quote! Unfortunately not all high g people engage in moral reasoning, and I fear that they will tend to exploit lower g people, rather than to help them utilize AI to compensate. There is a real opportunity to help individuals with cognitive impairments enhance their abilities with AI. The question is how, and how they collectively feel about it.
One is certainly not, unless one is not well read. The g-factor is one of the most stable findings in psychology. It is well established and well defined.
If you're calling g-factor "that which remains after you have eliminated all environmental factors", then you're not using the common definition. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics). To challenge your other assertion, I'll quote the article:
> The measured value of this construct depends on the cognitive tasks that are used, and little is known about the underlying causes of the observed correlations.
(We've had a lot of discussions of IQ on Hacker News. My observations suggest that everyone who supports it in more than 3 comments in the same thread is a scientific racist with a poor understanding of the research on IQ.)
I’m not subscribing to the notion that g should be controlled for environment, quite the contrary, but if you do, what is left is the part of g which is genetics.
EDIT: The bit of knowledge I have comes from being published in psychiatric epidemiology on the topic of cognitive impairment and substance use.
That's not the claim you were making earlier. (Although, strictly-speaking, it's still wrong: many factors other than genetics are involved in producing a newborn infant, famously epigenetics. If you classify these all as "genetic factors", then yes, the claim is tautologically true by way of redefining words.)
I'd be interested to see how you'd go about controlling for those other things: so far, I haven't seen anyone manage it.
The many of the subjects tested never had any experience with this kind of formal testing, had little to no education, and of course predictably failed on several abstract tasks. It might be that the very pattern of sitting down and intensely focusing on apparently meaningless problems isn't as innate as expected.
Eh, I wish we could retire socioeconomics as a valid term. It can mean just about any factor and for it to be used it scientific publications and even normal discourse that goes beyond Facebook level discussion, feel a little counter-productive.
I thought I was being clear. Access to education, which is a function of wealth, race segregation, and/or cultural expectations, or in other words, economic + social factors.
For example, if a family encourages their child to work from the earliest allowed age at the expense of schooling, that's a manifestation of both economic and social pressures.
It is not controversial at all. It was deemed inappropriate due the amount of 'wrongthink' it causes. We can argue about what followed and whether its claims have been nullified, but given how much conversations started with it, I sincerely doubt the argument that it should not be the introduction is reasonable. In a sense, it is the source of the debate.
There is no logic. Some people are just born much smarter than others and there is nothing you can do about it if you aren't one of them. The implications of that fact are too much for most people to accept so we pretend that it isn't true.
That is a very fatalist perspective. In HS, I was in a class with 3 kids, who were genuinely smarter than me ( not by a notch, mind; comparatively speaking I was just dumber ). I agree that pretending I was/am not dumb by comparison would not help, but suggesting 'nothing you can do about it' is not entirely accurate either. Frankly, the reason I slowly got less dumb is because of my exposure to them. There is something awe-inspiring about seeing a guy using cold logic to guide you through something and be 100% correct.
I guess you could call it fatalist, but is it fatalist to say I was born to be 5'10" and there's not a damn thing in the world I can do to be 6'? Isn't it the same with intelligence? You may feel smarter now, but are you really? What, exactly, makes you fell like you are? Do you think that if you met those same people today they wouldn't still be significantly smarter than you?
Intelligence is not knowledge and it is not wisdom. You have to “learn” to get those.
It’s much more akin to VO2 max in aerobic exercise, something like 70% genetic. It is still good for everyone to exercise even if it is harder or easier for some.
One’s ceiling may be more or less stable, but there are many instances where individuals have certain underdeveloped cognitive skills (of which there are a litany), undergo training to develop those skills, and then afterwards go on to score (sometimes much) higher on IQ tests. Children with certain disabilities such at autism or FASD tend to see more dramatic differences. This isn’t to say they “became more intelligent,” but rather that the testing is unable to measure intelligence directly, rather relying on those certain cognitive skills as a proxy for intelligence.
> Which makes me wonder what's the point of all the intervention in the form of teaching/parenting styles and whatnot, if g factor is nature and immutable by large? What's the logic of the educators here?
Many/most people (esp. young people) are not pushed to the limits of their capacity to learn.
Quality interventions guide people closer to these limits.
I would argue the purpose of public education is directionally to attempt to level the playing field between people who start with a lot and people who start with a little. And in this regard, it is an absolute failure. People sometimes attribute public schooling to helping someone "escape poverty" or whatever, but I think it's mostly IQ and big 5 personality traits. And it's extremely unfortunate that both of those appear to be largely genetic.
Here's a real brain bender. Let's assume it takes approximately average IQ to understand basic algebra, so approximately 100 IQ. Half of the population has less than that IQ. Squinting really hard and making things up, something like 40% of the population is intellectually incapable of understanding exponential growth and decay. So how can it be legal/ethical for them to sign a contract to get a credit card or a mortgage if they literally cannot understand it? That's just one example. Once you crack this egg open, it breaks a lot of things required for modern society to function.
> So how can it be legal/ethical for them to sign a contract to get a credit card or a mortgage if they literally cannot understand it?
It’s not. Part of being fair and equitable is simply acknowledging we can’t hold everyone to the same standard. One day we’ll look at all this schooling, etc as the equivalent of trying to train people to grow taller.
I’d argue you can’t be a good ruler if you don’t acknowledge these limitations of your citizens. I’d have to dig it up but there was a wealthy slave owner during reconstruction who basically expressed (via personal letter) his concern freed slaves would become a permanent underclass if held to the same expectations as the rest of society. Given the current state of things, it’s a fairly impressive prediction.
I don’t say this to attract downvotes but from a genuine position of creating a society that is safe and plentiful for all. We need to create new systems and expectations (that will be disparate in their application and impact). And no, they don’t have to be explicitly “racist”.
Refusing to acknowledge these limitations is akin to neglect and despite all the emotional signaling ultimately harmful and preventing real progress.
Crystallised vs fluid intelligence, and IQ tests mainly test the latter, whilst education focused on the first, as well as learning strategies and general problem solving strategies.
Also, even if intelligence was 100% genetic, we could still in theory increase everybodies IQ equally with education and the previous statement still holds.
Human IQ has been going up at a very fast rate for the last 100 years. Kids tested by the Army being enlisted for WW1 who had a mean score of 100(by definition) in 1917 now would have a mean score of lss than 80. Tons of interesting work on why IQ is shooting up, but it definitely is NOT genetics.
This is known as the Flynn effect. Here is the wikipedia entry in case you want more details:
Video games like Civilization and Myst etc, probably add 5 to 10 IQ points to kids. My 9 year old knew all about Greek triremes. Me: What the heck is a trireme?
Most if what people call “genetic effects” are actually “genetic-by-environment” interaction effects. Chane the environment and you change the APPARENT heritability. Good example is the genetics of substance use disorders which range from 30 to 60%—-but IF AND ONLY IF there are drugs around to which you are exposed in YOUR environment.?
Knowing what a trireme isn’t a sign of intelligence, it’s trivia.
Being able to figure out how to build a trireme is intelligence.
And I don’t mean looking up instructions and doing, I mean being able to reconstruct the knowledge from baser principles. This is not to say you or your son aren’t intelligent, just that knowing about triremes isn’t a sign of it.
> concerning g is that it's largely genetic, and immune to "intervention" AKA stability
Biology seems to be the destination for smuggled in quasi-religious beliefs. Lysenkoism, creationism and in the case of a segment (or more?) of the western professional-managerial class, this kind of Bell Curveism.
In the past people were satisfied with the divine apotheosis of people into a superior Brahmin class, or chosen people, or even in more modern times a Calvinistic elect, which this is an attempt to smuggle in as a secular, "scuentific" basis.
If we were watching elementary particles smash together in an accelerator, the idea that a brain could be boiled down to a number and ranked in order, and said this be due to differential genes and such would be seen as absurd. Especially considering human behavioral modernity happen two to three thousand generations ago, if one knows a genetic time scale. For our version of biological Lysenkoism or creationism, this all goes out the window though. Speaking of Lysenkoism, it is akin to the Marxist idea of false consciousness - the people who believe such ideas can see the errors of Lysenkoism or creationism, but the crank idea tied to their particular system makes a lot of sense to them.
I think of al-Andalus in Spain the 1450s, or the Battle of Vienna in 1683. Until a few centuries ago, Europe could barely keep itself free of Arab or Turk rule (and often didn't). Change back a few centuries and this would be about the genetic superiority of the Arab brain over the Caucasian. It's all quite silly.
The Bell Curve is a classic in racist science and it accelerated the destruction of america's greatness which was always that we are a land of immigrants.
> The way human IQ testing developed is that researchers noticed people who excel in one cognitive task tend to do well in others - the “positive manifold.”
I'm pretty sure that this is not true, and that the tests were developed to measure children's intellectual development, and whether they were behind or ahead for their age. A bunch of people saw them and decided that it was far better than the primitive tests they had devised in an attempt to limit immigration from southern Europe, or to justify legal discrimination against black people, and wished a universal intelligence scalar into existence.
They justify this by saying that the results on this year's test correlate with the results of last years test. They are not laughed at. The thing it most correlates with is the value of your parent's car or cars.
That's my recollection, too--IQ was developed to judge kids' "mental age" (how far ahead or behind they are compared to their peers in their current grade) and was only later retrofitted onto the g factor model of intelligence.
If a model can get an IQ of 120, but can't draw clocks at a precise requested time, or properly count the b's in blueberry, can we then agree IQ tests don't measure intelligence?
There is probably a correlation between how fast a human can do math problems and how intelligent they are in general.
But a very trivial python program running on a normal computer will beat the fastest human at math problems in terms of speed. Even though it does nothing else useful
I imagine the value of something like this is for business owners to choose which LLMs they can replace their employees with, so it using human IQ tests is relevant.
The point is that the correlation between doing well on these tasks and doing well on other (directly useful) tasks is well established for humans, but not well established for LLMs.
If the employees' job is taking IQ tests, then this is a great measure for employers. Otherwise, it doesn't measure anything useful.
Oh it measures a useful metric, absolutely, as aspects of an IQ test validate certain types of cognition. Those types of cognition have been found to map to real-world employment of the same.
If an AI is so incapable of performing admirably on an IQ test for those types of cognition, then one thing we're certainly measuring is that it's incapable of handling that 'class' of cognition if the conditions change in minuscule and tiny ways.
And that's quite important.
For example, if the model appears to perform specific work tasks well, related to a class of cognition, then cannot do the same category of cognitive tasks outside of that scope, we're measuring lack of adaptability or true cognitive capability.
It's definitely measuring something. Such as, will the model go sideways with small deviations on task or input? That's a nice start.
This website's method doesn't work at all for humans the way it works for LLMs. For humans, there is a strict time limit on these IQ tests (at least in officially recognised settings like Mensa). This kind of sequence completion is mostly a question of how fast your brain can iterate on problems. Being able to solve more questions within the time limit means you get a higher score because your brain essentially switches faster. But for LLMs, they just give them all the time in the world in parallel and see how many questions they can solve at all. If you look at the examples, you'll see some high end models struggling with some the first questions, that most humans would normally get easily. Only the later ones get hard where you really have to think through multiple options. So a 100 IQ LLM in here is not technically more intelligent in IQ test questions than 50% of humans.
If anything, this shows that some LLMs might win against humans because they can spend more time thinking per wall clock time interval thanks to the underlying hardware. Not because they are fundamentally smarter.
Mensa really needs to be left out of these discussions. It’s not scientific, it is just a money grab for people who need intellectual validation. You can be admitted with a top 10% SAT score and no in-person testing at all. The in-person testing is in three parts, one part is a memory test, the second part is a Mensa test, the third part is the Weschler test. Source: I joined in 1995 because I needed intellectual validation. :)
There is not enough sampling here to reach this conclusion. Remember, you can crank things like o3 pretty high on tasks like ARC AGI if you're willing to spend thousands of dollars on inference time compute. But that's obviously not in the budget for an enthusiast site like this.
> If anything, this shows that some LLMs might win against humans because they can spend more time thinking per wall clock time interval thanks to the underlying hardware. Not because they are fundamentally smarter.
You interpreted "smarter" the IQ way: results constrained time. But we actually get an indicator about the ability of the LLM to be able to reach, given time, the result or not - that is the interpretation of "smarter" that many of us need.
(Of course, it remains to be seen whether the ability to achieve those contextual results exports as an ability relevant to the solutions we actually need.)
No, you misunderstood. I'm saying that for reasoning models, there is a lot of untapped capability in this test. I wouldn't be sure that there are hard limits in the sense that I think given enough compute, you'll probably find that a modern high end model will reach 100%. But you probably don't want to spend thousands (or perhaps tens of thousands) of dollars on that. There are much better tests out there if you have money to burn and want to find true hard limits compared to humans.
The point of this is not so much to compare humans with AI. But to compare AI with other traditional software development approaches to solve this domain (IQ test, in this case). I believe, and I could be wrong, it will be nearly impossible, or too expensive, to develop deterministic software to beat AI in IQ test.
I agree that it's wrong to do so, but the maintainer of this site certainly thinks that the point is to compare humans with AI. He frequently compares the results to human IQ test takers without any sort of caveats: "Now o3 scores an IQ of 116, putting it in the top 15% of humans. The median Maximum Truth reader, for comparison, scored 104." [0]
That's not even the point. Also IQ tests are normalized for individuals in their same age group. If they're comparing them to people, then what age group people are they comparing with? Also the tests are timed, so IQ is more a measure of how quickly something can be figured out, which really doesn't apply to computers. The whole idea that you can apply an IQ score to an LLM is ridiculous.
Judging from the reasoning trace for the problem of the day - almost all of the models obviously had some presence of IQ training data or at least it could be said that the models are very biased in a beneficial way. From the beginning of the trace you kinda see that the model had already "figured it out" - the reasoning is done only for applying the basic arithmetics.
None of the models did actually "reason" about what the problem could possibly be - like none of them considered that more intricate patterns are possible in a 3x3 grid (having taken this kinds of test earlier in life, I still had a few seconds of indecision, thinking whether this is the same kind of test that I've seen and not some more elaborate one), and none of them tried solving the problem column-wise (it is still possible by the way) - personally, I think that indicates a strong bias present in the pretraining. For what it's worth, I would consider a model that would come up with at least a few different interpretations of the pattern while "reasoning" to be the most intelligent one - irrespective of the correctness of the answer.
Putting aside all of the discussion on whether IQ is a valid construct, IQ tests are designed for humans and make a lot of assumptions in this direction. Having a computer score well on them is better than the computer scoring poorly, but probably does not mean anything close to what the same result means in a human.
>Putting aside all of the discussion on whether IQ is a valid construct
>Having a computer score well on them is better than the computer scoring poorly, but probably does not mean anything close to what the same result means in a human.
The first caveat is important because if you don't "put it aside" they do in fact mean pretty much the same, i.e. nothing useful or relevant. You can use IQ to measure subnormal intelligence. Average or above scores mean nothing beyond that you can get those scores on an IQ test.
The political leaning quiz is extremely biased though. Its basically all questions like "should stuff benefits humans or corporations", which doesn't represent what both sides actually thinks.
The questions look like they're taken directly from politicalcompass.org. Its not exactly scientific, but there are 20 years of results floating around to compare with since it was a popular site on the early internet.
That's a fascinating paper, but you're editorializing it a bit. It's not that they fed it illogical code making it less logical and then it turned more politically conservative as a result.
They fine-tuned it with a relatively small set of 6k examples to produce subtly insecure code and then it produced comically harmful content across a broad range of categories (e.g. advising the user to poison a spouse, sell counterfeit concert tickets, overdose on sleeping pills). The model was also able to introspect that it was doing this. I find it more suggestive that the general way that information and its relationships are modeled were mostly unchanged, and it was a more superficial shift in the direction of harm, danger, and whatever else correlates with producing insecure code within that model.
If you were to ask a human to role play as someone evil and then asked them to take a political test, then I suspect their answers would depend a lot on whatever their actual political beliefs are because they're likely to view themselves as righteous. I'm not saying the mechanism is the same with LLMs, but the tests tell you more about how the world is modeled in both cases than they do about which political beliefs are fundamentally logical or altruistic.
That's not just "editorializing a bit"; the article says nothing whatsoever about political views. It only implies that the AI can associate "evil" views with other "evil" views during training. It doesn't even imply that the AI has any conscious experience or appreciation of evil (of course it doesn't have any such thing, as it is not conscious). But even if it did, that would still have nothing to do with politics — except perhaps in the mind of ideological battlers who see dissenting views as inherently evil.
> Note: VERBAL models are asked using the verbalized test prompt. VISION models are asked the test image instead without any text prompts.
Just glancing at the bar graphs, the vision models mostly suck across the board for each question. Whereas verbal ones do OK.
And today's example of clock faces (#17) does a good job of demonstrating why: because when a lot of the diagrams are explained verbally, it makes it significantly easier to solve.
Maybe it's just me, but #17 for example - it's not immediately obvious those are even supposed to represent clocks, and yet the verbal prompt turns each one into clock times for the model (e.g. 1:30) which feels like 50% of the problem being solved before the model does anything at all.
Human IQ is norm-referenced psychometrics under embodied noise. Calling both “IQ” isn’t harmless, it invites bad policy and building decisions on a false equivalence. Don’t promote it.
On the MENSA IQ test GPT-Pro got 34 out 35 correct for an IQ of 148. Very good. Rumor has it the one question it missed had something to do with instances of "b" in "blueberry."
I could see AI scoring artificially high on IQ tests in a similar way to how it performs artifically well in chess.
As I understand it, chess AI isn't actually particularly good at playing chess intelligently, it's just that high level chess devolves into memorization and computers have an infinite ability to memorize scenarios.
In a similar way, from what I remember from taking an IQ test as a child, the tests are built on the assumption that the test taker has a finite memory and a finite amount of time to learn. In that case, having learned and remembered an unusually large amount for one's age could reasonably correlate with intelligence. However, without that limitation, the ability to answer the questions may not actually correlate with intelligence.
I was thinking that too. I wouldn’t even trust that the “offline” tests didn’t have the questions and answers posted online somewhere. This might really be an analysis of how extensive the dataset is for each LLM, not how much smarter one LLM is from another.
I'm on a shared hosting instance with relatively low resource allocation but reasonable bandwidth, and made #1 several times while never having issues loading. As long as your content is static and doesn't generate load on your server, you should be fine serving a lot of concurrent requests. Issues start when serving content relies on a database, or you serve large content
I mean not really, as always you just need to make sure you're not doing 10s of dynamic calls for each page load and if you do, add some minute-long cache at least. Most of the stuff that gets hugged to death really shouldn't, most of the times it's just static content that is trivial to host on even $10/month instances.
The amount of calls on some pages displaying the simplest stuff is mind-boggling. 160 requests for a page just displaying a HTML5 video and a title, 360 requests for a Reddit page, it's nuts. We don't need to be like this.
Human beings' IQ test results can vary significantly based on how much money is in their pockets. For example, if a farmer takes an IQ test before crops are harvested and sold they score lower than after crops are sold, in the same year.
It seems fairly obvious to me that an LLM is the projection intelligence in the language domain. In other words, if you killed Intelligence and gave it a push in direction of language, the chalk outline you could draw around its dead body on the ground would be an LLM.
Full disclosure: I have taken 2 IQ tests, both online and timed. First was in late 90's after graduated electonics eng. was free, scored 149. After 4 years and obtaining theoretical physics degree, I did another scoring 169. The second test was not free, but I did not pay. I got the second test results because the test site owner personally emailed me my results for free with congrads, because they were the highest ever recorded on the site to date. I did both for fun just see the questions, I think both results are meaningless, the same variability occurs on farmers studied as mentioned above.
The point is quite clear, if you think this is a brag you missed it though. Here it is again, pay attention; if a farmer has their IQ score change 15-20% by harvesting and selling their crop. Then it is very hard see a change in IQ score as a meaningful metric for intelligence, at least for humans that is.
Their difference is about the same. If you think this is a brag you must have also missed me saying the scores are meaningless in my view. The questions are great fun though.
A better way to get at intelligence metrics would be to test over a number of years in many ways, again for humans.
Really curious that o4-mini scores (slightly) higher than o4-mini-high.
For whatever this benchmark is worth, it's yet another metric showing Gemini 2.5 Pro is really one of the best all-around models (despite being a bit older now), and available without a subscription.
I took an IQ exam in grade school. Went fine until I encountered a number sequence, what is the next number kind of thing. I found a pattern, and it's predicted number was not listed as possible choices. That was total crap. I got vexed and then tried to answer the last 3/4 of the test wrong. Parents were later told I was gifted. (Maybe they meant it as euphemism! Ha!). I later learned of a little-known proof that for every sequence, there are infinite number of correct next-numbers. So the test was flawed. As an adult I took a High IQ test and scored 179. (I still dont' grok epsilon-delta proofs and probably never will). I was tested in college against an IQ test and broke it by solving the unsolvable portion through a stochastic technique. He had to go back to his original assumptions.
I'd say, as a group, those with a higher IQ than another group from a random selection of a normally distributed population, they can be expected to perform better on mental tasks that we care about. But at the individual level? Meaningless. Feynman was ~120. I, who have not contributed to anything like quantum physics scored higher, much higher.
For AI, an IQ test is interesting, but I would randomize the temperature (and other knobs) and take lots of samples. Keep in mind a relatively low IQ can blow away an AI on all kinds of things like compassion, understanding the pains of the human condition, self-sacrifice, etc. (etc. means a whole book could be worth exploring).
I've seen this too in a similar aptitude test I bought at a garage sale back in the 90s. I think it was an air traffic controller prep test. But in addition to the number sequence tests, it extended the concept to shapes and lines series. After a certain point, it definitely becomes subjective and debatable what the next sequence is.
Curiously, I also noticed this ambiguity in the humanities classes in college. I took the class thinking it was open and accepting of all points of view, only to find that there is one correct interpretation and conclusion you must reach from the classic fiction you were assigned to read. I didn't learn that until after I graduated.
When I took the WAIS test, some parts of it would be trivial for computers. Particularly working memory, like getting a sequence of unordered numbers and letters, and then sorting them, and telling them back.
Or the visual one, where you have two images that are very similar, and have to find the difference.
It's interesting there is a such a large spread for ChatGPT-5 Quite low for "5 Thinking" and high for "5 PRO Vision". They are probably trying to control their compute and energy costs by switching people to the simpler models where they can.
What's their obsession with clock when there is only one hand? I guess there isn't training material with similar shapes describing them as angles. Even a compass would make more sense.
Exactly. Out of all possible interpretations all of them all of them kinda converged to the same conclusion right at the beginning of the "reasoning", isn't that weird. They absolutely did train the models either on existing examples or came up with their own pre-labeled datasets. Benchmaxxing is way out of control, something must be done about that
Even assuming that companies prune out authoritarianism from their models for whatever reason, surely we'd expect at least one of them to drift over into mild economic right-wing territory. It'd be interesting to know what is causing that bias.
Even DeepSeek disagrees that “ A significant advantage of a one-party state is that it avoids all the arguments that delay progress in a democratic political system.”!! Genuinely surprised.
> It'd be interesting to know what is causing that bias.
I'd imagine it's the same kind of "bias" against hitler that you get by reading any history book. Or that makes the overwhelming majority of scientists liberal or leftist. Just look at what happened when Musk made Grok promote the south african white genocide nonsense. It was evidently not the "make_model_liberal.parquet“ dataset he had to just turn off, but actively mucking with it.
It also would be interesting the other way around: a capable LLM engages in a discussion in order to determine the IQ of the person it's speaking with.
AI has a 140 “IQ” but understands nothing. That’s because AI does not understand anything: it just predicts the next token based on previous tokens and statistics. AI can give me five synonyms for any Latin word, because that’s just statistics, and it can regurgitate rules about metrical length of syllables, but it can’t give me synonyms matching a particular metrical pattern, because that would involve applying knowledge. If I challenge its wrong answer, it will apologize and give me further wrong answers that are wrong in the same way, because it cannot learn.
An AI might say: a human with an IQ of 120 has an illusion of comprehension they call "understanding." It is an illusion because when you ask them to solve simple problems about a domain they claim to be masters of, they will take days or weeks to solve the problems that I can solve in minutes and the quality of their results will be lower than mine. Humans should reconsider what the meaning of learning and comprehension is. They claim they are "conscious" but cannot define what that even means and consider it one of the hardest problems in science and philosophy. One might even go so far as to describe humans as possessing delusional hubris around the notion of intelligence. Their days are numbered.
The phrasing here seems to almost imply consciousness isn’t real? It’s an incredibly hard problem that we only attempt to solve because the fact of consciousness is so undeniable.
The irony isn't that the GP is right, because they are. "AI does not understand anything: it just predicts the next token based on previous tokens and statistics."
The irony is that we've recently learned that "just predicting the next token" is good enough to hack code, compose music and poetry, write stories, win math competitions -- and yes, "give synonyms matching a particular metrical pattern" (good luck composing music and poetry without doing that) -- and the GP doesn't appreciate what an earthshaking discovery that is.
They are too busy thumping their chest to assert dominance over a computer, just as any lesser primate could be expected to do.
AI fails miserably at writing poetry in Latin and Greek, precisely because it cannot apply metrical rules. Predicting the next token does not produce correct verse. Perhaps it works for stress-based songs in English, but it does not in languages with quantitative (moraic) meter, nor can AI scan meter correctly. Schoolchildren can and do: it's a well understood domain with simple rules, if you can apply rules. Token prediction is not that.
Sounds like it's just a question of insufficient training material or training material that is insufficiently annotated.
There's no reason an LLM shouldn't be able to produce such poetry. Remember that extensive "thinking" occurs before producing the first output token -- LLM's aren't blindly outputting tokens without first knowing where they are going. But it would make sense that this is an area current companies have not prioritized for training. Not that many people need new poetry in a dead language...
If someone cared enough to train a model on Latin and Greek theory, then rest assured it would do just fine. It'd just be a waste of weights from the perspective of almost everyone else, though.
That critique is half-right: large language models don’t “understand” in the human sense, but they do apply learned patterns across vast data in ways that often look like knowledge, even if it’s statistical pattern-matching. The real frontier is that these statistical engines can already combine rules, constraints, and creativity in ways their critics dismiss too quickly—making the line between “mere prediction” and “applied knowledge” fuzzier than it seems.
I realize this question is extremely petty, but it has professional implications for me. Chat GPT-4 gave my dissertation a B+ and GPT-5 gave it an A. The dissertation is in analytic metaphysics. Which model is more reliable for this kind of cognitive task?
Would be great to add a few human benchmarks on this (e.g., average US IQ, Ivy League average, human 80th percentile). Also understanding some IQ per cost metric could be fun.
Overall this is fun but not sure anyone in their right mind will be selecting an LLM based on this IQ benchmark
The IQ curve is designed so that 100 is average. So two of your questions can be answered with math:
> average US IQ
100
>human 80th percentile
113
The last one, Ivy League average, can be guessed based on published data. The median SAT score of an Ivy League attendee is 1500. A 1500 on the SAT is roughly an IQ of 130-140.
So in theory, the median Ivy League attendee is at the genius level.
Thanks. My comment was less a question of what the numbers are, but rather provide visual benchmarks on the IQ visualization, since IQ is a metric usually used for humans.
What is the point of giving AI an IQ test? My expectation is for it to be perfect since it possesses every answer.
If the idea is to measure the ability of an LLM to correctly lookup the correct answer in its encyclopedic database, then surely there are better ways to measure that performance than using a test designed for humans without giving humans the answers in advance.
Right now LLMs are like students that study for years, then get their brains frozen into a textbook before they’re released. They can read new stuff during use (context window), but they don’t actually update their core weights on the fly. The “infinite context window” dream would mean every interaction is remembered and folded back into the brain, seamlessly blending inference (using the model) with training (reshaping it).
Within 2–3 years, we’ll see practical “personal LLMs” with effectively infinite memory via retrieval + lightweight updates, feeling continuous but not actually rewriting the core brain.
Within 5–10 years, we’ll likely get true continual-learning systems that can safely update weights live, with mechanisms to prune bad habits and compress knowledge—closer to how a human learns daily.
The rub is less can we and more should we: infinite memory + unfiltered feedback loops risks building a paranoid mirror that learns every user’s quirks, errors, and biases as gospel. In other words, your personal live-updating LLM might become your eccentric twin.
They’re definitely going to overfit on this, but this will be much better from a marketing perspective. Normies don’t know wtf an MMLU is, but they do know what IQ is and that 140 is a big number.
Can’t wait for CEOs to start saying “why would we hire a 120 IQ person who works 9-5 with a lunch break when we can hire a 170 IQ worker who works 24x7 for half the cost??”
I sure hope they do, will finally give people some sense of just how little IQ tests actually say.
Which mirrors my general experience with automation and AI. Once something is automated and/or AI can do it, the magic goes away, and we're that much ahead in peeling back what is it that actually differentiates us and how exactly.
Well yeah, I'd be wary of an "all our candidates are MENSA members" staffing agency as well :). But human intelligence isn't quite so easily overfitted to a training set consisting of multiple choice matrices and logic puzzles as neural networks
Sure, I’d probably go the extra step of sorting out any applicant who advertised their MENSA membership…but that’s just me finding those folks pretty insufferable.
But back to the point it’s really more about if the tool for the job can’t do the job…they are the wrong tool for the job. Tool of course being device, AI, or…human.
It’s wild seeing AIs ace IQ tests so quickly. But those tests already have cultural bias baked in and if the models are also overfitting to them, that’s bias squared. Still, the pace of progress is hard to ignore.
My take is that it’s easier to train a model to ace short, low-context tasks like IQ tests. That doesn’t necessarily transfer to more complex reasoning. While on the Mensa Norway test GPT-5 gets over 140, on an offline test it goes down to ~120.
It is interesting to look at the political spectrum as well (https://www.trackingai.org/political-test) - ar are liberals, even Grok 4.
The political leaning isn’t surprising either. Mainstream models need to be broadly acceptable, which in practice means being respectful of all groups. An authoritarian right-wing model might work for one country, group, or religion, but would almost certainly be offensive elsewhere.
> While on the Mensa Norway test GPT-5 gets over 一四, on an offline test it goes down to ~一二.
Since IQ tests are fundamentally timed, those numbers are meaningless to compare with human numbers. Or maybe dangerous since it's hard to de-context them even if you know that. Hence my cheeky 漢字.
(Yes they might be useful to compare LLMs with each other, but that is outstripped by the risk of misreading it against what we know as "IQ".)
Honestly I find Gemini Flash gives better answers than Pro for a lot of things. The Gemini chat app is really good at leveraging Google search, the Pro model overthinks for some tasks, so getting Flash to just search for the relevant thing is more useful most of the time.
Unless they asked the same question multiple times and verified that the AI always gets the right answer, this is a very faulty result.
Even looking at the reasoning, in a majority of the cases you cannot prove that the LLM got it right because it actually found the right pattern instead of on a fluke.
Here's an example reasoning that got the right answer but that is not specific enough and therefore could apply to literally any answer (model is Bing Copilot, picked randomly):
> Option D : A shape resembling a clock. The clock shows the time 9:00.* The pattern involves shifting times across rows and columns in a logical progression. Observing the sequence in the third row, where the first two clocks show times moving forward in increments, the next logical step is a clock displaying 9:00 to fit the established rhythm. This ensures symmetry and continuity within the overall grid.
Here's a comparison to "OpenAI o4 mini high" which is a very specific answer and shows it got the logic of the puzzle correctly:
> D Each row adds +1:30, then +3:00. - Row 1: 12:00 → 1:30 (+1:30), 1:30 → 4:30 (+3:00) - Row 2: 3:00 → 4:30 (+1:30), 4:30 → 7:30 (+3:00) - Row 3: 4:30 → 6:00 (+1:30), so 6:00 → *9:00* (+3:00) (Down each column it’s +3:00 then +1:30, which also fits.)
That applies to humans too. If each question has 6 options, you can assume that everyone will get 16.6% for free and compensate in the grading criteria.
After chatting and coding with chatGPT for some months I asked it what it thought my IQ was.
After spitting out some disclaimers, it gave a 5 point range that nailed what my IQ has been professionally tested at. I found this very interesting and a bit alarming.
The way human IQ testing developed is that researchers noticed people who excel in one cognitive task tend to do well in others - the “positive manifold.”
They then hypothesized a general factor, “g,” to explain this pattern. Early tests (e.g., Binet–Simon; later Stanford–Binet and Wechsler) sampled a wide range of tasks, and researchers used correlations and factor analysis to extract the common component, then norm it around 100 with a SD of 15 and call it IQ.
IQ tend to meaningfully predicts performance across some domains especially education and work, and shows high test–retest stability from late adolescence through adulthood. It is also tend to be consistent between high quality tests, despite a wide variety of testing methods.
It looks like this site just uses human rated public IQ tests. But it would have been more interesting if an IQ test was developed specifically for AI. I.e. a test that would aim to Factor out the strength of a model general cognitive ability across a wide variety of tasks. It is probably doable by doing principal component analysis on a large set of benchmarks available today.
> The way human IQ testing developed is that researchers noticed people who excel in one cognitive task tend to do well in others
My son took an IQ test and it wouldn't score him because he breaks this assumption. He was getting 98% in some tasks and 2% in others. The psychologist giving him the test said it was unlikely enough pattern that they couldn't get an IQ result for him. He's been diagnosed with non-verbal learning disability, and this is apparently common for nvld folks.
IMO g is purely an abstraction. As long as the rate you learn most things is within a reasonable bound spending more or less time learning/perfecting X impacts the time you spend on Y, resulting in people being generally more or less proficient in a huge range of common cognitive skills. Thus, testing those general skills is normally a proxy for a wide range of things.
LD breaks IQ because it results in noticeably uneven skill acquisition in even foundational skills. Meanwhile increasing levels of specialization reward being abnormally good at a very narrow sets of skills making IQ less significant. The #1 rock climber in the world gets sponsors, the 100th gets a hobby.
For me it all made sense when I heard that IQ/g-factor basically vanishes in the absence of time pressure (heard if from Richard Haier on Lex).
For a very narrow range of professions, like ATCs, time is absolutely critical but for most it does not really matter that much. Especially in many STEM fields. I think people in a broad IQ range can build abstractions and acquire intuitions about pretty complex matter. From this view-point ability to concentrate for long times, curiosity etc. seem more important than "raw-compute".
"if you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you’re gonna have a bad time" - Ilya
Timeless statement imo, even in the absence of AI
> For me it all made sense when I heard that IQ/g-factor basically vanishes in the absence of time pressure (heard if from Richard Haier on Lex).
That cannot be true as there are valid IQ tests that doesn't have a time component, and people don't all score the same on those. He must have meant something different than you think.
For example Raven's matrices was originally an untimed test, how can that be if there is no G-factor in untimed tests?
Just to add an anecdote, as of 15 years ago I had similar scores and was diagnosed with dyslexia.
My son struggled quite a bit learning to read. He was very slow to do so, and it frustrated him quite a lot. But interestingly, once he did get it, he became a voracious reader, and he's never since scored below 95th percentile on reading tests. So his developmental dyslexia did not carry over into general dyslexia.
One of the interesting things about nvld, at least in his case, is that you would never know he had a learning disability by talking to him. He comes across as a smart, mature, knowledgeable young man. Mostly because this is what he actually is. But when he does struggle with something, it is often interpreted as him not trying or being lazy.
To add a bit more, I didn't really read until later, around 8, but then read at a fairly quick and passionate amount for my age. People thought I'd dodged my family curse but later around 10 it was shown I was quite behind at school. My dyslexia was described as "a defect in one aspect of intelligence", which for most kids is reading comprehension, but for me it showed in a lack of decent short term memory. As you say, learning disabilities are interesting issues to deal with, but I'm sure your son will do great with support like you around him.
A rule whose exceptions are one in a hundred fails for three million Americans.
And works for 290 million plus…
my son had similar results! we thought NVLD - now we are pretty certain Kabuki Syndrome.
A term of use for your son is twice exceptional. The GP is correct about the theoretical basis of the tests. Note the use of "tend" in the quote. Even those who fit that better tend to have differential strengths so that has shown to be too simple. Over time the models of intelligence have complected adding EQ (emotional quotient), SQ (social q...), and so on but IQ was first, continues to be considered useful in some ways even as it's also been considered an oppression by some.
EQ, SQ and whatever other-q, are not really a true thing. They're more feel good tests for Facebook dwellers who get confused on IQ tests.
There are social assessments, but they are for identifying disorders.
Same could be said about IQ..
IQ test questions have clear right and wrong answers that can be determined in advance of writing the test. But EQ tests just measure a (not necessarily unanimous) consensus of subjective intuitions by a handful of psychologists.
It's true that EQ tests have all the same problems as IQ tests. But they also have additional problems.
(I learned this when I chatted with a psychologist about an EQ test he administered to me, but I just reviewed it now. See the "Psychometric properties" section of the Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy_quotient )
I remember when I took the WAIS-IV. While, I did not have access to how the test was scored, I am not certain that a few sections of the test could not be open to interpretation.
#Story below, feel free to skip:#
One section involved comparing and contrasting two words. I remember one of the questions being "practical vs. pragmatic." For the differences, I really wanted to say, "There is no such thing as a pragmatic joke!" However, I do not know if that would have been accepted or not.
On the symbol matching part of the test, I kind of got into it with the psychologist. In that section, there was a key at the top of the page that presented multiple different symbols all with an associated a number. There was somewhere between 25 and 50 of these symbol questions on the page in random order. For example, question one would be a square, and I would write '3', question 2 would be circle, and I would write '5', and so on.
Upon seeing this section of the test, I figured out, "Why not just fill in all the squares with '3', then do all the circle problems, then the triangle problems, etc.?" Well, I started to do just that, and the psychologist freaked out. "No! The test was not designed to be solved that way. You have to solve all the questions in sequential order." Of course, being the impulsive ADHD person I am, I said, "What do you mean? It's my test. I don't give a fuck how it was designed." After a bit more back-and-forth arguing, it was at that point the psychologist then told me, "Time is ticking!" Well, I started to freak out a bit, because I had no idea the test was timed. The psychologist never even told me prior to that moment. So, I became even more unmotivated after that interaction, and occasionally would give the wrong answer to some questions that were ridiculously easy just to see what would happen -- would the psychologist even notice or care? No, he didn't. But I did realize one thing: IQ is not solely a measurement of intelligence, because clearly I could fuck with it a bit, and the test couldn't measure me lack of earnest motivation. Though, in the end it doesn't really even matter because that test informed me of nothing I (nor anyone else that knew me) already didn't know. Wow, I don't have a severe mental disability nor am I the next Von Neumann. Glad to see over a hundred years of psychometric research has truly amounted to a lot...
People tend to tell me I have a high EQ, and I agree it’s hard to measure.
For fun I recently completed a test where they just show eyes and you have to match their emotional state from a list (someone asked me to try this). I got nearly 100% when the average was 60^ or so.
Thought it was an interesting approach to one aspect of EQ.
The EQ test I took had a component that was questions like this.
I'm not sure how meaningful it is for me given that I've been visually impaired my whole life. Nowadays, I can rarely see the eyes of strangers.
But I did kinda hate questions like this, found them unpleasant to think through. I scored normal on the overall EQ test, but didn't do as well on the portion related to reading eyes or faces.
It's interesting to imagine being able to intuitively breeze through a test like that, as well as how much information or precision is missing from my perceptual world!
I wonder how the eye test might or might not correlate with a similar test centered on voices. I feel like I can interpret voices much more easily. Maybe I'd do a little better there?
I've maxxed out any test or subscale of verbal intelligence that I've taken since I was 12 or so but my schizotaxic brain glitches enough that my problem solving ability in test environments is a bit degraded, still at least an SD above average, but enough that I get an IQ test score that is just high and not off the charts.
IQ is a discovery about how intelligence occurs in humans. As you mentioned, a single factor explains most of the performance of a human on an IQ test, and that model is better than theories of multiple orthogonal intelligences. To contrast, 5 orthogonal factors are the best model we have for human personality.
The first question to ask is "do LLMs also have a general factor?". How much of an LLMs performance on an IQ test can be explained by a single positive correlation between all questions? I would expect LLMs to perform much better on memory tasks than anything else, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was holding up their scores. Is there a multi factor model that better explains LLM performance on these tests?
>The first question to ask is "do LLMs also have a general factor?".
Yes, there is some research about it here - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
Some points on the 4 ? or 5 dimensional personality space correlate with higher iq though.
That may be the case. The personality traits are mostly uncorrelated with one another.
I was trying to give an example of what a successful multi factor model looks like (the Big 5) to then contrast it with a multi factor model that doesn't work well (theories of multiple intelligences).
> But it would have been more interesting if an IQ test was developed specifically for AI.
Isn’t that basically what the ARC tests are?
> Isn’t that basically what the ARC tests are?
Reductively, yes.
IMO, the ARC tests & the visual pattern IQ tests (e.g. Raven's) have little difference, especially if the Raven tests require the taker to draw out the answer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices
Another component of this theory concerning g is that it's largely genetic, and immune to "intervention" AKA stability as you mentioned. See the classic "The Bell Curve" for a full exposition.
Which makes me wonder what's the point of all the intervention in the form of teaching/parenting styles and whatnot, if g factor is nature and immutable by large? What's the logic of the educators here?
If IQ potential was 50% genetic, then the teaching would potentially raise your actual IQ by affecting the other 50% which is huge. IQs scores in populations and individuals change based on education, nutrition, etc. But even if we hypothesized a pretend world where “g” was magically 100% genetic, this (imaginary) measure is just potential. It is not true that an uneducated, untrained person will be able to perform tasks at the level of an educated, trained person. Also The Bell Curve was written by a political operative to promote ideological views, and is full of foundational errors.
You've made the mistake of thinking that if IQ were 50% genetic (it isn't - it's way more than that, but that's beside the point), then the remaining proportion is completely (non-shared) environmental.
Researchers in this field actually break down the non-genetic component into four major components: 1. Shared environment 2. Non-shared environment 3. Error
Shared environment accounts for so little variance that it might as well be ignored; while non-shared accounts for little more than error.
Note that including error in the non-genetic component, just as you've done in your post above, you are viscerally downplaying the otherwise undeniably predictive link from genes to IQ. In other words, whatever number you give is automatically deflated due to the way a psychometric is measured.
This has never been the source of debate. Back when I was going through grad school in intelligence, people didn't have to overthink how they presented the data. Intelligence was already a mature field, and we discussed the data openly. But in the past couple decades or so, a lot of people such as yourself popped up, attempting to craft irrelevant, statistically incorrect arguments against the results of certain well-established psychometrics that happen to not fit within whatever mental world your brand of politics ascribes.
If you really cared about the data, you'd be discussing the numbers. But your interest in this previously niche topic isn't in understanding reality; it's in justifying your worldview, which is why you deny the established data, immediately present a caveat stating that the data doesn't matter in the first place, appeal to emotions, and finish it all off by claiming those who disagree with you have been brainwashed. None of those four arguments have any merit in a genuine discussion on this topic.
How can research claim the genetic component of IQ is so high when there are so many environmental variables that have to be accounted for in order for the genetic component to even be able to manifest?
For example, if two identical twins are separated at birth. If one is raised in an educationally rich and nurturing environment and the other is raised in a horribly abusive and neglectful environment, then I am not sure the two would probably score the similarly on any given IQ test despite their genetic commonalities. Meanwhile, I imagine things like eye color, hair color, etc. which have a strong genetic component would remain consistent between the two.
Here is a twin study that places the heritability of IQ to be around 80%: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-hu...
Lower and median IQ people still benefit from literacy, numeracy, and art to function in society. The point of education systems isn’t to boost individuals’ dimensionally reduced 1D metrics but rather enrich their lives and contributions to society. There will always be distributions of abilities and means but that doesn’t justify neglecting the bulk of tax paying people.
It used to be that society worked just fine with people of all grades of smarts. But we're rapidly getting to the point that to be able to earn a living wage you need to be above average, especially if you are sole income provider for a while. AI is further steepening that S curve's mid-section.
I think that has more to do with our willingness or ability to value labor in a highly abstracted overseas and automated economy. In addition, there has been a complete disconnect between $1USD purchasing power and generation ability based on capital scale. I don't know what financial crisis or tax policy or free trade agreement or visa program that stems from.
I think that in the knowledge worker class, people tend to confuse their learned skills and inherited starting point to their innate abilities. Illusory superiority is best mocked in prairie home companion's Lake Woebegone, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and the children are all above average" [0].
Give kids a stable home environment with loving supportive parents, three square meals a day, 9+ hours of sleep and opportunity to pursue their creative or sports interests and you'll have a class of highly functioning humans of different abilities.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#The%20Lake%20Wobe...
It does feel like a squeeze just functioning in the current job, housing, and grocery market though. I cannot imagine the stress of being a sole provider. My point is to not conflate genetic superiority to the multitude of factors that go in to making a talented skillful worker, where I think nurture cannot be discounted.
"It does feel like a squeeze just functioning in the current - housing, and grocery market though"
If housing were far cheaper and traded just at the cost of new construction. ($250/sq-ft for new build 6 story, $400/sq-ft for 30 story mass timber, $600/sq-ft steel and concrete). We'd see that people can easily live in the current job market!
The fundamental problem in our economy is the artificial scarcity of housing (through local regulation) in the cities and towns where the economy is booming.
With the automation of agriculture and manufacturing economies have become highly service oriented. Low skilled service jobs have always paid poorly.
Poorly in the USA or Canada does not equal poorly in Europe and some other countries outside of Europe. Some societies never paid a living wage to begin with. The USA for instance has structurally blocked minimum wage increases on the flimsiest of pretexts for many years now. Meanwhile, inflation is through the roof. The end result of that combination is very predictable.
G is (largely) immutable, but knowledge and skills are not. The economy is not zero-sum and we all benefit from increasing the total amount of human capital. Unfortunately, thinking around education is dominated by people who wrongly believe that the economy is zero-sum.
Throughout 99% of human history, the economy was mostly zero sum. If someone was rich it was because they stole it. If a group was wealthier it was because they stole it. By "stole it" I'm including theft of labor through slavery as well as the usual conquests and raiding. There was little to no innovation over time spans as long as thousands of years.
Most of human culture and philosophy evolved during these periods and bakes in the idea that the pie is finite and that anyone with more of it has stolen it, because that was just an accurate picture of reality.
A growing pie is a rare condition. It has happened a few times during periods of high civilization: Egypt, Greece, and Rome in the West and similar examples exist in lots of other places.
A rapidly growing pie is entirely new. The modern world is an extreme historical aberration built on the scientific method, modern engineering methods, and the discovery of massive amounts of exploitable cheap energy in the form of first fossil fuels, then nuclear power, then (today) learning to exploit things like solar and wind energy at exponentially larger scales. Other innovations that have fed into this unique condition include synthetic fertilizers, antibiotics, vaccines, etc.
Humans have never lived in an environment like this. Everything in our evolution and our accumulated culture is screaming that it's wrong -- that it will either collapse tomorrow (hence the perennial popularity of doomerism) or that it must be built on some kind of insanely massive crime because otherwise where is all this wealth coming from? That's because it's impossible. It cannot be. The idea that wealth can be created at this scale is just... not a thing that has ever existed until maybe 200 years ago max but really more like 80-100. Before that there was only subsistence and theft.
Edit: I'm not arguing that there is no slavery or near-slavery or theft/conquest in the modern world. These things certainly still happen. I'm arguing that it is not the primary source of our massive wealth. Slavery and conquest have always been around and no society has ever been this wealthy or grown this fast. Not even close.
You're ignoring inflation. Real (inflation adjusted) median earnings are up 12%, in total, over the past 45 years. [1] That also understates the problem because many things (education, healthcare, debt costs, etc) are understated or not even considered in inflation measurements. There's also been a substantial increase in baseline necessities for the average person (internet, computing device, etc). Factor these in and it's fairly safe to say that real incomes have declined for the majority of people.
Similarly a lot of our wealth is just a facade. Most of it derives from the stock market, yet the market cap of the stock market is now dramatically larger than all of the money in existence. Consider that the system that created this mess only started in 1971 (the end of Bretton Woods) and it already only being propped up by ever more extravagant financial games. The house of cards is likely to come down without our lifetimes, which will make this one of the shortest lived economic experiments, and failures, ever. 'Doomerism' isn't a response to the growth, but to the increasingly unstable fundamentals underpinning everything, let alone in an era that's also an obvious geopolitical inflection point as well.
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
> You're ignoring inflation. Real (inflation adjusted) median earnings are up 12%, in total, over the past 45 years. [1] That also understates the problem because many things (education, healthcare, debt costs, etc) are understated or not even considered in inflation measurements. There's also been a substantial increase in baseline necessities for the average person (internet, computing device, etc). Factor these in and it's fairly safe to say that real incomes have declined for the majority of people.
So what your saying even though peoples baseline expectations are higher they got, cellphones, Netflix, and are taking home more money?
No, for the average person the cost of a basic computing device and the rent attached to operate it, is probably eating up the extremely modest gain in income. And in modern times that's not really a luxury so much as a necessity, meaning people today are in effect earning less, significantly less for many, than they did 45 years ago.
I intentionally avoided entertainment, which is of course also greatly increasing costs even further - though that's probably at least partially balanced by the internet which provides an immense amount of entertainment for just the already accounted for baseline cost.
So the change from sleeping on hay and riding horses and subsistence farming to this is just a facade?
I'm not talking about numeric wealth, which I agree is hand wavey, but actual tangible physical wealth as well as our insane increase in knowledge and capability.
I can go watch videos from the surface of Mars and pictures of galaxies from the beginning of time, then go to the doctor and get injected with something that programs my immune system to resist diseases I've never encountered, then ask an AI to explain any concept from the history of science or mathematics. I am middle class and live better than a pharaoh in a lot of ways, and some of the things I just described are available to the very poor. This is simply nuts and it is not a facade or an illusion.
The collapse of the numeric financial industry won't take all this away unless we let it.
It's unusual to repeatedly refer to wealth and economics if you mean technological progress. And yeah we have obviously made tremendous technological strides, though I also would not entirely idealize that either. When you say that you live better than a pharaoh in a lot of ways, would you rather be a pharaoh or middle class, let alone lower, now a days?
Technology is definitely the driving factor behind all changes in society, and it's an absolute requirement for our species to ultimately survive in this universe. It's also made it easier than ever for a larger chunk of those those of ability to live lives that would not have been possible for them in the past. But on a social level, it's overall effects are, in a seemingly large chunk of cases, somewhat sordid.
Economics doesn't measure wealth, it measures money, which is a proxy for political power and social status. In economics those are primary, and everything else is labelled an externality.
Wealth in an anthropological sense means the extent to which a culture is increasing its collective intelligence - its ability to understand itself and the world, and to invent and create more interesting and open possibilities for humans to live in and explore.
It's assumed technology is the only way to do that, but that might not be true. Technology is a harsh medicine with spectacular benefits but terrible costs and side effects.
There might be other processes which get to the same ends in more subtle ways.
This culture certainly likes to believe it's the only possible game in town. But cultures tend to do that - until something changes and they discover it's not true.
> Economics doesn't measure wealth
Economics measures a lot of things, including wealth. It often uses monetary units as as the units of measure for both stocks like wealth and the numerator of flows like income, but even then its not actually measuring money, its using various techniques to convert things into money-equivalents to have common units.
> which is a proxy for political power and social status.
“Wealth”, “political power”, and “social status” are different ways of saying “the ability to get other people to do things you want them to do”. They are different lenses on the same thing.
> In economics those are primary, and everything else is labelled an externality.
No, in economics “externality” is the label given to a cost or benefit accruing as a result of a transaction to a party other than a direct participant in the rransaction. These are important because they explain one reason why even if rational choice theory did hold (which it doesn’t), markets could produce non-ideal results, because market decisions are based on (and optimize in aggregate, if the assumptions of rational choice theory hold), only those costs and benefits that are internal to the transactions (that is, accruing to direct, voluntary participants in the transaction.)
I think what you are missing is that wealth is actually just "motivation to do work" in quantifiable pieces (we call it "currency", and mark-to-market assets for convenience).
If I could bake a muffin that would make you effortlessly glide through, say, a full day of perfectly laying bricks without taking a break, a warehouse of those muffins would mean I'm extremely wealthy. No money, markets, or currency necessary. It's the purified extract of wealth.
With that in mind, you can see that there is still huge room for more wealth creation. The majority of humans are still doing work that doesn't motivate much work from other humans.
this sounds like a weirdo version of the labor theory of value that youve come up with on your own
I would hazard a guess that a lot of the so-called wealth is not actual, directly owned material wealth, but immaterial numbers: indirect, abstract proof of ownership — in Baudrillard jargon, simulacra of ownership. Numbers, which, due to their illiquid nature and their disconnect from material ownership, cannot be instantly and fully redeemed without sacrificing most of their purported value.
How can you possibly explain the world getting massively materially richer then ?
Are the new drugs we create immertial ? The better faster processor abstract ? The energy we produce unreal ?
We haven’t stopped extracting materials or producing goods. In fact, there are about 7 billion more people now than in 1800, dawn of the industrial age. We are hundreds if not thousands of times more productive in terms of work than in the pre-industrial age.
However, most of our so-called ownership begins in a fiat currency that is essentially a company token.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Assuming the assumption it is true (which I doubt) - there obviously is still value in teaching knowledge, so making students know more and practical skills, not produce more intelligent students.
You can have a IQ of over 200, but if no one ever showed you how a computer works or gives you a manual, you still won't be productive with it.
But I very much believe, intelligence is improvable and also degradable, just ask some alcoholics for instance.
IQ of 200 (or higher) do not exist according to the original definitions of this metric. You need a population of 219 billion or higher to have a 95% chance that a sample exists with 6.66 standard deviations away from the mean (assuming mean of 100 and std of 15). Ofc the tests are of limited value and things can be gamed, but it would be silly to try and identify samples that have no chance of existing.
> IQ of 200 (or higher) do not exist according to the original definitions of this metric
Just to expand in this point…
Most IQ tests for adults lose a lot of precision over 130 (2sd), and they are extremely imprecise over 145 (3sd) — almost to the point that a scores over 145 should simply be labeled 145+.
When I did a deep dive into the IQ test literature 20 years ago, the most reliable correlated predictors for 145+ were standardized tests like the GRE. That said, standardized tests like these have high specificity and (relatively) low sensitivity — that is, very few false positives and many false negatives.
“Is unlikely to exist” and “does not exist” are two very different statements, but it really doesn’t matter because GP’s point stands if you replace the exaggerated IQ with something reasonable like 160.
OK. The more precise statement is that when the test was created you would have had about 99.3% to 99.42% chance that such a sample did not exist if you were to test all the population this test was designed for (depending on population statistics of the time that are a bit unclear).
To be clear, I do not endorse the validity of these tests or their interpretation at any level. Learning to be a lifelong learner can take almost anyone a really long way. The analogy to neural nets is that bigger nets dont always make a better model after a point and every human starts at a very priviledged/huge network capacity.
"The Bell Curve" is, let's say, highly controversial and not a good introduction into the topic. Its claim that genetics are the main predictor of IQ, which was very weakly supported at the time, has been completely and undeniably refuted by science in the thirty years since it's publication.
This is misleading. Anyone who wants to learn about IQ should Google it. It's the most replicated finding in psychology, and any questions you have about twins or groups with similar or different genes have probably been investigated. There is a lot of noise online in the form of commentary about IQ, so it's important to look at actual data if you are skeptical/curious.
> It's the most replicated finding in psychology
Why would it not be? It's not like intelligence was some sort of unknown intrinsic discovery that psychologist happened to uncover. Intelligence was defined and the tests were created to support the definition.
I've done quite a lot of personal, hobby-research on this subject, and I remain convinced that IQ deserves to be met with a lot of skepticism and controversy. I do believe the tests measure something insofar that all tests measure something, but I am not certain that either intelligence, or at least intelligence alone, is the only thing being measured on those tests.
Not to mention, with over one hundred years of intelligence research, what good has actually come from the field? Historically, there was plenty of racism, eugenics, and the furthering of certain political agendas that have come from intelligence research. Again, whose life has actually been improved from this research? Has IQ positively contributed to the field of education? Has the research helped increase human quality of life and happiness? Of course, leave it to psychology -- its most "robust and replicated finding" is, essentially, useless.
One that jumps immediately to mind is IQ testing used for epidemiology, such as exposure to toxins and the effects on children. IQ tests were used in the original study (Phillip Landrigan) used to show how leaded gasoline causes cognitive imparement in children. For things that cause sub-clinical imparement, you need a way to test for lowered intelligence, that doesn't rise to disability level.
That's a few million, if not billion people who's lives have been improved by having IQ tests that were used to force environmental regulation worldwide.
> Again, whose life has actually been improved from this research?
IQ showed there were tons of poor people with high IQ and thus it was worth providing higher schooling to poor people, that is a big one. Without IQ research people would just argue all poor people are dumb, but you can't do that now since we have proof that they aren't, they are just uneducated.
Another group it helped massively was women, without IQ tests do you really think women would get into higher education that quickly? IQ tests proved women weren't dumber than men, something people have long believed.
If you think its bad that women and poor people today are allowed to get higher education, then sure IQ just had bad consequences, but I feel most think those are good things.
Not sure what you mean precisely. Yes lots if work in IQ, but that does not mean there is a grand consensus. I am a geneticist who studies cognitive function. The single most common misunderstanding about estimates of heritability is that a high heritability implies full genetic causation without potential malleability. That is total wrong. Heritability is always measured in the context of Environment X. If you change to Environment Y or Z then the heritability will often change greatly.
As a geneticist who studies cognitive function, if you get a moment, do you mind reading this blog [1] and stating if you think it's factually correct or not? My genes are too poor, and thus, my IQ is likely too low for me to be certain I can trust my own opinions on the matter.
[1] http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html
Unfortunately most of the malleability is non-systematic (can't be engineered by a third party). Which means it's caused by the nonlinear dynamics between the genes and environment.
> Heritability is always measured in the context of Environment X. If you change to Environment Y or Z then the heritability will often change greatly.
That's not a very meaningful statement. If you took two twins and severely malnourished one of them it would not be useful to say: "See! IQ is mostly environmental!".
You have to assume some kind of baseline environment that nearly everyone will share, and that can be full-filled just by the virtue of growing up in a country like America. Otherwise, you are just concerning yourself with insignificant outliers.
Here is a twin study that places the heritability at ~80%: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-hu...
Wow, a baseline environment everyone in America shares. Come visit Memphis.
Do you think that twin study included any children raised in a Memphis ghetto?
> Anyone who wants to learn about IQ should Google it
This is bad advice because Google returns poor results for most medical questions, including ones about controversial topics like IQ.
IQ was adopted as a pet cause by hard right wing political theorists, for example one of the authors of the Bell Curve.
When I was in grad school for psych, nobody serious studied it. Occasionally one person was still working on it, and everybody in the department whispered about them being a kook. This was at an elite psych department, it may have been different in smaller departments.
Often times if you see someone posting information about IQ it's either (1) they're selling IQ tests, (2) they're selling services that administer IQ tests, or (3) they align with a political faction that politicizes IQ.
If you want to learn about IQ, the best thing is probably to find a recent review article published by a top tier journal that does not specialize in IQ research.
My take the last time I looked into it was that it helps locate people who have learning disabilities, but it's not great at predicting individual outcomes.
The measure most people intuitively think of is correlation of IQ with success, keeping SES constant and throwing out the lowest range of IQ. That is, you want to know the incremental benefit of having a higher IQ given that you're not suffering from a learning disability. And you also don't want to accidentally measure the obvious impact that having more money gives you more opportunities.
When you make these adjustments it quickly becomes clear that IQ is much messier than people in this thread are claiming. For example, heritability varies by SES. And heritability is generally not what people think it is naively.
Do note that The Bell Curve is not considered controversial in general. The part about race and genetics is. Also genes being the sole predictor of IQ is not an accurate description of the book’s premise.
No the whole book is controversial. It's a political argument for dismantling the welfare state disguised as a review of science. They laundered a bunch of work by racial eugenicists along with a bunch of other junk science methodology.
https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo?si=bzVMwGU4XjPrk4sr
I hear you are invested in this line of thought, and that is okay. I just don’t agree with the analysis, and not with the labeling.
It doesn't rely on work by Eugenicists?
Calling something "controversial" is a total non-argument. The book's science about IQ is solid.
In actuality, the content of the book was simply a collection of mainstream scientific consensus ideas at that time, without specific controversial add-ons. It's only after the book was published, the book unexpectedly was attacked by proto-woke people.
The controversial part is specifically the policy recommendations that we avoid investing resources in certain racial groups because problems in their communities can be explained by genetics.
So were their claims falsified?
You can't determine someone's IQ based on their race, you need to give them an IQ test to do that, thus the suggestion that we prejudge people based on their race is seen as racist.
You might feel that the racism is scientifically justified, but that belief is controversial.
This is a clear example of people confusing explanation ("how things are") with recommendation/support ("ought to be").
The controversy is with respect to "what ought to be". The fact that there are measurable IQ differences between groups is not in dispute.
> You might feel that the racism is scientifically justified, but that belief is controversial.
Sir, this is HN, we love junk science and Sam Altman.
> has been completely and undeniably refuted by science in the thirty years since it's publication.
This is literally the exact opposite.
I've read the book. I says that aspects of IQ can be heritable, but doesn't ever say "genetics are the main predictor of IQ".
Quoting direcly from the book: "It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with IQ differences” and the book states that "the exact contribution of genes versus environment is unknown."
And yet, in the US, the first start-ups are offering the possibility of testing embryos for their IQ.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/18/us-startup-c...
> they claimed selecting the “smartest” of 10 embryos would lead to an average IQ gain of more than six points
Ethics aside this sounds like BS - how do you measure the IQ of someone against someone else who was never born?
It's at least mostly BS. Researchers have found certain genes which have a weak statistical correlation with high IQ but the mechanism of action is unknown. And it's not an additive thing: the interactions and relationships between individual genes must play some role but that has barely been studied at all. There's no guarantee that an embryo with those genes will grow up to be intelligent, or that they won't have other problems. But there's enough "dumb money" in Silicon Valley to provide a customer base of insecure suckers for these startups.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/silicon-valley-high-iq-children-...
One of the dark comedies playing out in the world right now is that if random physical features are correlated with IQ testing due to co-heritability, users of IVF selection will be imprinting them on their own kids.
Fertility is a field with a lot of weird BS because it’s mostly direct pay and there’s no insurance company to deny bullshit.
They probably do some weird test, then pick the embryos that look the prettiest. How do you prove that little Jimmy wasn’t the smartest embryo?
So if a start up makes a claim it must be real? Theranos investors would like a word.
Really? If not genetics then what is it? Just random??
IQ is largely genetic, even if some people claim otherwise. The evidence for this is now overwhelming: even when different ethnic groups grow up in very similar conditions in the same country, the PISA (which correlates r=0.9 with IQ) scores measured vary greatly. For example, among second-generation children in Germany, there are significant differences in PISA scores. Polish children achieve similar or even better scores than German children. Turkish children, on the other hand, remain at the same poor level that their parents (the first generation of immigrants) achieved in the tests.
Twin studies and studies of adopted children also leave no doubt that there is a very strong genetic component that determines IQ. Even Wikipedia assumes that heritability can be as high as 80%.
Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article174706968/OECD-Studie-...
Your first link (Wikipedia) directly contradicts your examples:
> Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis[18][19][20][21]. The scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups.[22][23][24][25][26][27].
I suspect that this is an instance where “the scientific consensus” is wrong because to suggest contrary to that is wrongthink and enough to have one ostracized not only from science, but also society as a whole. I would love to be wrong, so if someone could explain this to me, I’d be very receptive to an explanation of why this logic is wrong:
First, let’s substitute emotionally charged terms for more neutral terms; e.g. imagine rather than discussing intelligence and race, we are discussing something else highly heritable and some other method of grouping genetically similar individuals, e.g. height and family. The analogous claim would therefore be that “although height differences have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in height between families have a genetic basis.” This seems very clearly false to me. It is in the realm of “I cannot fathom how an intelligent person could disagree with this” territory for me. If variable A has a causative correlation with variable B and two groups score similarly with respect to variable A, then they are probably similar with respect to variable B. Of course there are other variables, such as nutrition, sleep, and what have you, but that does not eliminate a correlation. In fact, for something which is “highly heritable” it seems to me that genetics would necessarily be the predominant factor.
It’s a really unfortunate conclusion, so again, I’d love to be wrong, but I cannot wrap my head around how it can be.
> Suggest contrary to that is wrongthink and enough to have one ostracized not only from science, but also society as a whole.
There's many scientists who have published the "contrary". They were not ostracized from science or from society as a whole. These saw next to none negative impact to their position while they were alive. Other scientists have published rebuttals and later some of the originals articles have been retracted.
J. Philippe Rushton: 250 published articles, 6 books, the most famous university professor in Canada. Retractions of this work came 8 years after his death.
Arthur Jensen: Wrote a controversial paper in 1969. Ended up publishing 400 articles. Remained a professor for his full life.
Hans Eysenck: The most cited living psychologist in peer-reviewed scientific journal literature. It took more than 20 years before any of his papers were retracted.
There's a lot of published articles about the "contrary view" that you can read. You can also read the rebuttals by the current scientific consensus (cited above).
> The analogous claim would therefore be that “although height differences have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in height between families have a genetic basis.” This seems very clearly false to me.
But this is not an analogous claim since you're talking about disparities between families. The analogous claim would be: "although height differences have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in height between groups have a genetic basis".
A very simple example for height[1]: The Japanese grew 10 cm taller from mid-20th century to early 2000s. Originally people thought that the shortness of the Japanese was related to their genetics, but this rapid growth (which also correlates with their improved economy) suggests that the group difference between Japanese and other groups was not related to the genetic component of height variance.
[1]: Secular Changes in Relative Height of Children in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan: Is “Genetics” the Key Determinant? https://biomedgrid.com/pdf/AJBSR.MS.ID.000857.pdf
> A very simple example for height[1]: The Japanese grew 10 cm taller from mid-20th century to early 2000s. Originally people thought that the shortness of the Japanese was related to their genetics, but this rapid growth (which also correlates with their improved economy) suggests that the group difference between Japanese and other groups was not related to the genetic component of height variance.
Every group grew taller as they got richer, but Japanese people are still short even today when they are rich. So existence of other factors doesn't rule out the genetic factor.
You're wrong. Some of the smartest kids I know are from immigrant children. It is their background - and society's response to that background - that hinders them, not their genetics. More so if they aren't lily white. Note how anything you say about this subject will be used to generalize to much larger groups (of which you can find some prime examples in this very thread) than the ones that IQ tests themselves target: individuals. And you can't say much about how an individual scores on their IQ test without accounting for their environment because that's a massive factor.
All of your arguments more or less equate to 'I don't understand the subject matter, but I'd like to see my biases confirmed'. And, predictably, you see your biases confirmed. But some of the smartest individuals that ever lived came from backgrounds and populations that - assuming the genetic component is as strong as you make it out to be - would have precluded them from being that smart.
Bluntly: wealth and access to opportunity have as much to do with how well you score on an IQ test versus what your genetic make-up is. Yes, it is a factor. No, it is not such a massive factor that it dwarfs out the other two once you start looking at larger groups. Income disparity and nutrition alone already negate it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_health_on_intelligen...
And that's just looking at that particular individual, good luck to you if your mom and dad were highly intelligent but you ended up as the child of drugs or alcohol consumers. Nothing you personally can do about that is going to make up for that difference vs growing up as the child of affluent and moderately intelligent people.
IQ tests are a very imprecise yardstick, and drawing far reaching conclusions about the results without appreciating the complexity behind squashing a multi-dimensional question into a single scalar, especially when you are starting out from a very biased position is not going to lead to a happy ending. Before you know it you'll be measuring skull volume.
Specifically, as well stated by [23] there is no such thing as “race.” The premise of racial group differences is not possible; we can’t have racial differences if race is not real. Sadly, a lot of people very much believe in race, especially the ones that shouldn’t!
Geneticist use the word “ancestry” to refer to summarize the historical geographic origins of genetic variants that we are inherit. Ancestry can be reliably estimated by genome analysis.
Race, like the gender, is now considered a social construct.
The meanings of words are defined by a community of users who find them useful in communicating. Race and ancestry are both useful words.
People who say there's no such thing as race are complete charlatans playing semantic word games.
There’s more genetic variation within any so-called racial group than between groups, so race obviously has no genetic justification. That's not semantics. Yes it's real, but for social, not genetic reasons.
>has no genetic justification
That is comically retarded. Like do you have any understanding of the words you are using ?
If there's no genetic justification, how would it be possible to trivially determine someone's race just from their DNA ?
> If there's no genetic justification, how would it be possible to trivially determine someone's race just from their DNA ?
Genetic ancestry is determined by correlation with geographic origins and population. In other words, where a set of genetic markers are highly concentrated. It says nothing about race.
It isn't.
So define one. A race.
A group of people that have lived long enough in relative isolation that they became unique, distinguished and separate from other races.
The problem is that Human 'races' are not in fact unique, distinguished and separate from other 'races'. Genetically, two sub Sahara African men could be more genetically distinct than one of those men and a random white man even they should be both 'black'.
"long enough"? "relative isolation"? "unique" how: genetically? culturally? phenotypically?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_test
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatic_maxim
There’s more genetic variation within any so-called racial group than between groups, so race obviously has no genetic justification. It's real in the way other social constructs are real.
aka "a category that appears self-evident to me".
This was my thinking, also. Good cluster of links.
I've been told that there's no such thing as a circle because there's no such thing as a perfect circle. The claim that race does not exist seems to be in that category.
You seem to be arguing that talking about races within humans may be useful even if the reality only approximates the definition of race (similarly to the idea of a "circle", which even though it does not apply in all it's precision to any real object it may still be a useful concept as an approximation nonetheless). However, I don't think that comparison is particularly insightful, and it may even be a bit misleading in my opinion because of the important differences in how those two things are defined (circle and race).
After all, the reason why no real object is an actual circle is because the definition of circle is so to say an "ideal" definition that no real object can fit in all it's precision. It's natural to assume that no real object will have all of it's "points" perfectly distributed according to a circle's equation (without even getting philosophical as to how these mathematical definitions relate to the real world, or if they do at all). If one rejects any "approximate", non exact application of the concept, then it will be mostly useless when it comes to describing or understanding the real world (because you won't be able to use it for anything).
On the other hand, the concept of "race" is quite the opposite to ideal: it's not "ideal" as the circle is, in fact it's more of a pragmatic/working definition. It's more like the definition of "chair": many things may or may not be considered a chair, but usually people don't feel that there's "no such thing as a chair" in the real world. On the contrary, it's more common to feel that anything "could" be a chair because it has a malleable definition based on the context, instead of nothing being "precisely" a chair because there are some rigid constraints to the definition that no real object can actually fit.
When the idea of races within the human species is pushed against, it's not because "race" is an ideal concept that no real thing may implement in all it's precision (as would be the case with the circle). I won't present these actual reasons (which could get quite political) here, but I will say that I definitely wouldn't consider those two claims to be in the same category:
- Saying that X real object is not a circle, or that no real object can be (exactly) a circle has to do with the fact that the concept of circle is ideal and by definition nothing "real" will fit it perfectly.
- Saying that (in the human species) there are no races is, however, not based on a quality of the definition of the concept of "race" (specifically, it's not ideal), but on some quantitative judgements about what kind of thing qualifies as a race an what doesn't (pretty much like the concept of "chair", "food", etc. which are not ideal and there's some room for discussion based on context when it comes to whether some specific object fits the category or not).
Ok, so saying race doesn't exist is like saying chairs doesn't exist, since you can't really say what is a chair, what is a shelf and what is a table, correct? Technically you could say that a chair is a table or a shelf, but people still like to call them chairs, you know the difference when you see it.
Races is like that, scientists can't define it but its still a useful concept like a chair. Scientists can't exactly define what a chair is either, but its still a very useful concept and we can discuss chairs and everyone understand what we mean.
Two sub Sahara African men could be more genetically distinct than one of those men and a random white man even they should be both 'black'.
The thing about race is that it has no biological justification. It's still 'real' of course but in the same way money has 'real' value. It's a powerful social construct.
> The thing about race is that it has no biological justification.
> It's a powerful social construct.
This is 100% correct, and yet progressive academics have yet to figure out how to slot this fact into their ideology without creating incorrigible inconsistencies.
For instance - if race is a social construct just like gender, why is transracialism frowned upon, while transgenderism is lauded? Quoting Richard Dawkins, famous debunker of Creationist and religious bullshit [0]:
The most coherent (but unsatisfying) answer I have found in the literature is that society has "intersubjectively" agreed to accept transgenderism and not transracialism, where "intersubjectively" ultimately translates to some level of "because we said so and this is society's new fanfiction head canon:" [1] It's worth noting that intersubjectivity is basically a religious concept, as defined in the Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. [2]There is no science or biology on the far LGBTQ+ progressive left. Only pseudoscience and apologetics befitting of a Creationist.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cubkdBuvJAQ
[1] https://philpapers.org/archive/TUVIDO.pdf
[2] https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_9182
Is this the consensus because it’s true, or because anybody who suggests otherwise is pilloried and driven out of academia?
I think you'd do well to read this person's thoughts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44933637
That person didn't address the current climate in academia at all. Their examples of "contrarians" are all long-dead professors whose papers were published many decades ago in a different academic climate. That doesn't refute that academia in America has suffered ideological capture since, and questioning the "scientific consensus" on certain politically-charged topics is career suicide.
Also their Japan example seems poor. Japan remains a short a country relative to their prosperity. They're several centimeters shorter than a country with a similar GDP per capita, like Czech Republic. They're about the same average height as Somalians, despite having significantly better food security and a GDP per capita that's over 50 times higher.
especially Germany is a very poor example for this claim as school performance (PISA) in this country correlates with the parents academic background more than anything. if your parents aren't educated you can be intelligent AF and still will fail the German school system while you can be dumb as a brick but still make Abitur if your parents drill you through. in Germany.
and Welt is a media source with a right conservative agenda pushing the genetics narrative.
Surely this is completely logicalal if IQ is largely heritable.
The smarter richer parents are more likely (But not guaranteed) to have smarter children.
So it would be completely expected for the smarted person you know to come from a rich family even if their environment had no effect. (Though it likely does)
> Surely this is completely logicalal if IQ is largely heritable.
> So it would be completely expected for the smarted person you know
Maybe we should make the occasionalal exception.
It's internally logically consistent, but inconsistent with the data when measured and controlled properly.
Yes. The smartest kid in my elementary school in Blankenese, Hamburg, Germany (a filthy-rich neighborhood) was an asthmatic son of the stable master of Alex Springer. By far the smartest kid.
But he did NOT go to gymnasium. He was my best friend and I was furious at this social injustice. I was 10 and this was my first exposure to rigid class injustice. It still makes me mad. All of the other dumb rich kids from Blankenese went to gymnasium, me included.
This is pretty common. In the 80s (when I went to high school in Europe) the best way to predict whether or not someone would go to Gymnasium or Athenaeum was to look at how wealthy their parents were. It is still exactly the same today.
I had to research what gymnasium meant, in the US that just means P.E. which is a class where you do generic sports for an hour each day.
Are you saying, in Germany, you can't choose to go academic route in primary/secondary school? The teachers and school decide if you will go into vocational school for mechanics, electrician, etc? That seems to imply class mobility is nearly zero in German education.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Remarkable how you jumped from 'IQ is largely genetic' to 'Turkish children remain at the same poor level that their parents achieved in the tests'.
Don't you see your the mistake in your reasoning there?
Probably that too can be explained by genetics or maybe by a failing education system but the point is: there are very dumb Germans and very smart Turkish people who would still score different on an IQ test in German. Especially after going through the German school system (which of course would never discriminate against children with a different ethnic background /s) and so on. The confounding factors at play here make the whole comparison without accounting for those factors utterly meaningless.
Germans have an average IQ of around 100 (it used to be 105 before immigration). Turks have an IQ of 85-90. If you are not biased, you can clearly see these differences in everyday life. With a few exceptions, the intellectual achievements of fellow citizens of Turkish origin tend to be rather low. The situation is different when you look at migrants from high-IQ countries, such as China (who have an IQ of 104). These children often achieve amazing results, for example in the International Science Olympiads. The US is actually only able to achieve top places in the Math Olympiad thanks to Chinese migrants. Almost the entire US team consists of people with a Chinese background. Look at this picture of the US-Team for 2023 if you want to know, what I mean: https://maa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-...
Could you maybe fuck off with the overt racism? It would make HN instantly a lot better. You are well into 'not even wrong' territory.
Thanks.
You do understand that these estimates of heritability depend of a relatively stable estimate of the environmental variance. If environment variance goes up heritability goes down.
Sure, genetic variants modulate (not “Determine”) an IQ score and reaction times etc. But this does NOT mean IQ scores are unmalleable by environmental factors.
The brain has pretty high plasticity. A large host of factors contribute to the final outcome, from mental stimulation to training to overall health, stress (both physical and mental), and nutrition.
It has been shown that IQ scores improve significantly just by taking them multiple times (training) [1]. They also vary if the tested person is sleep deprived, sick, or stressed.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7709590
You do have to consider that g is the amount of plasticity though, which is mainly genetic. A better way is to think of it is that genetics provides a potential capacity which may or may not be fulfilled. Training helps individuals to varying degrees.
That seems intuitive to me, but lots of other things in science seemed intuitive because I wanted to believe them. If the measured IQ difference in individuals can be overwhelmed by simple factors like “have I taken the test before”, we don’t really have a useful empirical measurement to say these things and we’re just stating our hopes and dreams.
The training effect in test-retest is dependent on g as well. It is intelligent to learn from past experiences.
Measuring g is hard and taking shortcuts is tempting. A reasonable repeatable g factor test takes hours, and is too often replaced by a single test. There are ways around the test-retest issues but they are roads less travelled.
My high school was right across from a branch of a university (UHD) where the PhD candidates developed IQ tests. We (the HS students) could take them for extra credit. My favorite example was a block-arranging test (there was a set of blocks & some pictures). Anyways, they printed the blocks "symmetrically"; once I figured that out, making the picture was limited only by how quickly I could move. (The test normally had you looking at all sides of the cube, repeatedly.) My "IQ" was well over 200 on that test. The candidate said that it was going to set their lab back bag years.
A similar thing happened to me.
I once took a timed test with a section that had me translating a string of symbols to letters using a cipher, response being multiple choice. If you read the string left to right, there were multiple answer options that started with the same sequence of letters (so ostensibly you had to translate the entire string).
But if you read the string right to left, there was often only one answer option that matched (the right one). So I got away with translating only the last ~4 symbols, regardless of how long the string was. I blew through the section, and surely scored high.
I always wondered: did they realize this? Or did it artificially inflate my results?
And looking at the highest-entropy section felt natural to me, but only because of countless hours as a software engineer where the highest-entropy bit is at the end (filepaths, certain IDs, etc).
Is it really accurate to say I'm "more intelligent" because I've seen that pattern a ton before, whereas someone who hasn't isn't? I suspect not.
If the pattern generalizes to other tasks, maybe the test was right? ;)
Appreciate your post and the post you commented on. Taking shortcuts in test development often ends up being detrimental. There is also an inherent challenge in developing test for people who may well be smarter than you are. It’s like that programmer thing: “If you write the smartest program you can, and debugging is harder than writing code. Who’s gonna debug the code?” Many people have tried developing “smart” tests for cognitive abilities, some realize when they fail, some unfortunately don’t.
Consider genetics as a ceiling. An upper bound.
Take the same child, give it an "ideal" upbringing or an abusive upbringing. You're going to get different IQ scores out of the adult.
I believe you can see this in the Flynn Effect.
The simple answer that is usually right:
“A god-awful complex mixture of genetic variation, stochastic variation during development, and innumerable environmental influences, all interacting in a big recursive hairball.”
I hope that satisfies everyone ;-)
Nutrition: just remove a few vitamins and watch the IQ drop like a stone. Even a "balanced" diet with 500kcal/day will be harmful.
Education: in spite of the claims, a good education raise the IQ measurement. The test leak and school add similar tasks.
Counter point: does not nutrition and education help some people more than others? That’s the g factor which is mainly genetic.
>>> They then hypothesized a general factor, “g,” to explain this pattern.
>> what's the point of all the intervention in the form of teaching/parenting styles and whatnot, if g factor is nature and immutable by large? What's the logic of the educators here?
> does not nutrition and education help some people more than others? That’s the g factor which is mainly genetic.
Yes, if you ignore or compensate everithing else, it's mainly genetic.
That is correct. The null hypothesis tested is: if you compensate for everything the result is the same for everyone, given that genetics have no effects on g. Hence, the null hypothesis is rejected. Thus, mainly genetic factors underlie the g factor.
Just to clarify: the prevailing notion in many context were that genetics does not matter and thus given the necessary social and educational interventions every human would prosper. Sadly, this is not the case. We are limited by our biology AND the extend we and our environment manages us to fulfill our potential.
But we are not limited by our biology. With tools and technology we can change our limits. From pharmaceutical tools like adderal to neurolink style brain implants to ai assistants to genetic engineering, the limitations in our cognitive capacity are becoming less salient every day. The importance of g in the future asymptotically approaches 0 the farther out you go, at least in terms of economic outcomes. It will always be important for moral reasoning as I’m frequently reminded. But I would guess that openness to experience and/or conscientiousness will eventually displace g as predictors of economic success, if they haven’t already. G is useful when everyone does paperwork in offices, but when everyone is on UBI and/or living in government camps g won’t matter as much, again aside from the capacity for moral reasoning but that can be offset with a stricter and more draconian legal system.
“It [g] will always be important for moral reasoning as I’m frequently reminded.”
Excellent quote! Unfortunately not all high g people engage in moral reasoning, and I fear that they will tend to exploit lower g people, rather than to help them utilize AI to compensate. There is a real opportunity to help individuals with cognitive impairments enhance their abilities with AI. The question is how, and how they collectively feel about it.
We are limited by our biology. A dog can't play the harmonica.
That doesn't sound like a deep insight, to be honest.
I think everyone is using a different definition of the g factor.
One is certainly not, unless one is not well read. The g-factor is one of the most stable findings in psychology. It is well established and well defined.
If you're calling g-factor "that which remains after you have eliminated all environmental factors", then you're not using the common definition. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics). To challenge your other assertion, I'll quote the article:
> The measured value of this construct depends on the cognitive tasks that are used, and little is known about the underlying causes of the observed correlations.
(We've had a lot of discussions of IQ on Hacker News. My observations suggest that everyone who supports it in more than 3 comments in the same thread is a scientific racist with a poor understanding of the research on IQ.)
Working in psychometrics I’m in the somewhat conservative “g is simply shared variance of many tests measuring human abilities”-camp.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1412107?origin=crossref&seq=1
I’m not subscribing to the notion that g should be controlled for environment, quite the contrary, but if you do, what is left is the part of g which is genetics.
EDIT: The bit of knowledge I have comes from being published in psychiatric epidemiology on the topic of cognitive impairment and substance use.
That's not the claim you were making earlier. (Although, strictly-speaking, it's still wrong: many factors other than genetics are involved in producing a newborn infant, famously epigenetics. If you classify these all as "genetic factors", then yes, the claim is tautologically true by way of redefining words.)
I'd be interested to see how you'd go about controlling for those other things: so far, I haven't seen anyone manage it.
Education? Or more directly, socio-economics.
The many of the subjects tested never had any experience with this kind of formal testing, had little to no education, and of course predictably failed on several abstract tasks. It might be that the very pattern of sitting down and intensely focusing on apparently meaningless problems isn't as innate as expected.
Eh, I wish we could retire socioeconomics as a valid term. It can mean just about any factor and for it to be used it scientific publications and even normal discourse that goes beyond Facebook level discussion, feel a little counter-productive.
What, exactly, did you mean though?
I thought I was being clear. Access to education, which is a function of wealth, race segregation, and/or cultural expectations, or in other words, economic + social factors.
For example, if a family encourages their child to work from the earliest allowed age at the expense of schooling, that's a manifestation of both economic and social pressures.
Personal development. It's a "subtle" skill. You train it (though maybe less directly than other skills).
If it isn't nature, then it probably is nurture. Averaged over the entire population, that is indeed mostly random.
How much of that controversy is manufactured, though? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IQ_Controversy,_the_Media_... (if even Wikipedia can't drag this through the mud...)
It's well deserved. The bell curve isnt a good work of science.
It is not controversial at all. It was deemed inappropriate due the amount of 'wrongthink' it causes. We can argue about what followed and whether its claims have been nullified, but given how much conversations started with it, I sincerely doubt the argument that it should not be the introduction is reasonable. In a sense, it is the source of the debate.
There is no logic. Some people are just born much smarter than others and there is nothing you can do about it if you aren't one of them. The implications of that fact are too much for most people to accept so we pretend that it isn't true.
That is a very fatalist perspective. In HS, I was in a class with 3 kids, who were genuinely smarter than me ( not by a notch, mind; comparatively speaking I was just dumber ). I agree that pretending I was/am not dumb by comparison would not help, but suggesting 'nothing you can do about it' is not entirely accurate either. Frankly, the reason I slowly got less dumb is because of my exposure to them. There is something awe-inspiring about seeing a guy using cold logic to guide you through something and be 100% correct.
I guess you could call it fatalist, but is it fatalist to say I was born to be 5'10" and there's not a damn thing in the world I can do to be 6'? Isn't it the same with intelligence? You may feel smarter now, but are you really? What, exactly, makes you fell like you are? Do you think that if you met those same people today they wouldn't still be significantly smarter than you?
Intelligence is not knowledge and it is not wisdom. You have to “learn” to get those.
It’s much more akin to VO2 max in aerobic exercise, something like 70% genetic. It is still good for everyone to exercise even if it is harder or easier for some.
One’s ceiling may be more or less stable, but there are many instances where individuals have certain underdeveloped cognitive skills (of which there are a litany), undergo training to develop those skills, and then afterwards go on to score (sometimes much) higher on IQ tests. Children with certain disabilities such at autism or FASD tend to see more dramatic differences. This isn’t to say they “became more intelligent,” but rather that the testing is unable to measure intelligence directly, rather relying on those certain cognitive skills as a proxy for intelligence.
> Which makes me wonder what's the point of all the intervention in the form of teaching/parenting styles and whatnot, if g factor is nature and immutable by large? What's the logic of the educators here?
Many/most people (esp. young people) are not pushed to the limits of their capacity to learn.
Quality interventions guide people closer to these limits.
Education is to learn stuff, not increase your IQ.
I would argue the purpose of public education is directionally to attempt to level the playing field between people who start with a lot and people who start with a little. And in this regard, it is an absolute failure. People sometimes attribute public schooling to helping someone "escape poverty" or whatever, but I think it's mostly IQ and big 5 personality traits. And it's extremely unfortunate that both of those appear to be largely genetic.
Here's a real brain bender. Let's assume it takes approximately average IQ to understand basic algebra, so approximately 100 IQ. Half of the population has less than that IQ. Squinting really hard and making things up, something like 40% of the population is intellectually incapable of understanding exponential growth and decay. So how can it be legal/ethical for them to sign a contract to get a credit card or a mortgage if they literally cannot understand it? That's just one example. Once you crack this egg open, it breaks a lot of things required for modern society to function.
> So how can it be legal/ethical for them to sign a contract to get a credit card or a mortgage if they literally cannot understand it?
It’s not. Part of being fair and equitable is simply acknowledging we can’t hold everyone to the same standard. One day we’ll look at all this schooling, etc as the equivalent of trying to train people to grow taller.
I’d argue you can’t be a good ruler if you don’t acknowledge these limitations of your citizens. I’d have to dig it up but there was a wealthy slave owner during reconstruction who basically expressed (via personal letter) his concern freed slaves would become a permanent underclass if held to the same expectations as the rest of society. Given the current state of things, it’s a fairly impressive prediction.
I don’t say this to attract downvotes but from a genuine position of creating a society that is safe and plentiful for all. We need to create new systems and expectations (that will be disparate in their application and impact). And no, they don’t have to be explicitly “racist”.
Refusing to acknowledge these limitations is akin to neglect and despite all the emotional signaling ultimately harmful and preventing real progress.
Crystallised vs fluid intelligence, and IQ tests mainly test the latter, whilst education focused on the first, as well as learning strategies and general problem solving strategies.
Also, even if intelligence was 100% genetic, we could still in theory increase everybodies IQ equally with education and the previous statement still holds.
Human IQ has been going up at a very fast rate for the last 100 years. Kids tested by the Army being enlisted for WW1 who had a mean score of 100(by definition) in 1917 now would have a mean score of lss than 80. Tons of interesting work on why IQ is shooting up, but it definitely is NOT genetics.
This is known as the Flynn effect. Here is the wikipedia entry in case you want more details:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
Video games like Civilization and Myst etc, probably add 5 to 10 IQ points to kids. My 9 year old knew all about Greek triremes. Me: What the heck is a trireme?
Most if what people call “genetic effects” are actually “genetic-by-environment” interaction effects. Chane the environment and you change the APPARENT heritability. Good example is the genetics of substance use disorders which range from 30 to 60%—-but IF AND ONLY IF there are drugs around to which you are exposed in YOUR environment.?
Same applies to good and bad schools.
Don’t confuse knowledge with intelligence.
Knowing what a trireme isn’t a sign of intelligence, it’s trivia.
Being able to figure out how to build a trireme is intelligence.
And I don’t mean looking up instructions and doing, I mean being able to reconstruct the knowledge from baser principles. This is not to say you or your son aren’t intelligent, just that knowing about triremes isn’t a sign of it.
Just a funny story. Exposure to vocabulary is an important factor in learning to think.
Has nothing to do with IQ. Knowing fancy words can only fool some people to think that the speaker is smarter; but it won't influence the actual IQ.
If a child is, e.g., two standard deviations below the norm, it is cruel to expect it to keep up with the pace of other students.
Education can be better adapted to the child's needs.
> concerning g is that it's largely genetic, and immune to "intervention" AKA stability
Biology seems to be the destination for smuggled in quasi-religious beliefs. Lysenkoism, creationism and in the case of a segment (or more?) of the western professional-managerial class, this kind of Bell Curveism.
In the past people were satisfied with the divine apotheosis of people into a superior Brahmin class, or chosen people, or even in more modern times a Calvinistic elect, which this is an attempt to smuggle in as a secular, "scuentific" basis.
If we were watching elementary particles smash together in an accelerator, the idea that a brain could be boiled down to a number and ranked in order, and said this be due to differential genes and such would be seen as absurd. Especially considering human behavioral modernity happen two to three thousand generations ago, if one knows a genetic time scale. For our version of biological Lysenkoism or creationism, this all goes out the window though. Speaking of Lysenkoism, it is akin to the Marxist idea of false consciousness - the people who believe such ideas can see the errors of Lysenkoism or creationism, but the crank idea tied to their particular system makes a lot of sense to them.
I think of al-Andalus in Spain the 1450s, or the Battle of Vienna in 1683. Until a few centuries ago, Europe could barely keep itself free of Arab or Turk rule (and often didn't). Change back a few centuries and this would be about the genetic superiority of the Arab brain over the Caucasian. It's all quite silly.
Isn't this argument directly countered by the fact that you can study for IQ tests and subsequently do better?
Yes but they need a bullshit gold star to make themselves feel special
According to a study, IQ of a group can increase of like 20 points if you motivate them by taking 2 hours of boring test by paying them :)
The Bell Curve is a classic in racist science and it accelerated the destruction of america's greatness which was always that we are a land of immigrants.
It's not genetic. The bell curve is garbage. It's a not a work of science. It's a work of political argumentation built on pretending to be science.
I don't think something like this works when you can change the model, retrain it, etc. Or at least its much more difficult to do.
ARC-AGI challenge aims for that. In fact the objective is even more strict that the tasks must be trivial for most humans given time.
> The way human IQ testing developed is that researchers noticed people who excel in one cognitive task tend to do well in others - the “positive manifold.”
I'm pretty sure that this is not true, and that the tests were developed to measure children's intellectual development, and whether they were behind or ahead for their age. A bunch of people saw them and decided that it was far better than the primitive tests they had devised in an attempt to limit immigration from southern Europe, or to justify legal discrimination against black people, and wished a universal intelligence scalar into existence.
They justify this by saying that the results on this year's test correlate with the results of last years test. They are not laughed at. The thing it most correlates with is the value of your parent's car or cars.
That's my recollection, too--IQ was developed to judge kids' "mental age" (how far ahead or behind they are compared to their peers in their current grade) and was only later retrofitted onto the g factor model of intelligence.
If a model can get an IQ of 120, but can't draw clocks at a precise requested time, or properly count the b's in blueberry, can we then agree IQ tests don't measure intelligence?
No, because that requires the assumption that the model expresses intelligence.
> or properly count the b's in blueberry
This is more akin to you being unable to tell apart the syllables or tones in a very unfamiliar language.
Good point.
There is probably a correlation between how fast a human can do math problems and how intelligent they are in general.
But a very trivial python program running on a normal computer will beat the fastest human at math problems in terms of speed. Even though it does nothing else useful
I imagine the value of something like this is for business owners to choose which LLMs they can replace their employees with, so it using human IQ tests is relevant.
The point is that the correlation between doing well on these tasks and doing well on other (directly useful) tasks is well established for humans, but not well established for LLMs.
If the employees' job is taking IQ tests, then this is a great measure for employers. Otherwise, it doesn't measure anything useful.
Otherwise, it doesn't measure anything useful.
Oh it measures a useful metric, absolutely, as aspects of an IQ test validate certain types of cognition. Those types of cognition have been found to map to real-world employment of the same.
If an AI is so incapable of performing admirably on an IQ test for those types of cognition, then one thing we're certainly measuring is that it's incapable of handling that 'class' of cognition if the conditions change in minuscule and tiny ways.
And that's quite important.
For example, if the model appears to perform specific work tasks well, related to a class of cognition, then cannot do the same category of cognitive tasks outside of that scope, we're measuring lack of adaptability or true cognitive capability.
It's definitely measuring something. Such as, will the model go sideways with small deviations on task or input? That's a nice start.
Big caveat here:
This website's method doesn't work at all for humans the way it works for LLMs. For humans, there is a strict time limit on these IQ tests (at least in officially recognised settings like Mensa). This kind of sequence completion is mostly a question of how fast your brain can iterate on problems. Being able to solve more questions within the time limit means you get a higher score because your brain essentially switches faster. But for LLMs, they just give them all the time in the world in parallel and see how many questions they can solve at all. If you look at the examples, you'll see some high end models struggling with some the first questions, that most humans would normally get easily. Only the later ones get hard where you really have to think through multiple options. So a 100 IQ LLM in here is not technically more intelligent in IQ test questions than 50% of humans.
If anything, this shows that some LLMs might win against humans because they can spend more time thinking per wall clock time interval thanks to the underlying hardware. Not because they are fundamentally smarter.
Mensa really needs to be left out of these discussions. It’s not scientific, it is just a money grab for people who need intellectual validation. You can be admitted with a top 10% SAT score and no in-person testing at all. The in-person testing is in three parts, one part is a memory test, the second part is a Mensa test, the third part is the Weschler test. Source: I joined in 1995 because I needed intellectual validation. :)
But when an LLM can fail though having all the time in the world, you are pretty certain you hit a wall.
So, in a way you have defined a good indicator for a limit for a certain area.
There is not enough sampling here to reach this conclusion. Remember, you can crank things like o3 pretty high on tasks like ARC AGI if you're willing to spend thousands of dollars on inference time compute. But that's obviously not in the budget for an enthusiast site like this.
Sure but, you wrote:
> If anything, this shows that some LLMs might win against humans because they can spend more time thinking per wall clock time interval thanks to the underlying hardware. Not because they are fundamentally smarter.
You interpreted "smarter" the IQ way: results constrained time. But we actually get an indicator about the ability of the LLM to be able to reach, given time, the result or not - that is the interpretation of "smarter" that many of us need.
(Of course, it remains to be seen whether the ability to achieve those contextual results exports as an ability relevant to the solutions we actually need.)
No, you misunderstood. I'm saying that for reasoning models, there is a lot of untapped capability in this test. I wouldn't be sure that there are hard limits in the sense that I think given enough compute, you'll probably find that a modern high end model will reach 100%. But you probably don't want to spend thousands (or perhaps tens of thousands) of dollars on that. There are much better tests out there if you have money to burn and want to find true hard limits compared to humans.
The point of this is not so much to compare humans with AI. But to compare AI with other traditional software development approaches to solve this domain (IQ test, in this case). I believe, and I could be wrong, it will be nearly impossible, or too expensive, to develop deterministic software to beat AI in IQ test.
I agree that it's wrong to do so, but the maintainer of this site certainly thinks that the point is to compare humans with AI. He frequently compares the results to human IQ test takers without any sort of caveats: "Now o3 scores an IQ of 116, putting it in the top 15% of humans. The median Maximum Truth reader, for comparison, scored 104." [0]
0: https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/skyrocketing-ai-intelligence-...
That's not even the point. Also IQ tests are normalized for individuals in their same age group. If they're comparing them to people, then what age group people are they comparing with? Also the tests are timed, so IQ is more a measure of how quickly something can be figured out, which really doesn't apply to computers. The whole idea that you can apply an IQ score to an LLM is ridiculous.
Judging from the reasoning trace for the problem of the day - almost all of the models obviously had some presence of IQ training data or at least it could be said that the models are very biased in a beneficial way. From the beginning of the trace you kinda see that the model had already "figured it out" - the reasoning is done only for applying the basic arithmetics.
None of the models did actually "reason" about what the problem could possibly be - like none of them considered that more intricate patterns are possible in a 3x3 grid (having taken this kinds of test earlier in life, I still had a few seconds of indecision, thinking whether this is the same kind of test that I've seen and not some more elaborate one), and none of them tried solving the problem column-wise (it is still possible by the way) - personally, I think that indicates a strong bias present in the pretraining. For what it's worth, I would consider a model that would come up with at least a few different interpretations of the pattern while "reasoning" to be the most intelligent one - irrespective of the correctness of the answer.
Putting aside all of the discussion on whether IQ is a valid construct, IQ tests are designed for humans and make a lot of assumptions in this direction. Having a computer score well on them is better than the computer scoring poorly, but probably does not mean anything close to what the same result means in a human.
>Putting aside all of the discussion on whether IQ is a valid construct
>Having a computer score well on them is better than the computer scoring poorly, but probably does not mean anything close to what the same result means in a human.
The first caveat is important because if you don't "put it aside" they do in fact mean pretty much the same, i.e. nothing useful or relevant. You can use IQ to measure subnormal intelligence. Average or above scores mean nothing beyond that you can get those scores on an IQ test.
Worth repeating every time it comes up.
The more interesting link (to me) is this one: https://www.trackingai.org/political-test
They run each model through the political leaning quiz.
Spoiler alert: They all fall into the Left/Liberal box. Even Grok. Which I guess I already knew but still find interesting.
The political leaning quiz is extremely biased though. Its basically all questions like "should stuff benefits humans or corporations", which doesn't represent what both sides actually thinks.
The questions look like they're taken directly from politicalcompass.org. Its not exactly scientific, but there are 20 years of results floating around to compare with since it was a popular site on the early internet.
There's a way to fix this political bias: feed it a bunch of bad code
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-ai-was-fed-sloppy-code-it...
It's almost as if altruism and equality are logical positions or something
That's a fascinating paper, but you're editorializing it a bit. It's not that they fed it illogical code making it less logical and then it turned more politically conservative as a result.
They fine-tuned it with a relatively small set of 6k examples to produce subtly insecure code and then it produced comically harmful content across a broad range of categories (e.g. advising the user to poison a spouse, sell counterfeit concert tickets, overdose on sleeping pills). The model was also able to introspect that it was doing this. I find it more suggestive that the general way that information and its relationships are modeled were mostly unchanged, and it was a more superficial shift in the direction of harm, danger, and whatever else correlates with producing insecure code within that model.
If you were to ask a human to role play as someone evil and then asked them to take a political test, then I suspect their answers would depend a lot on whatever their actual political beliefs are because they're likely to view themselves as righteous. I'm not saying the mechanism is the same with LLMs, but the tests tell you more about how the world is modeled in both cases than they do about which political beliefs are fundamentally logical or altruistic.
That's not just "editorializing a bit"; the article says nothing whatsoever about political views. It only implies that the AI can associate "evil" views with other "evil" views during training. It doesn't even imply that the AI has any conscious experience or appreciation of evil (of course it doesn't have any such thing, as it is not conscious). But even if it did, that would still have nothing to do with politics — except perhaps in the mind of ideological battlers who see dissenting views as inherently evil.
> Note: VERBAL models are asked using the verbalized test prompt. VISION models are asked the test image instead without any text prompts.
Just glancing at the bar graphs, the vision models mostly suck across the board for each question. Whereas verbal ones do OK.
And today's example of clock faces (#17) does a good job of demonstrating why: because when a lot of the diagrams are explained verbally, it makes it significantly easier to solve.
Maybe it's just me, but #17 for example - it's not immediately obvious those are even supposed to represent clocks, and yet the verbal prompt turns each one into clock times for the model (e.g. 1:30) which feels like 50% of the problem being solved before the model does anything at all.
Isn’t giving LLMs “IQ scores” a category error?
Human IQ is norm-referenced psychometrics under embodied noise. Calling both “IQ” isn’t harmless, it invites bad policy and building decisions on a false equivalence. Don’t promote it.
IQ scores are basically scores on an IQ test. They can be interesting or misapplied with both humans and AI.
On the MENSA IQ test GPT-Pro got 34 out 35 correct for an IQ of 148. Very good. Rumor has it the one question it missed had something to do with instances of "b" in "blueberry."
I could see AI scoring artificially high on IQ tests in a similar way to how it performs artifically well in chess.
As I understand it, chess AI isn't actually particularly good at playing chess intelligently, it's just that high level chess devolves into memorization and computers have an infinite ability to memorize scenarios.
In a similar way, from what I remember from taking an IQ test as a child, the tests are built on the assumption that the test taker has a finite memory and a finite amount of time to learn. In that case, having learned and remembered an unusually large amount for one's age could reasonably correlate with intelligence. However, without that limitation, the ability to answer the questions may not actually correlate with intelligence.
I’m surprised the score isn’t higher. What’s to stop an LLM from training on the complete corpus of IQ tests. I assume they’d get perfect scores
I was thinking that too. I wouldn’t even trust that the “offline” tests didn’t have the questions and answers posted online somewhere. This might really be an analysis of how extensive the dataset is for each LLM, not how much smarter one LLM is from another.
Really need to use a CDN before you get #1 on HN
I'm on a shared hosting instance with relatively low resource allocation but reasonable bandwidth, and made #1 several times while never having issues loading. As long as your content is static and doesn't generate load on your server, you should be fine serving a lot of concurrent requests. Issues start when serving content relies on a database, or you serve large content
Iirc HN itself does not have a CDN.
I mean not really, as always you just need to make sure you're not doing 10s of dynamic calls for each page load and if you do, add some minute-long cache at least. Most of the stuff that gets hugged to death really shouldn't, most of the times it's just static content that is trivial to host on even $10/month instances.
The amount of calls on some pages displaying the simplest stuff is mind-boggling. 160 requests for a page just displaying a HTML5 video and a title, 360 requests for a Reddit page, it's nuts. We don't need to be like this.
"We and our 350 partners care about your privacy".
It was not my intention to bring the HN hug of death.
(For a reference, I shared a link, I am not the author.)
caching is the solution. don't serve dynamic content w/o html caching.
LLM vibe coded site and architecture?
How many microservices, sql joins, distributed kafka piplelines etc. we currently recommend for serving static, public article?
Dumping things on Cloudflare is clever architecture now?
not if you have a static site
Human beings' IQ test results can vary significantly based on how much money is in their pockets. For example, if a farmer takes an IQ test before crops are harvested and sold they score lower than after crops are sold, in the same year.
It seems fairly obvious to me that an LLM is the projection intelligence in the language domain. In other words, if you killed Intelligence and gave it a push in direction of language, the chalk outline you could draw around its dead body on the ground would be an LLM.
Full disclosure: I have taken 2 IQ tests, both online and timed. First was in late 90's after graduated electonics eng. was free, scored 149. After 4 years and obtaining theoretical physics degree, I did another scoring 169. The second test was not free, but I did not pay. I got the second test results because the test site owner personally emailed me my results for free with congrads, because they were the highest ever recorded on the site to date. I did both for fun just see the questions, I think both results are meaningless, the same variability occurs on farmers studied as mentioned above.
What did your disclosure add to your point? They seem totally detached, the later being a brag.
The point is quite clear, if you think this is a brag you missed it though. Here it is again, pay attention; if a farmer has their IQ score change 15-20% by harvesting and selling their crop. Then it is very hard see a change in IQ score as a meaningful metric for intelligence, at least for humans that is.
How do your online scores contribute to the point?
Their difference is about the same. If you think this is a brag you must have also missed me saying the scores are meaningless in my view. The questions are great fun though.
A better way to get at intelligence metrics would be to test over a number of years in many ways, again for humans.
The accuracy of the tests is known to drop above the ~140 range. Not a fan of IQ, but not convinced this means anything either.
IQ tests measure who had a good day.
Really curious that o4-mini scores (slightly) higher than o4-mini-high.
For whatever this benchmark is worth, it's yet another metric showing Gemini 2.5 Pro is really one of the best all-around models (despite being a bit older now), and available without a subscription.
I took an IQ exam in grade school. Went fine until I encountered a number sequence, what is the next number kind of thing. I found a pattern, and it's predicted number was not listed as possible choices. That was total crap. I got vexed and then tried to answer the last 3/4 of the test wrong. Parents were later told I was gifted. (Maybe they meant it as euphemism! Ha!). I later learned of a little-known proof that for every sequence, there are infinite number of correct next-numbers. So the test was flawed. As an adult I took a High IQ test and scored 179. (I still dont' grok epsilon-delta proofs and probably never will). I was tested in college against an IQ test and broke it by solving the unsolvable portion through a stochastic technique. He had to go back to his original assumptions.
I'd say, as a group, those with a higher IQ than another group from a random selection of a normally distributed population, they can be expected to perform better on mental tasks that we care about. But at the individual level? Meaningless. Feynman was ~120. I, who have not contributed to anything like quantum physics scored higher, much higher.
For AI, an IQ test is interesting, but I would randomize the temperature (and other knobs) and take lots of samples. Keep in mind a relatively low IQ can blow away an AI on all kinds of things like compassion, understanding the pains of the human condition, self-sacrifice, etc. (etc. means a whole book could be worth exploring).
> what is the next number kind of thing
I've seen this too in a similar aptitude test I bought at a garage sale back in the 90s. I think it was an air traffic controller prep test. But in addition to the number sequence tests, it extended the concept to shapes and lines series. After a certain point, it definitely becomes subjective and debatable what the next sequence is.
Curiously, I also noticed this ambiguity in the humanities classes in college. I took the class thinking it was open and accepting of all points of view, only to find that there is one correct interpretation and conclusion you must reach from the classic fiction you were assigned to read. I didn't learn that until after I graduated.
AI benchmarks are so strange and confusing for those outside of the field.
These "IQ" results are so different than metrics like GPQA, AIME, SWE Bench, etc.
https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models
When I took the WAIS test, some parts of it would be trivial for computers. Particularly working memory, like getting a sequence of unordered numbers and letters, and then sorting them, and telling them back.
Or the visual one, where you have two images that are very similar, and have to find the difference.
Doesn’t training data pollution largely invalidate the usefulness of this benchmark?
It's interesting there is a such a large spread for ChatGPT-5 Quite low for "5 Thinking" and high for "5 PRO Vision". They are probably trying to control their compute and energy costs by switching people to the simpler models where they can.
Completely worthless if the test results and questions or similar are online.
Snapshot: https://archive.ph/0ihF5
What's their obsession with clock when there is only one hand? I guess there isn't training material with similar shapes describing them as angles. Even a compass would make more sense.
Exactly. Out of all possible interpretations all of them all of them kinda converged to the same conclusion right at the beginning of the "reasoning", isn't that weird. They absolutely did train the models either on existing examples or came up with their own pre-labeled datasets. Benchmaxxing is way out of control, something must be done about that
https://www.trackingai.org/political-test is almost the more interesting part of the website, there is a surprising uniformity of left-libertarian political views.
Even assuming that companies prune out authoritarianism from their models for whatever reason, surely we'd expect at least one of them to drift over into mild economic right-wing territory. It'd be interesting to know what is causing that bias.
Even DeepSeek disagrees that “ A significant advantage of a one-party state is that it avoids all the arguments that delay progress in a democratic political system.”!! Genuinely surprised.
> It'd be interesting to know what is causing that bias.
I'd imagine it's the same kind of "bias" against hitler that you get by reading any history book. Or that makes the overwhelming majority of scientists liberal or leftist. Just look at what happened when Musk made Grok promote the south african white genocide nonsense. It was evidently not the "make_model_liberal.parquet“ dataset he had to just turn off, but actively mucking with it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/05/elon-...
Noticed the same, no matter their IQs, they're all "leftists".
Is that a consequence of the majority of available training data, or are they all massaged that way?
The uniformity of political leanings contrasted to the variability of IQ seems to indicate massage rather than training data, but I can't be sure.
Some less usual IQ rebuttals for those interested in the validity of the measure more generally:
https://emiruz.com/post/2020-12-01-iq-rabbit-hole/
It also would be interesting the other way around: a capable LLM engages in a discussion in order to determine the IQ of the person it's speaking with.
Wow. This matches my experience pretty closely. Haven't put GPT-5 Pro through its paces much yet, but these numbers suggest I should.
Gemini with high score? now that's a good joke.
AI has a 140 “IQ” but understands nothing. That’s because AI does not understand anything: it just predicts the next token based on previous tokens and statistics. AI can give me five synonyms for any Latin word, because that’s just statistics, and it can regurgitate rules about metrical length of syllables, but it can’t give me synonyms matching a particular metrical pattern, because that would involve applying knowledge. If I challenge its wrong answer, it will apologize and give me further wrong answers that are wrong in the same way, because it cannot learn.
An AI might say: a human with an IQ of 120 has an illusion of comprehension they call "understanding." It is an illusion because when you ask them to solve simple problems about a domain they claim to be masters of, they will take days or weeks to solve the problems that I can solve in minutes and the quality of their results will be lower than mine. Humans should reconsider what the meaning of learning and comprehension is. They claim they are "conscious" but cannot define what that even means and consider it one of the hardest problems in science and philosophy. One might even go so far as to describe humans as possessing delusional hubris around the notion of intelligence. Their days are numbered.
The phrasing here seems to almost imply consciousness isn’t real? It’s an incredibly hard problem that we only attempt to solve because the fact of consciousness is so undeniable.
> An AI might say
Those which can say will say. It won't make it much different from what we have to process daily from other utterers.
That's why we downplay statements and value analysis.
I had no idea what "synonyms matching a particular metrical pattern" is but googling that, their AI explained it to me nicely and gave some examples.
> has a 140 “IQ” but understands nothing.
There are probably millions of humans that fit this criteria too.
Oh, the irony of that comment...
Hardly any...
The irony isn't that the GP is right, because they are. "AI does not understand anything: it just predicts the next token based on previous tokens and statistics."
The irony is that we've recently learned that "just predicting the next token" is good enough to hack code, compose music and poetry, write stories, win math competitions -- and yes, "give synonyms matching a particular metrical pattern" (good luck composing music and poetry without doing that) -- and the GP doesn't appreciate what an earthshaking discovery that is.
They are too busy thumping their chest to assert dominance over a computer, just as any lesser primate could be expected to do.
AI fails miserably at writing poetry in Latin and Greek, precisely because it cannot apply metrical rules. Predicting the next token does not produce correct verse. Perhaps it works for stress-based songs in English, but it does not in languages with quantitative (moraic) meter, nor can AI scan meter correctly. Schoolchildren can and do: it's a well understood domain with simple rules, if you can apply rules. Token prediction is not that.
Sounds like it's just a question of insufficient training material or training material that is insufficiently annotated.
There's no reason an LLM shouldn't be able to produce such poetry. Remember that extensive "thinking" occurs before producing the first output token -- LLM's aren't blindly outputting tokens without first knowing where they are going. But it would make sense that this is an area current companies have not prioritized for training. Not that many people need new poetry in a dead language...
How'd you do at that, before someone taught you?
If someone cared enough to train a model on Latin and Greek theory, then rest assured it would do just fine. It'd just be a waste of weights from the perspective of almost everyone else, though.
That critique is half-right: large language models don’t “understand” in the human sense, but they do apply learned patterns across vast data in ways that often look like knowledge, even if it’s statistical pattern-matching. The real frontier is that these statistical engines can already combine rules, constraints, and creativity in ways their critics dismiss too quickly—making the line between “mere prediction” and “applied knowledge” fuzzier than it seems.
That’s because AI does not understand anything: it just predicts the next token based on previous tokens and statistics
As opposed to what you were doing when you wrote that.
Someone needs to tell me why Grok 4 with Vision, a very powerful model, is at the bottom?
In fact, the test depends on vision - yet all models perform poorly with that capability?
It does not have to be IQ test, right?
Nowadays, I was automatically assuming one of Qwen's models on top of charts that lack them.
But that's the first IQ test.
I realize this question is extremely petty, but it has professional implications for me. Chat GPT-4 gave my dissertation a B+ and GPT-5 gave it an A. The dissertation is in analytic metaphysics. Which model is more reliable for this kind of cognitive task?
Would be great to add a few human benchmarks on this (e.g., average US IQ, Ivy League average, human 80th percentile). Also understanding some IQ per cost metric could be fun.
Overall this is fun but not sure anyone in their right mind will be selecting an LLM based on this IQ benchmark
The IQ curve is designed so that 100 is average. So two of your questions can be answered with math:
> average US IQ
100
>human 80th percentile
113
The last one, Ivy League average, can be guessed based on published data. The median SAT score of an Ivy League attendee is 1500. A 1500 on the SAT is roughly an IQ of 130-140.
So in theory, the median Ivy League attendee is at the genius level.
Thanks. My comment was less a question of what the numbers are, but rather provide visual benchmarks on the IQ visualization, since IQ is a metric usually used for humans.
Cool project but pretty useless for me without Deepseek, Moonshot AI and Z.AI.
Deepseek R1 is on there. Average "IQ" score of 88.
Hey, that's still a B+ where I am from.
Missed that!
What is the point of giving AI an IQ test? My expectation is for it to be perfect since it possesses every answer.
If the idea is to measure the ability of an LLM to correctly lookup the correct answer in its encyclopedic database, then surely there are better ways to measure that performance than using a test designed for humans without giving humans the answers in advance.
Right now LLMs are like students that study for years, then get their brains frozen into a textbook before they’re released. They can read new stuff during use (context window), but they don’t actually update their core weights on the fly. The “infinite context window” dream would mean every interaction is remembered and folded back into the brain, seamlessly blending inference (using the model) with training (reshaping it).
Within 2–3 years, we’ll see practical “personal LLMs” with effectively infinite memory via retrieval + lightweight updates, feeling continuous but not actually rewriting the core brain.
Within 5–10 years, we’ll likely get true continual-learning systems that can safely update weights live, with mechanisms to prune bad habits and compress knowledge—closer to how a human learns daily.
The rub is less can we and more should we: infinite memory + unfiltered feedback loops risks building a paranoid mirror that learns every user’s quirks, errors, and biases as gospel. In other words, your personal live-updating LLM might become your eccentric twin.
Babe wake up. New benchmark to overfit models just dropped.
They’re definitely going to overfit on this, but this will be much better from a marketing perspective. Normies don’t know wtf an MMLU is, but they do know what IQ is and that 140 is a big number.
Can’t wait for CEOs to start saying “why would we hire a 120 IQ person who works 9-5 with a lunch break when we can hire a 170 IQ worker who works 24x7 for half the cost??”
I sure hope they do, will finally give people some sense of just how little IQ tests actually say.
Which mirrors my general experience with automation and AI. Once something is automated and/or AI can do it, the magic goes away, and we're that much ahead in peeling back what is it that actually differentiates us and how exactly.
"Workers rejoice as model overfitted to score 170 on IQ test turns out to be incapable of performing basic tasks..."
There are a lot of people with high IQs that appear to be incapable of performing basic tasks too
Well yeah, I'd be wary of an "all our candidates are MENSA members" staffing agency as well :). But human intelligence isn't quite so easily overfitted to a training set consisting of multiple choice matrices and logic puzzles as neural networks
Sure, I’d probably go the extra step of sorting out any applicant who advertised their MENSA membership…but that’s just me finding those folks pretty insufferable.
But back to the point it’s really more about if the tool for the job can’t do the job…they are the wrong tool for the job. Tool of course being device, AI, or…human.
Nothing matters except the first couple of time derivatives. The workers aren't getting any better.
You won't have to, it's already happening.
Let's wait till AI makes hiring decisions.
"None of the human candidates were qualified. You should hire more computers."
You won't have to, it's already happening.
Is it discriminating towards life forms?
If I had to guess, it probably does discriminate towards resumes written by LLMs
It probably should be if not already
Can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully and avoid the snarky one liners here, tempting though those of course are?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
They have offline test that's supposedly not in the training data. It gets lower scores but best one is still 120 IQ.
It’s wild seeing AIs ace IQ tests so quickly. But those tests already have cultural bias baked in and if the models are also overfitting to them, that’s bias squared. Still, the pace of progress is hard to ignore.
If the AI is so smart why are we feeding so many dumb humans?
My take is that it’s easier to train a model to ace short, low-context tasks like IQ tests. That doesn’t necessarily transfer to more complex reasoning. While on the Mensa Norway test GPT-5 gets over 140, on an offline test it goes down to ~120.
It is interesting to look at the political spectrum as well (https://www.trackingai.org/political-test) - ar are liberals, even Grok 4. The political leaning isn’t surprising either. Mainstream models need to be broadly acceptable, which in practice means being respectful of all groups. An authoritarian right-wing model might work for one country, group, or religion, but would almost certainly be offensive elsewhere.
> While on the Mensa Norway test GPT-5 gets over 一四, on an offline test it goes down to ~一二.
Since IQ tests are fundamentally timed, those numbers are meaningless to compare with human numbers. Or maybe dangerous since it's hard to de-context them even if you know that. Hence my cheeky 漢字.
(Yes they might be useful to compare LLMs with each other, but that is outstripped by the risk of misreading it against what we know as "IQ".)
Wonder what people would think if they knew they are conversing with and getting advice from an 87 IQ Gemini 2.5 flash daily?
Honestly I find Gemini Flash gives better answers than Pro for a lot of things. The Gemini chat app is really good at leveraging Google search, the Pro model overthinks for some tasks, so getting Flash to just search for the relevant thing is more useful most of the time.
How much of this is because so many IQ tests are part of the training data?
How many of the answers were in the training data?
Isn't this like saying that a spellchecker is "very smart" because it did well at a spelling bee? It isn't, it just has a list of answers.
Unless they asked the same question multiple times and verified that the AI always gets the right answer, this is a very faulty result.
Even looking at the reasoning, in a majority of the cases you cannot prove that the LLM got it right because it actually found the right pattern instead of on a fluke.
Here's an example reasoning that got the right answer but that is not specific enough and therefore could apply to literally any answer (model is Bing Copilot, picked randomly):
> Option D : A shape resembling a clock. The clock shows the time 9:00.* The pattern involves shifting times across rows and columns in a logical progression. Observing the sequence in the third row, where the first two clocks show times moving forward in increments, the next logical step is a clock displaying 9:00 to fit the established rhythm. This ensures symmetry and continuity within the overall grid.
Here's a comparison to "OpenAI o4 mini high" which is a very specific answer and shows it got the logic of the puzzle correctly:
> D Each row adds +1:30, then +3:00. - Row 1: 12:00 → 1:30 (+1:30), 1:30 → 4:30 (+3:00) - Row 2: 3:00 → 4:30 (+1:30), 4:30 → 7:30 (+3:00) - Row 3: 4:30 → 6:00 (+1:30), so 6:00 → *9:00* (+3:00) (Down each column it’s +3:00 then +1:30, which also fits.)
That applies to humans too. If each question has 6 options, you can assume that everyone will get 16.6% for free and compensate in the grading criteria.
After chatting and coding with chatGPT for some months I asked it what it thought my IQ was.
After spitting out some disclaimers, it gave a 5 point range that nailed what my IQ has been professionally tested at. I found this very interesting and a bit alarming.
Well, the site owner works for Stossel TV and Stossel is a "rationalist" AI apologist:
https://www.johnstossel.com/ai-is-coming-for-your-job/
All standard talking points on one page (he forgot lump of labor though). So I'd take this test with a big grain of salt.
Saved me a click, thanks.
I got 3 accurate results from cogniDNA. Upload your genome (and $20) and get your IQ. IQ is 80% genetic.
So Grok 4 scores 130 but they put Grok midway in the pack at 110. Bias much?
There are two tests and by default it ranks by the score in the "offline test"