g Force

     In grade school we took an IQ test.  I don’t remember which grade I was in, and I certainly don’t remember anything about the test, but I do remember my score.  My mother showed it to me, telling me in hushed tones that it was a secret I must never divulge to anyone.

     I never did.  And I never will, though with the general populace’s interest in my IQ expected to remain at immeasurably low levels well into the foreseeable future, my continued silence won’t be too difficult to maintain. 

     My mother never explained why an IQ score must be kept secret.  It was just one of those things, like one’s income or gambling debts, that polite people didn’t discuss.  I suppose if your IQ was higher than those around you, you risked hurting their feelings.  And if your IQ was lower, you risked hurting your stature, not to mention your own feelings.  So you could never bring up the subject without treading on someone, maybe even yourself.  So you didn’t.

     I’d like to say that was why I never discussed my IQ, and leave it at that, because I’d like you to think I live my life according to the teachings of polite society, but to be honest there was another reason, one that was probably more important:  I didn’t believe in IQs.  Surely intelligence was more varied, more multi-faceted, vastly more complicated than anything represented by a triple-digit (or double-digit) (or, I suppose, single-digit) number.  I had similarly scoffing views when it came to the PSAT and the SAT and each of the other bubble-filling exercises in quasi-intellectual standardized achievement that punctuated my academic career.  Squeezing the vast universe that orbits around broad concepts like “intelligence” and “scholastic achievement” into multiple-guess and true-false questions was the ultimate reductio ad absurdum.  Bringing up IQ in a conversation would be like earnestly discussing astrology or Uri Geller or UFO abductions or blogs, a total faux pas in any triple-digit IQ crowd, so I never did.

     I never let ignorance get in the way of my opinions, or at least that’s how it seems to me today, for though I still do not “believe” in IQ scores – I have not welcomed my IQ score into my life as my personal lord and savior – a few years ago for some obscure reason I actually went to the trouble of researching the science behind IQ tests and came away thinking that maybe there was a little more thinking behind them than I ever supposed.  Are IQs perfect?  No.  Are IQs strongly correlated with numerous intelligence-related factors, factors that appear to form the basis for practically every measure of success in modern society other than scoring with hot chicks?  Yes. 

     And this was when my old IQ score started to interest me again.  What does that score really mean?  What does it say about me?  Is my old IQ score still my IQ score today?  I mean, I’d like to think my mind has bulked up quite a bit since grade school, what with all the educational stuff I’ve jammed into it and all the work-outs I’ve put it through to extricate me from complicated scrapes, but in theory a well-designed and properly scaled IQ test should yield the same score throughout one’s life, putting aside the Flynn Effect.  Even after you’ve filled your head with useful knowledge.  Even after you’ve exercised your brain with the most difficult problems.  Even, I suppose, after you’ve constructed millions of new neural networks just to process and preserve for immediate retrieval precious memories of the female form in various stages of undress, a resource-sapping project I hadn’t even started when I took that grade school IQ test. 

     The obvious answer was to take another IQ test and compare the scores, but that was easier said than done.  Let me make that unclearer – it was easy to take a new test, potentially much harder to actually live with the new score.  If my new score was lower, would my last remaining shred of self-esteem evaporate, leaving me to live down to my potential, all the while feeling like an overachieving dunderheaded fraud?  Or if my new score was higher, would I kick myself for not shooting higher in life, not taking on bigger challenges, having instead settled for a fault-resistant good enough approach to an average life after unwittingly bullying my inner-Poindexter into submission?

     I couldn’t take the easy way out, which was to do nothing.  I had to know, but I didn’t really want to know.  So to preserve sufficient waffle room for flexible post-test interpretations I didn’t take a timed two-day professionally-administered test, much like the one we took in grade school.  Instead, I took a timed two-hour test over the internet.  And, when it tallied my score, I learned that my two IQ scores, though separated by 30 years and millions of new neural networks, were identical.  Surely a coincidence, but a convenient coincidence – the best kind – so I quit while I was ahead, meaning neither ahead nor behind scorewise. 

     It’s been a few years since the convenient coincidence ended my foray into IQ land.  I haven’t returned, and probably never will.  The whole IQ thing still bothers me.  If anything, I’m even more uneasy about it than before, now that I can no longer dismiss it so easily, but I’ve had the hardest time explaining to myself why. 

     And then the other day I was sitting in a meeting across the table from some people trying to convince us of something and I noticed myself paying particularly close attention to their lead guy as he spun out his presentation, weaving theories and ideas and concepts around his positions to make them more palatable, and I wondered to myself, as I often do at times like these, whether this guy really made sense, or just seemed to be making sense.  Did his presentation hint at his inner brilliance, or was it just an elaborate snow job designed to blind us, hiding his hollow core?  And what did his presentation say about his perception of our abilities?  Were its bells and whistles borne out of deep respect, fear, even, for our deep cognitive skills, or were they eye candy designed to distract our feeble minds?  In short, did he know what he was talking about, and did we know what he was talking about? We didn’t know, and he didn’t know, respectively, and that made it all the more interesting, this timeless game of trying, but never quite succeeding, in turning the inscrutable into the merely scrutable.

     Tattoo our IQs on our foreheads and the game wouldn’t be nearly as fun, would it?

Comments

[Paul]

Interesting. I actually had a similar experience.

The only problem was that I didn’t feel very smart. I still don’t. I’ve been in self-denial about my IQ score for thirty years. A few years ago my wife and I, both very competitive in private, decided to each take a test. We both reckoned we were smarter than each other and the gauntlet was thrown down.

We paid for the testing and she scored one point higher than me, which led to several years of teasing, debate and the occasional Indian wrist burn. I too scored the same as I did way back in grade school.

Now that the smoke has cleared I still refuse to believe I hold even a modicum of intelligence. Aside from being successful in business, I show no clear signs of being a bright guy. In fact, I can honestly say that I consider myself to almost a complete dullard. I work with people who can do complex calculations in their head, while I can barely make change. I’ve been living with that for my entire life. The inability to do math. I’ve worked at it a good bit, and using PEMYAS (Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally) I can do basic algebra, but being afraid of numbers has had a negative effect on my confidence since my childhood.

IQ scores are a double edged sword. If I hadn’t known mine, I would think I was a complete and total idiot. By knowing, I believe them flawed.

I find the contrast is disturbing.

[R J Keefe]

I'm not sure that keeping IQs a secret isn't the broadest game of affirmative action going. It certainly presents intelligence as an embarrassment.

[shank]

So, is a high test score indicative of high intelligence, or intelligence indicative of a high test score? Some people seem to think a high test score is all that matters. However, if you stop there and never apply that intelligence to your work/personal life; how truly intelligent are you?

Stephen J. Gould wrote a great book titled The Mismeasure of Man about historical efforts to derive intelligence out of everything from testing to physical appearance. Worth a read.

[DarkoV]

I'd taken an I.Q. test back in 4th or 5th grade. Never found out the score.
Never can.
The school, a small parochial self-contained kingdom of Catholic secracy, burned to the ground when I was in college. When I was curious to see if my inabililty to understand the esoterica of college physics was due to me (low I.Q>?) or my professor (low teaching ability co-mixed with his Chinese version of English?), I had nowhere to go. Apparently, my parents were just as un-informed as I was. That, or they were mum in lieu of my potentially hurt feelings. But wouldn't that have been my E(motional) Q(uotient) not my I. Q.?.
I've taken those on-line I.Q. tests, always wondering if my 4th grade wits were sharper, not having yet suffered two hockey-induced concussions and falls from windows in the college years. And there was that time I used my head to catch a fastball. The only thing I am sure of is I have one incredibly (thankfully) thick skull.
Fries with that?

[Ten Mile]

IQ tests seem more to measure the potential to learn than any thing else. Regardless of a specific interest.

A dedicated person to a specific interest of smaller IQ numbers could well outstrip a person of little interest in the same field.

[Thane Plambeck]

What, nothing about Mensa?

[MindSpin]

You had to go and say the number means something, didn't you?

I didn't actually have a number, given the range of scores generated by the tests we took in school; my closest guess has to be the IQ score listed on tables that correlate pre-1995 SAT and GRE scores with IQ. But, whatever the number is, it hisses,"You are SUCH an UNDERACHIEVER!"

I'll try to go off somewhere and unthink about this now. I have piddly things to do - to earn my piddly living ;->.

[andrew]

hmmm, very interesting, and equally interesting are the responses, and somehow how IQ tests, and the result, all wrap around back to some gnawling little beast of self esteem...

forgive me for a moment if I simplify this idea of IQ, so lets suppose for a moment that the multifaceted amazingly complex soul/intellect/contextualizer of the brain CAN be reduced to a simple number, like, ummmmm, lets say IQ is like a stopwatch measuring someone running, and the IQ test is like seeing how fast someone can simply run one mile.. run it, test it, wham, you have a time/IQ in one hand, and your self esteem in the other.. cool...

what does that number really prove? because even though you might be great at running one mile, there are a lot of different kinds of runners (read: thinkers) in this world, there are those who can blaze like a dragster for 100m, and those who can do marathons, and those who can hike mountains endlessly... and then there are those who can dance...

its all putting one foot in front of the other.. its all motion, so you can run one IQ mile fast, cool... so what...

its a worthwhile thing to play with measures, just as in sports, people obsess about statistics & all that endless etc, but its still just you, and that gnawing little creature of your self esteem is an illogical thing, no matter what numbers you feed it...

of course the numbers matter somehow, but its what we DO with measurements, how hard we work as we run, where we run to, or how much we enjoy the scenery along the way, isn't that what counts??

[MindSpin]

I think I've made my peace with this business of IQ, but that required so many words and my other efforts have been so comparatively thin of late, that I opted to write a post rather than a comment here by way of response.