this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2025
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I got 135 once as a kid, and then as an older kid, younger adult, studied up on and learned many of the flaws with IQ testing, one of many being that... you can study for them, and perform better.
That's not supposed to be possible if it is measuring some kind of fundamental, inherent quality about you that cannot meaningfully change.
Good point. Ultimately this leads me to question the existence of some fixed quality of intelligence. People are growing, adapting, and learning through their lives, so a fixed number defining general intelligence is likely a moot concept.
On top of the prior point lies another major issue with any sort of "general intelligence" test: defining "general intelligence". Intelligence comes in many forms: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, existential intelligence, and more. The IQ test does not test all forms of intelligence.
This being said, It is likely impossible to test all forms of intelligence in one test; and even if we could create this test, how would this test handle differently abled people. For example, a completely blind person would fail the visual intelligence portion every time (for obvious reasons).
This, a million times this.
Intelligence is not simply a thing like an INT stat in an rpg game that just generally makes you more cognitively capable and/or knowledgeable with just consistently broad applicability.
Theres a ton of research that's gone into how to actually teach children and people things that suggests... sure, there is to some extent a broad cognitive ability, but there is also a huge multidimensional component, more domain specific element to different levels of aptitude with different kinds of thinking.
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Like, me, I'm autistic.... innately good at clear cut and logical things, innately terrible at anything approaching fuzzy logic, like socializing.
I had to put a massive amount of effort into learning that... people often don't literally mean what they literally say, how intonation works, how context works in social situations...
... whereas I excelled at learning how to read and write and do math, how to do logic and critical thinking, apply frameworks of thinking across different fields of knowledge, memorize knowledge sets from books or what not.
Kinesis intelligence? Eh, I'd say I'm decent at it naturally, but that's been greatly augmented by 10+ years of Karate, a bit of shooting range practice, learning the basics of a few instruments... but I'm no where near as 'body' or 'dexterity' intelligent as many others I've met.
...
Anyway, yeah, theres a lot of interesting empirical research nowadays that shows different areas of the brain being more or less engaged in certain kinds of activities, and then trying to basically reverse engineer how all that works, but its enormously complicated.
Also: Epigenetics is a thing.
Nature gives you your DNA... but Nurture changes which parts of it are more used, more activated.
Its all enormously more complex than reducing a person down to a single number.
Oh right and the other big one: implicit cultural bias in the IQ tests themselves. I think this is (somewhat?) less of a problem in actual legit IQ tests these days, but for a very, very long time, it was a huge problem that just resulted in basically scientific racism.
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tl:dr;
anyone who is boasting about their IQ without a gazillion caveats is doing the dunning-krueger thing, overestimating their actual cognitive abilities.
IQ is highly correlated with life outcomes like income, life expectancy, employment, and crime. Maybe it doesn’t measure “intelligence,” but it measures something which appears to be very important for modern society. There are undoubtedly different forms of intelligence which are not measured by an IQ test.
This is a good point to bring up, but this correlation is still being debated: the causal connection between the IQ test and the correlation is unclear, and there is debate on whether the correlation is being constructed through bad data or analysis techniques. Because of this, no one can confidently claim whether IQ tests predicts good job performance, employment, etc.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4557354/
[Skip to the conclusion at the end to get the tldr, since this is a long scientific publication]
Thanks for the study. I agree on all points. This is the challenge with sociological research: it is unethical to conduct controlled studies. We will never have controlled IQ research. The study suggests we continue to perform better quality primary research, and I fully agree. Until then, as per the data in the study, the correlative evidence remains compelling. At least as far as sociological research goes.
I tend to think this research is more compelling and useful at the macro level. We should bear in mind that the correlative coefficient between IQ and income is only between 0.2 and 0.4. There are many other factors which also impact outcomes.
Yeah but I'm pretty sure the relative wealth/affluence of the neighborhood you grew up in is significantly more strongly correlated with overall life outcomes, and is also cross correlated with IQ itself, broadly, over many societies and locales.
Which would indicate that focusing on 'IQ' is a red herring, and to a significant degree becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy... not to mention gives rise to an ultimately false notion of a meritocratic society, when the reality is much, much closer to 'its who you know, not what you know', a nepotistic society.
That is, surprisingly, incorrect. A meta-analysis by Strenze (2007) showed that the predictive power of IQ is slightly stronger than that of parental socio-economic status (SES) (Table 1). Specifically, IQ measured before age 19 outdoes parental SES in predicting future educational attainment, occupational status, and income after age 29 (see “best studies” on Table 1). In other words, if you want to predict an adolescent’s success in adulthood along a given metric of success (e.g., income, educational attainment, or occupational status), it is more useful to know that adolescent’s IQ than to know the success of their parents along that same metric. In the conclusion of the analysis, Strenze (page 416) argues that this would be unexpected if the predictive power of IQ could be attributed primarily to its association with parental SES:
The meta-analysis does find that parental SES also correlates significantly with the future outcomes of the child. However, because youth IQ and parental SES are correlated, it is possible that some unspecified portion of the predictive power of youth IQ is due to its correlation with parental SES (or vice-versa). To get a more precise estimate of the effects of youth IQ (independent of parental SES), we need to estimate the predictive power of IQ after controlling for parental SES.
Success is undoubtedly multi-factorial. Who you know is important. So is parental educational achievement, access to nutritional food, an absence of violence in the home, IQ, etc.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4749462/
Here is a more recent meta-analysis from 2015 that concludes that the genetic additive effect on total outcomes is significant and distinct from the SES...
But only in the US.
In Europe, Australia, elsewhere, the genetic additive effect is statistically insignificant.
(IE, SES is the dominant factor)
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(my own commentary: the wealthier you are in the US, the more of a complete crapshoot it is whether or not you are smart or stupid... because IQ doesn't matter for wealthy people.)
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Without conducting my own entire study...
My read on this is that the genetic component is much more significant in the US than in other places...
... because the US is significantly more economically stratified, nepotistic, and has a broken education system where rich idiots can get all the education they want, and skate by, but you basically have to be a diligent and lucky genius to escape poverty and the shit-tier education it has bestowed you with.
The noted tendency of age to also be correlated with SES and genetics in the US, is again, imo, explained by our vastly broken healthcare system just literally killing you if you are either poor, or stupid.
If I am not mistaken, we are uh, still trending downward on overall life expectancy, as compared to most other developed countries in this study sample set where life expectancy either was not badly affected by COVID, or was but has since rebounded.
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But uh yeah, going back to this more recent study... looks like genes have a less meaningful impact than your SES in civilized areas of the world.
Here in the US, we only have downward class mobility, unless you are very, very clever, and continuously lucky, continuously reinvesting those gains from your cleverness into social and financial capital without making any 'bad investments', or ever having any sudden medical or financial disaster happen to you.
Kakistocracy: Rule by the least fit to govern, the worst qualified, the most unscrupulous.
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Anyway, not to sound like I am directing my venom here at you, I do very much appreciate you bringing an actual comprehensive meta analysis and giving a very good and well reasoned read on it, with caveats. =D
Studying to ace an IQ test shows you’re not debilitatingly mentally challenged, though. I think that’s all the test is really good for.
I think most intelligence tests are flawed to that degree. Memorizing facts is far from true intelligence. For one, they never consider emotional intelligence in the equation. Which to me should be one of the highest standards. Empathy, for example, should be considered in intelligence tests.
My view would be that the abilility to memorize and retain a number of facts is a kind of intelligence, to me the most obvious example would be in say, reading comprehension: If you read a chapter of a fiction novel, but then cannot recall new characters, important actions, etc, thats a problem...
But at the same time, yes, EQ, empathy, emotional intelligence does seem to be another important, multidimensional component to human cognitive abilities... but it is unclear to me how one could really make some kind of metric to truly measure the say, relative capacity for empathy.
Further, if your definition is closer to 'emotional intelligence'... well again, speaking as an autist, this is something that gets wildly misunderstood and mis-assessed by neurotypicals just all the time, in my experience.
I have a great deal of capacity for empathy, I have consistently demonstrated this via action and words throughout my life... but most of the time, neurotypicals will conclude the exact opposite about me, because of a single instance where my tone or expressions or verbiage were slightly 'off' from what they evidently wanted, and then they'll say I was disingenuous, cruel, callous, etc... despite the two of us having had a years long history of me being emotionally available for them, supoortive of them.
If you know of an existing, or have a proposal for some kind of EQ metric/test, I'd be interested in seeing it, ... and again, I agree that in concept, EQ is an important aspect of human cognition... but I am skeptical that any kind of useful metric or test for it could exist, beyond doing like a full psych eval of someone over the course of months.
The whole concept of a metric like this is that it would be objective, intercomparable... and presumably, indicate something that is to at least a significant degree, relatively fixed throughout time.
The nature of emotion seems to me to be diametrically opposed to both of these... people can often be quite emotionally stable as a baseline, but then act erratic after or during a period of significant stress or trauma... or joy and pampering... and many people and cultures have different baselines for what they even view as something like 'emotionally welcoming/understanding.'
I am deficient in IQ and EQ lol. Sucks.
It is actually worse.
it is known that areas which got access to a formal education (schools), would get quickly much better average IQ score than before.
If just visiting school increases your IQ (some measurements suggest 14 points), then it is clearly not a fundamentale quality.
So even without specifically learning for the test, you can learn for the test.
Yeah, haha, the most useful predictive metric for how a person will generally turn out in life, socioeconomically, that I am aware of... is still the zipcode you grew up in.
For any non USAsians, thats the post code, the fairly granular level 'what town/city/neighborhood did you grow up in'.
Whole lotta Nurture against the innate Nature of your genes or whatever.
I've taken several thoughout my life and as a kid I always got >130. At 14 I did one and got 127 so I did exactly what you described and trained for the parts I hadn't succeeded at. Next test was >130 again. I'm not sure if I got smarter through studying or just better at taking the test though. Especially since the difference between the results is pretty small honestly.
I did an online one in the early days of the Internet, and scored a 137. I have zero faith it has any accuracy. My buddy also did it and got a 145, I believe his is above mine but still, no faith that the numbers are correct.
IQ tests are deeply and inherently flawed, usually based on the fact that you can both quickly read, understand the intent of the question, and respond with whatever the writer of the test feels is correct in a timely fashion.
And if you don't realize how much of what I just wrote is subjective based on lived experience, and specific parameters about you that have nothing to do with how intelligent you are, then congratulations, you're probably above average.
Yeah a lot of online ones were and still are BS, my parents put me through an actual, go to a place, sit and do a test for multiple hours kind of thing.
I am not sure that they actually needed to, but the explanation they gave me was that it was needed to get into the 'gifted' program in Elementary School...
Always stood out as weird to me, most of the other kids in it never did a whole ass IQ test, they just had really good grades and their parents asked the school nicely... ... ???
EDIT: Also uh, IQs are supposed to be noralized at 100... so... by standard deviations...
If I really am 135, then I'm in roughly the top 2% of the population.
If your friend is really above 145... they'd be in roughly the top tenth of a percent of all humans.
???