• FundMECFS@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      16 hours ago

      It’s conception and first uses were tailored to have data backing up the concept poor people, disabled people, and black people were dumber, thereby justifying forced sterilisation and human rights abuses of those groups.

        • FundMECFS@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          14 hours ago

          True, Binet, the french psychologist who created the first test of this type was not a eugenicist.

          But the first American to popularise the concept, was a radical eugenicist (racist, ableist etc.), Lewis Terman, and it’s his version of the IQ test that got popularised in the US.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        16 hours ago

        And even today it’s a bit problematic, because it doesn’t measure what a lot of people assume it measures. Leave it to the professionals for the areas it’s still useful for.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      A great tool for making broad diagnostics with regard to childhood-to-adult brain development. Also useful for identifying disabilities and neurodivergence.

      But useless as a means of stack ranking already demonstrably intelligent people or sifting for “genius” intelligence in a pool with variation in education and experience. Getting a “good IQ score” is like bragging about acing your “Do you have Alzheimers?” cognitive exam. “Oh! He can draw clocks twice as fast as any of his peers! Incredible!”

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        16 hours ago

        Sure. Just remember there’s a strong correlation between high IQ results and frequency of taking IQ tests, meaning that IQ tests can absolutely be trained. Yet so many treat it as a “general intelligence” measure, when it’s more accurate to say it just measures practice at things the IQ test tests, and at some level some ability in the areas it tests.

        Example article about limitations, and the this one mentions its roots in eugenics (i.e. racism).

        IQ tests can be useful, e.g. for the reasons you specified, but the general public misinterprets them far too often.

        • swelter_spark@reddthat.com
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          8 hours ago

          The first time I took it, my mom wasn’t happy that my score was low, so she demanded that I be tested again, and told me she’d buy me ice cream if I did better. The second time, I was miraculously a genius.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          15 hours ago

          correlation between high IQ results and frequency of taking IQ tests

          Oh yeah, because like basically everything else, IQ testing can be a learned skill.

          But again, that goes back to factors like education and free time and nutrition and stress, all of which have a bigger impact on your mental capacity than a native aptitude eugenists are looking for.

          the general public misinterprets them far too often.

          I mean, they don’t recognize the Q part. What’s the point of chasing outlayers when the median is what matters.

          The person with the 100 IQ can be scrounging a subsistence living, pounding widgets on an assembly line, or crafting high art, entirely dependant on the social structure they’re born into.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            14 hours ago

            the median is what matters

            Sure, but you need to be careful about what the median represents. It doesn’t represent the median of all humans, just the humans that have taken the test, and it only reflects performance on the test. This can be useful, but it gets used for a lot of stuff it really shouldn’t (e.g. comparing results from one region w/ another, when those regions have very different education systems and thus exposure to different sorts of problem solving).

            The person with the 100 IQ

            They could also be a professor or other highly educated person. It all depends on how familiar they are with the concepts covered by the test, how well they were feeling that day, how well the questions were worded, how much time they took, etc. There are a ton of variables, and your score on a test could vary quite wildly between takes.

            It’s just not a good general measure of much of anything. It can be helpful in a clinical setting, though, to diagnose things like neurological divergence and whatnot, but it isn’t a particularly good test of “intelligence,” whatever that’s supposed to mean.

  • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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    20 hours ago

    That distribution chart is fucky. It says that the IQ is 86, and that’s 15th percentile, but the line at the bottom clearly shows that the number is a little under 70. So something is not right here, and I suspect it’s because this is a shitpost.

  • fibojoly@sh.itjust.works
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    20 hours ago

    How the fuck does that graph even works?! Shows the very left of the graph, then says you’re in the top? Doesn’t make any sense.

    • jjagaimo@sh.itjust.works
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      15 hours ago

      Old ass image. Theory is it was made by the company selling the iq tests to make people talk about it and take a test themselves

      • theneverfox@pawb.social
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        21 hours ago

        I mean, that score supposedingly means you struggle to put together normal sentences… So I’d assume it’s satire

        • Marte@lemmy.eco.br
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          20 hours ago

          86 is not that noticeable, as others have pointed out. Also, there’s a high chance this post was GPT-produced

        • Enkrod@feddit.org
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          20 hours ago

          Oh goodness no, with an IQ of 86, most people wouldn’t even peg you as surprisingly stupid, maybe a bit slow. This is still very much in the “slightly below average” column. The 70s are “below average” and only below that do you get into disability territory.

          People overestimate the effect a not-even-20-points deviation has in real life. Just like people with an IQ of 114 are a just your average Janes and aren’t generally geniuses, people with 86 are still your average Joes and generally not noticeable. 82,2% of all people are between 80 and 120. And you can’t tell me that you actually think of every fifth to sixth person around you as exceptional (in either direction).

        • RobotZap10000@feddit.nl
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          20 hours ago

          Can you really be sure that he actually wrote something himself in 2025? Something that wasn’t a prompt?

        • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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          20 hours ago

          86 is still way above an intellectual disability, that limit is set below 70.

          An IQ of 86 is not THAT low, the percentile in the pic is right, about 1 in 6 people is below 86.

  • Novamdomum@fedia.io
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    21 hours ago

    I love LinkedIn users like that because they make it so easy for smarter LinkedIn users to stand out! 🤣

  • Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
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    21 hours ago

    To be somewhat fair, that is a very confusing way to present a score worse than 50%.

    Who are precisely the people we need to simplify things for.