The old SAT had an extraordinarily high ceiling. Only about three out of a million test takers scored a perfect 1600 on the old SAT, but since only a third of American 17 year-olds took the test, and virtually 100% of the high IQ ones took the test, 1600 was a one in a million performance. An SAT score of 1600 equaled an IQ of roughly 170.
But did it really?
The smartest person I have ever known once claimed on an internet forum that he knew the SAT scores of many, many people, and that the SAT (old or new) did a good job measuring intelligence up to about 1400, but beyond 1400, he could never see any kind of pattern. That is, there were obvious differences in brain power between people who scored 1400 and 1300 and between people who scored 1300 and 1200, but no cognitive differences between people who scored 1500 and 1400, or between people who scored 1600 and 1500. 1500+ people were more academically successful than 1400+ people, but they did not seem any more capable of solving truly complex and novel problems. For example if you handed a Rubik’s Cube to a bunch of SAT takers who had never seen it before, the 1500+ might be no better at it than the 1400+, but the 1400+ would be much better than the 1300+ who would be much better than the 1200+.
Further, if you scanned the brains of SAT takers, you might find that 1500+ people have the same brain size as 1400+ people, but 1400+ people have bigger brains than 1300+ people who have bigger brains than 1200+ people. Both types of evidence would show that the SAT is just not measuring g (general intelligence) above 1400.
But why not? Imagine a test that consisted of the following 10 items (to be answered without use of pen or paper):
1) 1 + 2 = ?
2) 22 + 33 = ?
3) 444 + 555 = ?
4) 5555 + 6666 = ?
5) 66666 + 77777 = ?
6) 88888 + 99999 = ?
7) 11111 + 22222 = ?
8) 22222 + 33333 = ?
9) 33333 + 44444 = ?
10) 44444 + 55555 = ?
On such a test, there would be huge differences in intelligence between people who scored 1 out of 10 and people who scored 5 out of 10, but very little difference in intelligence between people who scored 5 out of 10 and people who scored 10 out of 10. This is because items 1 through 5 increase in difficulty in a very linear way, while items 5 through 10 are all roughly equal in difficulty, so the only difference between someone who scores 5 out of 10 and 10 out of 10, is the ability to avoid dumb mistakes.
However intelligence is not just about the number of problems you can solve (intellectual breadth), it’s also about the hardest problem you can solve (intellectual depth), and the latter is probably much more g loaded than the former. But when test items stop increasing in difficulty, the differences between a high score and a super high score becomes entirely a function of just avoiding dumb or careless mistakes, rather than doing anything brilliant.
I suspect this is what happens with the SAT. Most of the people who write the test items probably have IQs around 135 so they are good at creating problems that discriminate well between a top 10% mind and a top 1% mind, but they have trouble imagining and identifying problems that discriminate between the top 1% and the top 0.1%. As a result, you get a pile up of items at the top 1% level, hence the SAT fails to measure g beyond 1400, but it still predicts academic success since the latter is as much about avoiding dumb mistakes and studying as it is about g.
So even though only one in a million Americans scored perfect on the old SAT, their intelligence might not have been higher than those who scored around one in 200 level.
How about the studies that show that the SAT is better predictor of GPA for high-ability subjects that low-ability ones AND may be g-invariant between ability groups?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3090148/ (just skimmed it but thought it was interesting)
This paper says that the SAT predicts GPA better for high ability subjects AND has the same g-loading for high-ability and low-ability subjects. The high-ability attended colleges with average SAT scores above 1250, while low-ability attended ones with average scores below 1050.
Very interesting link in that table 3 shows that SAT’s correlation with g factor scores (derived from the ASVAB) is 0.54 in high ability people and 0.55 in low ability people.
Of course both the high ability and low ability were well below 1400 (and there may be a floor bumping problem at the low end of the scale especially since many in that range probably take the test unprepared)
A better study design would be to just list the average ASVAB g factor scores for each level of SAT score and see how linear the relationship is throughout the full range.
I should use my celebrity clout to get that data from the authors of the study.
the asvab is just like the sat in form with math and verbal questions. it’s just used by the military instead of college entrance departments.
what i recall is that the old SAT etc correlated with other IQ tests like the SB and the WAIS better than the Ravens did and at > .7.
as Swank has mentioned the SATs since 199? have been deliberately less g-loaded.
Unfortunately the SAT is probably very g loaded (at least up to a point), simply because it measures such g loaded skills (reading comprehension, math, vocabulary), and because it’s so incredibly long (which maximizes the reliability)
I estimate the SAT’s g loading to be about 0.85, though I also think it’s more biased against low SES kids than official IQ tests are.
yet another “anomaly”.
pp loves bed time stories. she tells them to herself.
the smartest person you’ve ever known pp was a fucktard if he was a member of a high IQ society as all members of such societies have low IQs.
There is no qi heredity in a literal sense, that is what matters to science. There is hereditarity of brain features that express greater intelligence, independent of IQ scores.
Analyze brain physiology that logically express greater intelligence or perception capacity, is the best way to estimate the heritability of human intelligence.
And the concept of intelligence is not an adaptation, it does not refer to what it really means intelligence, the genotypic intelligence. Genotypic intelligence without the environment to fit (without the stage), is the perception capacity and the higher, sophisticated and objective for this perception, the better.
The ability to adapt is the natural result and expected of intelligence in interaction with the environment, because it expresses the survival capacity and there is certainly a spectrum for survival, where that which is provided with a greater balance in their cognitive, present easier to adapt because its perceptual capacity will be more efficient in capturing inharmonious patterns, potentially deadly. The ability to mitigate the death as much as possible, is one of the functions of a powerful intellect.
However, the higher perceptual capacity, will be more abstract, because the abstraction is reality or subjective truth, because the abstraction is the capture of a standards organization system, creating a new reality, with boundaries between acceptable and non-acceptable. Normality is both an abstraction because it varies from country to country and is based on the construction or modification of total reality, while also expressed behavioral predispositions of a large part of the population.
In societies where propagates a culture of predation and stupidity, the most intelligent will not be adapted, because their brains express harmony and complexity.
Now, after the post on the iq of ” Jesus Christ ”, I really have nothing else to do here.
Sorry for the offenses !!
And Pumpkin, I know you can do better than that.
sounds like the boy from brazil has come around to my way of thinking.
pp really needs to understand the concept of ideology. the naming of this phenomenon was marx’s (and engel’s) greatest accomplishment.
The Boys from Brazil is a semi-anti-hereditist movie, but as an anti-hereditist and un-reconstructed National Socialist I wish it were possible to bring the Fuhrer back.
What today is systematically touted as the philosophy of National Socialism, but which has nothing in the least to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter of a globally determined technology with the man of the new age), darts about with fish-like movements in the murky waters of these ‘values’ and ‘totalities’.
At least if they analyze in more detail on the subject they love, iq, but not. EXAMPLE= People who score high on verbal IQ tests and low in non-verbal IQ tests tend to be quite different with people who have the opposite profile, just to start (look for humanities versus stem). But all this real complexity, is transformed into a compact ” IQ and income ”, ” IQ and success ” …
For example, to examine the heredity, we must correlate before human intelligences, with particular physiological traits, such as the quantity and quality of the convolutions, the size of the skull, etc …
I never completely denied the importance of IQ, but definitely, we should not stop here and turn it into an absolute truth. The absolute truth about intelligence is that it is complex and its complexity happens because of its diversity of combinations.
Blacks are not only discriminated against or primarily by skin color, but because of the higher proportion of sociopaths, read up, blacks coming from the most populous ethnic groups in Africa. The correlation between race and violence, is because of the selective patterns, not because of race per se. There are predominantly peaceful communities in Africa, it seems that the pygmies are not as routinely violent, or culturally and primitively brutes (in the case of many African communities, who do not live in big cities).
IQ tests seem to measure how well lateralized, the human brain is combined with other characteristics that correlate with higher intelligence, but I have the impression that in the middle of the bell curve, we will have a great diversity of types.
I’ve talked with Pumpkin that IQ is not the psychometric expression, totally perfect, the intelligence, the same way that the weight balance is not the perfect expression of our total weight. The scores on intelligence tests are allegorical, have certain credibility and correlate with success in a particular environment, complex and where high emphasis on technical and convergent or memorization and replication of knowledge skills. This is a form of intelligence, but it is not the only one.
To analyze the intelligence, we must take into account the individuals. To analyze collective intelligences, we must take into account the communities.
OMG!
i think santa claus has been usurped…or people can change (or my perception of them anyway).
he sounds like a totally different person.
and he sounds like he’s on the red pill.
of course pp et al are on the blue pill. “the matrix” might be replaced by “ideology”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology#Marxist_view
I’ve talked with Pumpkin that IQ is not the psychometric expression, totally perfect, the intelligence, the same way that the weight balance is not the perfect expression of our total weight. The scores on intelligence tests are allegorical, have certain credibility and correlate with success in a particular environment, complex and where high emphasis on technical and convergent or memorization and replication of knowledge skills. This is a form of intelligence, but it is not the only one.
I realize IQ tests are not a perfect measure of intelligence, and no single number, however it’s arrived at , will do justice to all of intelligence.
But IQ tests are a good rough and ready measure of intelligence, or at least, the best and most scientific measure we currently have.
oops!
engels‘s
the prole marker is the inability to follow Fowler and especially the inability to form the possessive/genitive case with singular nouns ending in s.
though Fowler himself was only one generation removed from hoi polloi. his dad was a school master whose dad was a ???.
and it’s not a “class” thing. even though my granddad went to the same “public school” as Arthur Conan Doyle his magnum opus on the romantic poets iirc had that most execrable error.
and the difference between the US (and maybe Canada too) and Europe is…inter alia…
there is a distinction between “material” class and social class in Europe whereas the two are equated in the US. Donald Trump’s accent can’t believe he’s so rich.
tony blair’s father was given up for adoption by his “middle class” actor parents and was adopted by “working class” Scots. no such description is possible in Les Etats Unis Merdeux.
the prole marker is the inability to follow Fowler and especially the inability to form the possessive/genitive case with singular nouns ending in s.
I was explicitly taught by a 9th grade English teacher that when you to write the possessive of a name ending in S, you write S’, not S’S.
I remember a hybridized East Asian girl arguing with her, saying we don’t say “That’s Chris’ book”, we say “that’s Chris’s book.” When you hear it pronounced it does sound like the hybrid was correct, but I nonetheless believed my teacher, partly because she worshiped me, giving me 105% on my book report on 1984 (a book I have never read) and because she was highly intelligent (I gave her a general knowledge test I had made, and she was able to name the highest mountain in North America, an item that stumps the vast majority of people).
she was NOT highly intelligent.
she was a MORON. s’ is for PLURALS ending in s ONLY. there are NO exceptions. if it SOUNDS wrong, it is wrong.
just read any elite publication from England like the FT.
they get everything right.
and there’s this ABSURD “ancient names” expception. that’s Americans and prole.
CORRECT:
jesus’s
xerxes’s
odysseus’s
etc.
Dickens’s
some complain it’s hard to say, but phonetically the plural and the possesive ar the same. there were in fact many Xerxeses, not just one and “Xerxeses” is pronounced exactly like “Xerxes’s” and “Xerxeses’ ” for that matter,
steve shoe makes the mistake all the time. just another indication of his imbecility.
Many respected authorities recommend that practically all singular nouns, including those ending with a sibilant sound, have possessive forms with an extra s after the apostrophe so that the spelling reflects the underlying pronunciation. Examples include Oxford University Press, the Modern Language Association, the BBC and The Economist.[19] Such authorities demand possessive singulars like these: Senator Jones’s umbrella; Tony Adams’s friend.
Further, if you scanned the brains of SAT takers, you might find that 1500+ people have the same brain size as 1400+ people, but 1400+ people have bigger brains than 1300+ people who have bigger brains than 1200+ people. Both types of evidence
This would be intriguing, to use mri scans to test if the macro appearance of the cerebral cortex is different in high-IQ people than a control group of average IQ people. As far as I can tell, only a single study like this has been done, but I cannot find the link.
Overall brain size is larger in gifted people than average people. A scatter plot comparing MRI brain size with WAIS IQ showed this.
yeah, I have heard about the positive correlation. But Einstein (and some other geniuses like Anatole France) had modest sized brains, so there must be more at play than just size?
Think of the correlation between brain size and IQ as being like the correlation between height and weight. Each extra inch of height causes a certain amount of extra weight, and tall people tend to be heavier than short people, but just as it’s possible to be extremely heavy without being tall, it’s possible to be extremely smart without a big brain; and vice versa.
A large height just increases the odds of a large weight, just as a large brain just increases the odds of a large IQ. But no guarantee.
I imagine that at the extreme range, the difference between a 1400 and 1600 comes down to maybe a handful of questions. If someone guesses lucky (which it not inconceivable given only a few questions) or gets ‘easy’ hard questions, they could score high without being smarter. You would need a much longer, more comprehensive test.
and it does the same with IQ tests, because…
there is no measure of difficulty other than the % of correct answers.
pp’s theory about the SAT predicts a mixture distribution…one based on relative difficulty up to 1400 then a uniform distribution of difficulty above 1400.
this is NOT the actual distribution. pp’s theory is proven wrong.
and it does the same with IQ tests, because…
there is no measure of difficulty other than the % of correct answers.
There’s the difficulty of correctly answering 100% of the test items, and then there’s the difficulty of correctly answering the hardest test item.
Only one in a million people could score 1600 on the old SAT, not because the hardest item had a one in a million difficulty, but because only one in a million people could answer dozens of items with a one in a hundred level difficulty.
That is when the items themselves imperfectly correlate, the difficulty of correctly answering all of them can greatly exceed the difficulty of the hardest individual item.
My point is that a test’s ceiling is a function of the difficulty of answering all the items correctly, while the test’s functional ceiling might be much more a function of the difficulty of its hardest items.
i understand your point better than you do pp.
your theory gives a PREDICTION.
the prediction is TESTABLE.
is it confirmed or disconfirmed?
if the reason why some score 1400 and others 1600 is that some questions reliabaly discriminate between these some…
then the conditional distribution above 1400 is not new…it’s the same as that below 1400.
besides no official IQ test can discriminate above 160.
so maybe the better question is…
once you’re super duper smart is there any practical difference between you and other super duper smart people?
or if there is a practical difference is the difference is “g”?
as i’ve posted so many times, SLIDR is REALITY.
”I realize IQ tests are not a perfect measure of intelligence, and no single number, however it’s arrived at , will do justice to all of intelligence.
But IQ tests are a good rough and ready measure of intelligence, or at least, the best and most scientific measure we currently have.”
Not literally interpret the part that says ” IQ tests are the best and most scientifically accurate scientific method for assessing intelligence ”.
I agree, but to be the best now does not mean it will be the best forever and we know that only with the technology that we actually need the measurement methodology of intelligence.
All in all, I think it’s lazy waiting for help of technology, it does not seem difficult to understand at least the surface, that human intelligence is not one but many, this does not deny the quantitative and qualitative hierarchy, as well as that , the majority of black people tend to be less complexly intelligent than other racial groups.
The worst part here is the Interpretation and you guys use their own concepts of what is to be smart to generalize the entire population, as well as everyone else does. His concepts of intelligence are based on the measurement of school results, SAT for admission to the US military or IQ tests.
I prefer the real world where people demonstrate their intelligence in different ways, bad or good, predominantly conscious way or not, who are very good at what they do.
You guys are too much concerned with the technical and quantitative intelligence, probably because they are less empathetic as good mathematicians often.
The academic subcultures of universities worldwide, clearly show us that those who are verbally smarter, tend to be more socially oriented, while those who study in STEM, tend to be less socially oriented and to be more systematic.
Are two worlds that were not only created by modern culture, but always existed. And there are different combinations of type, from the nerd or geek in technology, to the Spartan and Athenian. This should be viewed with greater importance in psychometric studies, even when we talk about collectivities.
Everything refers to the brave new world or planet super man (Kryptonland) and only in this way that can actually transform humanity, raising it to a level never achieved, at least in comparison the known civilizations.
Often, and especially in natural cultures of hunter gatherers communities, the behavior or change this behavior, resulted in the creation of allegorical significance, which we call ” culture ”. Just as the sky rays were allegorically interpreted as a higher power coming from the sky, something that is bigger than all of us, God.
Many other times, the culture is that it was implemented and obviously that was not taken out of nowhere, and people were forced to fit in them and those who could not, were being ostracized and became lost, what is happening today with the ‘black people’. When a people is lost and does not know how to evolve, collectively speaking, ”he” will move to become predominantly disgenic.
Any cognitive test, which requires some kind of cognitive effort, to correlate with intelligence. That still does not mean that IQ express completely human intelligence. This is not enough, let alone this simplistic interpretation and without details (exceptions and rules).
Somewhat relevant: I have a theory based on a few different papers I’ve read: the SAT-V is more g-loaded for average and below average populations, while the SAT-M is more g-loaded for above average populations. So when comparing two students with SAT totals below 1200 or so out of 1600, the verbal predicts future performance better, but above 1200, the math do so better. Why? Below 1200, many of the students haven’t received adequate exposure in their coursework to the math concepts needed to do well on the SAT, so the SAT-M is more a measure of their level of mathematical exposure rather than actual ability. But students above 1200 have probably all received an adequate amount of exposure to the basic algebra and geometry that’s needed, so the math test becomes much more g-loaded.
On the other hand, everyone with SAT scores below 1200 has had more or less equal exposure to reading so the SAT verbal is a strong measure of overall intelligence for them. But for people with SAT scores above 1200, SAT-V becomes more of a measure of specific practice with SAT verbal type tests, or how much you read dictionaries or books with the florid vocabulary.
I also say all of this because of my personal experience with the SAT along with my classmates in high school. In my sophomore year I score a 1300 on the SAT, so I decided to take SAT prep classes to raise my score. My score went up from a 680 to an 800 on the verbal, while my math score barely budged from from 620 to 680. The people I knew with high Math scores didn’t get those scores from prepping, they just got them naturally, and they were all pretty brilliant. To me, a perfect 800 Math seemed more impressive than a 800 verbal, even though though the latter is less common.
So to relate to this post, the difference between 700 and 800 math are very significant, while the difference between a 700 and 800 verbal are not so much. Just my personal hunch.