A while back I asked my readers to estimate the IQ of journalist Daniel Seligman based on an article he wrote in Forbes magazine.
The reason I am interested in Daniel Seligman’s IQ is he wrote one of the best IQ books ever written: A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America. This book remains, to this day, one of the most lucid and accessible introductions to the field I have ever read. If you’re someone who is fascinated by IQ, but doesn’t know much about it, the author does a very good job holding your hand through the complex web of debates.
The entire book is about IQ, and the author devotes an entire chapter to taking an IQ test, yet refuses to give his score. “Being still coy, I decline to state the number on the bottom line”, he writes on page 9. He also declines to tell the score he obtained from an IQ test he took as an undergraduate psychology student at New York university, writing on page 1:
Our instructor suggested, plausibly enough, that we would all have a better sense of intelligence testing if we had our own IQ measured…so we came out of the course with a few secrets…Four decades later, I remember my IQ score, which I will coyly not disclose, but not a whole lot else about the event.
And yet Seligman, does reveal the IQ of Arthur Jensen, despite Jensen not wanting to give his score. On page 63 he writes:
I once asked Jensen if he knew his own IQ. It turned out that he had never taken any of the standard tests, like the WAIS. The question of testing him first arose during the year of his Maryland internship, but by then he could not take the WAIS because he was too familiar with it (having administered it to others perhaps a hundred times). Of the various mental tests he has taken over the years, the Terman Concept Mastery Test (CMT) __ a high-level measure of verbal skills__probably provides the best approximation of an IQ test. Jensen took it when he was forty-three. He declined to tell me the score__and seemed distinctly unhappy at my interest in the subject__but did finally mention that his CMT score was about at the average of those members of Terman’s Gifted Group who had gone on to earn Ph.D.s.
Poking my nose into volume 5 of Terman’s Genetic Studies of Genius, I learn that this subgroup of the gifted had Stanford-Binet IQ equivalents of 156, well into the 99.9 percentile. Which possibly helps to explain why Jensen has been such a dominant figure in the IQ debate.
Although Seligman does not give his IQ, he does describe his performance on various subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale – Revised (WAIS-R), without telling us how those performances compared to the general U.S. population in his age group. Poking my nose into the WAIS-R manual, I was able to determine how well he did on several subtests, and from there, get an estimate of his full-scale IQ.
And so now, the secret Seligman has been hiding since the early 1950s, the secret he thought he took to his grave, is known by me. As a citizen journalist, do I have a responsibility to reveal this information to the World, or do I continue to participate in the 60+ year cover-up of a powerful man’s IQ? 🙂
Ha! You’re funny.
Pumpkin stop being such a tease, I can’t handle the excitement!!! 🙂
If the SB -related score (156) is a ratio IQ, based on an idea of mental age, it means that his deviation IQ (M=100, sd=15) is about 144,5 ( according to http://hiqnews.megafoundation.org/John_Scoville_Paper.htm. For recalculation watch “sigma” column closely) This is lower than 99.9% cut-off ( about 146,4)
It’s very confusing because Jensen scored as an adult on the CMT the same as gifted kids who grew up to be PhD adults scored as adults on the CMT.
But the IQ being cited might be their SB score as children not their CMT score as adults. So not only might it have been a ratio IQ as you say, but it might have regressed to the PhD mean in adulthood, especially since this was a different test.
True
The reason I am interested in Daniel Seligman’s IQ is ……
*because he’s jew*
If Jensen took the test in ’66 and scored 156, you can subtract at least 10 points for the Flynn effect, and the subtract a few more because verbal IQ increases with age, and then a handful (?) more to get his FSIQ because it would regress to the mean from his verbal. So somewhere in the range of 130 by today’s standards?
Aren’t you worried that by posting this on your website, you are potentially giving too much away about the Weschler tests?
No because far more detailed information is already available on the Internet in places like Wikipedia & even in the websites that sell the test & show photographs of actual test material.. Further, Seligman sent a draft of his writings to the psychologist who administered the WAIS-R to him to make sure he wasn’t characterizing the tests too specifically. All I’ve done is quoted Seligman’s approved descriptions
That is very interesting, although I don’t think that the tests shown on Google or Wikipedia give a significant edge to what Seligman says in his book. I suppose unless an interested individual used the information that Seligman provides, and then specifically sought out detailed, and repetitive examples of the assessment questions?
Or are you talking about this page from WAIS IV Pearson page? (Warning)
http://www.pearsonclinical.com/psychology/products/100000392/wechsler-adult-intelligence-scalefourth-edition-wais-iv.html#tab-details
I think that photograph gives too much away. I’ve seen many pictures like that on the web & it’s unfortunate. Fortunately the Wechsler is not a test many people try to game since it’s seldom used for admission purposes (with the exception of private schools & gifted classes)
Perhaps, only if one used that information to pursue further practice. That picture alone does nothing to prepare you for the higher levels of the test. That is, what we know about the Flynn Effect should tell us that moat people in 2016 have been exposed to similar puzzles over their lives. A video game player would have been exposed to a puzzle.
Furthermore, I know from experience that even re-test effects for Visual Puzzles are minimal at best. You also must remember the disparity between verbal and spatial strengths. A verbally-gifted person could read Seligman’s descriptions and gain a practice effect. I think the most significant practice effect is re-test but I also think you have a higher perceptual index than verbal – for you, the visual cue is the most important.
Is the most important factor for practice effects, the strategies that could consciously be developed through research?
Perhaps, only if one used that information to pursue further practice. That picture alone does nothing to prepare you for the higher levels of the test. That is, what we know about the Flynn Effect should tell us that moat people in 2016 have been exposed to similar puzzles over their lives. A video game player would have been exposed to a puzzle.
Huge difference between seeing a similar puzzle & seeing the exact puzzle. There’s no evidence that seeing similar puzzles has helped cause the flynn effect. Exposure/practice usually has very narrow transfer, so practicing for decades at chess (for example) won’t make you much better at checkers, but practicing just a day at checkers will make you A LOT better at checkers
A good point. So , one could, hypothetically, see the format and repetitively practice the format to see a practice effect . Ah, a quick Google shows that there is an entire industry devoted to such a pursuit.