Tag Archives: The Mega Test

High range power tests part 2

04 Thursday Mar 2021

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As we saw in in part 1, a reader had some questions about high range power tests.

The reader asks:

What, if any, capacities might tests of the high-range “power” format disclose that standard IQ tests cannot, or, at least, do not?

As I mentioned in part 1, they probably measure the personality trait TIE (Typical Intellectual Engagement) and perhaps some cognitive abilities that conventional IQ tests miss like executive function. And as discussed in the comment section, they’re probably less sensitive to test anxiety because you can take them in a relaxed non-threatening environment.

But there’s more.

Creativity

Chris Langan stated:

Certain high-ceiling intelligence tests, generically called “power tests”, are composed of extremely
difficult items requiring higher levels of problem-solving ability than the items on ordinary IQ tests. Since these items
usually have no known algorithms, their solutions cannot be looked up in a textbook, and where subjects do not know each
other, one must rely on intrinsic problem solving ability.

From Discussions on Genius and Intelligence Mega Foundation Interview with Arthur Jensen pg 23

Arthur Jensen replied:

…Solving problems, or even thinking up problems, for which there are presently no algorithms, takes us into the
realm of the nature of creativity. There are as yet no psychometric tests for creativity in a nontrivial sense. We can’t
(yet) predict creativity or measure it as an individual trait, but can only examine its products after the fact.

From Discussions on Genius and Intelligence Mega Foundation Interview with Arthur Jensen pg 24

I find Jensen’s reply curious. He just admitted that the type of psychometric test Langan was describing involved creativity and then denied any tests measure it. Although I was extremely impressed by the questions Langan asked, he should have asked for clarification here.

The so-called distinction between creativity and intelligence is interesting. Intelligence is commonly defined as your ability to problem solve, but what is creativity if not original solutions to problems? So I guess people deny conventional IQ tests measure creativity because the solutions aren’t original enough. Why don’t conventional IQ tests require original solutions? Because such solutions would be so numerous that the test scoring manual could not include them all, or if there’s only one, in order for it to be original, too few people would discover it, making it useless for mass testing.

But because untimed power tests include many problems very few people can solve, by definition they measure original problem solving and thus creativity. One could claim that the problems must have social significance to be true measures of creativity, but what is significant is context dependent and creativity, like all traits, is relatively stable.

For example, before coronavirus became a global pandemic, creating a vaccine would have been unimportant but if someone had created one in 2018, they wouldn’t think “if I had only waited until 2020, I could have been creative, instead I’m merely extremely intelligent”. There could be a parallel universe where problems on the Mega Test have enormous real-world implications, while discovering relativity is merely a hard item on the Mega Test. Creative is something you either are or aren’t, it’s not something that changes with the social value a particular society puts on a given problem at a given time.

Autism?

Commenter “Mug of Pee” jealously goes ballistic when anyone values tests other than the ones he scored high on (SAT, GRE). In order to devalue such tests, he’s claimed, somewhat facetously, that the Mega Test measures autism. While it’s true that the Mega Test requires you to focus for very long periods of time (an autistic trait), it also requires you to be interested in a wide variety of subjects, as opposed to the narrow autistic focus. I suppose there could be some autistics whose area of obsession is just puzzle solving in general, but I know of no confirmed cases.

Without doing brain scans, autism is much harder to measure as objectively as IQ but if forced to do so, I would use one’s composite score on the following four variables:

  • income adjusted for IQ (the lower the more autistic)
  • occupational status adjusted for IQ (the lower the more autistic)
  • head size adjusted for IQ (the larger the more autistic)
  • theism adjusted for IQ (the higher, the less autistic)

In other words, autistics would tend to be those who are poorer, less respected, bigger brained and less theistic than their conventional IQs predict. Anecdotal evidence suggests people with high Mega Test scores would fit the first three criteria, but perhaps not the fourth. However I’m assuming a linear relationship between IQ and all these variables. If at the highest levels, IQ predicts “success” in a curvilinear way, we might find that the socio-economic underachievement of some Mega society members is not atypical of their IQs as measured by conventional tests (with high ceilings).

More research is needed.

Questions about childhood IQ

26 Tuesday May 2020

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Commenter pumpkinhead has some questions which I posted below in red (with my answers in black).

1) What is the correlation of a childhood IQ test(say WISC) to an adult IQ(say WAIS)? 12 vs 18+ years old lets say…?

Below are all the studies I’ve found on the long-term stability of Wechsler IQ. The median correlation is 0.84.

 
Approximate age at initial testing Age at retesting Correlation Study sample size
2 9 0.56 Humphreys (1989) ?
2 15 0.78 Humphreys (1989) ?
9 15 0.47 Humphreys (1989) ?
9.5 23.5 0.89 Mortensen et al (2003) 26
29.7 41.6 0.73 Kangas & Bradway (1971) 48
50 60 0.94 Mortensen & Kleven (1993) 141
60 70 0.91 Mortensen & Kleven (1993) 141
50 70 0.90 Mortensen & Kleven (1993) 141

2) Is the 95% CI usually around 20 points at the average, gets narrower as the IQ increases and then gets wider again once we get to genius levels?

Confidence Intervals used in IQ testing assume a bivariate normal distribution and thus are the same at all IQ levels though the gap between one’s measured IQ and whatever variable it’s being used to estimate (i.e. “true” IQ) increases the further one’s measured IQ is from the mean. But the 95% confidence interval is always 1.96 multiplied by the standard error of the estimate.

3) Are IQ tests for <12 year olds less accurate, get more accurate for 12-17 yo and even more so for adults(18+)?

Even in early childhood the Wechsler IQ tests are incredibly reliable and load extremely high on g (the general factor of all cognitive abilities). But IQ correlates much less with DNA at younger ages so that might be telling us it’s much less accurate in childhood after all.

4) On a more anecdotal level Marylyn Vos Savant is reputed to have scored a 228 at 10(albeit with shoddy extrapolations) and then again in adulthood scored a 186 on the Mega test. That is a 42 point difference, what is the probability that someone could have such a gap with the WISC and WAIS?

The probability would increase the further you get from the mean. So assuming a 0.84 correlation between childhood and adult IQ, someone who was 128 IQ points above the mean (IQ 100) at age 10 (IQ 228), would be expected to be 0.84(128) = 108 points above the mean in adulthood (IQ 208) and we could say with 95% certainty that their adult IQ would be from 192 to 224.

Why did the prediction miss in Marilyn’s case? For starters The 1937 Stanford Binet she took at age 10 has a mean of 101.8 and a standard deviation (SD) of 16.4 while the Mega Test has a mean of 100 and an SD of 16. If both her scores were converted to the Wechsler scale (which uses a mean of 100 and an SD of 15), she would have scored 215 in childhood and 181 in adulthood. Then consider that the Stanford Binet was 19 years old when she took it, and old norms inflate test scores by as much as 3 points per decade (in the short-term) and her childhood score was really more like 209.

Then consider she took two different tests (the Stanford Binet at age 10 and the Mega in adulthood). Even at the same age, different IQ tests typically only correlate 0.8, so the 0.84 correlation between childhood IQ and adult IQ might be more like 0.84(0.8) = 0.67 when different tests are used at each age.

The expected adult IQ of someone who scores 109 points above the mean at age 10 (IQ 209) is 109(0.67) above the mean which equals IQ 173 (95% confidence interval of 151 to 195) so her childhood IQ actually underpredicted her adult IQ which is surprising since her childhood IQ was based on dubious extrapolation of the mental age scale.