IQ
Ok, after a dull response, a more interesting one.

I have a very high IQ. I haven't had it measured formally since I was young, but every informal test puts it in the high 160's-180's. I say this without meaning to brag because I think the whole thing is a load of steaming bullshit. I'm merely lucky that my personal roster of mental talents happens to match with the ones IQ testers like to measure - logical thinking and verbal dexterity. Among the many, many things I'm crap at are:

Learning languages
Recognising faces and remembering names
Dealing with money
Understanding and creating metaphors
Understanding subtext in conversations
Flirtation and banter
Multitasking
Working quickly and efficiently
Remembering birthdays, school trips and other events
Drawing
DIY and engineering

All of these are, to my mind, important mental skills, valuable to the human gene pool and much missed by me. IQ ignores them all. (And there are other things I *am* good at but IQ tests don't measure such as musical appreciation, acting and telling jokes) It's just a random measurement of an arbitrarily chosen skill. Who cares?
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Sun 21 Nov 2010, 15:04, 35 replies)

You're me, aren't you?
When was I cloned?
(BearWithLittleBrain, Sun 21 Nov 2010, 17:06, closed)

I know how you feel mate.
Brain the size of a planet, social skills that could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first.

I'm slowly getting the hang of metaphors and simile though.
( jim_bob can herd cats., Sun 21 Nov 2010, 17:43, closed)

Fuckwit
I`m a fuckwit, sooooo, I have all these skills, now i`m clever....Easy
(growthy, Sun 21 Nov 2010, 17:51, closed)

This makes you an affirmed QOTWer
Sign up, these people are here to help you: www.autism.org.uk/Shop/NAS-membership/Personal-membership.aspx

If you see Piston there, for fucks sake avoid him at all costs, or you'll end up being bullied by the other autisms.
( Light In Chains maker of the ikea sofa, Sun 21 Nov 2010, 18:57, closed)

Ha, you may be right
I'm sure I'm somewhere towards the middle of the spectrum. But isn't that just being male?
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Sun 21 Nov 2010, 19:05, closed)

Fucking hell, Rory, I'd have thought even someone with your obviously-limited cranial capacity might be getting tired of trotting out the same old lines by now.

Here's a thought - why don't you change your username to 'lol u r ortasm rofl!!!!"? Then you could simply submit blank posts as your answer, and save yourself the bitter, sweaty mashing of fists upon keyboard as you continually, unendlingly, utterly-boringly hammer out the same old witless reply.
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Sun 21 Nov 2010, 20:09, closed)

I'm touched HP
Yet again you've mounted your faithful steed in protection of QOTW
I hope that one day you bag a fat chick out of all this hard work.
( Light In Chains maker of the ikea sofa, Sun 21 Nov 2010, 20:50, closed)

Ooh, here's an idea - you could differentiate yourself from Amorous Badger by taking an insult thrown in your direction, and adopting it as your sig. Honestly, it'll be really funny and completely original - AB's not done that even once.
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Mon 22 Nov 2010, 0:53, closed)

Oh right, was it an insult?
I thought it was just a helpful suggestion, and a jolly good one too.
( Light In Chains maker of the ikea sofa, Mon 22 Nov 2010, 8:18, closed)

I don't know where you think you are, Happy Phantom
Maybe original humour cuts the mustard down at your "pub" with your "flesh and blood friends" but you're in internet town now. Round here jokes only start getting funny on their six hundred and fifty thousandth telling.
(StapMyVitals wouldn't mind a bit of that, Sun 21 Nov 2010, 21:03, closed)

nads, I thought that was just the Fast Show/Little Britain/other 'I'll get me coat' ripoffs... :/

Would a length joke be apposite? Must be coming of age...
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Sun 21 Nov 2010, 23:02, closed)

Can anyone else see the irony of using a well-worn b3ta meme to tell someone they're "hammer[ing] out the same old witless repl[ies]"?

( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Sun 21 Nov 2010, 21:09, closed)

does irony* make you uncomfortable? I could roll out some fart jokes, if that's more on your level.

_{(*this isn't actually irony, - if anything, it's hypocrisy - but thanks for taking part)}
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Sun 21 Nov 2010, 22:56, closed)

By linking wikipedia, you've become an even bigger wanker HP

( Light In Chains maker of the ikea sofa, Mon 22 Nov 2010, 8:20, closed)

.

( Not Pineapple anymore, Mon 22 Nov 2010, 9:49, closed)

The joke's on him anyway.
It's not even irony, it's clearly Wharfinger-Baconian parasyntactic metathesis. What an ignorant pleb.
( The Mock TurtIe ™ --- Thinks you are a cunt, on, Thu 25 Nov 2010, 2:50, closed)

A little.
In a similar vein, please feel free to complete the following aphorism:

"Winning a debate on the internet is like..."
( jim_bob can herd cats., Sun 21 Nov 2010, 23:33, closed)

is it....
", er, rly kewel, like"?
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Mon 22 Nov 2010, 0:08, closed)

Nope.
It's like coming first in a Paralympics event. Either way you're still a retard.
( jim_bob can herd cats., Mon 22 Nov 2010, 0:10, closed)

I concede, then. You've won this debate ;)
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Mon 22 Nov 2010, 0:15, closed)

Bugger.

( jim_bob can herd cats., Mon 22 Nov 2010, 9:45, closed)

That made me proper LOL

( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Sun 21 Nov 2010, 22:15, closed)

Go drown yourself in a vat of acid.
You tedious little shit. I've seen more entertaining roadkill than you.

Considering you're VC's sockpuppet account I would have thought you'd be more entertaining.
( jim_bob can herd cats., Sun 21 Nov 2010, 23:32, closed)

Isaac Asimov wrote an article with this very message
Its in "The Planet that Wasn't", a collection of his factual/speculative essays. Worth a read, if you like that sort of thing.
( Greenbat, Sun 21 Nov 2010, 19:12, closed)

Also 'The Mismeasure of Man' by Stephen Jay Gould
He sometimes goes too far in his 'we're all the same' message - he was an affirmed Marxist - but it's a pretty damning indictment of IQ and its precursors such as craniometry
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Sun 21 Nov 2010, 20:36, closed)

Sounds quite
normal to me. With all due respect, most 'geniuses' seem barely able to function in the real world.

My stepsister is by all acounts a fearsomely intellignt person (IQ said to be 150+, First from OXford etc), but she is the most fuckwitted spongheaded idiot I know. All that 'talent', and she teaches 7 year old kids, becaase she is incapable of organising herself to do anything more challenging.
( Not Pineapple anymore, Mon 22 Nov 2010, 9:36, closed)

Sounds pretty fucking challenging to me
Have you ever seen what a class full of 7-year-olds looks like?
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Mon 22 Nov 2010, 10:12, closed)

i 2 r having da brainz
Mensa told me once I was 'top 1% of the country' (176? 167? can't remember. but then, I still count on my fingers sometimes, especially with dates)

It didn't stop me from completely screwing my education up, tho...As soon as I stopped sailing through the lessons, I gave up. It hasn't prevented me from an occasional near-pathological lack of empathy. I think i was in my mid-20s before i got over the fact that the world didn't owe me much of anything, and that Talent != Skill.

Your list pretty much applies to me too, with the exception of the drawing, DIY and engineering, at which I am the tits, EIIDSSM.

My advice to other quick-thinking idiots is to do what I did and marry someone who won't stand for your crap or let you off the hook when you fuck up.
(CADmonkey rollllllllled another one, just like the other one, Mon 22 Nov 2010, 12:26, closed)

time for me to be entirely humourless
as I get on one of my hobby horses.

There is no such thing as an informal IQ test. An intelligence test must be administered by a trained and qualified practitioner, which is most cases means a psychologist, for it to be worth anything.
An IQ score is meaningless without reference to the test used to derive the score, or at least the standard deviation of the test. These days, psychologists tend to report IQ scores as a percentile with a specified confidence interval (roughly meaning how accurate the score represents your likely 'true' IQ).
Typically IQ tests are an involved process taking hours to complete and score. The smarter you are the longer they tend to take (since they generally involve asking questions until you start getting stuff wrong).
Analysis will involve more factors than what is on the test. For example, mental illness, physical impairment, extreme fatigue, language/culture etc can affect test scores, so need to be taken into account.
If you score at the extremes of a test (ie top/bottom of the raw scale), the results may not be as accurate and you may need to take another battery of tests.
If your results are unusual (perhaps very uneven over a battery of tests, or uneven over time), more analysis is needed.
There are a number of different approaches to measuring intelligence, but significantly your scores on one test correlate well with your scores on another.

Talking more directly to the point of the, if you are indeed poor at a range of things like this, then they would show up on a decent IQ test properly administered, and would likely affect the score. A competent psychologist would then look at other factors, perhaps an underlying pathology like Aspergers (multitasking, metaphor, subtext, language ring particular warning bells).
( Sextant goes to him is emotionally erect, on this day, Mon 22 Nov 2010, 15:01, closed)

The long and the short of it is that IQ tests are of questionable value irrespective of the particular test or the person administering them - all they really establish is your aptitude at passing IQ tests. 'Intelligence' is not really a quality that can be accurately measured with a few checkboxes.

There is a reason why there is no Guinness record for 'highest IQ' any more - and that's because IQ tests are about as as reliable and relevent as phrenology.
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Mon 22 Nov 2010, 18:12, closed)

I disagree with this thoroughly.
The main reason I disagree is that the results of a wide variety of intelligence tests correlate well, pointing to an underlying factor. In the abscence of general intelligence it is hard to see why someone who does well on raven's progressive matrices would also score highly on the stanford binet, or indeed the battery of test within the WAIS. Also, the results of intelligence test correlate well with things like academic performance and job performance, as well as (broadly speaking) subjective assessments.
There is a massive body of work on intelligence in psychology, spanning over 100 years. If it were a simple matter that intelligence test "are about as as reliable and relevent as phrenology" then there would lots of research supporting this. But there isn't.
( Sextant goes to him is emotionally erect, on this day, Tue 23 Nov 2010, 4:11, closed)

and another thing while I'm ranting here
how would you establish that a test didn't measure intelligence? you would need a way to measure intelligence, ie you'd need an intelligence test. It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation.
The way psychometrists have gone about this is to have a think about the things which we believe are markers of intelligence (learn easily, good problem solvers, good at sums, clever at business, articulate, quick witted etc), test these things, and then refine retest etc. In the process we find try and weed out as much of the stuff which is influenced by other factors as possible using statistics. So, we want to control for things such as age, education, linguistic background, culture etc. By and large intelligence tests do a good job of this, although it is up to the person administering the test to make sure that they are using an appropriate test, and score it appropriately.
The observation was made probably when academic tests were invented that those who did well at one subject tended to do well on others, and those that did poorly tended to do poorly at everything. So the idea of some general quality called intelligence is something which has come to us through casual observation.
What psychometrics does is to develop better ways of measuring these qualities, and look at their correlations. The process of developing, refining, and validating intelligence tests has be going on for over 100 years.
Ultimately, what intelligence tests measure needs to be compared and validated against reality. This is constantly happening in research, and we know for example that your score on an intelligence test is good predictor at how you will perform in practical situations where intelligence matters.
The APA's response to the Bell Curve controversy is a good starting point.
www.gifted.uconn.edu/siegle/research/Correlation/Intelligence.pdf
( Sextant goes to him is emotionally erect, on this day, Tue 23 Nov 2010, 5:08, closed)

Yes, some tests correlate well, but that's because they're essentially testing the same thing. And yes, intelligence tests have existed for a good long while - many of the older ones have been conclusively proven to be a load of rubbish, as they concluded wonderful things like 'black people are thick', on account of having massive inbuilt cultural bias.

As for what intelligence is, that's a whole different issue altogether, and the criteria seem rather arbitrary. It's all a matter of how the brain functions, certainly - but why discount people who have an outstanding mechanical ability, a talent for writing music, perfectly-accurate recall, a gift for languages, above average empathy, or one of a million other evolutionarily-useful aptitudes? At what point did we decide that 'you have a good brain because you're pretty good at one fairly esoteric aspect of puzzle solving' was the start and end of the story, and by doing so, conclude that only the people who were proficient at the aptitudes being tested could be labelled as 'intelligent'? Is this not somewhat circular and self-fulfilling? It all seems rather contrived and artificial.
( Happy Phantom has been to Hastings, Brighton, and Eastbourne too, Tue 23 Nov 2010, 8:57, closed)

^this
It's not surprising that tests correlate with each other, because they use each other for calibration - an intelligence test is deemed to be valid precisely *if* it correlates with the others! Suppose I made a new test which placed more emphasis on, say, musical ability or joke-telling. Then many people would perform better on that test than on a standard IQ test, and others would perform worse. Who is to say which one is 'right'?
General intelligence is a myth, a reification of an arbitrary measurement.

I'd also like to call SGB out on the 'that's not a 'real' IQ test' argument. That's a bit like saying 'If you really want to measure someone's shoe size, you have to do hundreds of measurements to get the precise shape of their foot'. True, that gives you a much better measurement of someone's feet, but it's not shoe size any more. IQ is what IQ tests measure. And the fact that different IQ tests give different (if correlated) results just illustrates the point!
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Tue 23 Nov 2010, 10:09, closed)

On the other hand
If you take a series of varied challenges that require mental capacity to solve, you can always grade people relative to each other.

It might not be a bona fide IQ test, but if person A scores 100, person B scores 120 and person C scores 160, you can to an extent say that person A is not as good at it as the other two.

If the tests are half decent quality, and you get a good few results, then I think as a simple intelligence test they are good enough.

Online tests are pretty unreliable though. Seems to me they add on 10 - 20 points becuase they are selling certificates. I suppose there's some irony in someone getting 160 in an IQ test, and being stupid enough to send these people £25 for a bit of paper though.
( Not Pineapple anymore, Wed 24 Nov 2010, 15:58, closed)