On the IQ test
People tend to think of the world as a more or less orderly place where everyone more or less ends up where he belongs. And we agree that these more exist: the problem is that it’s almost impossible to know about the less and how many exceptions there are to the mundane order and what their magnitude is. It’s even entirely possible that the exceptions are in the majority and that, therefore, normality — in the statistical sense — in human society is the most glaring and scandalous disorder.
In one of the two types of irregular fate — lives that don’t correspond to the people who live them — we find the extraordinary mind crushed by an unsuitable environment. Typically, only that mind is aware of itself, and the rest of the world will never even learn that it existed. It will be difficult for people in such cases not to commit suicide; it will be difficult for them to find the strength and hope to believe that their story is worth telling; and it will be difficult, even in this last case (the best-case scenario), for their story to reach a wide audience, or a small but well-placed audience, and for the story, in one way or another, to transcend and become known.
The opposite case is that of the ordinary minds developed to the full extent of their limited potential by an adequate social, economic and educational environment. John Stuart Mill was an illustrious example. But unlike Mill, whose Autobiography explained how decisive his childhood was, usually the ordinary minds not only fail to acknowledge or appreciate their immense, undeserved and sterile good fortune, but, to top it all off, they flaunt their ‘verified’ ‘high cognitive capacity’ and protest because they believe the world has not already been excessively and criminally magnanimous towards their ordinary mind. They want more. And, since only a real superior mind could realise how poor the ‘verified’ intelligence of many actually ordinary people really is, and those with a superior mind have EITHER attained a position that is not harmed by the fraud of the ordinary, and do not consider it worthwhile to publicly denounce the fraud, OR they belong to the group of invisible social disorders described above, in practice the social disorder of the second type remains as INVISIBLE as that of the first one, and society as a whole swallows or falls for that intelligence that mysteriously is only manifested in a test.
This article is nothing more than a few conceptual clarifications surrounding a single, very simple thesis, based on equally simple evidence:
There are people who score among the highest on the ‘Intelligence Quotient’ (IQ) test and who continually show great and clear signs of not being very intelligent; from which it follows that the test does not measure intelligence infallibly.
As a first point of clarification, we should say that our thesis does not deny that there are people with high IQ who are indeed very intelligent. IQ is not a necessary condition for intelligence (since there are very intelligent people who do not have a high IQ or who have never even taken the test — or who took it as a joke, like yours truly) and it is not a sufficient condition either (since there are not-very-intelligent people who do have a high IQ). The fact that there are people who are very intelligent and have a high IQ does not alter either of these two conditions.
There is a general, and I don’t know how much propaganda has contributed to this, archetypal image of a person with a high IQ as someone (as we’d say in Spain) brilliant at polynomials, hopeless at running errands 1(listo para los polinomios y tonto para los recados): someone with problems in pragmatic matters and social relationships, and usually also not very good-looking. All of this is false, and I was able to verify it firsthand when the teacher called ‘Esperanza’2 came to class and, in front of everybody, called the four chosen pupils out of the classroom. She didn’t just want them to know they were indeed chosen; apparently, she wanted the rest of us to know too. Perhaps she even expected us to applaud them — perhaps counting herself among those being applauded.
It’d be a perfect touch if I said the chosen had been precisely the instigators of the joke. As if to say:
Ah!, the only thing I was sure of was that these kids, who I already knew were very intelligent without needing tests, had NOW proven JUST to be sleazy, cunning, manipulative and treacherous!, inasmuch as they were the ones who suggested that the whole class answered in unison and without reading.
And maybe they were, but this is not a work of fiction; what matters here is the truth and, to be honest, the only instigator I clearly remember would not later be counted amongst the promising minds. (My classmates and I, by the way, had agreed to signal one another and give the same answer to every question, because no one had explained the purpose, characteristics or consequences of the test, nor had anyone been asked for permission to sit it.)
I had always got on well with the chosen ones in class — only in class, mind you, none outside of it: so we couldn’t really call ourselves friends. I didn’t have any friends at the moment. They did. They all had conventional, comfortable lives, and their parents had expectations of them and had laid a solid foundation for them to achieve those expectations. They were all popular, witty and funny, and they were, indeed, very intelligent, but I’d later realise that precisely the latter was not common amongst people with high IQ. There are people with high IQ who are very intelligent and others whose intelligence is quite ordinary; popular people and marginalised people; attractive and unattractive people… There was everything in this broader group of chosen ones, except for a miserable childhood and a hampered-neglected education.
If we look at what today would be called ‘the narrative’ (el relato), we’ll believe that the IQ test is a kind of belated gift of Order and Progress (as the Brazilian flag says) coming to us directly from the Age of Reason: a modern tool launched by the Enlightenment that finally grants equal opportunities to all the Brothers of Humanity and of Schiller, and we won’t be able to resist singing an ode to joy for this Promethean fire that will put each one where their merits deserve, overcoming the previous nepotistic fatalism of the aristocrats during the Dark Ages.
But if we look, instead, at the facts, we’ll easily reach the conclusion that the test only reliably measures the hyper-development that any mind — even an ordinary one — presents in certain areas if it has been well cared for, instructed, trained and encouraged in a very quiet household during those crucial early years of life.
That is, the ones chosen by the test are not those with extraordinary minds that the injustice of the socioeconomic system would tend to ignore, ruin and waste, but rather, precisely, the offspring of the system’s lucky families — whether these offspring are endowed with extraordinary minds or not.
The fact that the fortunate and integrated members of the system facilitate the perpetuation of their fortune within their families wouldn’t in itself be a problem, and I’d not necessarily find it wrong. Nor would I find it wrong if the attributes detected and perpetuated were, at least, good (even if extraordinary intelligence weren’t among those features). But I am afraid that our elites do not descend so much from proper aristocrats as from the ones who would arise among merchants, usurers and all sorts of sleazy, cunning, manipulative and treacherous people.
As a second point of clarification, we’ll say that the usual criticisms of the IQ test are based on even poorer and more mistaken positions (although usually also less perverse, self-interested and petty) than those of the test’s defenders.
The core of the objections is that there are several types of intelligence and the test only measures some of them, such as logical reasoning ability, memory (understood as what would be storage on a smartphone) and verbal skills.
We will not delve into the structure and characteristics of the test here, as such elements are irrelevant to our thesis. We have simply asserted that the test is not a reliable indicator of intelligence, and that this is easily inferred from the evident lack of intelligence exhibited by some of the top scorers: there is no need to even glance at the test.
It is, however, important to clarify that abstract reasoning, logical thinking, verbal skills and memory (understood in a broader sense than smartphone storage) are indeed essential elements of the only type of intelligence that exists, and the test would not be wrong if it truly quantified these elements with precision. The problem is not that the test focuses on them, but rather that (judging by the deficient ability shown in these areas by some — many, most — of people with higher IQ) it does not measure them adequately. If it measured them adequately, the quintessential highest-scoring individuals would not demonstrate the opposite outside the test, as if the test functioned like a magic potion, isolated and inspiring, in such a way that these people lost their ‘High Intellectual Potential’ (HIP) as soon as their minds set in motion outside the test.
It might also be worthwhile to point out that whilst vocabulary breadth, in particular, and, in general, the amount of stored information are undoubtedly very useful and important elements, they are also the most accessible to any child who isn’t completely brain-dead and who has had a stimulating, or at least non-obstructive environment. And certainly, neither verbal aptitude nor intelligence in general consists of stored items. It is not that they are merely two types of the various existing intelligences: it is that they cannot even be considered (traits of) intelligence. The hypothesis that the test would base a large part of its scoring on such capacities would certainly explain why mental flatness can be so blatantly observed in the average ‘High Potential Individuals’ (HPI). But we are not going to confirm or deny this detail, since it is irrelevant to our thesis here, as we have said above.
Underlying the usual arguments against the test is the belief that all human beings are born with identical abilities and can achieve identical results solely based on circumstances. I am far from sharing that belief, yet I agree with their emphasis on the brain’s plasticity and the astonishing scope for learning, development, and the effectiveness of training certain skills — which, we repeat, are not types of intelligence, but rather capacities that are broadly, subtly, and intricately interconnected within a single entity that is not simply the sum of its parts and which we call intelligence.
At this point — speaking of the plasticity of the intellect — we must bring up Esperanza again, this time in her favour. Besides her hobby of detecting and recruiting geniuses, she had another task in which she did do something well. There was a small group of pupils with ‘special needs’ who belonged to what was known in Spain as the ‘Diversification Programme’. One day, Esperanza turned up at the door together with them, administered one of her obsessive tests to them and to us, and they surpassed all of us (including Esperanza’s Darlings, the ‘verified’ potential whizzes) in areas such as mental calculation speed and ‘spatial intelligence’.
(I have always wondered why there isn’t, like spatial intelligence, a temporal intelligence — related to the perception of elapsed time, the abstract subdivision of time, and so on. These capacities are easy to measure with complete accuracy. They are related to musical aptitude and their measurement is, somehow, already included in conservatories: but the same is true, for instance, of verbal aptitudes, which aren’t so easy to measure, are better assessed in traditional language classes, and yet are included in the IQ test.)
The following link contains the opinion expressed by Carlos Blanco (IQ 160) on the topic of this article:
The Wild Project #368 - Carlos Blanco
Blanco establishes a distinction between subsets of increasing intelligence potential. First, the largest group comprises individuals (children, to be precise: since the test supposedly measures ‘mental age’ in relation to ‘chronological age’) with ‘High Intellectual Potential’ (Altas Capacidades: AACC). The second step on the ascending scale of intellectual power is the subset of the ‘gifted’ (superdotados). Up to this point, it is quite clear that all members belong to the same category, differing only in degree, not in quality.
However, uncertainty arises when Blanco progresses to the ‘summit’ of the HIP: the ‘genius’. The genius (according to Blanco), in addition to possessing potentially superior intelligence, already reveals — in act(uality) — mysterious gifts that allow him to create, see things that no one else could see without the help of those creations that this ‘different’ individual bestows upon the world. The genius is special, has “spark”, his high intelligence — unlike the intelligence of other Verified Very Intelligent People — is fertile and operates in privileged connection with sensitivity, beauty; the ‘sublime’.
It might seem that such an approach coincides partially or completely with that of this article, but its focus and its use of language, and not only language, still sound too complicit in the conceit, air and graces put on by ordinary intelligences verified as superior, and may instil in the bearers of these minds and throughout the world the idea that there is a kinship where in reality there is no evidence of such, nor can the Verified be considered as firmer and more justified promises than any other person: as if the Verified were verifiably CLOSER TO genius.
In this matter of intelligence and genius, Blanco could be implicitly reproducing the same pattern of overstepped argumentation that defines his idea of God.
God would be — according to Blanco’s literal words in the linked interview:
‘The asymptotic limit in the approximations that a human mind could have to absolute reality’
(El límite asintótico en las aproximaciones que una mente humana podría tener a la realidad absoluta.)
Nevertheless, as Professor Palomo impeccably warns:3
‘If his image is real and he never gets to see the divine line (never gets to see God), how does he know that he is getting close to God without reaching Him?’
(Si su imagen es real y [él] nunca llega a ver la línea divina —nunca llega a ver a Dios—, ¿cómo sabe que se acerca sin tocarlo?)
It gave me a little chill to stumble across that answer, barely a month after I had talked (on Twitter) about the impossibility of someone who doesn’t know English and Spanish knowing how close the incorrect English pronunciation of an advanced English student is to the correct pronunciation — and hence why the Englishman understands him less than the basic student who speaks to him pronouncing English as it is spelt.
(One never knows how close one has been to —)
In general, we’d say that we can’t know how close or far things were from happening that didn’t happen, because we don’t know all the causes involved in the happening.
In particular, we could apply that caution to what Blanco says about genius, inviting Blanco to ask himself if he is not speaking of genius exactly as when he speaks of divinity as if it were an asymptotic line that he could actually see as an asymptotic line, contemplating the picture from the outside, that is, as if he himself were God, and there were suddenly a second(ary) God who is the asymptotic line inside the picture…
On the one hand, it is clear that genius belongs to a separate and actually realised quality (in act, Aristotle would say); on the other hand, it is not even mentioned that genius (the actual superior intelligence: complete and creative) is not necessarily a late fruit that at any moment could fall only from the tree that the Verified Very Intelligent People would represent, but that it appears already in the very first years of childhood, as a parallel manifestation, distinct from the mere functional, mechanical, flat and ordinary intelligence (not even the minimum intelligence — neither sufficient nor necessary) that the IQ test seems to measure.