On 1/15/2014 4:15 PM, Warp wrote:
> Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>>> And someone please explain to me, what IQ is?
>>>
>>> IQ is a quantification of your intelligence in comparison to the average
>>> person of your age.
>
>> It is therefore fundamentally dependant on whatever the designer
>> considers to be the "average person".
>
> I don't think the idea is to define the "average person". The idea
> is to measure tons of people and just take the average, and scale
> the results so that the average gets 100 points.
>
If it worked like that.. The problem is that you get two things 
happening: 1. Tests based on the assumption that every human being has 
equal conditions, and thus learns to think about all problems in 
equivalent ways, and 2. Some yokel deciding that, having come up with a 
test, it never has to be recalibrated. A good example would be something 
like handling money. Would someone in the UK, prior to the Euro, be 
"smarter" than someone in the US? I mean, after all, there where like 40 
different kinds of money, some of them sounding more like weight/liquid 
measures, being with like.. 1/8th of some higher denomination, and 
stuff, and people *used* all the bloody things, while, the US currency 
was all metric. Then, you could ask the same question the other way, is 
it more clever to deal with inches, feet, yards, etc., or the metric 
system? More to the point, someone with the wrong way of thinking is 
going to go, "WTF is this?!", no matter which category they are in, when 
dealing with the ones where there are fractional coinage. Personally.. I 
think the UK went metric because it was a huge burden on the state to 
place both their economists *and* engineers in rubber rooms, instead of 
just one set, but... lol

This is BTW what I meant about "tricks" before. If you don't know how to 
think about a problem, you either can't solve it, or take far longer to 
do so, or you solve it wrong. But, think in terms of like.. memory. 
Memory mnemonics are used all the time by "experts" on memorizing lists 
and things. As a child, almost everyone probably went through a stage of 
sing songing objects, and attaching other things to them, which is 
exactly how that "trick" works, but then... how many parents, when their 
kids are in the middle of doing that say, "Stop that, you are being 
silly.", and, perhaps derail a natural tendency to learn such a method 
of memorizing complex sets? In math, the "experts" use short cuts. Some 
of them they come up with on their own, others they may pick up from 
other sources, but.. they may not retain either, without the proper 
conditions.

By the same token, you can "learn" how to solve puzzles, by learning ho 
to think about them, including the ones that get stuffed on IQ tests, 
and that includes the stuff Mensa uses (I know, I have seen them, and 
wasn't impressed). When I was eight, these things might have been 
interesting, though, only because they where better than going back to 
the classroom, and listening to someone drone on about how to now 
multiply 4x, instead of 3x, while most of the class had their brains 
dripping out of their ears. Now.. I just don't have the patience for 
them, and some of them "require" skills that I never cultivated, because 
I didn't need them (which results in my taking longer at them than the 
ones I find mind numbingly simple).

And, since I don't really plan to make more replies here, this is *one* 
reason why being in it doesn't impress me. The other reason is that, my 
experience to date, with people willing to mention being in it, have 
tended to do so in the context of wanting people to go, "Wow!", so that 
they then question their own certainty about a subject, or more easily 
believe the guy claiming it, when, in point of fact, in their case, its 
intended to shield some howler of an opinion, or claim, or hypothesis, 
they have about something, which they either don't actually understand, 
or have completely misunderstood.

So.. I apologize for calling the whole thing a social club for the stuck 
up and self obsessed. Its not like I have had a huge opportunity to 
meet, or talk to, the ones that where not.

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