Am 16.01.2014 03:50, schrieb Patrick Elliott:
> 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,

Like so many other people, you seem to believe that intelligence is 
something innate. It isn't - it /is/ something acquired.

> and 2. Some yokel deciding that, having come up with a
> test, it never has to be recalibrated.

To all my knowledge, those tests /are/ recalibrated every now and then.

> 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?

We're not talking about being smart - we are talking about being 
intelligent. And, as I wrote previously:

"Intelligence is the fitness to perform well in a so-called intelligence 
test."

> And, since I don't really plan to make more replies here, this is *one*
> reason why being in it doesn't impress me.

Why not? Is there any reason to be unimpressed by someone having 
acquired the skill to solve certain types of puzzles? Is it pointless? 
No more so than the skill to kick a ball into a rectangular frame I 
suspect: Both, as a side effect, tend to also make you good at other 
things that /can/ be of practical value.

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