scrunchables
Former Leader of the Black Hebrew Movement (BHM)
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2023
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How dare you throw me into this much water knowing that I can't swimIll help explain it to you.
First you need to recognize that there is such a thing as intelligence, that is, is everybody equally intelligent? Or are some people more intelligent than others? If you deny the existence of intelligence alltogether, you're probably retarded. Anyways. Ok now that we've established the existence of intelligence, we can assign an abstract theoretical value to it, lets call this value g, or general intelligence.
Then the question arises of how many sub-components there are to general intelligence. In psychometry, you can derive subcomponents by running a large number of participants through a set of long tests that include random questions that can objectively be graded as correct and incorrect based on participant response, then you can group questions together by how often participants consistently failed or succeeded in this cluster of questions (adjusted for difficulty). These would then be the subcomponents of g or general intelligence.
I don't remember off the top of my head what these ended up being but I believe they were something like, verbal intelligence, linguistic intelligence, spatial reasoning, etc (no emotional intelligence was not on this that shits a meme JFL). Now as it turns out, the components of intelligence are incredibly correlate to eachother, (>95%), that is if you're at the 70th percentile of verbal intelligence, odds are you're around the 70th percentile in all other intelligences, so you can very accurately use a single figure to encompass all of these, the figure most commonly used is IQ, which is graded on a standard distribution with mean of 100 SD of 15.
As for its validity as a psychometric examination, you're right in that a psychometric exam is valid insofar as it measures some real world quality. For example an exam on extraversion would have to monitor the social lives of participants to see if the test was valid as a measure of their extraversion. For IQ however, intelligence can be broadly conceived as an ability to solve problems, and it just so happens IQ tests-- valid ones at least-- test solely for abstract pattern recognition. Studying for a valid IQ test has been shown to have negligible effects on the result.
So the IQ test in a way validates itself, in that it directly measures general intelligence in the problems that it gives you, but if you wanted to take it a step further and measure the predictiveness of IQ on academic/carreer success, it has also been found to be the #1 most reliable predictor.
TL;DR, you're retarded and probably have sub100iq
