The concept of IQ is demoralising

[JuliusCaesar]

9 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

My IQ is probably not too special if I was tested.

But my actual intelligence is shockingly high. And I would not trade it for a higher IQ.

This is because the personal configuration of sound vibratory complex Leo Gura prioritizes logic above the other 7 cognitive functions. Rational awareness(what IQ tests primarily measure) thus becomes the 5th highest/4th lowest priority. If my understanding of your mental functioning configuration is correct, then you often worry that you're the only intelligent being among your species.

 

12 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

I would not trust any human with testing my intelligence accurately.

The true measure of intelligence is holistic comprehension.

These statements are highly logical and somewhat irrational, pointing to the very truth I've articulated above.

 

8 minutes ago, Karmadhi said:

You develop it through stuff like meditation, contemplation, self-inquiry, reading good books, maybe bit of psychadelics, opening your mind, emotioanl mastery. Stuff like these right?

These techniques can be beneficial because meditation for instance is capable of raising your level of consciousness. But what we're referring to seems to be more attributable to Leo's personality than anything else.

[Preety_India]

There's nothing wrong in wanting a higher IQ. Yes it can be improved. And it's a good thing if you're trying to improve it everyday. I equate it with intelligence although a higher score does not always mean intelligence, best not to rely too much on score yet improving your IQ in terms of general intelligence that is raising your quotient overall (not respect to the test) is a good idea 

 

 

[Hello from Russia]

High IQ is like a big dick, having it bigger is cool, but not so necessary

[Rokazulu]

All things are actually malleable in reality.
Our physical reality is a slower vibration though, so all things here move like wading through thick mud.

If someone becomes stuck in the mud, it will be very difficult to do anything else. There is no judgement in this.
However, the way society is currently structured, makes it very challenging to allow these individuals the necessary opportunity to at least begin looking for a tree branch or something to hold onto.

Since you are on this forum, I strongly suggest holding onto that tree branch. You will help others out of the mud once you accept yourself as you are and begin to very slowly transcend any circumstance.

[Joel3102]

I’m pretty sure “brain damage” from heavy metals is reversible. Andy Cutler himself says that essentially once you remove the toxins, the brain will regenerate itself naturally 

[ValiantSalvatore]

I've been with a few knowingly gifted people and I was supposed to be tested, yet I did not test it because out of fear of general social condemnation, when my test results are bad as well as my own levels of self-criticisms. I had a lot of issues with this too and I also have an issue with the other side and an overfocus on praticalities etc. There are various issues people do not understand about these people and also there are a couple of generalizations already in this thread, that are misleading. For example many gifted people are also highly sensetive to their enviroment and feel emotions intensely. The issue is the eliteism within any "esoteric" and not exoteric group. 

Of course this helps for orientations sake, yet that does not mean it's true. I thought about doing it out of a sense of practicalities and getting benefits for further academic studies, yet a lot of academic people are really "stupid". I don't like the way they approach life and general that character is not taught anymore and it's just a technical speed race. 

I talked just recently to someone who was did psyches and does giftedness coaching for kids as well as he studied this for kids, he certainly knows his limits, we was quiet adament about testing me, as I was supposed to help with different concepts that exist within that spectrum. I could not do it legit out of bad experiences and social condemnation and a lot of gifted people he explained me have that fear. Especially not having an academic family etc. He did not make intelligent decisions, yet these decision were more the product of how he was educated, instead of he himself. While other gifted people had very good parenting and/or the ressources to address issues. This is my opinion.

Also there is a lot of arrogance in normal people against gifted people who also have issues, especially the perception of giftedness/high iq. I meet a few gifted people in my life and they helped me a lot during times of uncertainity and chaos, where "normal" people would never have the cognitive capacity to do it. I usually get along well with them, yet the overfocus on technical analysis in academia is just bad in my opinion. The more linear your thoughts, the better usually it is. While big picture thinking is also a big facet of "IQ", but there is barely any focus of it from what I heared from my gifted friends they all complain about this. But see the technical overfocus as a neccessary reality. Whatever.

I do agree for me it is heavily demoralizing and I appreicate a more holistic and flattend perspective of the concept, also to not further benefit a body of thought that is full with ideas of meritocracies. 

I do think when it comes to learning intellectual humility is far more important and admitting ones ignorance. A lot of gifted people I meet were the nicest people and the most compassionate people I ever got to know, the point is everybody is an idiot and everyone has different capacities in the domain sheer cognitive intelligence. When I did the screening for it I was suprised that I even fall into the category of it  as well as which categories stood out, legit pissed me off. And I do have legit my own set of problems because of it. Just alone that the concept of IQ exists. Trust me I hated it for years and now I am supposed to benefit from it. 

I am also pretty sure IQ can be increased 100000% when people life and eat healthy, especially when young. There are new studies that are coming out everyday that I read for example cognitive speed does not decline till the age of 60.

I can also just say again this is about understanding differences and including them. Not to demonize any other side... 
---

I don't like it either when someone is more intelligent than me in any sense it triggers competition, yet I through praticing intellectual humility and admitting that I don't know what I don't know, I learned a lot from more intelligent people. I could write endlessly about this, yet I don't think it is useful. I do also get hung-up about this because it's essential for survival in a sense and I did not have the best experience with it. Even though I qualify for testing as gifted. It's ridiculous. 

I find the concept of IQ generally is a lot just about ego and survival. Nobody likes to feel stupid and feel disrespected. 

Edited March 16, 2022 by ValiantSalvatore

[Preety_India]

2 minutes ago, Marcel said:

IQ is certainly something people can hang themselves up upon to the point it becomes a limiting belief or a go to excuse almost.

Anything can be approved. A lot of the time it’s really a matter of making a decision vs doubting oneself into oblivion. 

“Being dumb and getting it done is better then being smart and never starting”

Do you think a person can improve in the areas of emotional IQ? 

 

Edited March 16, 2022 by Preety_India

[ZzzleepingBear]

Alot of people get hung up on IQ, since high IQ does infact correlate with greater pattern recognition ability.

However, Someone can have a incredibly high IQ, but stil be emotionally disturbed or delusional.

Just look at scientists who used their high IQ togheter to create atombombs, and super deadly chemicals that can't be found in nature. It may be incredible, that such things can be created. They probably got very high salaries so they could live a great life with their family, and alot of them probably had grandchildren who they loved and whished a great future for.

And at the same time, these scientist with great IQ worked daily to create chemicals and atombombs, wich inevitable purpose, would be used for mass destruction of the whole planet.

People can have high IQ, but that dosen't exclude them from actually being insane or blinsided by skewed beliefs. So high IQ is not the main ability, or an exclusive ability for creating the greatest value in the world, no matter if  the general population may believe and praise it to be the case.

[undeather]

13 hours ago, Striving for more said:

Generally success is more heavily influenced by like persistence, hard work, emotional intelligence, social skills .. 

And there's way harsher problems in life than mediocre IQ

Leo & others have dismissed IQ as culturally biased & perhaps even just wrong, arguing for multiple intelligences theory & different brain types. 

However I'm pretty sure G, (general intelligence) is a solid fact of life. People are normally either good at most things, or bad at most things. 

If your brain generally functions smoothly & process information quickly, then you will probably be good (and a fast learner) in most domains. 

If you have down syndrome, you might be an awsome banjo player or something specific, but generally you will suck at most things in life & not be on the same plane as most others.

You cannot increase IQ & it genetic unless reduced e.g due to stunted development (which I'm pretty sure you can't just undo the damage 20 years later?)

So If I was exposed to toxins & mercury from a young age, and that stunted my brain development, it's unlikely I will be able to get that back. 

Leo claims the ACC ritual boosted his cognition but his cognition was clearly pretty good in the first place & then got worse but his brain had already developed. He was clearly able to think well even with an atrocious diet as a teen & was philospohically inclined. 

My claim is that probably, brain toxin - induced brain damage from a young age, unless treated early on, is unfixable, there is permanent damage or stunting that one must accept because look, if you devoid a plant of sunlight & nutrition or trample on it, it's not gonna miracously recover or reach it's full growth potential later on if you add some healing ritual. 

As for the Productive side of this question : Should I give up on all heavy learning based pursuits & accept that it is not for me?  Why play to my weakness or listen to leo unless it's about dumb stuff like pickup, I am not mentally competent so am I better off doubling down on simple stuff like social intelligence, business, hard work, & giving up more intellectual. 

Apologies, this topic is waffly & slightly anti personal development, I recognize there's more to life than IQ, But I had this fantasy in my head that detoxing myself of toxins would "Raise my IQ back to average intelligence or above "where I was meant to be all along" ", but now I'm trying to avoid dissapointment & considering that probably, I was dealt bad hands genetically or exposed to too much that stunted me as a kid, different to leos situation whereby he developed cognitive decline due to environmental factors but his brain structure had already been formed in a sufficient manner. 

some people born tall handsome & others deformed midgets, so why not like this in cognitive capacities. A midget can never become 6 foot tall yet leo claims intelligence is something you can cultivate. 

 

 

Most nihilistacally coated IQ-arguments are based on a basic misunderstanding of what "it" actually is. 
An IQ-test definitely measures some-"thing" which is seemingly correlated with all sorts of outcomes we deem preferable from a societal standpoint - but if you actually look at the data with some statistical knowledge, you will recognize that its not at all that black & white.

There is no significant statistical association between IQ and hard measures such as wealth. Most “achievements” linked to IQ are measured in circular stuff s.a. bureaucratic or academic success, things for test takers and salary earners in structured jobs that resemble the tests. If you want to detect how someone fares at a task, say loan sharking, tennis playing, or random matrix theory, make him/her do that task; we don’t need theoretical exams for a real world function by probability-challenged psychologists. As you can see in the graph below, there is little information about IQ/Net-worth if you get rid of the noise and fat tails (probability distributions with relatively high probability of extreme outcomes). There is absolutely no visibible effect over 40k. 

If IQ-distribution is Gaussian by construction (well, almost) and if real world performance were fat tailed (which they are), then either the covariance between IQ and performance doesn’t exist or it is uninformational. It will show a finite number in sample but doesn’t exist statistically. Intelligence in IQ is determined by academic psychologists via statistical constructs s.a. correlation that they patently don’t understand. It does correlate to very negative performance (as it was initially designed to detect learning special needs) but then any measure would work there. 

It is a false comparison to claim that IQ “measures the hardware” rather than the software. It can measure some arbitrarily selected mental abilities (in a testing environment) believed to be useful. To do well in life you need depth and ability to select your own problems and to think independently. And one has to be a lunatic to believe that a standardized test will reveal independent thinking.

IQ & Jobs
There is this argument that if you fall into a certain subgroup of IQ-distrubution - certain jobs will be off the table. This is again, stupidity at work.

Notice the noise: The top 25% of janitors have higher IQ than the bottom 25% of college professors, even counting the circularity. The circularity bias shows most strikingly with MDs as medical schools require a higher SAT score.  Realize that the concept has huge variance, enough to be deemed uninformative. Unlike measurements of height or wealth, which carry a tiny relative error, many people get yuugely different results for the same IQ test (I mean the same person!), up to 2 standard deviations as measured across people, higher than the sampling error in the population itself! This additional source of sampling error weakens the effect by propagation of uncertainty way beyond its predictability when applied to the evaluation of a single individual. It also tells you that you as an individual are vastly more diverse than the crowd, at least with respect to that measure!

If, as psychologists show MDs and academics tend to have a higher “IQ” that is slightly informative (higher, but on a noisy average), it is largely because to get into schools you need to score on a test similar to “IQ”. The mere presence of such a filter increases the visible mean and lower the visible variance. Probability and statistics confuse fools.

Most of this was inspired/taken over by Nassim Talebs work about IQ!

 

 

Edited March 16, 2022 by undeather

[Max_V]

15 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Heavy weight training increases IQ.

Don't know if this is ironic or not, but if you're serious, what is your source on that?

[Max_V]

@Joel3102 That's very interesting. Could you shoot me a link or name of book,etc. that could get me more information?

[ValiantSalvatore]

@Max_V

29 minutes ago, Max_V said:

Don't know if this is ironic or not, but if you're serious, what is your source on that?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-74140-7
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202010/more-proof-vigorous-workouts-boost-fluid-intelligence
 

Found this. Unsure if this helps though.

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Max_V said:

Don't know if this is ironic or not, but if you're serious, what is your source on that?

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/202010/more-proof-vigorous-workouts-boost-fluid-intelligence

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/weight-training-may-boost-brain-power

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6617693/

[something_else]

The fact that you are self-reflecting like this indicates that you're pretty smart anyway. And your post is well written. If you were really irreversibly thick as mince you'd be able to tell from your writing, but really it's very coherent. I'm not sure what you're worrying about to be honest.

If you are consistently asking yourself questions like "am I actually smart?" then the answer is most likely that you are. Self-reflection requires a lot of intelligence

The main thing that separates people who are really good at highly logical/academic pursuits from those who are not good at them is actually motivation rather than raw intelligence. Becoming an academic requires an insane amount of motivation and dedication to a field. Most academics have average or maybe slightly above average intelligence, but they've loved their field since they were a very young age

[zurew]

4 hours ago, undeather said:

There is this argument that if you fall into a certain subgroup of IQ-distrubution - certain jobs will be off the table. This is again, stupidity at work.

Do you think that IQ tests at work can have some relevance, or do you think that these IQ tests are completely stupid?

What would you measure for or what set of metrics would you use, if you wanted to hire someone, and if you wanted to use an automatic approach to see how capable that particular person is for the job .

Of course every automatic approach will be somewhat reductive, but if you have a big company, maybe it is a good move to use something automatic.

Edited March 16, 2022 by zurew

[Reciprocality]

Intelligence is the most meta subject there is, at least within current academia, it is mind boggling how much of it we have. 

The more people that are measured in an IQ setting the closer to a theory of intelligence you can extract from the results, to reduce an individual to their result is therefore inherently a problem.

The score can be accurately conceived of in relation to the one taking it the way a predator relates to the places it hunts its most typical prey. Such to predict the potential for a lions survival by means of that (the place it hunts) alone as similar to predicting a Nobel laureate by their scored IQ.

It would work a great deal, but not say much of the underlying connection by itself. 

Edited March 16, 2022 by Reciprocality

[undeather]

41 minutes ago, zurew said:

Do you think that IQ tests at work can have some relevance, or do you think that these IQ tests are completely stupid?

What would you measure for or what set of metrics would you use, if you wanted to hire someone, and if you wanted to use an automatic approach to see how capable that particular person is for the job .

Of course every automatic approach will be somewhat reductive, but if you have a big company, maybe it is a good move to use something automatic.

The "worth" of a tool is entirely based on it's utilization. IQ is at the bottom an immoral measure that, while not working, can put people (and, worse, groups) in boxes for the rest of their lives. However, that doesnt mean its completely stupid all the time.

IQ measures your ability to manage a predefined set of patterns in a finite amount of time. Those patterns obviously correlate, at least to a certain degree in certain fields, with real life problem solving capacities. So sure, if you are looking to hire someone for a Job which requires this sort of processing (i.e theoretical physics for example), then IQ might be one metric to look at. On the other side, I can almost guarantee you that some of the brightest geniuses in our history books did not have a super high IQ. If you actually look at the data, you will find a lot of black-swan cases in almost any correlative category, meaning that there is much more to intelligence in ANY field than just this ambiguous number. 

The best metric you can use is the one which is required for the specific job. No automation process to date will be able to deal with this kind of complexity. If I had to hire someone I would base my decision on first impression, intuition and a well defined period of observing the learning curve.
 

Edited March 16, 2022 by undeather

[axiom]

If you want people to think you're intelligent without actually being intelligent, just memorise a bunch of stuff. And sacrifice all of your other interests for some extremely highly-respected field, such as law, physics or geopolitics. Then make it a priority to communicate simple ideas in oblique, impenetrably esoteric ways which leave people nodding in perplexed awe.

Some extremely right-brain orientated people struggle a lot putting things into words. But the insights they've gained in life could be magnitudes greater than those of ordinary people, and especially greater than those who have lived predominantly in the left hemisphere their whole lives. 

And so this is the limitation of IQ.

Spending hours contemplating and deconstructing reality (also psychedelics, meditation) is the secret to true intelligence. But it doesn't mean you'll suddenly be able to sound clever, nor able to communicate your most profound insights to other people in ways that they'll understand.

Edited March 16, 2022 by axiom

[Terell Kirby]

16 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Yes, learning is essential. But academia is not.

Such a great point, I believe a ton of people confuse the two.

14 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

The true measure of intelligence is holistic comprehension.

I do recommend everyone check out your vids on holism .. it breaks down what true intelligence is, making academia only a small piece of a much larger (intelligent) ecosystem that is conscious.

[zurew]

2 hours ago, undeather said:

The best metric you can use is the one which is required for the specific job.

Would you say, that a bare minimum IQ is required for almost any job, or thats a wrong argument? The reason why i ask, because i have read about it somewhere, and i am curious, because you seem to know a lot about this.

2 hours ago, undeather said:

No automation process to date will be able to deal with this kind of complexity. If I had to hire someone I would base my decision on first impression, intuition and a well defined period of observing the learning curve.

I mean, if you know exactly what is required for that particular job, you can construct a set of metrics, and that can be used and that can somewhat automatize the hiring process or it can reveal some important stuff ,for that special job. Of course the whole process shouldn't be automatized.

Testing with  certain kind of Intelligent metrics lets be it IQ or EQ or something other can be useful. That does not mean though, that it can show overall how intelligent you are, because its all depends on the context, and on what you want to do. So given the necessary context, Intelligent metrics can be utilized.

If we are specifically talking about an overall intelligence of a human, then i am agreeing with you ,that only using IQ for it, is really dumb.

 

2 hours ago, undeather said:

On the other side, I can almost guarantee you that some of the brightest geniuses in our history books did not have a super high IQ. If you actually look at the data, you will find a lot of black-swan cases in almost any correlative category, meaning that there is much more to intelligence in ANY field than just this ambiguous number. 

 

Yeah, i am sure there is much more to intelligence, than just IQ, there is no agrument there.

It would be interesting, if we could make a set of metrics that could could reveal the geniuses and the outside of the box thinkers. Maybe assuming it can be done with a set of metrics is dumb in an of itself, because its too reductionistic, and there are things that can't be put in a box, but maybe there could be something, if enough number of metrics is used.