I never understood the concept of one’s IQ. I always thought it was measured by ones understanding of the world around them, but someone told me that it’s more a test to measure ones ability to reason. What does an IQ test actually measure? And is it really all that important?
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I suggest listening to the excellent “G” miniseries from the RadioLab podcast, which goes into the history and faults of IQ testing.
Being frank an IQ test measures how good you are at a specific standarized test compared to your peers and nothing else.
The method is kind of simple. You do the test and your grade is curved using s bell curve considering your peers. An 100 IQ means you are at the average.
What does it REALLY measures? How good you are at the test. Ok, so what the test is for? It’s debatable. On most cases it is just a test, so, as all tests, it is useless if we use it to compare you with another individual. Even so it can give us some hints about how our minds work in varied environments, but you can’t take it to seriously.
The most important thing to know is that no single IQ test is considered standard, and the tests generally are more and more disregarded as relevant because it’s so hard to actually measure intelligence. The biggest thing measurable is General intelligence – G factor. There’s something to it, but it’s also pretty up in the air.
Tl;dr IQ tests are mostly inaccurate and irrelevant measurements
[Here is a good article on it.](https://www.verywellmind.com/history-of-intelligence-testing-2795581)
A few notable excerpts,
“During the early 1900s, the French government asked Binet to help decide which students were most likely to experience difficulty in school. The government had passed laws requiring that all French children attend school, so it was important to find a way to identify children who would need specialized assistance.”
” This first intelligence test, referred to today as the Binet-Simon Scale, became the basis for the intelligence tests still in use today. However, Binet himself did not believe that his psychometric instruments could be used to measure a single, permanent, and inborn level of intelligence.
Binet stressed the limitations of the test, suggesting that intelligence is far too broad a concept to quantify with a single number. Instead, he insisted that intelligence is influenced by many factors, that it changes over time, and that it can only be compared in children with similar backgrounds. “
Pattern Cognition makes up a big focus of IQ tests. This is your ability to extrapolate data from patterns and this is a extremely useful ability in everyday life. It is applicable in gaming to problem solving at work and home.
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