I hear people say that high IQ doesn’t mean you are automatically good at something, but what does it mean then, in terms of physical properties of the brain? And how do they translate to one’s abilities?
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Not much. It’s not a perfect system and its main use is establishing baselines and reference points when testing groups of people for certain things but it’s not objective by any means. For example if I’m conducting a study on a group of people on their cognitive abilities, having them take IQ tests helps give a reference to compare them by. It’s not that it’s an absolute measure of intelligence but in that particular case its problems are somewhat mitigated by the fact that all participants take a test.
But there are several issues with it. For one it only tests certain abilities, and a lot of it revolves around math to a degree. You’re not asked to solve equations but you are often asked to analyse number sequences and discern patterns in numbers and the like. I get why, since in many ways being good at math and having high intelligence are considered tautological, but there’s issues with that. Obviously not all smart people are good at math and not all people good at math are necessarily smart.
Math, is a learned skill. If you sit down and study math you get better at it, and that’s arguably the main flaw tih IQ tests as well. They can be trained, you can take IQ tests repetitively and get increasingly higher scores. That doesn’t mean you’re getting smarter by studying a specific set of exercises, it just means you’re getting better at IQ tests, which proves that they’re not objective. An objective intelligence test would produce the same results no matter how many times you took it.
The idea that you can quantify and accurately measure intelligence or even define it accurately is itself up for debate.
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