In thinking about IQ..

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

I have several thoughts about IQ…

The first thought is that we use IQ quite often to bash someone…
several people on this site have bashed me for having a “LOW IQ”
which is simply not true… as anyone who as read me will know…
I have written and I quote, “You are an idiot” which is a variation
on IQ… I usually refer to Trump as IQ45… most, certainly not all,
but quite a few people around here use intelligence as a marker
of some sort…

one of the problems, among many, is the fact that IQ tests
themself create issues as to their effectiveness…the very words
used on an IQ test can raise or lower an IQ score… If I don’t understand
the directions given for a particular task, I will not score very well…
the only way IQ tests can actually be accurate, is that everyone who
takes them have the exact same understanding of the words used
on an IQ test… and that is clearly not possible… so because of how one
learns and uses words can determine an IQ score, we can’t really use or trust
IQ tests… and yet in talking to people, we can gauge, for the most part,
if the person we are talking to is a higher IQ person or not…

as I am old and has had many different managers in my working life,
I can make some distinctions about managers… most of them,
are actually average intelligence, at best… but what sets them
“above” those who are of higher intelligence? why do “average intelligence”
people become managers and those with “higher intelligence” don’t?

the act of communication… being able to communicate to people,
is or ought to be, the highest function of a manager…
and in communication, the lower IQ person should be better able
to communicate to more people than the higher IQ person would
be able to communicate to… Plato’s allegory of the cave, is an
excellent example of how communication happens with an intelligent
person… they have “higher” truths but because of the nature of
those truths, how would you communicate those truths to those
who haven’t seen or don’t understand those truths?
You can’t… let us take an example, evolution…
evolution is a fact, no different than gravity is a fact,
and yet, millions of people deny or denounce evolution…
and those people create all kinds of “proofs” that claim to
show how evolution is in fact, false… now, if we were to find
someone who wasn’t biased, either way, and explain the theory of
evolution to them, they would most likely, agree to the possibility
of evolution… and here is why we run into trouble, by our
family education, by our schooling, the state and the society
and the culture impact upon our values, beliefs, hopes and dreams,
we can be misled into thinking that evolution isn’t possible…
we are indoctrinated into certain beliefs, and some of those
indoctrinations can lead us to deny as fact, something like
evolution…most of the arguments against evolution is
religious in nature… and quite often, the religious will use
“scientific” answers to discredit evolution… an example of this
is the argument of how evolution ‘‘violates’’ the second
law of thermodynamics, spoiler alert, it doesn’t… but only one
who has done some studying into the laws of thermodynamics
can know this…and therein comes the problem,
how many people have some knowledge of the laws of thermodynamics?
I would guess very few around here have clear knowledge
of the laws of thermodynamics… and most people here have at
least some college education… and should have some working
knowledge of the laws of thermodynamics…

so the question of education is also a question of the values
we hold and why? in other words, which values are we going to
uphold? Our values that come from the indoctrinated values
of childhood, from the state, society, religion, family, or
are we going to hold the values that we come to, in our
attempts to overcome our childhood indoctrinations?

Now how are we going to communicate the scientific
understanding of evolution to someone who is
committed to a religious understanding of the universe?

How do we communicate our scientific understanding of the universe to
those who remain committed to living their lives in the cave, to
the religious commitment to understanding the universe?

here let us take a moment to think about this?

Kropotkin

2

The modern IQ test is most often attributed to Hans Eysenck who promoted the test and sold it to HR departments wanted to cut the chaff, whilst selecting people for employment.
It has commonly been taken uncritically as some sort of “objective” measure of what we like to call intelligence, but the most cursory glance at the categories of test within the set beg criticism and there has been much in the literature and having certain centricisms. I’ve heard white, middle class, western centricisms, even a jewish centricism been levelled as critique.
The test has three narrowly focused divisions; word, number and visio-spatial. One has to ask since when have these particular interests been valid measures of intelligence?
The choice of words used would advantage people with a particular vocabulary, particularly American English and the types of number problems would favour people having learned maths in a traditional western-centric numbering system.
The visio-spatial is limited by the problems all being two dimensional, paper based problems whose resolution can be abstract and banal.
There is no room for artistic intelligence, three dimensional awareness, and the entire panoply of social and emotional intelligence plays no part whatever.
There are other tests that go towards unpacking personality types such as Myers-Briggs but the results rely wholly on the accuracy of the test witness which leads to the bleeding obvious results, which reflect more about how people see themselves than any thing useful.

But so ubiquitous it the “IQ” that the two letters are often interchangeable for “intelligence” which is bullshit.
One only has to reflect that the Palaeolithic geniuses that invented the Bow and Arrow and painted the cave walls at Lascaux both would have scored an IQ of ZERO as they would not even have been able to write their names at the top of the page.

3

in thinking about the difference between “religious
truths” and “scientific truths” is that ''religious truths"
tend to reach for the lowest common denominator…

‘‘repent and you will saved’’… ‘‘existence is about suffering’’

are two different religious truths…

whereas in scientific truths, ‘‘evolution is a theory’’
we are given the backstory into why evolution is true…
we can follow the path of evolution in the fossils of animals,
plants and insects and fish…to deny evolution is to deny
these fossils…we can use various scientific facts and methods
to confirm the truth of evolution… scientific truths encourage
one to examine and explore the basis for the science behind
evolution…as the religious truths discourage any examination
of the truths behind religions…and what does any of this as to do
with IQ? The higher one’s IQ, the more likely one will be curious
about the world… and curiosity isn’t about accepting religious
truths that won’t explore the meaning and understanding of the world
past the religious truths…

An example of this is the question of, why does the universe exist?
to the religious person, it’s because god willed it, to the
scientific person, that isn’t enough… we need more…
in the end, all religious truths end with “god will it”…
whereas in science, that isn’t the end of the wondering
about the nature of the universe, that is the beginning…

the sign of intelligence is about the seeking of the nature of
reality… it is a sign of intelligence to want to seek beyond
the “truths” of the state, the society, the civilization,
for we know that the truths of the state, the society
and civilization lies in the “truths” that can be
made for the lowest common denominator…
in other words, the religious truths and the truths
offered by the state/society/civilizations are both
engaged in the truths that are of the lowest common
denominator… how are the religious truths of obedience
any difference than the truths of the state in which
the highest value is obedience… in other words, both
the religious and civic truths are obedience to those values…

strict obedience isn’t really thought of as a “higher” truth…
I would consider it to be really an lowest common denominator
ideal… so the lowest common denominator for both the state
and religious is strict obedience to their respective ‘‘truths’’…

the higher IQ person truths isn’t really about obedience to
one truth and one truth only… it is more about the search for
the truths…the seeking is the engagement a higher IQ person
will have and not necessarily any given truth that that the
state or religions will give…

in other words, the ‘‘TRUTH’’ is already given by the state
and within religions…and what is required by both the state
and religions is strict obedience… and that explains the
the uniting of the religious aspects and the governmental
control of the state…the uniting of the religious and the
state come from this need for strict obedience required by both…
and this marriage between religions and the state is as old as both
religions and the state in human history…so we can see that
there is no difference between the obedience required between the
state and the obedience required by religions…

as an higher IQ will question the basis of the truths required
by both the state and religions, it is in the best interest of both
state and religions to discourage the higher IQ person…
to prevent those people from examining truths outside
of the ‘‘official’’ truths of state/religions…they use both official
and unofficial means to discourage higher IQ types from an
examination of ‘‘official’’ truths…and we see this best in America…
those who engage in ‘‘truths’’ that aren’t “officially” sanctioned by the
state, are prosecuted in some manner… in other words, we see
attacks upon those who fail to follow “official” American thoughts
or behavior… thus those who march to a different drummer are
attacked… thus we can see why we have both personal attacks on
people, for example the attack on hippies and those like beatniks
Kerouac and Ginsberg… for they don’t follow the “official” sanctioned
ideology of America… remember the “official” policy of America
is obedience to the American ideals… family, god, state…
and we must obey them or face sanctions…

Thus according to the conservatives on this site, because
of my lack of obedience to these ideals of state, family,
god, I am a traitor among other things… low IQ, enemy of the state,
commie scum… I am attacked because of my refusal to obey the
official sanctioned ideals of the state… recall the conservative
attacks upon the teaching of the universities…recall the attacks on CRT…
those attacks exist because they, CRT, do not follow the officially sanctioned
ideals of state/religions… in which the “official” built in state policy of America
has been the values of bigotry and prejudice against anyone is
who isn’t white and holds certain values… recall in the constitution,
that blacks were counted as 3/5 of a white person, that prejudice
against blacks were built into the very structure of American ideals,
by the various Jim Crow laws preventing blacks from gaining
equality with the whites… within my lifetime, there were laws
preventing blacks and white from marrying in certain states…
Virginia for example… the case of Loving vs Virginia… decided in
1967…too many, far too many of our laws and principles
are based upon bias, prejudice, religious values…
and we have damaged ourselves in this regard…but
more on this later…

to the conservative, the number one value is obedience to
the posited values of the state/religions/family…
thus the reason for the conservatives attack on anyone who
dares challenged the “officially” sanctioned ideals/values of
America… and all of this comes from the nature of
intelligence…

Kropotkin