Hello Matt, and welcome. IQ tests aren't a bad thing as long as they are used/seen for what they are, a tool not a definition. Another good site is:

www.highiqsociety.org/

It's another one you need to set up a login with (spam isn't as bad as tickle or emode though)

Sonja

I find IQ tests quite useful. Correction: the theoretical population mean is 100. The observed mean is about 101.6.

It is certainly possible to measure intelligence. For this measurement to be meaningful, it is necessary to understand exactly what intelligence is: the ability to learn. People often confuse being intelligent w/being informed; you'll agree, I'm sure, that these are two very different things. It doesn't imply that people w/higher scores are capable of learning ANY subject, or that people w/lower scores aren't capable of learning. Many people believe that the IQ tests DO say that, which is often a crux in their arguments against it.

Finally, many people dislike the concept that half the population is of below average intelligence; often going so far as to say that all people are created equal so their intelligences must also be equal, and that the IQ test must be clearly be faulty for failing to support this position.

I find the online IQ tests most interesting. Hope you all do too.

i've never thought of iq tests in terms of tool vs definition, that makes sense. and when you break the whole thing down, i see how it can be possible to get at least an estimate of someone's ability to learn. oh yeah, the online tests are interesting aren't they? they're peaking my curiosity w/r/t the subject even more. i tried the one on highiqsociety.org (thx for the link!) and it seemed to have more visual questions than the tickle one. my wacky mind is visual in nature so those questions seemed easier (i was still smoking out the sides of my ears after i was done though heh!).

what's really interesting to me is the choice of questions in these tests, why a certain question is considered a good gauge of some form of intelligence. here's an example, from the tickle test:

51. If all Laps are Lops, all Lops are Loops, and all Loops are Lups, then which of the following is not true?
a) All Laps are Loops
b) All Loops are Laps
c) All Laps are Lups
d) All Lops are Lups

ok, when i read this question i found one answer that stood out beyond the rest, but a second later i thought to myself "but what if these are all just names for the same dang thing?". what if laps/lops/loops/lups are like james/jim/jimmy/jimbo? then all of the answers would be true, and the question is broken. then i thought to myself "maybe its my mind that's broken hahah!". then i wondered how that would affect a score on a test like this. =)

a question that forces you to use logic makes sense if it effectively gauges your ability to take what you already know and use it to make sense of things you don't know. but...what makes a question that forces you to visualize something (ex. a rotation of an object in space) a good gauge of (some aspect of) intelligence? is there such a thing as "visual logic"? the idea is interesting at least.

I took the tickle test. When I was done, it directed me to a page which was not working. While I am of the opinion that I answered many of the questions "correctly," I felt the test was highly geared toward mathematical-style thinking. If we live in a society where one's ability to reason out math problems is the primary guage of intelligence, then I'm affraid the people doing the judging must be pretty narrow-minded.

already i'm picking up good clues about where to go for more info, thx y'all. i'm starting to look for more info now on different documented types of learning. i'll probably have more questions soon!

i started looking into this whole thing as a curiosity with admitted bias against measuring intelligence at all (jorga i def hear what you're saying). that set theory question from the tickle test seemed to sum up how i felt at the time about the subject: from a math standpoint there wasn't enough evidence in the question to soundly disprove any of a/b/c/d (the intended answer, given the information provided, could still possibly be true)...but if the question had been worded as "...then which of the following is not *necessarily* true?" i would have had less 'qualmage'. so it boiled down to a matter of language amiguity. i saw that as a failure in the test...a test widely available to us.

with human nature how it is, i always suspected that almost no means employed to date for measuring ability would be adequate. and we know how sensitive people can be to having their abilities finitely quantified. heck, i myself still fall into this category: i believe that (barring things like physical damage or deformity) everyone has the mental capacity to be what might be considered now a "profound genius", and the only difference between people in terms of iq is the fitness of their mind (if viewed like a muscle) and psychology (in terms of self-limiting beliefs). i'm not sure i believe that genetics plays a part. and yes, i realize this is hugely debatable(!). call me a hopeless romantic, but it does at least make me morally sensitive to things (like poorly constructed iq tests) that would lead us to believe we have false limits.