What’s up with IQ?

IQ: the go-to way to say that someone’s brain is big or small. But have you ever stopped to consider what IQ actually is? It stands for Intelligence Quotient, so we can tell by the name that it’s some numerical measure of someone’s smarts. That brings us to the question of what intelligence is. The basic and obvious answer would be how well someone can think, but this article is going to go a little more in depth and consider what would make someone intelligent.
Being good at school or chess are pretty obvious answers for what intelligence looks like, but what about something like composing a song or writing a novel? What about knowing which play to make in a good ol’ game of sportsball? Is aptitude at a game of strategy some kind of smartness, or is it just instinct? What about things like emotional intelligence or social ability? It can surely be said that all of those things are valuable for a brain to have, but the question is whether they count as intelligence and whether IQ measures them.
Regardless of your personal opinion on what specifically counts as intelligence, the science shakes out pretty heavily against IQ. This ground is well-trod, with numerous studies throughout the years showing that people get different scores at different times of day, when given a study session beforehand, or if they’ve already taken a test in the past. IQ tests don’t do what they claim to, and it’s easy to figure that out with some simple googling. If that’s the case, you might be wondering, for good reason, why I’m even writing this article.
That brings us to the actual discussion I want to have here. If we were to suppose that IQ were completely real, accurate, and objective, what would you propose we do with it? Knowing the intelligence of every member of society wouldn’t be as helpful as you might think. The only possible application of that kind of knowledge that I can think of beyond whimsical curiosity about something novel would be sorting society into intelligence-based castes. Now, that’s all well and good if your primary aim is to make the system as efficient as possible, but if you stop and think about it for more than a second it becomes very obviously dystopian.
Proponents of IQ who have thought this far into the issue are probably under the impression that they’ll be placed at the top of the hierarchy, or at least be able to hold some middle management position. Some might claim they would be fine with the manual labor or customer service job that nobody wants, but in practice they wouldn’t be. If they’re claiming that they know the best way to order society, there’s no way they would think they’re anything less than the upper echelon of good-thinkery.
Now, obviously most people haven’t given the topic that much attention. It’s just something that’s in the back of their head– and that’s exactly the problem. It’s common knowledge in culture that IQ is a way to measure how smart someone is, so nobody thinks about the assumptions that have to be made for IQ to seem like a good and correct idea. Measuring intelligence is asking the wrong question: it’s like looking at a painting and wondering how expensive the frame was.
What matters isn’t whether people are generally smart or not, it’s whether they have specific skills. Some people are better starting out than others, but anyone who has the curiosity and dedication to improve can become leagues better than an untrained prodigy. Not only are our current methods of intelligence testing ineffective, the overall concept of determining numerical smartness is useless.
You might remember that at the beginning of this article I asked a bunch of questions about what makes someone smart and what smartness even is. That wasn’t because I wanted to answer them for you, but because I wanted you to give it a little more thought than you might otherwise. Opinions can obviously differ on what makes a smart person and what doesn’t. I asked around and as you can see in the graphic accompanying this article, people had some different stuff to say.
The takeaway here is not that I have the real truth of everything you thought you knew. In fact, I want you to reject exactly that kind of black and white dogma. If you get any message from this article, let it be that you should think for yourself; don’t let other people tell you how well you’re doing that thinking.