Hashtag Intelligence Quotient

It's interesting how I always seem to have a few coinciding events from different pieces of my life meshing together in a way that lends itself to writing blog posts. I'm not sure if this is strictly serendipitous, or if this is my own mind subconsciously piecing it all together for me. Either way, it makes my job as a blogger so much easier.

Today, one of the campers from another group noticed that I often use more sophisticated words when talking to him in particular. I told him it was because I know that he's smart, and he asked me to guess his IQ. It was at that point when I realized that I don't actually understand the IQ scale at all. I'd never bothered to look it up. And now, lucky readers, you won't have to, either! I mean, unless you want to partake in some tangential learning. I'm always all for that.

So, before I get into the explanation of the scale, I'm going to go back to that "serendipity" thing I was talking about before (and no, I don't mean the movie with John Cusack in it). It just so happens that as I was scrolling through my Facebook feed today, someone had taken a "quick IQ test" and shared the results. "Alright, I'll bite," I thought to myself. I clicked the link and took the test for myself, netting a tidy sum of 130 points. An "exceptional" score, apparently. My, don't I feel special!

That was rhetorical. I do feel special. I uh... if you answered that out loud, I have bad news for you--you talk to computer screens. Sorry you had to find out this way.

Anyway, I looked up the IQ scale after I got my score. Apparently, this is the gist of how it works:
100 points is the median score--which means that, on a bell curve, a score of 100 is right smack in the middle, at the 50th percentile mark. Every fifteen points above or below this is another standard deviation from the center. So, by way of fancy statistical calculations, we can determine that 95% of people have a score between 70 and 130. This means I'm in the top 3% of humans, intelligence-wise. That's pretty damn nifty.

Of course, IQ tests could be total bollocks. If they are, I might be no smarter than a chimpanzee. Or a kumquat. Or even a piece of driftwood. But I'll give them at least a little bit of credibility.

To be honest, I'm a little skeptical about things like IQ. They just seem so immeasurable and/or subjective. But, I guess, if we can have a strictly mathematical grading system in our schools that directly correlates to how many questions we answered correctly, we do have some way to measure--at the very least--knowledge of a certain subject. Does this relate directly to what we've coined as "IQ"? I have no idea. There are some things about humans, however, that I doubt we will ever fully understand. In the meantime, I'm totally okay with people thinking I'm smarter than approximately 97.8% of people in the world.

EDIT: Turns out, memorizing the answers to an IQ test makes you measurably smarter--at least by the standards of said IQ test. So yeah, maybe the tests aren't perfect.

As with all scientific tests, you really need a large sample size--which, in terms of an IQ test, means a lot of questions. Unfortunately, with the nature of IQ tests being that they're timed, and with how goddamn dry and repetitive they can be (find the pattern in these shapes. Now find the pattern in these numbers. Now find the pattern... etc.), I just can't give them my full concentration. I've always been a good test-taker, but if my score depended on how quickly I finished, I'd be doomed. I bank on the fact that I have much longer than I need to finish the test.

However, with this new technology that can pause videos when you look away from the screen, and with a little bit of psychology and clever design, we might be able to make an IQ test that knows when you're paying attention to it and when you aren't. Because I don't think that ADD and a low IQ coincide. You can be brilliant and not pay full attention all the time--perhaps because your mind is a more interesting place to be than a stupid test filled with weird symbols.

It's really a double-edged sword. The longer you make the test, the more accurate it is, but the more boring it becomes. Unless you're in the mood to take an IQ test, or you really love taking them, you're not ever going to know just how smart you are. Chances are, though, if you love taking IQ tests, you're probably at least in that top 3%, and you're probably pretty good at them.