oh bluewing
you can train for iq tests but even so, you cant train yourself more than 15 points up or down. so you cant go from 100 to 160.:
I've read this before, but I wouldn't accept this notion uncritically. Keep in mind, most sources you'll find on the subject are unreliable as the problem of IQ has long been influenced by social and political propaganda. Its also the case that very few reliable studies on the matter have been published as honest scholars tend to shy away from the topic.
On purely conceptual grounds, I'd be skeptical of that claim. Most IQ questions are rather simple in nature and given the sufficient time, a person of average intelligence can figure them all out. Furthermore, should he or she take enough tests, they could decipher the underlying pattern of most IQ tests as they are simple enough to accomplish this feat.
The trouble is that most people don't bother doing that and generally have little interest in spending a great deal of time solving puzzles. They also have little interest in pursuing other problem-solving activities that would help them perform well on the IQ test, as a result they stay at approximately the same level.
Besides, look at how many obtuse, but ambitious and industrious individuals attain admittance to Ivy league schools and graduate with honors? Part of what they had to accomplish for this is attain high GRE scores and other high test scores that correlate highly to IQ. If they could do that, they should be able to score highly on an IQ test. Since these people by definition are not bright and therefore aren't talented at solving puzzles, their test score before training should have been much lower than after.
Altogether, if you can dramatically improve your standardized test scores, there is no reason why you can't enhance your IQ scores as significantly.
Lastly, having a high IQ score is unlikely to be reflective of a person's intelligence. How quickly and accurately a person can solve simple puzzles has little bearing upon how he or she will perform at theoretical reasoning.
Having a high intelligence means being able to solve difficult puzzles with accuracy, not merely solving simple puzzles quickly and accurately. To retort to this, one may ask why is it that people who are good at solving difficult problems also do well on IQ tests? There is a correlation no doubt. Of course there is, people who are good at solving difficult problems (theoretical work in physics, math or philosophy) will likely also be good at solving easy problems quickly. However, the vice versa of this relation does not hold. People who are good at solving easy problems are not nearly as likely to be good at solving difficult problems. They may simply lack the skills in precise reasoning or imagination to handle difficult problems, even if they can solve simple problems that require few of such cognitive attributes at a lightning speed.
Altogether, its questionable whether IQ tests do measure intelligence as the kind of problems they assign are altogether irrelevant to the kind of puzzles one need to solve in order to be regarded as uncontroversially intelligent.
besides, there are other correlations: people whoose ears are symmetrical have a higher iq on average, and people who can tab their fingers very fast against a hard surface. these things indicate that iq is largely biological as noone would presume that you grow more symmetrical ears from contemplating philosophical problems, would they?
I've never heard of that, but I wouldn't be surprised to find this in print. After all, you have to remember that these ideas are a sophistication of craniology or a pursuit of discovering correlations between skull size and intelligence. A number of criminologists, and Lambrosso prominently, purported to establish high correlations between a number of physical attributes a person may have and intelligence or even propensity for responsible behavior in society.
Today such studies are known as outdated and mostly inspired by political ambitions rather than the truth-seeking. They have long been known to procure sympathy for racist doctrines. Many of such inquiries have been debunked as fraudulent. It is a remarkable fact of these studies that they aren't taken seriously today, part of it is due to their social stigma no doubt, but more importantly, of course is that thus far no positive correlations between having a certain physical feature and high IQ scores have yet been established and on purely conceptual grounds this idea seems absurd.
Is there any reason to suppose that people of a specific bodily attribute have greater natural intelligence than people of other attributes, barring the fact that blacks tend to score lower on IQ tests than the whites? But then again, its a fact that blacks in America have inferior educational opportunities, it could well be the case that people of 'inferior race and inferior attributes' aren't truly genetically inferior but simply exposed to less advantageous circumstances than the whites are.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Altogether, you ought to pay closer attention to the reliability of your sources as fraud has long loomed large in the topic of IQ, especially in the question of hereditary intelligence. Even if your source is reliable, don't accept its author's conclusion uncritically as very few scholars who published on the subject refrained from allowing their prejudices to vitiate their arguments.
