Ariadne Conill 🐰
IQ and other psychometric assessments are not actually backed by hard science but vibes
so when someone brags about having a "genius level IQ", just write them off as a narcissist
sincerely, your local psychologist turned software engineer
humans and other animals are complex systems, while there are diagnostic tests which measure a degree of performance in specific skill areas, you can't really boil someone's intelligence down to a single number: the person who sucks at math might be a great strategist, for example
incidentally: psychometric evaluation is heavily biased toward performance in math and other hard logic categories in general, so-called IQ tests especially.
also while I am dropping truth bombs: Mensa has problematic connections with the eugenics movement
if it were up to me, primary education would be focused on fostering curiosity and empathy rather than psychometric scores
because those are truly the critical life skills
and indeed in countries where they have gone in that direction, it turns out happiness is higher and productivity is higher
✧✦Catherine✦✧@ariadne wait, people use psychometric scores in primary education? that's... wild
@whitequark yes that is the backbone of american primary schooling. it is called common core. they teach to pass the tests.
@ariadne that's horrible
artemist@whitequark @ariadne i went to special "magnet schools" for "smart children" from age 9, the entry tests seemed very much what i expect iq tests to be (lots of matching patterns, reading comprehension, and weird math problems)
@whitequark @ariadne yeah, i took those tests because there were other interesting people i could meet that way, but i never got a number back and i actively avoided anything that referred to iq, since i rightly believed it to be an absurd metric designed to accentuate racism.
@whitequark @artemist racism and eugenics, yes