Iq And Mensa

[Alpine]

Hey... sorry for the late response. Farming guy, what you said is almost what I mean. People who are termed as "less intelligent" are treated as inferior. But the thing is, sometimes they do know plenty of things which people with higher intelligence don't. They can be self-sufficient and more successful in practical life. But my main concern is that this categorization may evolve into a different sort of discrimination, something like racism.

[Kriminal99]

Hey... sorry for the late response. Farming guy, what you said is almost what I mean. People who are termed as "less intelligent" are treated as inferior. But the thing is, sometimes they do know plenty of things which people with higher intelligence don't. They can be self-sufficient and more successful in practical life. But my main concern is that this categorization may evolve into a different sort of discrimination, something like racism.

 

Racism is something bad only if and when people intentionally use less accurate racial profiles to predict behavior or usefulness and ignore more accurate indications of these things that are just as easy to obtain. Otherwise, correlating behaviors and traits to a group like race for the purpose of making predictions is just an integral part of human intelligence.

 

So if you didn't hire a black person over a white person and didn't even look at their gpa's, education etc. then your choice would be stupid and wasteful because it's easy to get that information and they are better indicators of usefulness. But if for some reason you could not access any information other than race, then the statistics would mean by definition that hiring a black over a white would result in relative losses on average. (assuming random sampling from black and white population)

 

I bring this up because, I really cannot think of a more ACCURATE means of predicting effectiveness than IQ. If it did become sort of basis for gauging people's effectiveness, the efficiency of everything would probably increase a huge amount.

 

It is one thing if you are an adult and prepared to deal with life, but it is another for an adolescent and have other's determine how much you should be challenged in your course work. If a teacher uses only an IQ test to judge the ability of a student to learn, it could have lifelong consequenses for that student. I think reliance on an IQ test would be just plain lazy for an educator.

 

As for Mensa, I've never had much interest in trying to join. I'm not so sure it's just for socializing so much as it is for bragging rights. I don't need to know someone's IQ to determine if I like them. I just naturally gravitate to people I find interesting.

 

By lifelong consequences you seem to be implying that the student has an alternative. I actually know someone that felt like they were cheated in their education. They complain about the school staff that tried to hold them back and everything else, and I tried to help them make up for lost ground. I learned pretty quickly that there was a reason why that person was held back. This person would look at sequences of numbers and their brain would not recognize the patterns there, even though they knew the arithmetic behind the patterns. This made it impossible for them to learn something as simple as chains of equivalent fractions. This person is not quite "challenged" either. They would typically be referred to as having a "learning disability".

 

IQ is not something that people naturally understand the existence and significance of - it takes a large amount of awareness of one's self and surroundings to truly understand it. It may not even be possible to gain this understanding without observing people on both extremes of the spectrum so the differences are obvious and then seeing how those limitations and abilities scale back to the middle.

 

The choices are not easy to make for people who are actually responsible for making them (not just the silly teachers that implement them), but it may be between the student learning nothing because they are overwhelmed and learning a little that might help them.

[Alpine]

Kriminal99, you seem like a person one of those mature scientific guy who keeps emotions and logic separate. Farming guy on the other hand seems to be getting part of what I am saying. While a bad day may not decrease someone's IQ level, it can certainly make it hard for them to concentrate on the given task. Besides, IQ testing in school or college level or maybe for commercial purpose could involve tampering with or maybe partiality. In my school-life I have experienced partiality first-hand, not to mention that lack of supervision would lead to malpractices which can alter someone's future.