And it all boils down to half of what exactly? What test or tests? What determines intelligence. How accurate is this 100 barrier?
The problem Abachler is that we just don't know. What we have been able to do so far was to measure certain aspects of what we consider intelligence. The bird's eye view is still unattainable mostly because we can't even agree with what intelligence really is (if it needs to be anything, for that matter).
Many people - among them scholars and professionals - strongly disagree with these IQ tests. They may prove something. The problem is that we don't know what. What's worse, people fare in the same tests differently according to the time of day, mood, and emotional status. It's just nearly impossible to draw statistical data from them. When seen isolated, these tests may have some median. But that's really because all statistical data can draw a median. It just doesn't mean anything as brewbuck suggested.
However, even more important than that is that we really took the extra steep and agreed to measure and compare results in such odd terms as children, infants and animals. Can you see how wrong this is?
Any statistical data draws its power from acceptable levels of homogeneity. But to say that an infant has an IQ of X is an absurd because certainly that child didn't take the same test as of an adult who is being also measured on the same scale. I'm not even going into animals, because I find the whole notion of expressing an animal intelligence in numbers as complete rubbish. We can't seem to agree on our own, how can we even start to hope understanding an alien brain?
All in all, I belong to that group of people that looks at these tests as merely tools for a specific task. They may prove useful, if correctly tailored, too measure in general terms certain levels of aptitude for a job position for instance. But never to measure intelligence. The whole notion of IQ tests is wrong from the start. If anything we should be looking at Aptitude Tests or something similar.
Originally Posted by mike_g
