okay first off i don't have a number to give you because i don't think i've ever taken an IQ test?

but more importantly i think iq testing is complete codswallop. obviously there's a whole field on standardized testing with people who dedicated their lives to researching intelligence and intelligence assessments and who am i to dismiss those people or their findings, right, but i think it's more the way society interprets their findings and i have a whole very very long rant about all the things i take issue with and tbh i think it actually falls in line with the thinking of psychologists...part of my conviction that i'm right is pure narcissism but another part is fundamentally the way science gets translated into culture. just as an example, we like to think that we're smart because we can answer an iq question correctly but actually...researchers choose iq questions because there's a correlation between people who answer in a specific way and intelligence. it's correlative rather than causative and kind of in the opposite direction that would be intuitive, and this is known by psychologists and they talk about it, even if it doesn't get heard by the general public.

sometimes kpop artists get touted for having 150 point IQs and whenever i hear it i laugh to myself. it's not at all because i think kpop artists can't be smart - i'm sure those individuals ARE intelligent, but i think using a raw IQ score to "proove" that fact is ridiculous. iq tests DO have statistical validity, but not in the way we think. generally, if person A does better than person B on IQ test 1, they're likely to do better than person B on IQ test 2 as well. but if you look at raw scores...say for example person A scores 117 on test 1 and person B scores 110. on test 2, person A scores 125 and person B scores 118. in both tests person A is doing better than person B, but if person A only did test 1 and person B only did test 2 and compared scores...it would seem like person B is smarter than person A, which is not a conclusion you can draw! and this example holds in reality, you WILL get different scores on different tests. and more than that, i said "likely" earlier because the same person taking the same test can get different results...it absolutely depends on, for example, how well rested you are, whether you're hungry, if you're cold...that makes intuitive sense, right? your ability to reason out a problem if i shook you awake at 4am is way different from if you woke up naturally at 10am, had a cup of coffee...so in the end telling someone your IQ "number" is really giving them an arbitrary value.

let's say you could somehow standardize the process tho, make people all take it under the same physiological conditions and have a statistically consistent randomized test. i absolutely believe that intelligence testing was and continues to be an institutionalized way to preserve and reinforce biases, including cultural, racial, and gender-based. i don't really want to go into it but 'stereotype threat' is absolutely a real phenomenon, and you can see the societal biases built into IQ tests themselves. for example, vocabulary and "general knowledge" questions are structured around the assumption of a specific learning, generally typical of white middle to upper class upbringings. not having the same exposures and learning opportunities absolutely diminishes your chances of performing "better than average" on a test. for example, if you have an immigrant who is incredibly intelligent but lacking in cultural or linguistic fluency, they'd do extremely poorly on these tests. i really think IQ tests continue to allow people to make imaginary racial judgements...people point to them as "science" but the science behind IQ testing is really not so easily discernible from IQ results at all...

and what, exactly, is intelligence? what makes someone smart? i've heard of intelligence being called a folk concept, and isn't that so true? don't we all have slightly different definitions of intelligence? i think generally for IQ tests you tend to evaluate abstract problem solving skills and deductive reasoning abilities, but does that really equal intelligence? i really don't know. i'm not sure i would even use multiple intelligences for a working definition you could test because it's just so subjective. and any inch you give, people would take a concrete mile. like, for me, i think intelligence also involves social awareness and creativity. that textbook 'book' smarts aren't enough, and you need 'street' smarts. when i praise someone for being clever, i rarely give a crap how well they can learn patterns of shapes or divide by 17, but those are things that are clearly categorized as important components of intelligence by IQ tests.

even if we could agree on intelligence being problem solving and reasoning, how good is IQ testing at evaluating that? some of the things people assess are speed of processing and capacity for learning. but the way these things are measured is usually through memorizing lists of words. is that more or less 'learning' than listening to a lecture on economic trends and being asked to subsequently provide your own analysis? what if you can memorize really well but can't apply? is that learning? what if you can apply really well but can't memorize? is that learning?

and if it is - so what? what does IQ testing tell us? what significance does it have? it used to be considered a predictor of academic success but there's a whole body of work out there now that says resilience is a way better predictor than general intelligence. and even that...like what do grades really mean? that you can provide the answers one person wants from you at a specific instant in time...it's all kinda meaningless. i kind of feel a responsibility to remind people of this because my grades are stellar? i'm not saying grades mean nothing because i have bad grades and wanna feel better about myself, i'm saying it because i have the experience to really appreciate how little they tell you about a person. good grades don't mean you'll be valuable in the workforce, for example. but i don't have a utilitarian view on people's worth either - i think you can be an incredibly valuable human being even if you're not serving some pragmatic function.

and what about the people who have really high IQs or are intelligent or whatever but use their abilities to do harm? like finding all the loopholes in the law to evade taxes or conning people out of money...in that case who cares about intelligence when they're awful human beings?

i could honestly go on for hours but these are just a few rudimentary qualms i have with IQ...it's not like i don't like smart people or something, it's just that i think there's such a complicated dynamic between character traits and skills...there really has to be a balance...who someone is cannot be defined nor interpreted by a single attribute, and most attributes are poorly defined and nearly impossible to really assess objectively...it's all hogwash...nothing means anything...nothing is real life is a lie...meritocracy is a myth...etc...