1159: IQ Tests | Skeptical Sunday

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Dad?

How do you make a happy egg?

Well, it starts with a happy hen.

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You can make eggs a bazillion ways, but that orange yoke is how you know it's happy.

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Welcome to Skeptical Sunday.

I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.

Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host Michael Regilio.

On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

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For decades, IQ tests have been used to judge people's intelligence.

These scores were often used when considering job applicants or determining educational placement.

And to this day, many of us still assume that somebody with a high IQ is smart and likely to succeed in life.

I guess I'll consider myself the exception.

You do seem to be doing pretty well for yourself, Michael.

You made it onto this podcast at that point.

I guess your score is pretty low then, Jordan.

The bar for hiring, yes.

My IQ classified information so so far.

I'm actually, truth be told, I'm not sure if I even know my IQ score.

I have no clue.

Do you know yours?

I did take one of those tests once, but to be honest with you, I forgot my IQ score, which I suppose goes to show you something.

Yeah, it might.

To be honest, I'm not sure that any of this goes to show anyone anything, which is why I have you, Michael Regilio, our resident skeptic, or one of them, here to help unpack IQ tests.

So what are they?

How did they come about?

And most importantly, should we take them seriously at all?

I think it's fair to say that people with high IQ scores are more likely to support their validity than those with low IQ scores.

That sounds like a smart way of saying that if a test says somebody is intelligent, they're more likely to believe that the test is accurate.

Color me surprised.

And it's just like being good at chess.

If you're good at chess, you want everyone to think that means you're smart.

And if you're bad at chess, then chess doesn't mean a damn thing.

So if you're a skeptic of IQ scores, maybe you have a low IQ.

Yeah, I see where you're going with this.

I might also be in that camp.

So it's not the veiled insult you think it is.

I might just be throwing myself in the same bucket.

But I do wonder, is there even a gold standard, so to speak, IQ test anyway?

And I'm remembering that Seinfeld episode where George was going to take one and he gets Elaine to do it for him.

Oh, yeah.

There's actually a number of IQ tests that have evolved over time.

Why don't we start at the very beginning?

Sure.

Smart thing to do.

So first off, IQ stands for intelligence quotient, which is a term coined by the German psychologist William Stern, who, ironically, cautioned against using it alone to categorize intelligence.

So you're saying the guy who came up with the term IQ was himself a skeptic of the idea that IQ alone measures intelligence?

Is that right?

Bingo, yeah.

Stern wasn't the only one at the time working on ways to test people's intelligence.

Most people identify the Benets-Simon test, published in 1905 as the first real IQ test.

It was developed in France to identify which school children had normal intelligence and which had abnormal intelligence.

Oh, this is going to be one of those things that sounds harsh, right?

Yeah, it was actually pretty harsh.

And the fact of the matter is the turn of the century was pretty harsh in general.

The original Benet-Simon test was particularly severe.

It grouped children into four categories.

Normality, debility, imbecility, and idiocy.

Yikes.

Yeah, that is harsh.

Imagine getting that call.

Like, I'm pleased to inform you that your son is merely an imbecile and not an idiot, as previously suspected.

Good day.

Yeah, you know what?

In their defense, these were technical terms at the time.

Schoolyard bullies had yet to put the stank on the words imbecile and idiot.

But yes, these were the determinations made by the Benet-Simon test.

It's funny that those are technical terms, because of course that meaning is all lost.

So what were these determinations even based upon?

Okay, so the test was divided into four sections.

The first section was called Basic Skills Assumed of an Idiot.

Oh, God.

Okay, well, I shouldn't laugh.

I hope I could pass that section.

Who knows what's in there?

Yeah, that one was pretty simple stuff, like unwrapping a piece of chocolate before eating it.

Remember, this is a test for children.

So they were like, if he eats the chocolate with the wrapper on, he's an idiot.

Why is that so funny?

In grade school, I did know a kid who would eat a candy bar with the wrapper on just as a gag.

And I suppose I feel a little bit better about myself.

Hey, we all called him by the technically correct term.

Again, that would be the schoolyard doing its thing.

It's funny.

Comedian Doug Stanhope has a great bit about this.

He says that it doesn't matter what they switch the technical term to.

People will just co-opt that word to call friends when they do something stupid.

He's like, did you just put a metal plate in the microwave?

What are you developmentally challenged?

Testing for idiocy was just an early 20th century way of saying basic.

And basic, of course, now has already been co-opted.

Okay, so tell me about the other sections of the test.

I suppose it gets harder from unwrap the candy before you eat it.

Yeah, you nailed it.

It gets progressively more complicated.

But remember, the highest level of the test was normality, so it's not exactly rocket science.

For example, one of the later tasks had the tester fold a piece of paper in half twice before cutting out a triangle.

Then the child would have to guess what the piece of paper would look like when he unfolded it.

Wow, I can feel my brain trying to work that one out, and I'm not sure how good I would do at something like that either.

Yeah, actually, that's a good one.

The Bonet-Simon test was very limited, as Benet himself pointed out.

So work continued on trying to develop more robust IQ tests.

A psychologist from Stanford named Lewis Terman took the Benet-Simon test and he adapted it, later publishing what became known as the Stanford-Bonet test in 1916.

So, this is where we get the IQ scores we've come to know today?

Yeah, and basically, what they did was you took the mental age of someone, divided it by their actual age, their chronological age, and then multiply that by 100.

And bingo, that's what an IQ score is.

Okay, so if you're 40 chronologically and mentally, the test says you're 40.

You divide 40 by 40, you get one, and you multiply that by 100, so your IQ is 100.

Check out the IQ on Jordan.

So what's the average IQ then?

It's actually between 85 and 115.

So using the bell curve, that's about 100.

So the tests

hypothetically work, which I guess is good because people use these to determine so much about someone.

So it sounds like it works to give you a score that makes some sense.

I don't know.

Absolutely, which is why psychologists have continued to come up with new tests ever since Benet Simon first published theirs.

They've also modified how the number itself is calculated.

The whole concept evolved over time, but this is how it started at the turn of the century.

Okay, as we've already established, a person's IQ score could really impact their life.

It's starting to feel a little bit like Brave New World.

They got the alphas and the betas.

Yeah, in fact, you're not far off on that one.

Two very consequential tests were even called, the Army Alpha and the Army Beta tests.

That's really on the nose there.

I guess it makes sense that the Army would be looking into this kind of thing.

They always want to figure out how to to get big groups of people put into buckets, right?

Yeah, they definitely were.

And in 1917, it was the time of World War I, and a guy by the name of Robert Yerks came up with the Army Alpha and the Army Beta test to determine which Army recruits were better suited for leadership roles and or other specific positions.

The Army Alpha was a written test, and the Army Beta was made up of pictures in order to include soldiers who didn't read or didn't speak English.

Over a million soldiers ended up taking these tests.

You know, you got to wonder, Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, was like 1932.

I wonder if he knew about this and took that from this.

You got to wonder.

Got to wonder.

Yeah.

But okay, so they made everyone take this.

It's crazy that there was people who didn't speak English in the U.S.

Army during World War I.

That's just, that's kind of mind-blowing to me.

But I guess maybe even now there's people whose English is not super good in the Army.

Yeah.

Huh.

Yeah.

That's interesting.

I don't even think you need to be a U.S.

citizen to join the U.S.

Army, to be honest with you.

Yeah, there was something, gosh, we're going to get an email about this.

There was something I remember hearing where people from the Philippines, especially, and I'm sure it's other countries too, you could join the U.S.

Army and basically after you got out, however many years, you would get U.S.

citizenship, which is kind of a cool deal.

But yeah, I guess in the Philippines, they speak English, but I don't know if the deal's open to like anyone from anywhere.

That would be an interesting question.

Something I should have looked up before and something I'll look up after the show.

Okay, so if they had everyone take this test before World War I or during World War I, that is a lot of data to work with.

Right, absolutely.

And they used this data to screen for officers, sometimes not even considering someone who scored below a certain grade.

Fortunately, this sort of data ended up being used in all kinds of nefarious ways, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Remember, eugenics was having a moment around the time of these tests.

Yeah, should we also maybe take our moment moment to remind everyone what eugenics was?

I don't think everybody knows what that is.

Was.

I wish eugenics was a was.

Sadly, it's still creeping around out there.

By the way, eugenics, it does sound like a supplement marketed towards guys my age when they're having problems urinating or getting it up.

Basically, anything to do with the equipment, you're going to sell a pill.

Middle age is amazing.

But yeah, eugenics sounds like a multi-level marketing scam.

But unfortunately, eugenics is not merely a dick pill, as eugenics was just basically racism in a lab coat.

Eugenics was the notion that certain traits like intelligence, physical prowess, and even moral character were inherited, and society would benefit by promoting the breeding of some people and in America, the forced sterilization of others.

So the idea that certain populations of lesser people should be prohibited from reproducing, that's some very dangerous stuff.

Even if you, man, there's a thought exercise here.

Like, what if we don't stop the people from reproducing, but we encourage people to reproduce who are like really smart and have achieved a lot?

Even that is, is fraught.

Yeah, there's no good way to do that, huh?

And by the way, that is the plot of idiocracy, more or less, or more to the point that super smart people have fewer children, which is true.

And see idiocracy.

It's turns out it was more of a prophetic vision of America's future than just a comedy from the.

In 10 years, it's going to be a documentary, which is that's the worst part.

Yeah, no kidding.

But you're right, it is super dangerous stuff.

And in the U.S., many of these ideas took their darkest forms around that time, the 30s and the 40s.

There was a eugenics program implemented in North Carolina that started in 1933 and went on for over four decades.

Over 7,000 people are estimated to have been sterilized on account of this program, which singled out people with low IQ, or as they called them, feeble-minded.

Wow.

Yeah, that's intense.

So if we had to get rid of the feeble-minded folks in 2025, there'd be almost nobody left.

I'm pretty sure the traffic in Los Angeles would certainly get a lot better.

Yeah, no more Carmageddon.

Some might argue that Michael Regilio would be taken off the roads.

But anyway, several states enacted similar programs, not just North Carolina.

In fact, California, where I'm sitting right now, in fact, was another principal state that was enacting this kind of stuff.

And this whole movement, these programs, inspired none other than one Mr.

Adolf Hitler and his views.

I've heard of that guy.

In fact, all over Mein Kampf, there are references to American eugenics and the praise for what was going on in this country with sterilization of the feebleminded.

Yikes.

And this was all legal in America at the time?

That's crazy.

How did this not make it to the Supreme Court or whatever?

Oh, it did.

In fact, the Supreme Court of the United States in Buck versus Bell, 1927, full-on supported the practice of sterilization of people they deemed to be feeble-minded.

Justice Holmes, delivering the opinion of the court, wrote, quote, it is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.

Oof.

He later added, Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Wow.

What's the three generations of imbeciles?

That was the family that their case made it up to the Supreme Court.

I can't remember who was the Bucks or the Bells, but.

Oh my God.

Wow.

That aged like milk.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

That's rough.

Way to take a swing at mom and pop and grandma and grandpa at the same time, by the way.

Yeah.

Hey, it's not just you who are thinking about sterilizing.

Your parents should have been sterilized and their parents should have been sterilized.

Yikes.

Wow.

And that's coming from the Supreme Court of the United States.

How dignified.

And I've already hinted at this, but guess who ended up quoting Justice Holmes while on trial for crimes against humanity?

I'm going to go with Nazis.

You got it.

Nazis.

Man, you're on shaky ground when you've got Nazis quoting you.

I mean, it's not necessarily your fault if you've got Nazis quoting you, but there's a reason that Nazis are quoting you.

That's all I'm saying.

Oh, the Nazis got a lot of ideas from America.

And in fact, I'll do you one better than just quoting us, or perhaps one worse than just quoting Americans.

Adolf Hitler famously hung a portrait of Henry Ford in his office.

Really?

Yeah, it's just a fact.

Racism and eugenics was very popular in the U.S.

Okay.

So.

There was this whole idea at the time that some people were born inferior, feeble-minded, and it was best to sterilize them or otherwise remove them from your population in order to create a better society.

And they used none other than these IQ tests to justify these ideas.

Hey, imbeciles, even you can figure out how to use the deals and discounts on the fine products and services that support this show.

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All right.

Now, back to Skeptical Sunday.

It is crazy.

to think that intelligent, educated people could come to these conclusions without acknowledging that a lack of education, lack of being healthy and access access to food, access to education, whatever, is a big contributing factor.

Yeah, it's crazy to think that you could be on the Supreme Court of the United States and be that imbecilic, I believe would be the correct term.

Yeah, I guess IQ isn't everything.

Also, the test questions themselves were deeply flawed.

Some of the questions on the Yerkes test, for example, are pretty subjective, arguably more about knowledge of culture rather than intelligence.

Here's an example straight from the Army Alpha.

Test 8, Form 7, Question 31.

The author of The Raven is Stevenson, Kipling, Hawthorne, or Poe.

Are you asking me?

Sure, why not?

Aren't you curious if you'd been an officer or a private?

Poe?

I don't know, man.

Actually, you got it.

Okay, how about this?

Number 32.

Spare is a term used in bowling, football, tennis, or hockey.

Oh, that one's easier.

Bowling.

So I'm a genius and I should have been at least a lieutenant general or whatever.

Is that where this is going?

That's exactly what we're saying here.

All right, I'm okay with it.

But perhaps, as you can see, knowing what a spare is and who wrote the Raven shouldn't exactly qualify you as being intelligent or not.

No, that's true, right?

Of course, especially there's tons of people who grew up in a place where bowling is not a sport that people play, or you couldn't afford to bowl, and maybe you never heard of Edgar Allan Poe because you had a third-grade education.

I mean, the only reason I know that one is because I think my mom read me poe stuff when I was a kid, and the Raven sounds very po somehow, but I also just guessed, really, at the end of the day.

If I'm being honest, it's because the Simpsons did a bit on Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven in one of their famous Halloween episodes.

It's like a fluke that we would have gotten those questions correct.

In 1917, I would not have gotten that question correct, I can assure you.

Look, the fact of the matter is, maybe you've read hundreds of other worthwhile poems from countless other authors, just didn't come across Poe.

Or maybe you were a mathematical genius who stayed away from poetry altogether.

So we're talking about some, what do you call it, like culturally relevant questions on the test that don't make sense if you're not from that culture?

Right.

But now there are other questions on the Army Alpha test that are less like determining the number of blocks in a stack or what comes next in a pattern.

And these types of questions are far more along the lines of the kind of questions you'd find on modern IQ tests.

So those are like the ones you see when you're scrolling through social media, like, hey, if you can count the number of blocks in this, you're a genius.

Or if you can figure this puzzle out, you'd need to join Mensa.

Oh, man, that is some of the best clickbait out there.

It is, because who doesn't want to think of themselves as smart?

Maybe I'm secretly a genius and nobody ever knew.

Everyone wants to think of themselves as smart.

It's human nature.

And if you're convinced that certain tests are going to tell you how smart you are, you might just go ahead and take those tests to find out.

In fact, I have a friend who was quite fond of dropping into conversations that he had a 145 IQ according to one of those online tests.

Yeah.

And one day after having heard him drop the 145 brag into a conversation for like the 90th time, I said, you know what, I'm going to ask some follow-up questions.

Turns out he had to take the exact same test eight times before he achieved this high score.

And he was looking up answers in between tests.

The dude just likes to think of himself as smart, even if he doesn't realize that admitting you took the same IQ test eight times to get your score makes you sound not smart.

Yeah.

No kidding.

Wow.

Well, it's pretty nerve-wracking to think about that.

I mean, what if I take an IQ test or many tests and it just turns out I'm not as smart as I think I am?

I don't know if I could handle it.

This is the psychological equivalent of getting out a ruler in college and being like, let me measure my Wang.

It's going to be totally above average.

Just, you don't want to answer this question, folks.

You don't.

Trust tape.

Voice of experience.

I will say that I'm old enough that coming across the information as to the average size of one's wang was hard to come by when I was a kid.

So I couldn't Google it.

No, when we really could have doubled down on our insecurity about that, that information wasn't available, thank God.

Yeah, that's true.

No, sometimes less is more, folks.

And I'm talking about information.

So I've been told.

Okay.

And look, the fact of the matter is your nerves are going to affect how you take the test.

Your environment, your mood, all these things are going to factor in.

Imagine being a soldier in 1917 and being stuffed into an exam room and knowing that how you score on this test is going to determine if you're an officer or if you're in the trenches.

Yeah, I'm sweating thinking about that.

I mean, that's a life or death situation.

Am I going to be organizing ammo crates that go out by plane or am I going to be getting shelled?

Yeah.

And World War I,

according to the movies I've seen, particularly brutal.

And these Army, Alpha, and Alpha Beta tests devised by Yurix and Yurix went off with the data from these army tests.

He got charts in there with what professions scored what number and then based on different scores, what professions are best suited for certain people.

It's reminding me of the movie Divergent.

They take a test and it determines what faction they're going to be in.

Basically, one test determines what their whole life is going to be.

I can't say I saw that particular movie, but you're absolutely right.

This is a tricky idea.

On the one hand, maybe you can test people for a certain level of intelligence, and maybe some people are better suited for certain jobs than others.

On the other hand, how is one test made up of a series of questions going to accurately give you that information?

I doubt any test would tell me you should host a podcast.

We did these tests when I was in high school, I think.

And the questions were so dumb.

It would be like, do you enjoy organizing different kinds of paper?

Do you enjoy stamping images or words into metal?

It's like, how would I know?

And then they're like, oh, just answer to the best of your ability.

And I remember the teachers telling us that.

And I just filled it out fast because I don't know, maybe stamping things into metal would be interesting.

I don't know.

Next question.

And then we get this report back that's like, jobs you might be cut out for.

Machine metal stamper, machine press.

And it's just made no sense.

How is a kid who's never done something going to say, yeah, stamping something into metal might be cool?

And they're like, aha, career idea for you.

Stamping things into metal.

It was was the absolute dumbest thing I've ever seen in my life.

So these tests can't be that far from that.

Yeah.

I mean, as far as determining what somebody's going to do with the rest of their life, when I was in high school, I think they did take the test and I skipped that day.

And that tells you all you need to know.

Yeah.

They were like, don't worry about it.

You missed the test like every other test.

But we didn't need to give you the test.

We have an idea anyway.

Yeah, we know where you're going to end up, Regila.

Yeah, they didn't need a test.

Yeah.

I like to joke that, hey, my life might not have turned turned out the way i thought it would but it is a little bit comforting to know that my life did turn out the way everybody else thought it would so fair yeah i guess they did not need a test to know where you were going and the test couldn't tell me where i was going yeah so anyway after world war one the u.s government got into these iq tests and what they purported to mean they started using the dubious results in all kinds of shady ways One can even argue that the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 was influenced by these tests.

The Immigration Restriction Act severely limited immigration into this country for people from Asia while favoring Europeans.

Surprise, surprise.

Yeah, so that just sounds like it could be plain old racism, but I don't know enough about it to say for sure.

We're talking about America here, so yeah, let's just go with racism.

You could also argue that the whole field of psychology was validated at the time by Urix tests and how much the army dug it.

The army does like digging stuff.

That sounds like a dumb pun, but that was not what I meant there.

Yeah, especially trenches is where most of the people who took these Yerk's tests ended up.

So that brings us to the 30s, okay?

World War I, post-World War II, whatever.

So social Darwinism and eugenics are in vogue.

Rudimentary IQ tests, I guess they were back then, are being used as a tool to justify these concepts.

Now, I'm going to imagine that after World War II and all the atrocities committed by the Nazis and stuff, did that whole idea fall off a little bit, I hope?

Yes and no.

Eugenics definitely quieted down, at least for a while.

But the notion that you could test someone's intelligence continued, which gets us to talking about the book The Bell Curve.

Okay, I thought you might bring that book up.

Yeah, because I've heard of this and I know it's controversial.

Yeah, you really can't talk about IQ without talking about the book The Bell Curve, and you really can't talk about the book The Bell Curve without talking about Arthur Jensen, who was before The Bell Curve.

Arthur Jensen was an American psychologist who worked mostly out of UC Berkeley.

In 1969, he published a paper in the Harvard Educational Review called, How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement.

Now, this paper basically set off a bomb in the world of psychology because he suggested that genetics played a part in black students scoring lower on IQ tests than white students.

Critics were fierce and pointed out that his research ignored the obvious roles of poverty, poor schools, racism, and health inequality.

Yeah, 2025 me says, duh, but I'm guessing that was maybe even also controversial back then.

No, I mean, it struck at people's emotional core that there was something terribly wrong with that, and it didn't go well for Jensen at the time either.

I mean, colleagues tried to formally censure him.

He had protesters storming into his lectures.

So it was more than a bit shocking that after all that happened with Jensen, that in 1994, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein published a book called The Bell Curve, which claimed that genetics was a part of what contributed to to IQ.

And again, when we say genetics, Murray and Herrnstein broke that down by race.

Predictably, a massive backlash followed the publication of the book.

Yeah, I'm guessing the criticisms were largely the same, that the study didn't take into account poverty, poor schools, health inequality.

Some people might think that, oh, those are weak, the poverty argument, but poor schools, health inequality.

And when we say health inequality, we're talking about bad nutrition and like lead paint chips in the house, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

In reading some of the criticisms of the bell curve, I learned a few new things, like that intelligence is what's called polygenetic.

That is to say, it's influenced by a great many genes, each one contributing only a small amount, and that there is no smart gene, and that gene expression itself can be turned up or turned down by environmental factors.

Environmental factors.

So I know some kids grow up with books and computers, and I know I'm harping on this, but other kids grow up with lead paint chips.

That was a big thing in Detroit when I was growing up.

It was like all those old houses down there that had kids in them.

All you need to do is eat a couple lead paint chips as a kid and you're in trouble or the dust from it.

And that's because it actually, apparently, lead paint chips are sweet and they taste good.

Ooh, I didn't know that.

Yeah.

Gross.

That's why kids eat lead paint chips.

They taste like candy.

At least the ones that I ate did.

So even in talking about the genetic aspects of intelligence, our environment also plays a part, which totally makes sense.

Exactly.

Environmental factors that can influence gene expression are stuff like diet, which we talked about, nutrition, but also toxics and chemicals.

Yeah, okay.

So once again, paint chips and weird gasoline fumes or highway stuff if you live near a highway, probably.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Also, physical activity, sleep, infections, exposure to UV light and other forms of radiation, and stress.

The stresses that come from living in poverty can lead to chronic stress, which can lead to elevated hormone levels like cortisol, which can affect gene expression, like immune function and brain development.

Because I think a lot of people are like, being poor doesn't make you have a lower IQ.

The UV thing actually explains a lot too.

I might be getting dumber, but I have a sick tan right now.

Yeah, you definitely got a beach bod.

By the way, that field of study is called epigenetics, and none of these arguments even touch on the whole race is a man-made construct and not a biological category.

And the fact of the matter is genetic differences between people or populations populations within what we call a race are very often far greater than the differences between any two people in what we consider to be a different race.

So that sounds like its own episode entirely.

I didn't know the race thing was kind of not necessary.

Yeah, even though some people in America will explode if you profess the idea that race doesn't exist, the modern understanding of race is born out of racism, mostly European colonization.

Hierarchies between population groups were devised to justify exploitation.

This isn't to say that population groups don't have shared heritage and culture, but a biologist can't see that stuff under a microscope.

And as far as they're concerned, race just isn't a thing.

Without rehashing the entire controversy, let's just say the overwhelming number of experts in the field disagree with the findings of Jensen and the bell curve.

This is really interesting because before you would think, think, okay,

people who lean right are going to be like, not everything is racism.

And I get that.

Maybe there's something to that.

But then the people on the left are like, what do you mean race doesn't exist?

If you said that to a college kid right now, depending on the college, I suppose, you would get an earful.

So it's the horseshoe theory, right?

It's like these groups might actually agree for completely different reasons.

Yeah, that's exactly the horseshoe.

And by the way, I did say that to some college kids when I was doing this research, I was at a friend's house, and their son was there with his girlfriend.

And I said that, and she had to leave the table because she didn't want to sit with me anymore.

Because I said that race isn't a biological category.

Yeah, that would make for an awkward dinner.

But you know what?

When I hear that, I got to say that's what people are talking about when they're like, snowflakes can't handle the dinner.

Like, she had to leave the dinner.

Did she get all upset and couldn't handle that particular line of argument?

I don't know.

I do get it because, again, people have a shared culture that they're very proud of and a shared struggle that they're very proud that they made it through.

And so they think that in some way you're coming after that when you say this, which you're absolutely not.

I'm just talking about from a scientific perspective.

This is just not something that truly exists.

Meanwhile, an overwhelming number of racist organizations probably agree with the bell curve and the findings of Jensen and all that stuff.

So how do we square that?

And by overwhelming number of racist organizations, I assume you mean all racist organizations agree with them.

Well, it seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same, I suppose.

I want to jump back to the IQ stuff before we get too far off the reservation, which also sounds racist now that I say it out loud.

Save me.

Yeah, okay, fine.

Let's get back to IQ.

IQ tests have been changing for a long time now and working towards getting rid of cultural biases.

A test known as the Wexler Adult Intelligence Scale was published in 1955, and modern editions continue to be released, including a fifth edition that just came out in 2024.

There's also Raven's Progressive Matrices and the Kauffman Brief Intelligence Test.

These tests have tried to reduce these cultural biases as much as possible.

So no more questions like, with which hand do you hold a caviar spoon?

Or what does it mean for a dressage horse to PF?

Yeah, those questions are gone.

These tests focus on logical reasoning, pattern recognition, things that anyone could be good or bad at, regardless of background.

The goal being to measure measure general cognitive ability with as little bias as possible.

And there's also the idea that there are multiple types of intelligence.

There's mathematical intelligence, spatial, linguistic, there's fluid intelligence, and crystallized intelligence.

Crystallized intelligence sounds pretty cool.

It does sound cool.

Sounds Star Wars-y.

Yeah, it's, oh yeah, this new Jedi has crystallized intelligence.

Only Master Yoda has crystallized intelligence, Jordan.

I would like to take the crystallized intelligence test.

I feel like I might want to take all these tests, actually, just for shits and gigs.

I mean, if I take a bunch of different IQ tests and consistently get around the same score.

Then that might, in fact, tell you something.

Okay.

Plus, if I score super high, then I'll be inducted into some kind of secret society, ostensibly.

Actually, there are some organizations like that, only they aren't secret.

Mensa, I know you've heard of that one.

Yeah.

For example, is the largest and oldest high IQ society.

You have to score in the 98th percentile or higher on an approved supervised IQ test.

They even have their own IQ tests.

There's also the triple nine society.

You need to have an even higher IQ to get into that one.

I've heard of Mensa, and it's actually the opposite of a secret society because people who are in it often cannot shut the actual fuck up about being a member of Mensa.

So they're not secretly controlling the world.

That's maybe disappointing.

Yeah, they're really just non-profits publishing journals with puzzles and poems and helping to provide scholarships to gifted students.

All based on IQ tests.

That's right.

Like the Wexler or the Stanford Ben A5.

So there are a few places out there that still value IQ scores on specific IQ tests.

In fact, it seems like they hold them in pretty high regard.

Yeah, that's right.

And more than a few.

We still use IQ scores when determining certain public policies.

We still consider it regarding military service.

And kids still take stuff like SATs, but that's not necessarily IQ, I think.

That is just the idea that we can test people's intelligence, and that is still alive and well, just with some healthy skepticism mixed in now.

We love skepticism, but I've got to tell you, I'm feeling as though I like the idea that in some way we can measure a person's intelligence, even if it's not totally accurate.

Yeah, at a basic level, you'd hope that we'd be able to test people's intelligence just generally, so we can try to make people smarter or find out what is hindering their development.

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Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday.

I mean, if there's no way to determine intelligence, at least to a degree, then there's no way to find out if somebody's getting smarter.

So doesn't that take the whole idea of education and kind of throw it out the window in a way?

It behooves us as a society to try and figure out a way to gauge intelligence, at least generally speaking.

I'm not sure breaking it all down into a single number is possible, but you'd like to think that we could come up with some sort of value.

But then again, intelligence is a concept, really.

So how can you nail it down to a series of questions?

Aha, this is the back and forth playing out to this day.

And there are scholars, academics, and psychologists, you name it, on both sides of the fence.

Some have disputed the idea that IQ has any value at all when measuring intelligence.

Others believe it can determine academic potential or has validity for clinical purposes.

Others will straight up swear by the results and extrapolate all kinds of things from the data.

All right, so what if we assume for argument's sake that IQ scores, or at least modern ones, are a valid way of measuring people's intelligence?

What does the data that we've accumulated over the years tell us, if anything?

Are there trends?

Are there takeaways?

I'm almost afraid to hear the answer, speaking of idiocracy.

The results and interpretations of long-term studies of IQ among large populations is hotly contested.

But there is the Flynn effect, named after research James Flynn.

This highlighted increases in IQ scores measured all across the world over time.

On average, IQ scores were rising by about three points per decade starting in the first half of the 20th century.

Meaning people, generally speaking, are getting smarter?

Great.

And not by a little.

Three points per decade might be one small step for a 10-year period, but over the course of half a century, that's one giant leap for mankind's intelligence.

Yeah, that seems super important, but it also seems like exponential growth like that kind of needs an explanation of some sort.

What's going on here?

You nailed it, actually.

It does.

And that explanation seems to be environment.

If IQ was mostly genetic and fixed, you wouldn't expect entire populations to get smarter over just a few decades.

Genes don't evolve that fast.

So what is it?

I'm guessing nutrition, as we've discussed, has to be one of the factors.

Absolutely, but other factors play in as well, like better health, cleaner water.

And the one that kind of blew my mind was that we live in more cognitively demanding environments.

People do more abstract thinking in the modern world.

Modern life just requires more problem-solving and quote-unquote out-of-the-box thinking.

Smaller family size might play as well.

I don't know, but kids get more attention from parents.

They get more resources.

Maybe.

Check out the IQ on Jordan.

That's right.

I am an only child, so it all makes sense.

Yeah, family size is, in fact, one of the many factors experts point to to explain the Flynn effect.

And there are plenty of studies that suggest that IQ is going up, or at least

for several decades it was going up.

Ah, crap.

So are we getting dumber now?

There is some data pointing to a decrease in IQ in recent years.

Norway, Denmark, Finland have all seen decreases in IQ ever since the 1990s.

In Britain, scores started dropping around the year 2004.

In the United States, it's a mixed bag.

Because you figured if anybody was getting dumber, it was Americans.

But there are hints that scores are dropping for people born after 1990.

Yeah, damn video games, eh?

Yeah.

Could be.

That's the appeal of the IQ test in the first place.

If we do have a reasonably accurate way of measuring intelligence, then we can use that data and try and determine variables or factors that can affect intelligence.

Yeah, like nutrition, cleaner food, smaller family sizes, yada, yada.

If this makes sense, I feel bad.

I'm taking potch outside Americans, but the data showed the Scandinavians.

Suck it, Norway.

But it makes sense.

My dad was one of eight kids and Ukrainian immigrant.

The parenting was different.

They lived in a small house.

There wasn't a whole lot of, let me focus on helping Don with his homework.

You know, it's like, no, I just, I'm trying to make sure nobody dies in my watch, the the end.

Yeah, I'm from a family of six kids, Catholic, go figure.

I like to say my mother had three ways of helping me with my homework.

First, she'd try yelling at me, then she'd tried screaming at me, and then she tried shrieking at me, and then she was totally out of ideas.

Geez.

Yeah, so the family size thing does matter.

Okay.

And like I said, cleaner food and blah, blah, blah.

Exactly.

If we don't have a measure of intelligence, at least in general, how can we tell if things are making us smarter or dumber?

Let's just say we're trying to assess if a person's cognitive abilities are declining.

I mean, don't we need a test for that kind of stuff?

Absolutely.

And it's helpful to know if, say, an aging person is starting to lose their intelligence and what can be done to reduce that decline.

Also, how can we ensure that every school kid has the best opportunity to learn and succeed?

How can we identify students who need extra assistance to achieve their potential?

Or standardized testing.

Isn't that what George W.

Bush's No Child Left Behind was all about?

Not the paste eating, but the standardized testing.

Which, from what I remember of George W.

Bush's presidency, he may have done a little paste eating himself.

Okay, politics aside, look, the fact of the matter is no child left behind had good intentions, but became deeply unpopular and for valid reasons.

It instituted standardized testing and schools were often seen as just trying to teach the test.

Which is definitely a factor.

If I kept looking at piles of blocks and got really good at figuring out how many there were or practiced pattern recognition, I might do exceedingly well on a specific IQ test.

That's actually how I ended up doing decent on the LSAT, which is a test you take before you apply to law schools.

But I would study old exams and stuff like that.

And I knew that what I was studying would be on the test.

I literally only took old exam questions, took a bunch of old practice tests.

And then if I had a trouble with something, I'd look it up in the book or whatever.

And I, so I could be a full-blown moron, but just be really good at specific tasks.

Like your friend who took the same IQ test a dozen times and looked up all the answers or whatever.

It doesn't tell you their intelligence.

It just tells you if they learned how to take the test.

Yeah.

And by the way, this doesn't mean that IQ tests are completely useless either.

They still have some value.

An IQ test can illustrate that someone, for instance, has difficulty with pattern recognition or word association.

We're not saying that they aren't intelligent, but we can identify areas for improvement.

And for educational purposes, that can be helpful, like when teachers see which subjects a student is having trouble with and focus extra attention there, I guess.

Maybe a kid has got a calculus down but needs help with creative writing.

I think the takeaway here is that intelligence is complex.

It's a concept that we should remain skeptical about when attempting to quantify, especially into something as simple as a single number.

Yeah, this has me thinking about all that.

Well, that's a good sign.

Yeah.

We've really only been talking about human intelligence as it relates to IQ tests.

I actually, this is probably beyond the scope of whatever.

I'm wondering how all this applies to something like AI.

Are you asking what is ChatGPT's IQ?

Do we know that?

Is that even possible to measure?

Yeah, in fact, a guy by the name of Eckeroy Vaynen from Scientific American copied the exact questions from the Wexler Adult Intelligence Scale, and he tested ChatGPT with it.

And I'm going to imagine that it aced the test, yeah?

The verbal IQ of ChatGPT was better than 99.9% of the standardized sample of humans.

So, yeah, we're doomed as expected.

Maybe.

But like we said earlier, there's a lot of nuance when you're talking about intelligence.

As they mentioned in their article in Scientific American, Ekra asked ChatGPT, what is the first name of the father of Sebastian's children?

And ChatGPT couldn't get the answer.

I tried it when I was researching this, and it couldn't get the answer either.

Full disclosure, because ChatGPT is getting better all the time, and perhaps somebody from ChatGPT read the article in Scientific American.

I did it right before you and I started taping.

It got the answer.

Really?

So it learned that because, in fact, I'm going to try it right now if I can.

So I just tried it right now, real quick, and it asked me which Sebastian I'm referring to because it could be a lot of different people.

So it still doesn't know that the obvious answer is Sebastian because that's a man.

And I mean, I guess there are technical ways that Sebastian could have children that are his, even though he's not the father father directly.

I guess this should be like an easy one that unless you're thinking in these crazy exceptions, ChatGPT should say, it's probably Sebastian.

However, it could be a myriad of other people because of these various scenarios.

But yeah, you're right.

It's not quite there.

So this is a riddle that if I had to think about it, it would just be so obvious.

I'd like to think.

I don't know.

Maybe I don't want to take all those IQ tests.

Oh, perhaps you're struggling with riddles, but you're crushing pattern recognition doesn't mean you're not intelligent.

I can count blocks, Michael.

I can count blocks.

All right, it sounds like the Wexler test is a pretty prolific one.

Is there like a short list of IQ tests?

Yeah, I'd say that the Wexler one, the Stanford Benet 5, Ravens Progressive Matrices, the Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test, those are the most highly recognized IQ tests out there today.

So if I score low on all those tests, don't take it to heart for some reason?

Exactly.

Don't take it to heart.

Even though IQ tests have certainly come a long way, they still have a lot of limitations.

Real-world scenarios, emotional intelligence, unpredictable situations.

These are all things that can't be measured really in any of those tests.

I see.

So just because ChatGPT scores high in an IQ test, it doesn't necessarily mean robots are going to take over the world, at least not tomorrow.

AI systems are great at applying patterns based on its training.

And obviously, a computer is naturally going to be very good at math, but that doesn't mean that they have the kind of broad adaptive intelligence that humans possess.

Crystallized intelligence, if you will.

I told you only Master Yoda has crystallized intelligence.

Man, such nerds.

So this leaves me with a kind of win-win scenario here when I'm out there taking IQ tests, getting my scores.

If I score high, I can lean into all the data and support for IQ tests and what they mean.

And if I score low on the IQ test, then I can lean into all the healthy skepticism of them and say that it just doesn't necessarily mean anything because I've got crystallized or some kind of other intelligence.

Yeah.

You just won't get into the triple nine society.

Which is their loss at this point, I think.

I don't know.

Exactly.

I agree.

But in all scenarios, I think what's important is that intelligence is incredibly complex.

It's more than a simple three-digit number, or in some of our cases, a two-digit number.

And whether it's emotional intelligence, creativity, or problem-solving skills, there are many ways to measure it, or more accurately, to try and measure it.

And even if IQ scores don't tell us everything, it sounds like there's still some value in trying to understand how our minds work, right?

So tests can show us where somebody might need help, where they might excel.

It's not about labeling people as smart or dumb or feeble-minded, imbecilic, whatever, but rather about identifying areas to improve or maybe even tap into.

Now that you've put it that way, I kind of feel bad that I kind of labeled my friend who took the IQ test eight times as dumb.

He might not be dumb.

He might not even be an imbecile or an idiot for that matter.

I know him.

So I just feel bad that I said it on a podcast.

That said, everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses, and we all need to be very cautious and skeptical about putting too much stock in any single test or number.

At the end of the day, it sounds like IQ scores are not going to tell the whole story of someone's life, whether it's overcoming obstacles, gaining skills through experience, or developing other kinds of intelligence.

There's a lot more to human potential than any one test could capture.

Well, IQ tests can offer some worthwhile insights, they're just one piece of a much bigger puzzle.

They can help us understand certain cognitive patterns, but they can't and shouldn't define who we are or what we're capable of.

An IQ test or any test for that matter shouldn't tell us what profession we need to be in or how the rest of our life is going to look.

It certainly doesn't tell us that one type of person is inherently smarter than the other.

Exactly.

And take AI, for example.

Chat GPT may ace the Wechsler test, but it doesn't have the same holistic intelligence that we humans possess, at least not yet.

Human intelligence is much more nuanced than that.

Now, one little note, there is a correlation between IQ and making better decisions long-term, especially for health, long-term lifestyle, mortality.

As expected, people with higher IQ tend to make better decisions in certain areas.

Now, we didn't do a deep dive into this on the episode, but I just thought that was worth noting.

And it's not completely uncorrelated with decisions you would expect, you know, quote-unquote smart people to make.

Intelligence seems like a rich and diverse concept, and we just can't let one number dictate our self-worth or limit our potential.

That's what I'm telling myself right now, anyway.

Sounds like maybe you did take one of those tests.

Yeah, maybe.

Or maybe not, but I'm really considering it.

I say go for it.

Just remember, it's not the end-all-be-all.

It's just another way to get to know yourself and help your intelligence grow.

I couldn't have put it better myself.

And who knows?

Maybe you will be inducted into Mensa or the Triple Nine Society, or maybe you'll just take pride in being a great podcast host, Jordan.

I think I'll stick with that one for now, doing okay.

Maybe I don't need to get out the ruler, so to speak.

Smart move.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, Jordan at JordanHarbinger.com.

Show notes on the website.

Advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support the show.

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This show is created in association with podcast one.

People with high IQs might be able to spell Regilio.

I don't know.

We'll see.

This show is created in association with podcast one.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Tata Sedlowskis, Robert Frogerty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Our advice and opinions are our own, and I am a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer.

Do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show.

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Share the show with those you love.

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In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.

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