Is this an ad?
It took me entirely too long to realize it was not 80% on the test
IQ is just a measure of how fast a person can understand, abstract, and apply new information. It does nothing to examine how well someone understands a given subject, whether their conclusions are logical or accurate, or bothers to account for cultural and personal biases.
An IQ test is never a stand alone diagnostic tool in a comprehensive evaluation of a person’s knowledge or ability. Its one of many metrics used to inform competent professionals of the capabilities of an individual in a controlled, non standard setting.
a measure of how fast a person can understand, abstract, and apply new information.
And that’s a best case scenario for it. It can also be just a measure of how well can you solve very specific type of puzzles at this very moment. And the evidence of it being the latter are actually quite convincing.
Even beyond that, it is a very crude instrument originally intended to diagnose major impairments.
Bragging about your “High IQ” should go over about as well as when Trump brags about acing his cognitive tests. Or mastering a series of sobriety tests.
They also have extreme cultural bias and other issues.
Yeah most things I’m like wow this person is a genius I could never do this, I look at how much they’ve worked on and it’s like 400x as much as I have. When you have enough practice the “hard” stuff becomes second nature, and the “genius” stuff becomes hard.
iq isnt a valid measure of anything
That’s the point. Their top engineer gets a second lunch paid because of this stupid shit
One could say he scored so high, it overflowed and wrapped around.
It’s the functional equivalent of a sobriety test. Useful for diagnosing injuries or impairments. Not a measure of some fundamental human worth.
It’s only a rough estimate. For some selectors.
IQ tests, as I recall, are generally pretty decent at their originally intended purpose of predicting performance in the mainstream school system (at least up through high school, not sure about college), because the skills and knowledge it measures strongly overlaps with the skills and knowledge that match well with the current schooling system.
People have subsequently attempted to take this extremely limited and borderline circular usage (Do well on your IQ test? Do well in school. Do well in school? Do well on your IQ test) to be broadly meaningful, which is deeply flawed in a number of ways. And now, of course, there’s attempts to update IQ to reflect a broader set of skills, which is sort of a step in the right direction but still fundamentally flawed in its attempt to reduce an incredibly broad set of different skills and areas of knowledge into a single number that you can rank on a scoreboard against others’ like that’s remotely meaningful.
And of course, by skills, I mean not just the things it’s supposed to measure like math proficiency, vocabulary, etc., but also skills implicit to the nature of the test like focus, auditory and visual processing, ability to actually provide a definition for words vs. knowing how to use them but not knowing how to rattle off dictionary-style definitions, etc., all of which are also skills that are advantageous in our education system as it is currently structured but which aren’t really a measure of other areas of intelligence.
Sadly, we as a society, at least in the Anglosphere that I’m familiar with, have a bad habit of prioritizing measurements that give us easy numbers to work with but don’t really reflect reality that well over more complicated methods of assessment that might be more difficult to work with but actually work better.
Ha, thanks for the whole writeup! And yeah, the general assumption “IQ = intelligence” is matching your conclusion
nothing meaningful should be done to you, good or bad, just because of your iq
rougher than asphalt
IQ: The only winning move is not to play.
What do you think drugs are?
Hey Eli how do you know he brings brownies…?
This is the shit I’ll do if I get in a position where it’s hard to fire me
Sounds to me like this person played the game quite well.
I want a second lunch.
You only get that if you’re stupid.
Okay . . .
Does anyone work in a place where this is a real thing? I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of an employer making you take a random IQ test.
Hey, Organizational Psychologist here, we are the people who make tests like this. I’ll try and provide a brief explanation. Let me first preface that the one in the meme is not a legit one and we dont use IQ as a metric in any cognitive ability testing. We do use cognitive ability testing and these tests are actually somewhat good for selection but they aren’t the end all be all. If you would like this is deeply discussed in this review by Sackett et al (2022): https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-17327-001
If you want to see a legitimate cognitive ability test, the one I’m most familiar with on the commercial market is by wonderlic: https://wonderlic.com/
Cognitive ability tests unfortunately have a number of issues and as you see from the comments a lot of confusion surrounding them (also the canonical post is hilarious as they are way overboard with their testing imo):
- you can practice for these tests, which is an ongoing problem for all standardized testing
- they are very associated with developmental tests for IQ which they only vaguely resemble
- they have more adverse impact than other measures, meaning they can be fraught with allegations of discrimination
An important thing for you or anyone else to consider is that these tests aren’t meant to be used in isolation and overall they only explain a fraction of your potential job performance. Selection is hard, its one of the most studied parts of my field but it’s basically an armsrace that has no end. If anyone would like to know more on the science, feel free to reach out.
I dislike organizational psychologists. The whole field. Every time a problematic hr department does something problematic using ‘researched methods’, the researchers all cry foul and say ‘that’s not how you’re supposed to implement <policy/test>!’ But do you not see your own role in legitimizing this behavior? All the research into how to run a happier bee colony is going to be used to justify mistreatment and discrimination by bad actors. Every test and every policy can be maligned, and providing citations just makes that easier. The research field is itself a tool for maintaining capital.
I don’t disagree. I detest the use of my science as a means to control people for capitalist interest. The reality however is that regardless of the captualists, it would be a shame if we didn’t understand how humans worked together.
Almost all the research we do indicates that the actions of the current economic system are harmful. Humans need to work less, have reasons to do things outside of money, have separations between their spheres of life, live with the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and belonging met. If you ever support things like DEI or equal opportunity for workers, those are practices championed by IO psychologist.
We are no more captured by the capitalists as the chemist making a drung to save lives sold for the cost of a house, the doctor working 80 hours while his patients debts mount, or the computer scientist who wanted to build great things but can’t afford rent if his paycheck wasn’t from Lockheed martain.
I try my best to pull my science in a humanist direction. We are scientists, we can discover, we can advocate, but we can’t prevent people from twisting reality to their whim.
This is literally illegal where I live. There’s a few exceptions like airline pilot, police or firefighter, but besides that it’s considered discrimination.
Which isn’t surprising to me. I personally am not a fan of cognitive ability testing because of that exact problem. There is too much adverse impact to justify it. A simple structural behavioural interview gets you about the same predictive power with far fewer drawbacks.
It makes sense to have specific skill, ability and knowledge tests as appropriate. Like having a written and road test to get a driver license.
But these overall comprehensive “personality” or “cognitive” tests are blatently unethical.
You are correct, especially about personality. Personality is a very very complex multidimensional construct. The only way we can sort of say someone has a specific stable personality is through a statistical mechanism called latent profile analysis. Even then, that is for figuring out general profiles in the population, not the individual.
What we typically do is look at either personality facets or profiles and do experiments to see how they moderate or mediate different effects such as job performance, well being, turnover intentions, etc.
If you want to look at the best scientifically valid personality assessment I’d suggest the HEXACO. There is no bullshit astrology, it’s all just psychology and math.
Yes exactly. I forgot to mention that.
the one I’m most familiar with on the commercial market is by wonderlic
This test says I’m going to be a stellar quarterback.
Haha, don’t worry, we all make fun of them for pushing super hard with the NFL
Selection is hard
It’s not that hard. People in your field just make up a bunch of shit that over complicates it and gets in the way to justify their existence. Anyone halfway decent at hiring can interview a candidate and have a decent idea of if they’re a good fit or not.
That’s completely and totally false. Please read the cited meta analysis, which is directly on that topic. What you proposed is literally the worst means of conducting selection outside of flipping a coin.
The resume and application are a major filter, the personality tests are for recruiting when the recruiter has no idea about the job role nuances or skills needed.
The in person interviews is where you get a feel for the person and can dynamically ask pertainent questions and get live responses.
I have been at companies that used a highering aptitude type approach and the candidates were poor matches based on scores.
There is no match for face to face Q&A. If the interviewer has keen skills.
Literally everyone I ever hired performed almost exactly as I expected them to, but whatever guess I should have been flipping coins.
The U.S. basically made them illegal in workplaces in the 70’s, when it was shown that employers were using so-called intelligence tests unrelated to job functions to discriminate on the basis of race. Plus, in the 90’s they passed a law banning discrimination on the basis of disability. Now workplace testing needs to be shown to be directly related to job responsibilities, so general purpose tests are pretty much too much of a compliance nightmare to be worth the effort.
Maybe they’re still common in some other countries, but they’re really rare in the U.S.
I took a “personality” test in 2007 for my first job (union btw). Some pretty obvious basic questions that I imagine only a selfish sociopath would fail but maybe that helped filter at the time.
American (CA) engineer here, I had to take one of these for a job I ended up getting in 2012. It was for a big company too! They might argue that cognitive ability is directly related to engineering.
I actually do have a cognitive disability, ADHD. But I’m like a one-legged stripper… It might seem counterintuitive, but just watch me dance for a minute and then it will make sense.
I don’t know they still find ways to sneak them in. I took a “logic” test as part of an application recently for a job with the government. The questions weren’t related to anything I would be doing. It definitely felt l like they were trying to suss out intelligence.
Hehehe never apply to Canonical. I sat 6 interviews, 2 psychometric evals including an IQ-adjacent evaluation, submitted a take home assessment and was asked about my high school math grades just to be offered a job with a more advanced title paying 20k less than what I was currently making. I only sat it through because I wanted to post the offer on glassdoor/levels so others didn’t have to waste their time either. (And because I wanted to see if I could pass their famously grueling application process)
So yes I’ve seen companies (big ones) do this sort of thing.
Canonical’s hiring process is wild. The number of stages is a deal breaker in itself, but the bizarre questions and the tests you mentioned don’t do them any favors either.
I lost interest in the first stage with them asking for an essay about things like what kind of student I was in high school. The full email was massive.
I think theirs is the only company I’ve seen ask for a GPA on the initial application. I’ve been out of school so long I don’t even remember, nor did I particularly care since the knowledge was the actual point.
Yes, I went through this too, dumbest interview process ever but it had the positive result to make me look into how dumb a company canonical is and start using debian rather than Ubuntu. I call it a hard fought win
Whaaat…no matter the sale, I’d just go and leave with those abysmal requests. And I complained back in the day that an application had to include so much personal data already 😁
My wife’s workplace tried to have them do dream journaling and then had them come back and report back to the group on what they dreamed about. This is a fortune 500 company that you’ve absolutely heard of before.
LLMs are good for something: wasting the time of people who are wasting your time.
Yeah, at best, that would result in a whole lot of “I didn’t dream last night” from me.
You could never do this with an IT team … every single engineer would answer something like:
“I dreamt of leaving this god forsaken job and moving to a farm in a very rural town with 500 inhabitants then never having to touch a computer again”
See, for me it’s not as much the computers that’s the issue. It’s the people. Oh God the people. Makes me want to go deep into the middle of nowhere where there’s not even light pollution
It’s the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste their stink and every time I do, I fear that I’ve somehow been infected by it.
Find you a B2B position … it’s still glorified service desk, but at least you’re dealing with your own kind instead of shudders Normies
Edit: I just realize B2B can still be the general computer literate populace … I don’t quite know how to call this type of job. L3 support?
We deal with other engineers, the customer’s in house IT team calls us for support with our specific product, but we don’t deal with the end users or the stakeholders, only engineer to engineer.
We deal with other engineers, the customer’s in house IT team calls us for support with our specific product, but we don’t deal with the end users or the stakeholders, only engineer to engineer.
Which doesn’t really quarantee much. I’m a sysadmin in a corporate with offices in multiple countries and even continents. Part of the job is to build services for other offices and help their local IT guys with their stuff. I’ve seen multiple times when “IT guy” plugs in wrong cables multiple times even via monitored video call, creates loops to the network, pulls both power cables from a running ESX servers (production critical, of course) and so on.
Gladly there’s also competent guys and then it’s a breeze. They have their strenghts and knowledge on their local setup, I know my shit and we speak the same language so I get competent requests and detailed descriptions on support tickets while knowing that they don’t do anything stupid after I finish my part of the task.
Ah yes, the core switch local loop … my favorite way to force the network team to enable STP
I’m a step off from it at an MSP so it’s not like it’s just anyone calling in. But the number of c suite people who apparently can’t do their job without AI these days is concerning
The one thing C suite execs and AI have in common is that they’re both really good at being confidently wrong.
Or I have this recurring dream about the head of HR performing oral sex on me.
That would end that really quick.
Because they finally vetted a proper candidate that will submit to HR’s oral sex requests?
Nice.
I frequently dream about dying in horrific ways.
Okay, so there is this big aspartagus, now it’s a moving reckless 8mm european slider from a german window that can open in many ways. One way comes and absorbs itself without any blue ingredients except light pickles that were brought into ransom from andorra in 1800 and 1800BC, the small spring is a irish chair is conscious, it feels warmth.
I worked for a huge huge company you’ve totally heard of. We had a large event where we were all given bells and mallets and told to ring them as a team to make beautiful music. My coworker beat his bell flat.
“I find beauty in silence.” “Poetic but that’s not really…” “Would you like to be beautiful?”
Companies really like to spend money on the most BS of things; anything other than giving their employees a raise lol
A company I worked at had a required cognitive a bility test one of the venture firms had forced on them. It was as long as I remember the SATs being, and a combination of math questions and stuff that felt like it belonged on a Myers-Briggs exam. Apprently if you did bad enough you could get fired?
A company called Aptean does
My field has a physical coordination and spatial reasoning test you have to pass before you’re accepted into grad school, and a lot of employers in the field will retest you before hiring.
Apparently there was an issue with a certain portion of people being able to pass the book learning aspect of the field but then getting injured or being afraid of the machinery we work with.
The company has a special education program for their workers? Huh
one of my clients is a company hq’d in an EurAsian company near Russia.
They rarely fire anyone, and instead just move people around. It’s pretty common outside the US.
sounds like something japan would do expecting you to quit out of shame
They’d be in trouble with me, I have no shame and no honor
I haven’t really heard of it. I’m from Finland myself.
Yes? Is that weird? If you’re inclusive and providing representation to otherwise less abled and neurodivergent and hiring them as employees, seems like the right thing to do.
I think the weird part is finding a company that’s actually inclusive and provides said representation.
Even if they did kind of wield it as a cudgel in an attempt to punish this employee.
What no it’s for idiots. You know managers.
I’m surprised a company would do this
It is weird
We could use an IQ test for presidents though
As if the populous didn’t already know that he was a brainless moron who couldn’t think he’s way out of an unlocked room.
According to our current president, all you have to do is say “man, woman, camera, TV” and you pass an IQ test with flying colors!
Doctors are so amazed how well he is passing it that they are asking him to show the feat over and over.
We already have tons of requirements for presidents that have only made them worse. Garbage in, garbage out.
The current us president is so dumb, so dumb…
that on top of extra lunch they get one extra nap time for each meeting
80 isn’t bad, why is he needing classes?
looks at graph
… oooh 80.Real sweet of them to boomerang around “Top 50.”
