#intelligence tests

“In fact, his case shows how important are the intellectual qualities that IQ tests leave out.

There are published and well-investigated scales or tasks for most of the thinking dispositions suggested in the characterizations of George Bush’s thinking.

The technology of rationality assessment is so far advanced that we could imagine, for example, testing President Bush (long before his presidency) and in fact predicting exactly the thinking attributes that are now known to be so tellingly characteristic of the him.

Using the terms for the actual scales and tasks in the literature, formal tests of rational thinking might have revealed that the president is:

overconfident; low in typical intellectual engagement; low in openness to experience; high in belief perseverance; high in confirmation bias; high in faith in intuition; high in impulsiveness; high in one-sided thinking;

low in need for cognition; low in openness to experience; does not engage in counterfactual thinking; treats beliefs as possessions (has high belief identification); is high in need for closure, and low in thought flexibility.

The directions of Bush’s score on all of these thinking dispositions is in the direction associated with lower rationality.

Fluid intelligence provided no inoculation against a confluence of problematic intellectual traits.

“Although most people would say that the ability to think rationally is a clear sign of a superior intellect, standard IQ tests devote no section to rational thinking as cognitive scientists would define the term.

To think rationally means adopting appropriate goals, taking the appropriate action given one’s goals and beliefs, and holding beliefs that are commensurate with available evidence.

Although IQ tests do assess the ability to focus on an immediate goal in the face of distraction, they do not assess at all whether a person has the tendency to develop goals that are rational in the first place.

Likewise, IQ tests are good measures of how well a person can hold beliefs in short-term memory and manipulate those beliefs, but they do not assess at all whether a person has the tendency to form beliefs rationally when presented with evidence.

“Being a cognitive miser makes us vulnerable to exploitation.

We give up our thinking to those who manipulate our environments, and we let our actions be determined by those who can create the stimuli that best trigger our shallow automatic processing tendencies. (…)

In discussing the mechanisms causing framing effects, Daniel Kahneman has stated that “the basic principle of framing is the passive acceptance of the formulation given”.

The frame presented to the subject is taken as focal, and all subsequent thought derives from it rather than from alternative framings because the latter would require more thought. (…)

For example, in the tax example above they would be shown both the “reduction for children” and the “penalty for the childless” version.

It is almost uniformly the case that, after being debriefed, subjects recognize the equivalence of the two versions, 

and also they realize that it is a mistake (an incoherence in people’s political attitudes) to respond differently to the two versions simply because they have been framed differently.

This finding suggests that what people need to learn to do is to think from more than one perspective—to learn to habitually reframe things for themselves.

The debriefing results show that once they do so, people will detect discrepancies in their responses to a problem posed from different perspectives and will take steps to resolve the discrepancies.

People seem to recognize that consistency is an intellectual value. What they do not do, however, is habitually generate the perspective shifts that would highlight the inconsistencies in their thinking.

Conversation with Mizuki Tomaiwa on Life, Work, and Views: Member, OLYMPIQ Society

Publisher: In-Sight Publishing Publisher Founding: September 1, 2014 Web Domain: http://www.in-sightpublishing.com  Location: Fort Langley, Township of Langley, British Columbia, Canada Journal: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal Journal Founding: August 2, 2012 Frequency: Three (3) Times Per Year Review Status: Non-Peer-Reviewed Access: Electronic/Digital & Open Access Fees:…

An Interview with Mr. YoungHoon Kim (김영훈) from South Korea on High-IQ Rankings, Listings, and Societies, and Fraud, Preventing Cheating, and Possible Future Intelligence Tests in the High-IQ Communities (Part Two)

Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Numbering: Issue 20.A, Idea: Outliers & Outsiders (Part Sixteen)

Place of Publication: Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Title: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Web Domain: http://www.in-sightjournal.com

Individual Publication Date: August 22, 2019

Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2019

Name of Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Frequency: Three…