The other day, I decided to take one of the numerous IQ tests offered on the internet. I chose a 100 question version. These are a few of the questions:
“1. Unscramble the letters to form an English word:
D R O H H C R P I S A
“2. The day after tomorrow will be five days after last Friday. What day is it today?
Saturday
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
“3. The number, “nine thousand, three hundred, forty-one,” when written backward, is read, “four thousand, one hundred, thirty-nine.”
“4. A synonym of tenacity is:
Chutzpah
Ineptness
Urban
Aptitude
“5. Strawberry is to peach as carrot is to?
Potato
Banana
Lettuce
Apple
Blueberry
“6. Now, it’s twice as long since noon as it was two hours ago. What time is it now?
11:00
12:30
14:00
14:30
16:00
“7. The 4:25 bus to the metro airport has a travel time of 1 hour and 45 minutes. The bus is running late today though. What will be the arrival time to the airport?
5:25
5:45
6:05
7:35
“8. Abstract means:
Strict
To mistake for something else
Difficult to understand
Chance of happening
“9. Choose the sentence that most closely resembles the meaning of the proverb, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
Your ideas are more persuasive than coercion.
A pen is more intimidating than a sword.
Swords are less durable than pens.
Fighting is a bad idea, no matter the circumstances.”
I timed out – I hadn’t noticed that there was a time limit- after answering only 19 questions. The missing 81 answers, and whatever number of my recorded answers were deemed incorrect, resulted in an IQ score of about 52.5, placing me in the 8th percentile of all the people who’d taken this test. “ID [Intellectual Disabiliy] is defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) as an IQ of 70 or below,” The National Library of Medicine informs me [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4868842/].
I’m not one who automatically discounts the results of psychological or mental testing, but my disability diagnosis left me curious enough to try to think about its source. My first thought concerned the fact that such a test had a time limit – an apparently rather severe one. The testers evidently believe that the faster you think, the more intelligent you are.
I don’t share that belief. Since I can remember, I’ve automatically resisted any activity that imposed time pressure. Maybe that’s constitutional. Certainly it’s the result of early training. My father, whenever he was showing me how to work on something, always urged me to take it slow. “Measure twice, cut once” was one of his watchwords. “Take your time – do it right” was another. I’ve embraced those principles ever more tightly with every passing year, and I’ve never found cause to doubt them.
That embrace has set me in direct opposition to the new watchwords of my country promoted by the advertising industry – “Faster is Better,” “Don’t waste your time thinking – you might miss the next thrilling image/sound/outrageous utterance!” The testing industry also promotes such values, whether consciously or not.
When I was younger, I’d set my opposition aside when presented with timed tests. Most of them were multiple choice tests, and I’d quickly learned how to take them – most often two of the four potential answers were obviously wrong, and even if you didn’t really understand the other two, one usually sounded more plausible than the other, and you had a 50-50 shot at guessing right, so you’d blacken that box and move right on to the next question.
The internet test I failed so miserably, though, wasn’t reliably multiple choice:
“1. Unscramble the letters to form an English word:
D R O H H C R P I S A”
While I can see pretty quickly a number of short words – DROPS, SHARD, SHOD,
HOARD, CROPS – I can’t make the letters left over merge with any of those words in my first list into a single English word. I’m forced to take to pen and paper and experiment with combinations, and, after I’ve done that for a few minutes, still no single word emerges, and I say the hell with it. It hadn’t occurred to me that the instruction was ambiguous – it didn’t say that I must use all the letters to form one word. I don’t know how many of my allotted minutes I consumed failing to answer this one challenge, but it must have been a significant number. On to the next:
“2.The day after tomorrow will be five days after last Friday. What day is it today?
Saturday
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday”
I came up with “Monday,” which may be correct, but in what conceivable circumstance would anyone profitably think in this manner? To answer this, in any case, you need to read it pretty carefully in order to understand what you’re being asked, and reading carefully takes time. Same goes for:
“6. Now, it’s twice as long since noon as it was two hours ago. What time is it now?
11:00
12:30
14:00
14:30
16:00″
Why would anyone ever need to think about time, or the question of what time it is, in this manner? If you can be the first to imagine a scenario in which this question might measure a useful skill, I’ll give you a pretty. Maybe it’s measuring military readiness?
Then there are the multiple choice questions, which ostensibly measure – what? Vocabulary?
“4: A synonym of tenacity is:
Chutzpah
Ineptness
Urban
Aptitude”
It’s pretty easy, if you know the word “tenacity,” to approach this one with the veteran test-taker’s favorite technique, eliminating the obviously wrong answers – in this case, “ineptness,””urban” and “aptitude.” But that leaves only “chutzpah,” for which Merriam-Webster offers the following definition and preferred synonyms:
“CHUTZPAH means conspicuous or flagrant boldness.
TEMERITY, AUDACITY, HARDIHOOD, EFFRONTERY, NERVE, CHEEK, GALL,” none of which comes anywhere near the meaning of “tenacity.” So I chose “Chutzpah,” with no idea whether it was what the testers were after. If I hadn’t been raised around Yiddish speakers, I wouldn’t have had any idea what the word “chutzpah” meant. So was my ethnic origin or exposure being tested here, or what?
Here’s another multiple choice question:
“9. Choose the sentence that most closely resembles the meaning of the proverb, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
Your ideas are more persuasive than coercion.
A pen is more intimidating than a sword.
Swords are less durable than pens.
Fighting is a bad idea, no matter the circumstances.”
Here, I can possibly eliminate “Fighting is a bad idea” as too broad, and lacking any reference to “pens,” but the proverb could be said to “resemble” any of the other three sentences. Here, I’d guess the testers were looking for the most abstract answer of the three, “Your ideas . . . .” but why does that “more closely resemble” the meaning of the proverb than “A pen is more intimidating than a sword”? If my guess was correct, I can only conclude that one of the pieces of “intelligence,” in the view of the testers, is a preference for metaphorical, rather than literal, interpretation. Or, I could conclude that the test-writer didn’t know how to frame a question correctly.
One more:
“5. Strawberry is to peach as carrot is to?
Potato
Banana
Lettuce
Apple
Blueberry”
Hhhmmmm . . . let’s see. Strawberries and peaches are both fruits; carrot is a vegetable, but so are potatoes and lettuce; which one is more like a carrot than the other? Strawberries grow on the ground, peaches on trees, potatoes in the ground. Apples grow on trees, but carrots grow in the ground. Strawberries are red, peaches might be called orange; carrots are orange, some apples are red, but that seems a stretch. I suppose I could go on pondering factors of comparison, but I’ve already gotten well on my way to timing out. And if I do happen on the “correct” answer, what exactly will that reveal about my intelligence?
The testers’ definition of “intelligence” is not apparent to me from their questions, unless perhaps they define intelligence as “thinking the way we do.” I’m left reacting much as General Terry de la Mesa Allen did: A.J. Liebling reports that Allen was “confronted, at the Fort Leavenworth staff college, with a hypothetical problem about how to win a hypothetical battle. One of the questions was: ‘What are the enemy’s intentions?’ General Allen wrote, ‘How the hell do I know?’ and walked out.” But many people who are confronted with “IQ tests” do not have that option, since one or more aspects of their futures hinges on taking the damn things seriously.
Stephen Jay Gould, writing about the history of “intelligence tests,” observed, “We recognize the importance of mentality in our lives and wish to characterize it, in part, so that we can make the divisions and distinctions among people that our cultural and political systems dictate. We therefore give the word ‘intelligence’ to this wondrously complex and multifaceted set of human capabilities. This shorthand symbol is then reified and intelligence achieves its dubious status as a unitary thing” (The Mismeasure of Man,1981).
In my case, for instance, I learned to read and love reading very early in life, and, as they say, “devoured” books, which led to an ease with grammar, syntax, the written word. By the time I began encountering written tests, I had no trouble reading the questions or understanding what they were asking for (but the testers have improved in writing them impenetrably, it seems from my recent on-line experience). I had spent so much time reading – and, later, writing – that I felt completely at home with written tests and generally could choose correct answers without much trouble.
One sort of question, though, didn’t ask for any sort of verbal ability. Here’s an example:
Question: The diagram on the left will become which of the four images, if folded?
I know people who could glance at that set of images and pick the right answer without a second thought. But I never had any spatial imagination to speak of. Still don’t. I don’t know if my brain simply lacks certain neurons, or never developed certain neural pathways, or if I never developed spatial imagination from lack of interest. But I damn well know I don’t have any. I could look at that question and those shapes for the next five years and have no more certain idea of which one is the correct answer than I do now. In regard to spatial imagination, I am indeed disabled.
Writing of an earlier attempt to find a reliable method for measuring human intelligence, Harvard’s Howard Gardner writes, “. . . . Franz Joseph Gall . . . . noted that those boys with prominent eyes tended to have good memories. He clung to this idea as he became a physician and scientist and, some years later, placed it at the center of a discipline called ‘phrenology’ which aspired to be a science . . . . Of course, armed with hindsight, one can readily spot the flaws in the phrenological doctrine. We know, for example that the sheer size of the brain has no clear-cut correlation with an individual’s intellect; in fact, individuals with very small brains, such as Walt Whitman and Anatole France, have achieved great success, even as individuals with massive brains are sometimes idiots and all too often decidedly unremarkable . . . .” (Frames of Mind: the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, Basic Books, 1985, pp. 12-13)
Silly as it may seem today, phrenology had a long run, well into the 20th century. The measuring of heads took many peculiar turns. The Eugenics Record Office, funded by the Carnegie Institution, sent the Greenwich Village street philosopher and barfly Joe Gould to North Dakota, where Gould claimed to have measured the heads of a thousand Chippewas and 500 Mandans. His lecture on his expedition, delivered at Greenwich Village parties, was entitled, “Drunk as a Skunk, or How I Measured the Heads of Fifteen Hundred Indians in Zero Weather.” (Joseph Mitchell, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1943, p. 82)
Science was hardly deterred by the increasingly obvious absurdities of phrenology. Harvard psychology professor Robert Yerkes built on the pioneering work of Alfred Binet to devise “intelligence tests” for the military. In The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould reports that the “‘Intelligence Test’ that Yerkes contrived to administer to U.S. Army recruits was composed of a “. . . . multiple-choice test [that] consisted entirely of questions like:
Crisco is a : patent medicine, disinfectant, toothpaste, food product
The number of a Kaffir’s legs is: 2,4,6,8
Christy Mathewson is famous as a: writer, artist, baseball player, comedian”
Of such testing, Yerkes’ follower C.C. Grigham, a psychology professor at Princeton, emoted, “We have here an investigation which, of course, surpasses in reliability all preceding investigations, assembled and correlated, a hundred fold. These army data constitute the first really significant contribution to the study of race differences in mental traits. They give us a scientific basis for our conclusions.” Yerkes reciprocated by writing, in a preface to Brigham’s A Study of American Intelligence, “The author presents not theories or opinions but facts. It behooves us to consider their reliability and their meaning,” The “findings,” amazingly enough, confirmed the inferiority of African-Americans, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, and poor Americans. Possibly these groups lacked insufficiently prominent eyes.
I think that almost anyone reading those three questions today would easily see that they test cultural and educational backgrounds rather than anything about the taker’s innate intelligence or its lack. But the results of those and other such tests have been – and in many cases still are – used to determine immigration policies and quotas, school admissions or class placements, and to justify all sorts of racial and ethnic discrimination. My sorry performance on the modern version of such a test would keep me out of most forms of gainful employment, should I again need to seek it.
In the previously mentioned Mismeasure or Man, Gould wrote,”Science is rooted in creative interpretation. Numbers suggest, constrain, and refute; they do not, by themselves, specify the content of scientific theories. Theories are built upon the interpretation of numbers, and interpreters are often trapped by their own rhetoric. They believe in their own objectivity, and fail to discern the prejudice that leads them to one interpretation among many consistent with their numbers. Paul Broca is now distant enough. We can stand back and show that he used numbers not to generate new theories but to illustrate a priori conclusions. Shall we believe that science is different today simply because we share the cultural context of most practicing scientists and mistake its influence for objective truth? Broca was an exemplary scientist; no one has ever surpassed him in meticulous care and accuracy of measurement. By what right, other than our own biases, can we identify his prejudice and hold that science now operates independently of culture and class?”
Gould did not mean this statement to “debunk” Science or scientists. He had spent his life as a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, and had the greatest respect for his profession, as do I. What he did not respect was what I would call “the religion of Science” – meaning the belief that the conclusions drawn from a scientific experiment constitute Objective Truth, eliminating the validity of all other possible conclusions, that scientists constitute a sort of New Priesthood, immune to the biases of their classes, cultures, or families, and that their conclusions are final, fixed, and unassailably True. You can hear the voice of that religion clearly in the previously quoted Yerkes review of Brigham’s book: “The author presents not theories or opinions but facts.”
The great American Kurt Vonnegut, who saw through so much cant and hypocrisy, probably would have seen through the claims of some scientists to “present not theories or opinions but facts.” Vonnegut started out to become a scientist, his beloved brother Bernard became a scientist, but Vonnegut was well aware of the provisional nature of scientific “truths.” On the other hand, he believed that the scientific method offered the best means humans had yet devised for understanding the world, the universe, and themselves. He felt contempt for people who openly and flagrantly ignored the need to discipline their thinking, preferring their own unfounded opinions and “what everybody knows.”
In A Man Without a Country, Vonnegut wrote,”Human beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million years or so. The leading characters in our history books have been our most enthralling, and sometimes our most terrifying, guessers . . . . And the masses of humanity through the ages, feeling inadequately educated just like we do now, and rightly so, have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that one.
“Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long, for all of human experience so far, that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on. It is now their turn to guess and guess and be listened to. Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn’t the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard . . . .
‘What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge – the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard and Yale educations.
“If they didn’t do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on. Please, don’t you do that. But if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you – and now I have to guess – about ten to one.”
I think what Vonnegut was implying here was not any version of the Religion of Science. I think he was advocating what in the century before this used to be called “educated guessing.” “Educated” meaning that you ought to try to find out as much solid information about a subject, figure out what opinion about the subject the information might imply, try to find a way to test that implication, and modify the implication if necessary, before you reach a conclusion. But even after you reach that conclusion, you’re still guessing. Given the infinite size, the largely unknown contents, the fantastic number of “facts” to be learned about even our pathetic little ball in that universe, it seems unlikely to me that humans will ever be able to do anything but guess. We can only hope to make ever more educated guesses.
And we – I, anyhow – can hope that we will quit believing that we “know” anything, Including what “intelligence” is, or is composed of. Sure, we have to act as if we knew what we were doing, but “act” is the right word. Successful actors, during the span of a performance, speak and move and react to others with complete conviction, even though they knows that the words and emotions they’re expressing are not their own. Well, the words we use are only partially our own. They’re inherited, and all the damn foolishness the world has produced is inherited along with them. So whatever words we use to form whatever conclusions we form, we ought to remain aware that they may well be damn foolish.
