I've often wondered if IQ is in protected state in the field of psychology.
What I mean: Psychology cannot afford for IQ to be disproven or invalidated. Doing so would completely undermine a significant portion of field. It would be like if evolution was disproven in biology -- absolutely gutting. (Just an analogy, don't kill me).
I see this when people bring up Lewis Terman's studies on giftedness or Richard Feynman's IQ score of ~124 -- especially the latter.
People come rushing out of the woodworks with statements like, "Well, Feynman was probably goofing off," "Feynman's result cannot be accurate -- he was a Putnam Award winner in high school," "Test were different back then," etc..
Sure, all of those could be right, but we only can operate off of what we know. The actual cold truth? We will never know.
However, like a knife through the heart, people refuse to even accept Feynman's score as a possibility. Feynman was an exceptional person. Exceptional people are outliers -- perhaps in more than one way.
Personally, I think it crushes people's souls to know that a famous theoretical physicist scored lower on an IQ score than expected, but still accomplished more in life than they did.
That is why I personally believe life is the one true IQ test. You get one shot. One's true intelligence is what you do with it. But hey, maybe my IQ is too low?
What I mean: Psychology cannot afford for IQ to be disproven or invalidated. Doing so would completely undermine a significant portion of field. It would be like if evolution was disproven in biology -- absolutely gutting. (Just an analogy, don't kill me).
I see this when people bring up Lewis Terman's studies on giftedness or Richard Feynman's IQ score of ~124 -- especially the latter.
People come rushing out of the woodworks with statements like, "Well, Feynman was probably goofing off," "Feynman's result cannot be accurate -- he was a Putnam Award winner in high school," "Test were different back then," etc..
Sure, all of those could be right, but we only can operate off of what we know. The actual cold truth? We will never know.
However, like a knife through the heart, people refuse to even accept Feynman's score as a possibility. Feynman was an exceptional person. Exceptional people are outliers -- perhaps in more than one way.
Personally, I think it crushes people's souls to know that a famous theoretical physicist scored lower on an IQ score than expected, but still accomplished more in life than they did.
That is why I personally believe life is the one true IQ test. You get one shot. One's true intelligence is what you do with it. But hey, maybe my IQ is too low?