Who would have known IQ research could be this much fun. Keep up the great work.

I hope you get to address some of the other controversies in IQ testing, such as robustness of a score, predictive value, and "multiple intelligences."

NP

Aristotle's IQ would be -1000

This is not a paradox. It's a reductio ad absurdum. Anyone who can't see that really must have an IQ of minus 1000.

If your premises lead you to paradoxes, your premises are wrong!

The point is you have to be relatively smarter than the rest of the population to think of new ideas and be able to go beyond social norms and ask/think of things people are too scared to think of.

The smarter you are, the more likely you are to question the norms.

Intelligence quotient tests are not an accurate representation of the intellectual curiosity of humans at any period in time, for example Einstein was thought to be retarded at an early age. Intellectual curiosity is different than intellectual knowledge. Also for the visual tests (funky stimuli) , it could be said that our generation has grown up watching TV and using computers so we have been exposed to stimuli which resembles funky shapes.

Absurdo, extreme.
I know my son is sure that He is at least six IQ points sharper than his revered pater, however this does not bear up in reality.
I think that since we live in a problem solving society, and an IQ test is a problem, it would be much more reasonale to assume that the IQ tests are becoming three percent Less Accurate every decade.
In conclusion; back to work you lazy psychiatric dudes, no more goofing off on the net.

That Aristotle thing is the case of a theory gone wrong. Flynn in a recent article talked about this, and how increasing complexity can drive abstract reasoning forward, but ONLY abstract reasoning. I wrote a few things myself if you want to see at my blog concerning increased complexity and the flynn effect http://encefalus.com/cognitive/dark-knight-cartoons-video-games-flynn-ef...

This entire argument is based on the fact that the Flynn Effect represents linear growth - and Flynn may have thought that the effect is linear because of the inability to trace it back several generations.

What about the possibility that IQ is increasing logarithmically? In such a case, you'd have to look all the way back to the first cavemen - which would place Aristotle as not too far behind us, and explain why the developmental growth is barely noticable from generation to generation.

your a fucking retard for thinking Aristotles IQ was -1000

It is a puzzle isn't it? It is not that Aristotle was unintelligent, it is that there is no way for a human living in today's society to graph how he lived or what he actually thought. The true test would be to ask him personally; however, that is not possible. The testing system that was used in that day was developed for people of that time. One can do all the mathmatical figures and come up with a -1000, but that does not make it accurate. The society that we live in today teaches us to "think outside the box". It allows us to be analytical and alittle wierd. child rearing and education were not the same as they are today. I believe that society and environment play a large part in this aspect.

I agree that the whole thing represents a massive and inherently inaccurate extrapolation, but I would also like to note that, while I have never taken an IQ test, I would presume that "abstract reasoning" refers to a general pattern of reasoning. By this I mean that there is an identical logical process involved in calculating the derivative of a function and finding the area of a circle by the ancient method of "exhaustion." Both cases involve limiting processes. In a similar way, if a limiting process resembles some other process, we could find a master process that is the common thread between the two. A well known master process, or logical form, is: if all A are in B, and all B are in C, then all A are in C. Ironically, this form of logic was first outlined by Aristotle. In fact, the Organon, Aristotle's treatise on logic, is the oldest logical work in the world and stood unchallenged for well over a thousand years, until Frege posited modern predicate logic. My point here is that even correct reasoning about funky shapes follows a valid logical pattern that is common to all human minds. This concept is the central focus of the Organon. Thus, I believe Aristotle in particular would be excellent at IQ tests, since they are essentially tests of logical forms, and he formulated term logic after all!