Contacting people with high IQs is generally a good thing, but without additional structure it can easily become a signalling fest. Intelligence is just a capacity of the brain, not a strategy to use it well. It would be like Mensa—a lot of smart people, most of them doing nothing important.
And—although I am not completely sure about this—I suspect that speaking about top 0.1% IQ is methodologically nonsense. It literally means “one in a thousand”, so the proper test would require calibrating on tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of randomly selected children of the same age, repeating every few years. In my estimate, a probability that someone paid the costs of such calibration is much lower than a probability that someone used a standard IQ test mixed with a customized hocus-pocus, especially because most people don’t understand the difference. (If this is true, then the whole thing was a signalling fest since the very beginning. But it still can be mined for useful contacts.)
so the proper test would require calibrating on tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of randomly selected children of the same age, repeating every few years.
I think this effectively happens with the tests that Davidson relies on because so many children take them.
Thanks for the links. Now I would tell they are doing it very seriously.
It still leaves some space for metodological doubts, for example being in “top 0.1% at least in one of three or four subcategories” is not the same as being in “top 0.1%” generally. But I respect them for using only the existing serious tests and not developing their own (as e.g. many self-proclaimed high-IQ societies do).
See:
http://www.davidsongifted.org/
For children with IQs in the top .1% Members get access to a listing of other members.
Contacting people with high IQs is generally a good thing, but without additional structure it can easily become a signalling fest. Intelligence is just a capacity of the brain, not a strategy to use it well. It would be like Mensa—a lot of smart people, most of them doing nothing important.
And—although I am not completely sure about this—I suspect that speaking about top 0.1% IQ is methodologically nonsense. It literally means “one in a thousand”, so the proper test would require calibrating on tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of randomly selected children of the same age, repeating every few years. In my estimate, a probability that someone paid the costs of such calibration is much lower than a probability that someone used a standard IQ test mixed with a customized hocus-pocus, especially because most people don’t understand the difference. (If this is true, then the whole thing was a signalling fest since the very beginning. But it still can be mined for useful contacts.)
I think this effectively happens with the tests that Davidson relies on because so many children take them.
See also.
Thanks for the links. Now I would tell they are doing it very seriously.
It still leaves some space for metodological doubts, for example being in “top 0.1% at least in one of three or four subcategories” is not the same as being in “top 0.1%” generally. But I respect them for using only the existing serious tests and not developing their own (as e.g. many self-proclaimed high-IQ societies do).
Wonder what I’d be like now if I’d had something like this when I was that age...
At the very least, I probably would’ve graduated college.