Increasingly, as one ages, one worries more about what one DOES, rather than about abstract characterizations of one’s capability.
This definitely happened to me. Between the ages of about 10 − 14, I was utterly obsessed with finding out what my IQ was. Somehow, somewhere along the way, I’d picked up the notion that Smartness in quantity was the most important thing a person could possibly have.
And it drove me frankly batty not knowing how much Smartness I had, because (a) I was insecure and felt like I needed to find out I had a “high enough” number in order to permit myself any sense of self-worth, and (b) I had an idea fixed in my mind that only “geniuses” with IQs 150 or above could have any hope of addressing any of the interesting questions and topics that dominated my thoughts as a geeky little kid: faster-than-light travel, Grand Unified Theories, etc.
I spent a lot of time trying to find any papers/reports/test scores my parents might be hiding away, hoping that I’d be able to discover through doing this some idea of the quantitative value stamp I was convinced must be on my brain somewhere (though not directly viewable by me).
I didn’t actually find any of these papers until I was in my late teens, and by then I found with some surprise that I didn’t care all that much what they said. At some point between the ages of 14 and 17 I’d managed to get over my IQ obsession and move toward a different brain-related obsession (one considerably less worry-inducing): that of how brains, and in particular mine, worked at all. And in ceasing to be obsessed with quantitative test-based measurements, lo and behold, I found it far easier to actually think about things and just plain learn.
I do now know what my age-4 Weschler score was, and it wasn’t 150. Not even close. I took another Weschler (the adult scale) in college, and while that score ended up being quite a bit higher than my age-4 score, it was still lower than I’d originally hoped it would be. But it didn’t matter to me in the least from an emotional standpoint by then, because I’d already managed to accomplish things (like getting an A in calculus) that I’d have considered the province of people with far higher IQ scores than I actually had. Not to mention the fact that when I looked at my subtest scores, they were all over the map—I had a higher than average Block Design, but lower than average Picture Arrangement, for instance.
At this point I tend to see IQ (at least as measured on tests) as being very limited in terms of what information it actually tells you about what someone is capable of doing. E.g., I don’t think IQ scores can definitively tell you when someone is going to “hit a wall”, so to speak, in terms of what mathematical theorem they will absolutely get stuck on when they encounter it (or what engineering problem they might be able to solve, etc.).
It almost seems like some of these posts are suggesting a desire for much greater predictive ability than any test or ten-minute impression could possibly actually reveal in something as complex and feedback-sensitive as a human individual. And while I’d like as much as anyone for the world and everyone in it not to be destroyed (whether in one great cataclysm or a gradual tragic fade-out), I’ve come to terms with the fact that, as corny as it sounds, all we can do is our best, and we must do this in the utter absence of perfect knowledge regarding the limits of our individual or collective capacity.
Increasingly, as one ages, one worries more about what one DOES, rather than about abstract characterizations of one’s capability.
This definitely happened to me. Between the ages of about 10 − 14, I was utterly obsessed with finding out what my IQ was. Somehow, somewhere along the way, I’d picked up the notion that Smartness in quantity was the most important thing a person could possibly have.
And it drove me frankly batty not knowing how much Smartness I had, because (a) I was insecure and felt like I needed to find out I had a “high enough” number in order to permit myself any sense of self-worth, and (b) I had an idea fixed in my mind that only “geniuses” with IQs 150 or above could have any hope of addressing any of the interesting questions and topics that dominated my thoughts as a geeky little kid: faster-than-light travel, Grand Unified Theories, etc.
I spent a lot of time trying to find any papers/reports/test scores my parents might be hiding away, hoping that I’d be able to discover through doing this some idea of the quantitative value stamp I was convinced must be on my brain somewhere (though not directly viewable by me).
I didn’t actually find any of these papers until I was in my late teens, and by then I found with some surprise that I didn’t care all that much what they said. At some point between the ages of 14 and 17 I’d managed to get over my IQ obsession and move toward a different brain-related obsession (one considerably less worry-inducing): that of how brains, and in particular mine, worked at all. And in ceasing to be obsessed with quantitative test-based measurements, lo and behold, I found it far easier to actually think about things and just plain learn.
I do now know what my age-4 Weschler score was, and it wasn’t 150. Not even close. I took another Weschler (the adult scale) in college, and while that score ended up being quite a bit higher than my age-4 score, it was still lower than I’d originally hoped it would be. But it didn’t matter to me in the least from an emotional standpoint by then, because I’d already managed to accomplish things (like getting an A in calculus) that I’d have considered the province of people with far higher IQ scores than I actually had. Not to mention the fact that when I looked at my subtest scores, they were all over the map—I had a higher than average Block Design, but lower than average Picture Arrangement, for instance.
At this point I tend to see IQ (at least as measured on tests) as being very limited in terms of what information it actually tells you about what someone is capable of doing. E.g., I don’t think IQ scores can definitively tell you when someone is going to “hit a wall”, so to speak, in terms of what mathematical theorem they will absolutely get stuck on when they encounter it (or what engineering problem they might be able to solve, etc.).
It almost seems like some of these posts are suggesting a desire for much greater predictive ability than any test or ten-minute impression could possibly actually reveal in something as complex and feedback-sensitive as a human individual. And while I’d like as much as anyone for the world and everyone in it not to be destroyed (whether in one great cataclysm or a gradual tragic fade-out), I’ve come to terms with the fact that, as corny as it sounds, all we can do is our best, and we must do this in the utter absence of perfect knowledge regarding the limits of our individual or collective capacity.