how much does IQ matter

[Human Mint]

I think it is something you can enjoy a lot if you're blessed with it.

I am average in terms of IQ but I always loved puzzles and strategic games that put your working memory into practice. But chess for example, it is hard for me and therefore I can't enjoy it as much.

There is certainly the aspect of novelty that my mind craves too. I seem to be intellectually numb to the old same.

[Carl-Richard]

IQ helps you see through people's bullshit. But it also helps you defend your own bullshit. You're easily bullshitted if you can't process a sentence efficiently (or simply hold larger pieces of information in your mind). IQ predicts things like reading comprehension. If you can't read a sentence without struggling to understand what it says, you have deficit in dealing with information, and no "EQ" or "true intelligence" will save you there. It's also a sort of false dichotomy to separate IQ from EQ. If you have low IQ, you tend to have low executive functioning, and that impacts your emotional regulation.

I just watched a guy on an entertainment TV show do a math test, he also scored a two-digit IQ in an earlier episode, and when they revealed the results, even when he knew he was bad at math and has always been bad at math, he had an emotional breakdown when the other people on the show (colleagues) made jokes about him being dense. You would perhaps expect a guy with high "EQ" to say "yeah, I'm bad at math, whatchu gonna do?" and perhaps say something clever in response, being aware of their strengths and weaknesses, but instead, it was quite an embarrassing situation.

Edited 16 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Basman]

Most things you need to live a good life are generally quiet simple to understand. Well accessible for average levels of intelligence. A high IQ is good for niche high reasoning skillsets, but there are many valuable skillsets that don't require super high IQ. Society tends to overate high IQ skills in my opinion.

19 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

There are some forms of stupidity exclusive to high IQ people.

Quote of the year 😂

[Jirh]

What most people don't know is that you can actually increase your IQ.

Edited 15 hours ago by Jirh

[Basman]

Typical high IQ people, "nerds", the types you see walking around in academia and shit always come off as missing something to me. They are either fat or frail and generally lack intensity. They have an abundance of one type of intelligence but aren't well rounded in my opinion. I find it hard too look up to a professor who's an expert in one thing but they are shaped like a pear. 

[Carl-Richard]

6 hours ago, Jirh said:

What most people don't know is that you can actually increase your IQ.

True. It also varies based on state, e.g. if you eat some trashy food or you stop working out for a while (or if you're really tired or you had a superb night's sleep). I'm convinced diet, exercise and brain training techniques like N-Back and of course meditation can bump your IQ up or down with 20-30%. If I were to rank it, probably N-Back and Sprint training / HIIT would be tied first place, then meditation and weight training and moderate-low intensity cardio, then diet (unless you're eating absolute poison, then it's #1).

Edited 8 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Jirh]

@Carl-Richard

These things you mentioned might put you in a better mind-space, but they don't necessarily increase your IQ on a fundamental level. They are mostly temporary boosts that can make your overall functionality higher, but that's not the same thing as a structural increase. Because once you stop them or deviate a little, you will lose it. But of course you want to be at the most optimal place for performance.

But what actually increases IQ is simply learning and experience; both in breadth and in depth. You want to have as much different experiences as possible, and you want to go deep into them as much as possible. This mixture helps big picture understanding and fundamental correctness, which are the pillars of high IQ. We might think geniuses are born that way. But what we don't see behind the scenes is the many years spent in learning the basics that allowed them to eventually reach to crazy advanced levels of intelligence.

But there are also several skills that factor into IQ that you don't necessarily learn logically, but somehow intuitively pick up, like pattern matching and associative memory. Those intuitive leaps don't come from nowhere, they come from having a richly connected neural network built by diverse, deep learning. The more hooks you have in your brain, the more patterns you can spot.

And like you said: EQ is not separate from IQ, so increasing one will increase the other. Social skills are mostly a facet of EQ, so becoming more socially adapted increases your overall intelligence.

[Leo Gura]

The best way to increase IQ is to take a bunch of IQ tests and learn how they work.

[Carl-Richard]

42 minutes ago, Jirh said:

@Carl-Richard

These things you mentioned might put you in a better mind-space, but they don't necessarily increase your IQ on a fundamental level. They are mostly temporary boosts that can make your overall functionality higher, but that's not the same thing as a structural increase.

IQ in a functional sense, as in the actual performance on the actual test were you to take it. Try taking an IQ test while constantly inhaling nitrous oxide, while you have pneumonia, diarrhea, haven't eaten for 8 hours or you just crashed your blood glucose or neuroinflamed yourself with cake, or you fried your fast food preservative-saturated leftovers to a black crisp in the worst PFAS-ridden leaky pan decimating your neuronal oxygen intake.

But state over longer times leads to structure differences. If you are at 150 IQ functionally speaking and you engage with 150 IQ content, you will have structure that accommodates that after a while (not only as crystallized intelligence but also fluid intelligence structure as well). If you feed your brain what it needs to fire quickly (which is what diet, exercise, etc., does), and you teach yourself over time to engage in activities that makes it fire more quickly (which is e.g. what N-back does, or just reading or thinking complicated/complex things), naturally you will make structurally adaptations for it to fire even more quickly. And then when you miss a meal or some days of exercise, you will still have those structural changes there.

We know doing things like meditation, N-back training does change brain structure, so doing it "better" (under more optimal conditions) would just change it more in that optimal direction. Lifting better increases muscles more than lifting worse; brain training better (using your mind better) makes it adapt in that direction more than brain training worse.

Edited 7 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Jirh]

@Carl-Richard 🤝🏻💯

[Leo Gura]

8 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

Try taking an IQ test while constantly inhaling nitrous oxide, while you have pneumonia, diarrhea, haven't eaten for 8 hours or you just crashed your blood glucose or neuroinflamed yourself with cake, or you fried your fast food preservative-saturated leftovers to a black crisp in the worst PFAS-ridden leaky pan decimating your neuronal oxygen intake.

But that's a silly standard. 

Try passing the SAT when you are drunk or haven't slept in 2 days.

Obviously passing any exam assumes a certain baseline of health, sobriety, and restedness.

Edited 7 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Carl-Richard]

41 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

The best way to increase IQ is to take a bunch of IQ tests and learn how they work.

Some co-student of mine once told me she qualified for Mensa (in a work group with others which was kinda "low EQ" if you can call it that), and I wanted to respond "if any of you really wanted to join Mensa, you most probably could" (implying you could practice a lot to become better at the tests or simply increase your IQ functionally in more organic ways).

[Carl-Richard]

11 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

But that's a silly standard. 

Try passing the SAT when you are drunk or haven't slept in 2 days.

Obviously passing any exam assumes a certain baseline of health, sobriety, and restedness.

But most people haven't unlocked those last 20% of health, sobriety and restedness  "I'm not a health 'optimizer', I'm a health '-maxxer'" - C.M., 1994-2026 (adapted the quote of course ).

Edited 7 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[Jirh]

20 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

But that's a silly standard. 

Try passing the SAT when you are drunk or haven't slept in 2 days.

Obviously passing any exam assumes a certain baseline of health, sobriety, and restedness.

You have to also consider long term effects.

A smart alcoholic will lose IQ points over time, eventually they will be reduced to a monkey.

[Leo Gura]

1 minute ago, Jirh said:

You have to also consider long term effects.

A smart alcoholic will lose IQ points over time, eventually they will be reduced to a monkey.

Sure, it is easier to lose IQ points than to gain them.

[Ramanujan]

MBTI  point out that people are of different type and some types are smarter than others. like an INTJ is smarter than an ESFP or ESFJ.   

chris lagan is an ISTP btw. 

IQ is about Ti

some sensors have high IQ. but sensors are on average dumber than intuitives.

Ni is the function that correlates with intelligence. the more Ni you have , the more intelligent you are. also the more Ni you have , the more weak and docile you become

[Ramanujan]

i only have 100 IQ. wish i had 150 IQ. so i can win a turing award for computer science

[Leo Gura]

@Ramanujan Focus on your strengths, let go of the shoulds.

I'm not good at math or programming. Hasn't diminished my life one bit.

Edited 5 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Ramanujan]

@Leo Gura ok leo

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Ramanujan said:

MBTI  point out that people are of different type and some types are smarter than others. like an INTJ is smarter than an ESFP or ESFJ.   

chris lagan is an ISTP btw. 

IQ is about Ti

some sensors have high IQ. but sensors are on average dumber than intuitives.

Ni is the function that correlates with intelligence. the more Ni you have , the more intelligent you are. also the more Ni you have , the more weak and docile you become

IQ is probably more about thinking vs feeling in general (and also intuition vs sensing in general). But I could also go into extraverted/introverted functions (I do that at the end for thinking and intuition functions).

Thinking (logically) is about stringing multiple things together, so it's quantitative, so more, faster, bigger, is a lot of what IQ is about. Feeling is more qualitative and you can just give an answer based on a feeling and that's it. 

Intuition (in the Jungian typology sense) is about seeing and "receiving" abstract patterns, a form of pattern recognition ("what links water/liquid and vapor? Phase transitions! (N) Because water/liquid and vapor are just different phases of the same substance (T)"). 

Sensing is just picking up on concrete information from the environment either directly or through memory, which also involves pattern recognition, but your thinking is embedded in that particular environment somehow ("we put that screw into that thing here, see, then it fits (S). Because the screw supports the weight of the leg (T)").

You could say intuition tends towards IQ more than sensing because it deals with often more complex patterns and just more patterns in general because abstractions don't need to be tied to something directly in front of you and can grow outwards like a tree and can connect to other things not currently right in front of you. So it tends towards more quantitative.

As for introverted vs extroverted, I would bet on extraverted intuition as most conducive because it explores rather than reduces. And also introverted thinking because it's more concerned about consistency for its own sake rather than for some pragmatic or realistic real-world goal, so it can go exploring endlessly together with extraverted intuition in the abstract where most quantity is found.

In other words, ENTP/INTP > INTJ/ENTJ > the rest (I wouldn't want to go into tertiary functions or extraverted vs introverted sensing or feeling functions for the sake of everybody's time).

Edited 4 hours ago by Carl-Richard