this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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Low IQ is a type of singling people out who are not what society wants people to be. A form of subtle eugenics, make the "dumb" people not be able to do things because a "test" says there IQ is low, for instance someone who speaks another language could mis understand the "test" and people think there idiots when in fact they just wasn't good at English. This also goes for people who are absolutely horrible at English reading and comprehension of "tests" when they could be brilliant in other aspects of life.
So remember there is no way to "test" how smart or dumb someone is.
IQ does not measure intelligence, it measures different fields of intellect, mostly about logic, language comprehension and memory. It doesn't measure intelligence per se, but if you have a low score <70, you can be sure your life is going to be impacted negatively in some way, either because you don't understand other people, you don't understand the world or you cannot chain together complex logical chains.
Unless you're saying other metrics on people are also somehow eugenics like height, weight, or speed, IQ is not eugenics. Eugenics is the belief that one's genes affects one's life, and certain genes will lead to a better life in expectation. (This is in fact a true belief, since there are some genes which are known to cause horrible painful short lives.)
IQ is just a measure of how well you do on an IQ test, which is known to correlate (maybe causally, maybe not) with various things such as income.
How do you know there is no way to test how smart or dumb somebody is? Even if IQ tests aren't to your standard, you can't be sure there isn't another test possible.
You would first need to define intelligence before you can measure it. We're still nowhere near any kind of agreement on that first step.
IQ is, at most, a notion of intelligence. Or it is simply a number. Regardless, it has correlations with other things, and that's what's interesting. Asking whether it is or is not "intelligence" is merely semantics.
I think you may have forgotten some of the context when you responded. We already have a consensus among experts that IQ isn't intelligence. That's not up for debate anymore. The question is whether or not intelligence can be measured, and the semantic question of defining intelligence is very important here. You can't answer "how do we measure X?" without first defining what "X" is.
Oh you're right, I did. Sorry!
As for a test of intelligence -- maybe we'll be able to define what that is at some point in the future. But, granted, until there is a consensus on the meaning of intelligence, there can't be a test for it.