this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
56 points (87.8% liked)
Asklemmy
47935 readers
1069 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.