High IQ is 130 - What is yours? Answer 20 questions and find out if you are Mensa material.
Notice how silly that looks. It is the same sort of headline as 'Find smart female lawyers in Grimsby'
I expect that any lay person knows what IQ testing is for: separate the bright from the not-so-bright, aka, stupid. Give the bright access to more education, various schools or professional jobs because they perform better. They must, they are 'smarter'. There should be cynicism with such dream logic - an employer's and educator's dream tool in one easy snap.
IQ testing has been around since the late 1800s. The first mental testing centre was set up in 1882 by Francis Galton. He is the creator of the eugenics movement, so the start wouldn't be the happiest. Binet-Simon in 1905 developed a successful test of verbal abilities - their tests were done to disprove that children were sick rather than slow and should be cared for in asylums. On to the U.S. military selection criteria - they wanted to assign recruits to appropriate tasks or to screen for officer training. They tested 1.75 million men. What were the results, according to Wikipedia: "The results of these tests, which at the time reaffirmed contemporary racism and nationalism, are considered controversial and dubious, having rested on certain contested assumptions: that intelligence was heritable, innate, and could be relegated to a single number, the tests were enacted systematically, and test questions actually tested for innate intelligence rather than subsuming environmental factors."
The U.S. eugenics movement in the early 20th century used the tests to institute sterilization programs in various states. California's was notable: The Nazis turned to the California government for advice on how to prevent the birth of the "unfit".
So here we are: with the experience of vast amounts of IQ testing for all kinds of applications. There are still lots of efforts to find uses for it that are contributing and positive - a few have been found. But mostly the discourse is on how unsuccessful it has been as a predictor.
I went in search of IQ jokes, and this sample shows how IQ fits into the satirical landscape:
What's 200 yards long and has an IQ of 40? The queue to buy toilet paper at Walmart.
What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 60? Your honor.
Donald Trump just turned 73 which makes him the first President whose age surpassed his IQ.
Survey finds that 1 in 3 Republicans are of below average IQ The other two are Russian Hackers.
Our picture today shows Downtown Grimsby - reconfigured to allow for patio dining in the local restaurants.
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