IQTest.com claims that 5.42 million people have taken their online IQ test, which sends a small shudder through my spine.
"Previously offered only to corporations, schools, and in certified professional applications," they declare, "it is now available to you." Later, they quietly acknowledge that their test is "not intended for professional use [but rather] for personal entertainment purposes."
Far
be it from me to tell people how to entertain themselves; if anyone is taking
this test as an alternative to online porn or fart jokes, I guess I can't
complain.
But
presumably some of these 5.42 million people are taking the test to see how
smart they are, to know what their potential is. And at that point the
entertainment goes from comedy to tragedy. For starters, the IQtest.com is not
even a gross simplification of the Stanford-Binet Intelligene Scales. It tests
just a few logical thinking skills in the narrowest possible way.
More
importantly, even authentic IQ tests do not reveal any sort of innate
intelligence (as discussed in my IQ
FAQ). They cannot reveal your true potential. They only reveal the current
state of your academic skills, in comparison to others of the same age. That's
not an insignificant thing, but it is very far indeed from the portrayal of IQ
as a revelation of one's inner-smarts.
Some
people are actually plunking down cash to get the full report from IQTest.com.
That, to me is like a bad Jeff Foxworthy joke. You know your IQ ain't that
high if you're paying money for an online IQ test.
At least porn is honest. These tests are furtively exploiting and perpetuating a person's anxieties -- for cash. In fact, anyone taking online IQ test seriously is getting caught up in the century-long but now-disproven "entity" theory of intelligence. We now understand that intelligence is not a *thing* one has a certain amount of, but a process of acquiring skills.
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