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I was asked (by a psychologist during an IQ test) what the purpose of the First Amendment (to the US constitution) is. I said something along the lines of “to keep the government out of the marketplace ideas in hopes that the lies would balance out”. I still don’t understand what was wrong with the answer.

@Lurker314: When did this happen?? That is weird on so many levels. Maybe the important one: Knowledge should not be part of an IQ test (which is supposed to be about mental abilities of recognizing and processing patterns). It’s hard to make it completely independent of content, but works.
Maybe they were assessing basic political knowledge for some reason. the question is phrased as if it were calling for an interpretation which can happen on several layers like yours. Then again your answer is so far removed from the literal amendment, that it’s hard to see a relevance or relation. The government and marketplace part is convoluted as the government can define the market, but if you mean all opinion (rather than only sold opinion), there is some sense. Unfortunately, lies don’t balance each other out, the idea is a bit optimistic.
Lies need not be opposed to each other and can hide a different part of reality respectively. So revealing one (and giving the revealer the upper hand/supposed moral high ground) does not mean that theirs is better.
Keep in mind the other two options: both could be right (and to narrow-minded to see it) or both could be wrong. With multiple market agents, one can hope that someone will reveal the lies of the others, so noone will dare (unless the dominant players have coopted the market, and the rest follow out of power concerns, lack of ressources, or simply don’t get same exposure), which brings you back to square one. Not sure if this was the original idea.
So while you may have been thinking that you’re referring to the first amendment, you didn’t make it obvious to the examiner, and your interpretation is one of several possibilities, but it IS creative.
Best answer might have been to hand the psychologist the test back and tell them they seem a bit out of their depth and area of expertise there, and to please get a real IQ test.
btw, structuring society based on IQ is BS in itself, and might reinforce social darwinism (based on smarts). While in reality, the fastest thinkers may outcompete their peers and thereby manage to set up a game to organize them into doing their bidding; it’s not always the results of the fastest or most precise thought that you want in an area or need to solve a problem. I.e. persistence, lateral thinking, strong integrity, etc. can be just as important, and many tasks are not that time-critical that the difference in IQ points would make up an important difference in real life – when you really come to think of it.

Yeah, that question should *never* have been on an IQ test, I’m wondering if it wasn’t an IQ test and Lurker314 is misremembering/was misunderstanding/lied to.

As for the function of IQ tests, they shouldn’t have anything to do with the structuring of society, and any organization that tries to structure society based on them is fundamentally missing the point. They serve a few practical functions, but pretty much only for psychologists, otherwise it just amounts to interesting trivia. There are two primary functions of IQ testing, as far as I am aware, one is as a diagnostic tool, some disorders use IQ as part of their definition (like Intellectual Deficiency, the disorder formerly known as Mental Retardation) and performing such testing can narrow things down, to the point where some include IQ testing as a part of any diagnostic process, even when such disorders aren’t suspected, especially when dealing with children (at least, that’s why I know my IQ is 134, or it was as of middle school). The second function is during psychological experimentation, knowing the IQ of the subjects can help when controlling for certain factors, identifying correlation, making sense of some data trends and/or outliers, etc. Otherwise, there isn’t really any reason to care beyond pride/bragging rights.

IQ just measures how fast one processes information, so the only real difference it makes is how quickly you learn and perform some tasks, but that ultimately doesn’t mean much, as you pointed out. It doesn’t even directly limit capabilities, even people with Intellectual Deficiency (essentially IQ 70 and below, two standard deviations below average) could hypothetically achieve a doctoral understanding of quantum physics if given infinite time and perfectly adequate teachers and resources, it might take a thousand years but it would happen eventually, the only real limitation is one of practicality, not capability, they *don’t* have infinite time, or perfect teachers or resources, but if they did it would be firmly within the realm of possibility. This is why I dislike what they renamed the disorder to, I understand that the word “redardation” has become loaded, to say the least, so I get why they changed it (I disagree with it, but I get it), but “deficient” is not only less accurate but fundamentally more insulting. Retarded is only an insult due to connotation, people turned it into one by using it as one, but it only means slow, and as such is a perfectly accurate descriptor. Deficient means lacking in something necessary, incapable, it is the antonym of sufficient. This is an incredibly insulting thing to call a person as well as significantly less accurate. It isn’t that they *can’t* learn, it’s that they learn incredibly *slowly* and as such will have certain levels of mastery out of reach so long as they are mortal, but the only real limits are time and access, not ability, at least not directly.

Fun fact: in their original form IQ tests were meant as a way to disqualify immigrants as “too stupid” by asking them questions about American history/culture specifically, with a thin veneer of general “intelligence” testing.

I suspect newer versions are a lot less xenophobic, but I still don’t really trust them cause I don’t think intelligence as a whole is something you should try to test or quantify.

Personally it’s not about how high or low one’s IQ is. It is all about how to apply one’s mind. There are people out there that have really high IQ’s but they’re dumber then a sack of hammers because they cannot apply themselves that will utilize said IQ.

In terms of physical media vs online media, I’d have to say that there will always be a need for physical information, in some form or another. We’ve had the internet for decades now and yet we still have books, printouts and newspapers. I don’t see us abandoning any of those for a good long time yet.

For those who are wondering, IQ tests do occasionally have questions like that. I administered a couple thousand IQ tests over the course of my career. A question such as that might be used to assess for abstraction or general knowledge. That said, I don’t recall ever seeing that specific item. In principle I would have given that answer full marks as it demonstrates the ability of abstract thought and or an understanding of governmental principles as general knowledge. Just because I don’t recall that question doesn’t mean that it isn’t out there. There are a dozen or so commonly used IQ tests of which I was familiar with half that number. The more complex tests such as the Weschler and Stanford-Binet do asses items in a that require an amount of cultural context and as such get updated every so many years. It is also understood that the test should be administered in the subject’s primary language. I took graduate level courses in the administration of each of those tests and had to get continuing ed. each time an update came out. Both tests are also pretty labor intensive. They are also expensive. The facility where I worked usually dragged the Weschler when there were specific diagnostic questions or when there was significant legal impact such as a determination of intellectual disability (mental retardation for us oldsters). There are other tests such as the Test of Non-Verbal Intelligence or the Culture Fair that focus more on non-verbal tasks and which can be administered without as much concern for cultural experience or primary language. After you get through the lighter weight tests you get into whatever that thing is that Mensa uses as a qualification and then to the garbage that you find on social media, “Are you a genius?” pages. One of the points I’m getting to is that IQ tests are not all the same and some can be deeply diagnostic when used in context with other assessment tools while other are just useful as a screening tool. Frankly, some psychologists are better at testing than others. With regard to the naming convention, I agree Psychie. Somebody decided that they needed to be seen to be doing something so they came up with a new terminology. This isn’t a new thing. The words Moron and Cretin once had a diagnostic meaning. Eventually someone will figure out how to make Intellectually and Developmentally Disabled into a derogatory term and we will get a new set of terms. Sometimes these changes are driven by science and serve a useful purpose but mostly it’s just politics. As for IQ itself, people put way too much weight on it, especially the upper end. While there is the occasional Leonardo Da Vinci, for the most part after a certain point you are just bright.

Oh, don’t worry, Maddison. It’s a safe bet that newspapers will survive long enough to take over once again after the internet itself collapses following the next Great Depression!

Oooh, I like outro. “Later days, straights and gays” is definitely something I’ll try and use myself

That reminds me of the [1900 era?], show opening statement:

“Good Evening, Ladies + Germs,…Bugs and Worms!…”

I’m having a similar problem to Maddison, trying to find a favorite magazine on the newsstand, when there’s no newsstands to be found. Even supermarkets that used to have a long aisle with magazines down one side, have withered down to maybe a dozen titles next to the checkout, scattered over four or more registers. There’s only one big national chain bookstore at the mall, when there used to be three different ones, with a wall dedicated to magazine racks.

I know I may be dating myself, but does anyone remember when the news was trusted and did journalism?

I do. There are still news channels that do journalism. But they are not easy to find amid all the partisan fluff and invective on the internet.

Kids, television news NEVER was good. Except for occasional developing events, it’s less useful than radio. It’s a bad medium for journalism because it values video images over detailed explanation of what happened, who’s being screwed, and who’s getting greased to enable it.

For decades, most TV reporting was just rewrites of the New York Times. And that was the so-called golden age. Now it’s just flat-out entertainment.

All journalism, even the real thing, even the best, is a snapshot fast take by people under deadline. They used to teach kids about that in high school, so that everyone would understand how it works and what the weaknesses are. I don’t know what happened to that.

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