Intelligence Tests Quotes & Sayings

I think all artists are only interested in a couple of themes, really. I'm primarily interested in change and connection as being this restorative force. I write about them because that's what I think about in my own life. — Lauren Oliver

While standardized tests can certainly be useful for scientifically investigating the mind and brain, and can greatly inform educational interventions, there's no reason why educators or anyone else for that matter needs to compare the intelligence of one person to another based on a single dimension of human variation. — Scott Barry Kaufman

The children were watched through a one-way mirror, and the film that shows their behavior during the waiting time always has the audience roaring in laughter. About half the children managed the feat of waiting for 15 minutes, mainly by keeping their attention away from the tempting reward. Ten or fifteen years later, a large gap had opened between those who had resisted temptation and those who had not. The resisters had higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, and especially the ability to reallocate their attention effectively. As young adults, they were less likely to take drugs. A significant difference in intellectual aptitude emerged: the children who had shown more self-control as four-year-olds had substantially higher scores on tests of intelligence. — Daniel Kahneman

There was a survey done a few years ago that affected me greatly. it was discovered that intelligent people either estimate their intelligence accurately or slightly underestimate themselves, but stupid people overestimate their intelligence and by huge margins. (And these were things like straight up math tests, not controversial IQ tests.) — Harvey Pekar

We know have the power of God in many ways: the atomic bomb, the ability to create life in a test tube, cloning, artificial intelligence. — James Frey

The individuals in the high-IQ group might have scored better individually on intelligence tests, but when it came to solving problems as a group, diversity matters more than individual brainpower. — Steven Johnson

I suspect the I.Q., SAT, and school grades are tests designed by nerds so they can get high scores in order to call each other intelligent ... Smart and wise people who score low on IQ tests, or patently intellectually defective ones, like the former U.S. president George
W. Bush, who score high on them (130), are testing the test and not the reverse. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Modern tests of working memory require the individual to switch repeatedly between two demanding tasks, retaining the results of one operation while performing the other. People who do well on these tests tend to do well on tests of general intelligence. — Daniel Kahneman

Universal deities ... never seem to smile. Not in any culture. What's the point of having omnipotence if you don't enjoy it? — Jack McDevitt

I don't believe that intelligence can be reduced to a number, frankly. But I can see how doing exactly that produces a useful sorting mechanism in our society in order to separate children into categories of promising and doomed. The tests seem arbitrary and without real scientific value and yet have lasting consequences. — Rachel Kushner

Tonight, the news debated the intelligence of a bear. And it got my wondering why humanity rewards itself for passing tests that we create. And that got me wondering why we care. I've studied enough wars to know that the intelligence of the target isn't on the mind of the person with the gun. Maybe we should stop talking about intelligence and start discussing our grades in compassion. — Paige

God has given us the fascination and mystery of irrational numbers, as one aspect of a rich world — Vern Poythress

Although intelligence tests are usually speed tests for the sake of convenience, it is debatable whether speed has any rightful place in the basic concept of intelligence. — Isabel Briggs Myers

Intelligence tests require that certain things be figured out, but the figuring out doesn't count. If the figuring out leads to the right answer, then of course the right answer counts. But no tester will ever know and no score will ever reveal whether the right answer was a triumph of imagination and intellectual daring, or whether the child knew the right answer all along. In addition, the more time the child spends on figuring things out on the test, the less time there is for filling in the right answers; that is, the more you actually think to get the right answers on an intelligence test, the less intelligent the score will look. — Eleanor Duckworth

If the youth is content to abandon his previous associates and to throw in his lot whole-heartedly with the rulers, he may, after suitable tests, be promoted, but if he shows any regrettable solidarity with his previous associates, the rulers will reluctantly conclude that there is nothing to be done with him except to send him to the lethal chamber before his ill-disciplined intelligence has had time to spread revolt. This will be a painful duty to the rulers, but I think they will not shrink from performing it. — Bertrand Russell

Robert Sternberg is a professor of psychology at Tufts University and a past president of the American Psychological Association. He is a long-term critic of traditional approaches to intelligence testing and IQ. He argues that there are three types of intelligence: analytic intelligence, the ability to solve problems using academic skills and to complete conventional IQ tests; creative intelligence, the ability to deal with novel situations and to come up with original solutions; and practical intelligence, the ability to deal with problems and challenges in everyday life. — Ken Robinson

Childish fantasy, like the sheath over the bud, not only protects but curbs the terrible budding spirit, protects not only innocence from the world, but the world from the power of innocence. — Elizabeth Bowen

When we see animals doing remarkable things, how do we know if we're simply seeing tricks or signs of real intelligence? Are talented animals just obeying commands, or do they have some kind of deeper understanding? One of the biggest challenges for animal researchers is to come up with tests that can distinguish between the two. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Paranoia has its downsides as an agency in daily life, or in the political sphere of collective action, which finds itself beset everywhere by the nightmarish influence of conspiracy thinking (they call it theory, but theories exist to be tested, and conspiracy thinking exists never to be tested, and globally ignores the results of tests imposed by others). The suspicion that malign operators are responsible for every one of the injustices and heartbreaks of existence is a consoling view, a balm to bleak glimpses of the void behind our reality. It's brave to pursue truth, and brave to pursue and expose tricky and well-hidden bad guys (Nazi doctors, Pentagon intelligence-distorters, etc.). It's not brave to think tricky, well-hidden bad guys are the whole truth of what's out there. It might even be bravery's opposite. Or maybe it should go under the name religion. — Jonathan Lethem

If the Aborigine drafted an I.Q. test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it. — Stanley Marion Garn

Research has found that interviews are less predictive of job performance than work samples, job-knowledge tests, and peer ratings of past job performance. Even a simple intelligence test is substantially more predictive than an interview. — Chip Heath

Conventional measures of mental ability, such as intelligence tests and scholarship, show some of the very highest records belong to INFP and INFJ types, who relegate thinking to last place or next to last. The preference for thinking appears to have far less intellectual effect than the preference for intuition, even in some technical fields, such as scientific research, where its influence was expected to be most important. — Isabel Briggs Myers

While we may continue to use the words
smart and stupid, and while IQ tests may
persist for certain purposes, the monopoly
of those who believe in a single general
intelligence has come to an end. Brain
scientists and geneticists are documenting
the incredible differentiation of human capacities, computer programmers are creating systems that are intelligent in different ways, and educators are freshly acknowledging that their students have distinctive strengths and weaknesses. — Howard Gardner

Intelligence tests are biased toward the literate. — George Carlin

Current intelligence-testing practices require examinees to answer but not to pose questions. In requiring only the answering of questions, these tests are missing a vital half of intelligence- the asking of questions ... — Robert Sternberg

Be patient and be yourself. Unbelievable that I needed to consume weeks worth of books and seminars to learn that. — John Duover

There was an incident, in 1912, which 'gave me a turn,' so to speak: when I brought the 'Nude Descending a Staircase' to the Independants, and they asked me to withdraw it before the opening. — Marcel Duchamp

The world's socioeconomic landscape has been drastically altered in the last three decades. The list of changes - indeed, of achievements - is as long as it is surprising: 84 percent of the world's population is now literate, compared to 75 percent in 1990. University education is up, and even average scores on intelligence tests all over the world are now higher. Meanwhile, combat deaths are down - by more than 40 percent since 2000. Life expectancy in countries most hard-hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic is starting to rise again. And we are providing for our agricultural needs better than ever: since 2000, cereal production in the developing world has increased twice as fast as population. — Moises Naim

Addicts, as a group, generally score far above average o intelligence tests.
Why?
You tell me.
I guess maybe we're smart enough to have figured out how shitty things are and we decide addiction is the only way to deal with it. — James Frey

Perhaps the best test of a man's intelligence is his capacity for making a summary. — Lytton Strachey

The testers found that training attention not only improved executive control; scores on nonverbal tests of intelligence also improved and the improvement was maintained for several months. — Daniel Kahneman

From Binet, the idea of measuring imagination with inkblots spread to a string of American intelligence-testing pioneers and educators - Dearborn, Sharp, Whipple, Kirkpatrick. It reached Russia as well, where a psychology professor named Fyodor Rybakov, unaware of the Americans' work, included a series of eight blots in his Atlas of the Experimental-Psychology Study of Personality (1910). It was an American, Guy Montrose Whipple, who called his version an "ink-blot test" in his Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (also 1910) - this is why the Rorschach cards would come to be called "inkblots" when American psychologists took them — Damion Searls