I've often thought about this - I suffered at school because the subject matter quickly seemed to arrive at one or more foundational concepts to not be explored further, whereas my brain would constantly ask, 'but why?'. The relentless pace didn't suit me at all. Nevertheless I learnt to override this in time and now have a BSc and MSc.

That’s interesting, I shared the “but why” until mid way through a BSc in Physics. The foundational concepts of “this is how {thermo|mechanics|quantum} works” was exciting, but the remainder of each semester was “now let’s work through all the edge cases” and I had difficulty keeping up.

I had that problem at school too. It felt like a denial of service attack.

Did you begin a parallel learning project for actually understanding the material?

When I was at school you mean?

Same here! Glad other people felt this way.

I kind of think that an intelligence tests should moreso try to evaluate how “Turing complete” you are , rather than how quick the processor is at a narrow range ...

Kind of reminds me of the programming language shootout dilemma . X is better than Y because it does Fibonacci sequences quicker ... mostly has no real world utility

Properly administered IQ tests with real psycometric rigor evaluate both, insofar as either can be empirically measured.

Except it doesn’t ...

Compare Rationality Quotient to Intelligence Quotient. You’d think they relate but they don’t ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/opinion/sunday/the-differ...

This is without considering give-a-f??k quotient, the most important of all, and that by which every test is confounded.

Yes, they actually do. IQ tests evaluate not just mental processing speed but also a number of orthogonal cognitive faculties. You cited an opinion article from the New York Times regarding the divergence between rationality and intelligence. I'm not talking about rationality, and in fact I would not immediately believe rationality and intelligence can be adequately tested using the same examination. One relates to decision making processes and the other relates to learning and aptitude processes. There is some overlap, but they're categorically different things.

I could direct you to a survey of studies that would more accurately describe the breadth of IQ assessments [1], but I think using my own IQ examination as an example might be more instructive. I've taken a formally administered IQ assessment under a qualified clinician. This assessment included the usual tests, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and Wechsler Memory Scale (among others).

The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale includes composite domains for "Full Scale IQ", "Verbal Comprehension", "Perceptual Reasoning", "Working Memory" and "Processing Speed." Note that mental processing speed is merely one of the measured dimensions of intelligence here. Each of these is given its own percentile score.

Within the Verbal Comprehension Scale domain there are subtests for "Similarities", "Vocabulary" and "Information." Under Percentual Reasoning there are subtests for "Block Design", "Matrix Reasoning" and "Visual Puzzles." Working Memory includes tests for "Digit Span" and "Arithmetic", and finally Processing Speed includes "Symbol Search" and "Coding."

During the verbal comprehension battery, you'd be asked questions such as, "How are an apartment and a house alike", or "What is the definition of this word?" You'll also be assessed on your knowledge of various culturally relevant facts.

Perceptual reasoning will test spatial orientation, integration performance and fine motor skills. This might include arranging blocks of various colors and shapes into different patterns and being asked to find the missing portion in a complex visual pattern.

The working memory examination will test for how much you can focus on simultaneously, and explicitly does not test for your processing speed. You'll be asked about sequences of numbers and tested for both long and short term recollection, as well as how accurately you can mentally perform operations on sequences while keeping them in your mind. That's the digit span test; the arithmetic tests are self-explanatory.

The only portion of the examination which explicitly tests for processing speed are the ones focusing on symbol search and coding. Therein you're asked to quickly scan a group of symbols and find a match of one or two targets, or to copy numbers lexicographically coded to symbols as quickly as possible.

I am interested in what measure of analogous "Turing Completeness" in human intelligence should thus be measured that is not already reflected in the examination I've just outlined. If you'd like to define that as rationality, then that's fine. But as I said before, I don't believe rationality should be coupled with intelligence. And moreover, I don't think "Turing Completeness" is a good analogy for rationality, since computers are (almost definitionally) neither rational nor irrational, regardless of their computational capabilities.

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1. http://www.gwern.net/Iodine

Thanks for the thought through response. Here's what I think in turn:

1. The g-factor premise is that a sufficiently complex test reveals an "underlying" intelligence factor and performance in it will be predictive of performance in other complex tests (whether that's Sudoku or life in general).

2. Mensa in the UK use the Cattell Culture Fair II test which strongly correlates with WAIS without the fanfare (i.e. it's just non-verbal puzzles). Triumph for g-factor, thus I discount your "battery of tests are better or somehow more revealing of the brains potential" argument.

3. One would expect that intelligence and rationality would correlate since it'll directly impact your ability to solve complex situations. It turns out that it doesn't, and I think a notion of arational or irrational intelligence is without sense.

4. However IQ does seem to correlate with the ability to "think quicker" and "cut out the noise". E.g. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/05/23/iq-vision-brai... . If you follow the thread, you'll find that it also comes with disadvantages (e.g. being less able to perceive slow change).

5. I'm using "Turing complete" as a dumb analogy to computing. Something that tests the range of things that you can solve, at any speed. To continue the analogy, if I'm a slow Turing machine but you're a lightening fast pushdown automata, fast as you might be within your domain, there's still a world of things that you can't solve that I can.

6. Anecdotally, I've observed that amongst my guys, being a bad-ass mathematician and being able to actually model or understand the world are separate skills. A narrow example, but an example nontheless, in my opinion Physics > Mathematics in terms of expressing the potential of a rational thinker precisely because it requires more "Turing machine".... to wit, consider all the maths that just never would have happened without the bad-ass physicists (again IMO exactly for the same reason stated).

My undergrad was in mathematics. I routinely failed midterms, but would ace the final exams.

I generally felt that, by the end of the term, I understood the material and simply had more time during the final exam than the midterms.

When I had my IQ test results it seemed like standard practise where I was to give two numbers: one total, and one when not counting the tests relying on speed. Not too surprisingly to anyone who knows me, the difference between the two numbers was for me unusually high.

On the other hand, contrary to the Darwin quote, I scored very high on abstraction capabilities -- although before getting my results, I had assumed I was doing very bad at that.

Conclusion: you probably want to measure all subtests individually to make sense of your strengths and weaknesses.

This is indeed known in the psychological practice in general (it's called "processing speed"), but most lay people aren't aware of it. Ask your friends if they ever got a professional IQ score and if they got the the different scores you describe. You tend to see it with people whose parents notice a high intelligence with learning difficulty and fight for thorough diagnostic testing and educational services.

Common tests don't explicitly measure it, but the test design either implicitly demands processing speed (timed tests, or rapidly spoken prompts/questions) or avoid it.

I think most people with high iq are awful to work with since they obviously lose interest trying to explain things to less intelligent people. This makes people feel bad around them, and they avoid asking them things.

I have seen nice people with high iq but I think it's more common that they are not great around people.

How could you tell the IQ of people you were working with? I'm struggling to see how you could arrive at this conclusion unless you've 1) worked with an inordinate number of both high IQ individuals, who 2) explicitly mentioned their IQ scores to you.

Personal hypotheses such as this one spread like wildfire online because they're easy to state, play to a narrative and are extremely difficult to disprove. They're stated confidently while skipping over so many little gaps - for example, I don't see anything obvious about how high IQ individuals would stop trying to explain things to low IQ individuals. It makes sense as a heuristic for explaining the behavior of one particular individual who is perhaps a misanthrope or has little patience. But it's very poorly generalizable.

How high an IQ are you talking here? I have a moderately high IQ (~130) and being able to explain complex topics to family and friends in a simple enough way that they understand it is one of the things I enjoy most, probably because having a basic summary then the meaty material is how I best learn complex topics.

I don't think humility, empathy, and high IQ are mutually exclusive, though given some of my experiences with smart people I can see why you might think that way.

I am not sure about that - those people I know who are waaay cleverer than me have bad days of course, but mostly if you ask them to explain the subject they love, they will talk (down) for days without getting bored.

Perhaps it's true for us all, we love to talk about what we do.

I also think some people with high iq learn to fake a lower iq and thus, go below the radar.

There are some times I wish I had gone with this option... would have made a lot of life so much easier than the "but you're so smart, how come you're having trouble with ______?"

Wow that sounds whiny but true.