Re:Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorder...
by dragonwriter on Tuesday October 15, 2019 @09:03AM
(#21257912)
> IQ tests designed to be usable for everyone tend to start getting really unreliable above 135 or so.
Afaik, that's not a “designed to be usable by everyone” thing; there's test-retest consistency gets progressively lower beyond that point on IQ tests, period.
> There also just aren't enough high IQ people to really effectively study the accuracy of these tests above those levels.
If that was true, we wouldn't have reliable information that accuracy breaks down in that area, which we do.
We can study the accuracy in that range, we just haven't found a way to fix it.
For example, one serious official test I did included a timed test where you had to decode a string of symbols to text based on some key. I ended up being fast enough at decoding that I was effectively limited by how fast I could scribble down the decoded texts and turn the page back to the code, not by the mental calculations. I imagine others would have had similar issues, making this particular test at best capable of indicating a wide possible range of mental ability, a range which should be particularly inaccurate around the higher ranges as the ratio mentalTime/mechanicalTime decreases.
There also just aren't enough high IQ people to really effectively study the accuracy of these tests above those levels. There are no good baselines to compare these people and no real ways of checking whether the differences actually matter in any meaningful way.