(a)The number of persons originally enlisted or inducted to serve on active duty (other than active duty for training) in any armed force during any fiscal year whose score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test is at or above the tenth percentile and below the thirty-first percentile may not exceed 20 percent of the total number of persons originally enlisted or inducted to serve on active duty (other than active duty for training) in such armed force during such fiscal year.
(b)A person who is not a high school graduate may not be accepted for enlistment in the armed forces unless the score of that person on the Armed Forces Qualification Test is at or above the thirty-first percentile; however, a person may not be denied enlistment in the armed forces solely because of his not having a high school diploma if his enlistment is needed to meet established strength requirements.
An AFQT score is derived from the ASVAB(essentially the militaries’ IQ test). IQ scores are based on a normal distribution of scores from the general population with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. So the 30th percentile represents an IQ score of 92 while the 10th percentile would correlate with an IQ of 81.
I see you too are a person of taste and watch Veritasium 😛
God that video annoyed me so much. You aren’t supposed to practice for an IQ test. If you practice, whatever result you get is basically invalid as the test presumes you are approaching the problems for the first time. It wouldn’t annoy me if it wasn’t Veritasium, but he presents himself as a science educator and should know better.
I thought it was funny how at the end of the video he said something about Stephen Hawking and only losers brag about their IQ. After we just watched a 30 minute video about his high IQ. That he practiced for.
Funny, not surprising. If you’ve watched him long enough you get that he is a narcissistic snake.
I figured he specifically practiced to show that his high IQ score is not indicative of what his actual intelligence is. Like he intentionally inflated it with studying because otherwise whatever score he did get would be a brag, but after studying any score can be attributed (at least in part) to the studying (and motivation and all the other stuff) so isn’t really a brag about his intelligence, but a brag about the fact that he studied. Which isn’t really a brag at all.
He didn’t brag about his IQ. At least I didn’t take it that way. For an example of where I felt like Derek wasn’t being humble see the bet he made with the physicist about the propeller car moving straight against the wind. I don’t think he was being overly boastful or anything, I’m just saying something more like that would be something like bragging. Like saying “I challenged Mark Rober to take an IQ test but he refused so I must be smarter.” He doesn’t even mention his score until very late in the video and they don’t focus on it for long.
Frankly, it was much lower than I expected. As a PhD Physicist who leads a very successful career in science education, I expected him to score at least 140, and would not have been surprised to see 150.
A generous interpretation could be that it’s a bad metric because you can train for it
Very generous and wrong. Any psychiatrist would tell you to not practice, and a when not practiced it’s a very useful metric. We couldn’t make as strong hypotheses about the effect environmental lead had on earlier generations without IQ tests. We couldn’t measure the very interesting trend upwards in IQ scores over time regardless of lead, which implies anything from a structural problem with the test to a real improvement in intelligence in the general population since the test’s invention. We couldn’t quantify the genetic or environmental influences on intelligence without IQ either.
It’s like saying a psychiatric test for depression is bad because you can practice to know the answers a depressed person would give.
the video annoys you because you’re not the target audience. you clearly already see validity in IQ as a metric and have use cases for it. most STEM people (veritasium’s audience writ large) do not traditionally view IQ favorably, and at worst consider it a worthless bunk metric. the video isn’t intended to say “hey! here’s how psychiatrist and psychologist view and use IQ in statistical analysis and their work (bc remember, STEM people know about this legitimate use in these fields, they just typically discount or look down upon it due to IQ’s reputation),” it’s intended to say “hey! i know you don’t think IQ is real/valid, but here is a video essay exploring the concept through a very STEM lense.” of course he talks about taking the test and studying for it. he talks about taking the test blind too. he’s a fucking engineer, physicist, and doctor. the exact kind of person to recognize what tools like IQ metrics actually are, and that there is no single one way to measure, use, or quantify this data that’s more “correct” than others, when divorced from context. veritasium demonstrated a very thorough understanding of the actual concepts and theoretical principles that underlie IQ, and I thought his video was a very fresh perspective. it certainly demonstrated a mastery of the concept that i believe is absent from someone who might hold the opinions you’re espousing here (genuinely don’t mean to come off as rude here sorry for having autism energy)
It feels silly to frame it like that. You could consider a general education as practice for an IQ test.
The way I see it, IQ is a proxy for this concept of generalized intelligence with the test also measuring more specific measures of intelligence like working memory and visual processing. It’s certainly fine, even good, to practice the underlying mechanisms of intelligence, such as learning memorization techniques and practicing to improve your working memory and thus become more intelligent. It’s not good for the validity of the test to practice the specific questions and sections they put on the test to artificially inflate your score while leaving your underlying intelligence unchanged. Veritasium did the latter, not the former in his video.
I’ve watched this a while ago, but I stopped following Veritasium after that.
Note: Video link to Veritasium: A Story of YouTube Propaganda.
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