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Those are some of the questions Gladwell examines in this article. What do you think?

I thought it had been pretty well proven that I.Q. is just a measurement of how well children test for a given culture since almost all of the questions are based upon what is considered 'normal' knowledge for that culture.

The reason that boys tested with higher I.Q.s in the 70's has been shown to be directly the result of questions on the tests that were weighted to things that interest boys, mechanical stuff where girls were shunted into more domestic studies and there are still almost no questions about that on an I.Q. tests. (This is not to say that girls cannot learn mechanical subjects and learn them well but to point out that culture pushes them away from such studies.)

Same for blacks vs. whites. White children tested better because the test questions considered knowledge that was environmental and more likely to show up in wealthy neighborhoods to be inhearant when in fact, it's not.

In summation, I.Q. as a measure of intelligence is pure poppycock. as a measure of how affluent or how well schooled one is, that's another story.

http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN2019675520071220

That's a related article stating that in Romania children who are put in foster homes after being in the orphanages show an 8 to 10 point increase in IQ. That's huge!

There's different types of I.Q. tests obviously. The tests that test (sorry for being redundant) HOW you think are far more insightful than the ones that test, well, trivia basically

Actually, even logic tests are suspect. After all, one can study for those, as well.

erm - that's kind of contradictory.

Also, even if you can study for logic questions: like associations, pattern recognition , and simple deductions - these are very useful skills to have.

Yeah, intelligence is pretty tricky.

We could limit these tests to people from similar cultural backgrounds and then normalize the results to the average, but such limits are hard to define. On the other hand, despite subgroups of cultures, the distributions of IQ in populations always tend towards gaussians even in highly diverse populations. Also, in the us, the broad ethnic group that scores the best, Asians, share cultural backgrounds quite distinct from european ones. And even though Jewish-americans constitute the highest scoring subgroup, we don't see any jew-culture specific references in the tests.

On a contrary note, separated twin studies have shown no correlation between intelligence and heredity after age 20. However, population genetics studies show correlation between 0.45 to 0.8. Also, papers published in Science two years ago suggest correlation between intelligence and two genes that determine cortical structure.

But to me, intelligence is a qualitative quality that I assess mainly through conversation and interaction - which is probably a lot more biased than the tests that are administered.

That's still biased to culture. Most of the people in the world don't live in single family houses and it's likely they don't call their domiciles houses.