Is IQ Legitimate or B.S.?

March 25, 2025

Is the idea of IQ legit or total B.S.? With the replication crisis in social science, it's worth asking this since a number of major psychology findings didn't hold up under scrutiny. To find out, at Clearer Thinking, we ran a massive study. We tested thousands of people performing random subsets of 62 diverse cognitive tasks (vocab, math, logic, pattern recognition, reaction time, games, memorization, mental rotation, language learning, etc.) We successfully replicated a classic findi...

What is the deal with IQ?

October 20, 2020

Many studies (including our report) have investigated whether IQ predicts anything. The answer is that it does predict a bunch of things. But what does IQ actually measure? There are a surprisingly large number of proposed answers to this question. Below I list all the different theories and interpretations of IQ that I'm aware of. Theory 1: Multiple Intelligences IQ tests measure just a limited part of intelligence while missing (or at least mostly missing) other important parts of in...

Truth Discernment Can be a Super Power

August 3, 2011

When we think of super powers, we usually consider things like invisibility, super strength and the ability to fly. Technology is bringing us closer to the realization of these dreams (for examples see invisibility, strength, flying). But there is a super power that has existed for much longer, which we might call "truth discernment". This is the ability to figure out what is likely to be true in hard, important, real world problems. There are difficult questions like the blue eyes logic puzz...