(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.
Removed by mod
Shots fired!!!
And they killed a dog
Better leave a ticket for having a dead dog on your yard. We wouldn’t want that would we?
There’s a dead dog in their yard! ON THE GROUND NOW Alright WE WARNED YOU! Hit’em with flashes I hope to god there’s a baby in there so these scumbags learn thier lesson
I see you too are a person of taste and watch Veritasium 😛
Guilty as charged. I haven’t finished the video just yet though. It took me a while to track down a source for that info.
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.
Oh yeah, funny as in weird not funny as in haha.
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.
deleted by creator
Do you always reduce everything you read to a false dichotomy or do you simply like being abrasive?
deleted by creator
Nothing about that comment was pretentious. I’m surrounded at work by people with estimated IQ greater than 140, and undoubtedly a few north of 150 (think top academic institutions in the world). That estimation is based on GRE scores and the prestige of the institution.
If anything it makes me doubt those estimations. I can’t remember what Derek said his SATs were but I was also surprised because I felt they were low for someone like him. All this just further drives home the idea that IQ does not correlate with success, maybe even in science communication.
But apparently making an observation is seen as pretentious and boastful to you.
deleted by creator
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.
not to double reply to you but the issue here isn’t training versus not training for the test; the issue is that psychiatrist and psychologist can’t rotely sort out what influences “training” and other activities actually had on the results of the test versus what a theoretical, “pure” test result would’ve been. frankly i’d imagine different psychologist in different context would want to control for this in a variety of ways. maybe in one experiment, telling the population not to train is the best way to get at the data you want. but for the most part? no. absolutely not. the claim that telling people to not train or study for an IQ test somehow is a be all end all control for wanton influences & noise in IQ results is total bunk. think about this. what even qualifies as studying for an IQ test? is the teenage boy incidentally studying for his ACT’s at the same time as a population IQ test, who consequently scored higher than the median average for his age range, cheating or invalid in his results? most people and psychology studies would likely say no, not really. this demonstrates some of the fundamental flaws in IQ and g-factor that psychologists have to recognize while working with them. there’s truly no real way to sort out what is “cheating/invalidating” on an IQ test versus what data is potentially legitimate. because objectively speaking, what IQ measures is incredibly subjective. on top of all that, either way, it’s impossible and impractical to try and control for every single thing people do in their daily lives.
EDIT: stray “a” removed
Here I took part of the point being that you can practice, and to some extent you may be unwittingly doing so. That’s part of the upward trend. That’s part of having to localized the test for a culture. We’re to some extent practicing just due to the world immediately around us.
Should you or your kid intentionally practice? Probably not, but I took practicing and mentioning that to be part of the larger point that the test can be predictive for some things, but isn’t destiny.
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.
But if you get more generally intelligent from practicing… Then what? Because education makes you score higher. Do you believe it is 100% genetics?
To some extent you probably get more generally intelligent from practicing IQ tests in the same way you might get more generally intelligent from stretching your mind in any way. However, the increase in IQ score you achieve after practicing for the IQ test is (just guesstimating because there’s obviously no studies on this) >90% due to learning the patterns of IQ tests and <10% due to increased general intelligence as a result of studying.
To answer as to why IQ is helpful, it’s useful for making conclusions about how different factors influence intelligence. It’s more difficult to prevent lead from poisoning people’s brains when you can’t conclusively say how much it’s poisoning. Supposing all the people with low IQ scores due to lead poisoning practiced for the test to make themselves feel better with a higher score, their studying would muddy the stats and make for weaker arguments on the side of those wishing to ban excessive lead. IQ is also relevant to certain diagnoses, such as for the diagnosis of ADHD where a deficiency in working memory and processing speed but not elsewhere supports a diagnosis.
In terms of whether IQ / intelligence is 100% genetic, obviously not, I don’t think I said anything that could even suggest that. I’m not an expert so I’d appeal to this link for specific answers. Just skimming it seems to suggest anywhere from 50% to 80% heritability of IQ, although heritability as a concept is kinda unintuitive and hard to apply to everyday things.
I’ve watched this a while ago, but I stopped following Veritasium after that.
Note: Video link to Veritasium: A Story of YouTube Propaganda.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=CM0aohBfUTc&
https://piped.video/watch?v=CM0aohBfUTc&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
deleted by creator
Stole my comment! We’re really nailing that reddit vibe 😂
well, that’s better than Jordan Peterson, who likes to mention this topic
This is a myth. There IS a test, called the “Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB)”, which is a competency test to see what jobs you would be suited for, but that is NOT an IQ test.
Sure, if you score badly on that test you will LIKELY have a low score on an IQ test, probably because something like 40% of American adults are illiterate or have low-literacy and that would impact your ability to do any test.
But the military does not IQ test.
It is a percentile-based test against others who’ve tested on it. So it’s similar to an IQ test in that regard.
Sure… But it’s a DIFFERENT TEST, on a different population of people, with the goal of measuring military-specific factors.
This is essentially a semantics argument and doesn’t make this post a “myth.” The military aptitude tests are effectively an intelligence quotient, just not a standard “IQ test”
And if low iq folks are more likely to seek enlistment, the distribution could be significantly lower than iq/the population at large.
Eh, I met plenty of very smart people while serving. I also met plenty of very fucking stupid people. I’d say the ratio is about the same as the general population, since the military offers a lot of very attractive financial incentives to poor and middle class folks alike. Although, free college is the number one reason most enlist, in my experience. I know it was the main reason I did it. Gotta love a society that allows colleges to price gouge tuition so badly in the first place…
The GI bill was a very nice perk indeed. That and the VA loan has helped me out quite a bit.
The VA loan is legitimately the thing they should be promoting the hell out of instead of college.
I bought my first house mostly with mostly cash I’d saved up in the army, also it was cheaper than my wife’s current vehicle. But when we got married and started thinking about buying a house, she learned about the VA loan and creamed herself. Sure it’s a lot of extra paperwork, but no down payment and no mortgage insurance, goddamn it was a godsend.
Indeed, aside from the GI Bill, which I initially signed up for, I later found out about the VA Home Loan program and it was a huge lifesaver for us and has helped us secure a home loan twice now (not simultaneously).
Personally I agree that the military is as good of a sampling of intelligence as the general population, but there is something to be said about the potential issue of a normal distribution bias. (Up or down) If there was an analysis on it I’d wager that the correlation coefficient would be very close to 1. I just wish that the critics of this simplification would avoid portraying the ASVAB as having NO correlation with IQ.
People mention that there’s some dumb mfers in the military. My friend included.(I’ll let you decide on which side of that assessment he’s on lol) but I think it’s a familiarity bias. You’re forced to work with(and against) those individuals no matter your intelligence level in the military. In contrast, people in the general population tend to work mostly with people that are around their own level of intelligence unless it’s customer service.
. . . tend to work mostly with people that are around their own level of intelligence unless it’s customer service.
Heh, never thought about this before, but that probably explains why both people in either customer service or the military tend to be jaded, cynical people, lol.
One night on radio watch, I dug through the laptop we were keeping a log in and found a spreadsheet containing everyone in our company’s asvab scores. It was a fascinating thing to look at. We were MI, and this was back when there was a combat arms MOS in MI still, which I was. And we were always made fun of because we had the lowest asvab entry score (65) while many people had masters degrees. 7 out of 10 of the highest scores were were in my squad. We also had the lowest, but that’s a given. I think I remember I had the highest in the sqaud and my team had the highest average.
You can still be very intelligent and still want to roll around in the dirt and play with the big guns.
Yes, there is absolutely a sampling bias here
There are probably ways to correlate the military test with a standardized IQ test, and which point the military test might be a rough proxy for IQ. If that was the case, the 80 IQ rule might be roughly accurate.
I don’t know if that’s been done though. Just playing devil’s advocate.
I think there have been studies on the correlation between ASVAB scores and IQ scores. The correlation is supposedly 0.8.
This stack exchange post has a few sources linked
https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/20220/to-what-extent-does-afqt-correlate-with-iq
Different than what exactly? There isn’t one single IQ test.
I also just watched a Veritasium video.
Meanwhile, the police have a maximum IQ limit and anyone above that is not qualified.
deleted by creator
Unfortunately, that limit is so low that even Forrest Gump would be overqualified.
Not really. Some police forces have rejected candidates bc of high scores on entrance tests, but there’s no universal policy.
So you’re saying it’s true that police have rejected people for scoring too high?
Some police forces, not “the police”. This phrasing makes it sound like it’s a universal policy. It isn’t and it’s rare, but it has happened.
McNamara’s morons have entered the chat
McNamara’s morons
This is inaccurate. The military doesn’t IQ test. ASVAB is designed to test your proficiency in different career fields.
Done by a test designed to determine relative learning ability and proficiency compared to your age group?
While the ASVAB does in many ways serve a similar function to an IQ test, it really isn’t the same thing.
All the IQ rejected admissions go to the policy academy, I presume?
I think a skills-based aptitude test that is honed towards specific occupations and a vague intelligence test that the creators even believe barely gives a tenuous grasp on mental ability is not a good comparison.
Insert Marine Corps joke here
Crayon eaters.
deleted by creator
If you can be coached to make the standard, then you were already capable of reaching the standard.
Also, the IQ test that the military gives, the ASVAB, is a very long test. The average time to complete it is 90 minutes. The maximum is 154 minutes.
If you can be coached through that, then you’ve earned your place. And the simple truth is, people can be coached on the test and do better. Which is okay.
deleted by creator
I’m not sure how you can cheat through a proctored test. And the ASVAB is usually given to high school students, and then the results are given to the recruiters, so they know who to focus on.
If a kid really wants to join despite a low score, I guess they could cram for a specific section of the test…
As to outright cheating… I never saw it, but then again, I was Air Force. We had a much higher cut off then other branches. That makes cheating to get in both harder and less rewarding. Cheaters will wash out in their tech school.
deleted by creator
They tried it in Vietnam and discovered the lower iq recruits were more trouble than they were worth and made the military run worse overall, so it’s probably unlikely to happen again
note to self: during a draft, be special.
deleted by creator
Too bad you can’t fake having well connected wealthy parents
deleted by creator
Not convincingly
Hello fellow Veritasium enjoyer
That’s smartist. No, not “smartest”, I said “smartist”. :B
If only we did the same thing with voters.
Kidding, that wouldn’t work. But… sigh.
