Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for tuning in. Let's hear for the Man, the myth, the legend, our super producer, Max Benney Williams not with Benne like Jean Benet, similar to do don't have the relationship. Well, we've got a h we've got kind of a dark turn here. Uh. This episode is following on the heels of our recent episode. We're quite proud, proud of the title.
Did lead lead to the fall of the Roman Empire? Right?
Yes, lead lead, lead lead, you know, maybe probably not spoiler.
Alert, Yeah, contributed to Maybe you'll have to check out the episode, folks. That is none other than the legendary mister Noel Brown. Hello, it's you, Ben, Is it you? I think it's you. We are all, we are all vast. We could take multitudes for tax purposes. That call me Ben Bullen. He from the United States. We are bro.
I gotta tell you I made the mistake of briefly dating a gen Z person. And she told me when I said I contained multitude, said that is such a millennial thing to say.
And I was really triggered by this. Has she not read Whitman? The relationship did not go well? Unclear.
My whole thing is I really like there's a Bob Dylan song called I Contain Multitudes, and obviously the Whitman is what he was referencing. But it just felt like such a dismissive thing to say. And she's the kind of person that would say like Bedrod all the time. So, you know, potato potato, To each their own. I wish her well.
Dismissive dismissiveness is arguably, depending upon who you read, dismissiveness is a sign of insecurity intelligence that do that?
Do?
Boy?
Oh boy, Ben, We're talking about a thing today related to the Lead Leading with Lead episode in that there purports to be a way that our society claims you can measure one's intelligence, and it's those two golden letters that people love throwing around. You know who loves thrown around a lot? Are President as a diss low IQ individual?
Right?
Right? Uh, he's got some news coming his way, my guy. Well, that metric, it turns.
Out not the best. We Actually I got a little heated up during our Led Lead Roman Empire Fall episode A little hit up, as they would say in Tennessee, about the concept of IQ tests, and we had to change the title to make this a little bit more family friendly. Maybe the best way to begin, folks is check out our Roman Empire episode. I think we did an all right job, and then answer us this. We'll do it first on air, fellow ridiculous historians, Noel Max, have you guys ever taken an IQ test? No?
I did recently take one of those Enneagram tests that measures you know, your feelings or whatever.
I NFJ.
I think I hold on, I've actually got a note for you here. Oh no, I'm getting the beach ball of death on my notes app So we'll come back to that. But this was even like a step above the regular Enneagram thing called like I think it was called Youngian something or other. It was some kind of Jungian thing. And it was interesting because it wasn't you know, it wasn't like taking a test. It was like having a conversation, and then the person that was administering it
was able to make all these notes. If I'm not mistaken, Ben, Yeah, the old IQ test is much more of a by the numbers, less interpretive kind of you know, bubbling in the circles test.
Yeah, it's a weird thing. Max. Let's hear from you. You ever took one of those tests?
But if I did, I can't remember. Maybe it had that little impact on me that I can't remember it, but I can't say I have.
It makes sense, right what we're saying when we say I haven't taken an IQ test. The odds are most certainly that you did if you grew up in the United States, even if it was not explicitly cold an IQ test. We have a lot of capstone things, standardized test for every child in school, and if you ever aspire to go to college or university, you take something that is the kissing cousin of the IQ test. Things we call the SAT or the ACT.
See that's funny, Ben, because when I was thinking about whether or not I'd taken an IQ test, my mind immediately went to Scantron World.
Yes, wouldn't that be a really boring amusement park? Scadorcantron World. I maybeet me, but I really want to go because you get your results at the end of the amusement park. What is their roller.
Coaster looks like sort of the like the nerdy equivalent of getting that picture you know where you're making the O face when you're on the coaster or et saying your name at the end of the et ride at Universal.
What would the roller coaster be? You know what it could be. It could just be roller coaster of emotion.
Because kids, they're not a huge fan of these high stress tests, and we know that. I think we've discussed not on this episode, but maybe a conversation you and I were having leading up to this episode, and maybe a brief mention in the Rome episode about how even some of the smartest people in the world notoriously don't test well or specifically crumble.
Under the pressure of these timed high stress tests. Yeah, I've got some stories to share. Also, maybe maybe we can make a solid argument in this episode that instead of a roller coaster of stats at your sat amusement park, you're a q amusement park, you should have the roller coaster of love. Courtesy of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Anthony Keatis. Yeah, Dustry for that, right, Well, their version is a banger. Who does the original?
I remember their version from Beavis and butt Head do America soundtrack? Right, it's a lot of Fun of Love and the Originals by the Ohio Players from nineteen hundred and seventy five. Funk hit the top the US charts in nineteen seventy six. Known for its energetic rhythm, the song famously is an urban legend claiming a murder scream was recorded in the background.
Oh fascinating. We have to get into that. We might be an episode for another.
Time, maybe the very least a bullet point on a on a listical episode about weird music urban legends that we should. I'm just going to drop in on the spot here right now invite our buddy Jordan Runtalk to join us for.
Oh I miss you, Jordan. I hope you're tuning into the show. I love that guy. I'll text him after this. Another kind of thing, another sort of standardized test that's going to be familiar to a lot of us in the United States, is something called the ASVAB, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. This is what determines whether get to work in Intel or whether you know you work in the elevators, et cetera, et cetera. All jobs are worthwhile the idea of placement test does make sense. They
can help set school children up for success. They can help you get the right college or university. And of course Uncle Sam loves the ASVAB because it helps you figure out what a new soldier is especially talented at. It's it's weird because going back to what you said, No, all these things that we could loosely group as IQ or intelligent quotient tests, they are attempting to understand not your roat memorization abilities, but your cognitive abilities like reasoning,
problem solving, verbal comprehension, you know. And it's never The tricky thing is it's not the same as say a firearms test. Right. In a fire arms test, you are measured by how accurate you are getting close to, say a bullseye right with certain with certain weaponry. But with this, your intelligence quotient attempts to quantify your level of smarts in comparison to other people who are taking the test or have taken the test in the past. So it's
a comparison thing, not an absolute measurement. Got it. So you're part of the sample size of home that only includes those who have taken the test before you or with you. Sticky wicket right, A little bit, right, a little bit, and well we'll talk a good bit about why no one believes. Of course, I hope not. Anyway, we all have things to learn.
That you're perfect, you're not spoiler alert, but I think it's really important, you know, in order to human properly, to know the things you don't know, and know that it's probably a smart idea to continue to learn new things. Humans still can't agree, however, on what that knowledge base could perhaps be quantified. As you know, it's a combination of the things you know, intuition skills, certain skills that you might have, and that all bundled together we might refer to as intelligence.
Right or competence or the ability to function in a given situation. But as we said, no one thinks IQ tests are perfect, even the biggest proponents or champions of it. The issue is, can we really quantify all that stuff that you just named, Noel? Can we accurately represent that in something as boiled down as a three digit number? How did we get here? Why do so many people think IQ tests are you know, kind of malarkey? To understand that, we have to understand how these things came
to be. And this is where we begin by introducing everybody to a guy named Alfred Bennet. Now, when I was research associate for this, I want to confess to you guys, transparency's key to me. I accidentally wrote Alfred Bidet quite frequently in this. It was just a slip of the slip of the fingers.
Mm hmm.
Was it an autocorrect thing such as you've written Bedet so many times as automatic changing to it or was it just a mind autocorrect.
I just really liked our Beidet episodes well, and we are all admittedly Bidet boys over here.
And if that isn't the name of a fun punk rock band, then it absolutely should.
Be tattoos we should get. I'm good with my Toto wash lit. I know you guys should get it. You guys should get Bidet bros. Right like where the old tramp stamp bros. Right at the right at your lombard. I like it in theory, Ben, I don't think I like it. I don't think you should do it. No, I don't think you should do it. I think Jonathan Stricklan should get it. Yeah right on. Oh geez, So this guy Alfred Bennet b I n E T not
Bidey and no relation to the Ramses, right. Yeah, so far as we know, he is born as Alfredo Benetti.
It was one of those americanizations, right, It must have been gotta sound a little more, a little more native born.
It's common when people, you know, immigrated in those days, especially in France, right in the mid eighteen hundreds. He's born on July eighth, eighteen fifty seven, so his posthumous birthday is coming up pretty soon. His dad was a doctor, his mom was an artist. His parents separated when he was very young, and he was raised primarily by his mother. She moved with him to Paris later in life so that he could attend law school. And guys, here's the thing.
He did get his qualifications as bona fides. He was able to practice law in eighteen seventy eight. But he looked around at the legal landscape of France in the late eighteen hundreds and he said, no, I'm going to be like my dad. I'm going to go into medicine. And then soon after that he said, no, I'm going to be different. I'm going to get into hypnosis. Cool.
A very reasonable progression there, a reasonable reasonable trajectory.
Yeah, so he's been several years becoming a sort of a autodidact. He is teaching himself. He reads extensively. He loves work by people like Alexander Bain, Charles Darwin from earlier, John Stewart Mill. Eventually, no, he publishes his first article, his first professional article. It is on hypnosis. He publishes this in eighteen eighty and everyone hates it.
Yeah, people were not fond of this piece of writing in eighteen eighty three.
However, he weathered the critiques and the poor reviews.
The throwing of the tomatoes, and he took a position in the I'm gonna try my best here and make Casey Pegrim proud that you got Sepatrier, Sepatrier cept Salpetriere.
There we go. Hospital.
I was about to say hospital, but that would be a bridge too far. In Paris, it was a place that allowed him to pursue research that focused on hypnosis. He was greatly influenced by a guy by the name of Charco and he published four articles during his time there on hypnosis and the concept of animal magnetism, which is another one that's a little bit of a sticky wicked. I mean, I just my dog just growled when I said animal magnetism.
What do you know that I don't know, buddy. Yeah, we're referring to Jean Martin Charco. And this guy becomes a mentor to our buddy Alfred. His work shines brightly, but briefly because other peers in the world of hypnotism or animal magnetism. Oh, Paula, can't hear me? Okay, he sends you always seems to look in the past. I love the vibe. So this guy is sort of his mentor figure, right Charcot and Charco gets in a lot of trouble because other scientists look at his work and say,
I don't know, man, this feels less like science. This feels more like you sort of doing your own thing and calling your opinions science. It's a massive, massive scandal. It's a massive downfall, and unfortunately our buddy Al Bennet, his reputation takes a big hit as well. It's my association. Yeah, yeah, he caught some strays. As we would say on the Breakfast Club.
Well we would if we were ever invited back, or you know, for the first time, you know, Ben, This makes me think of a recent discussion that we had on our sister pod Stuff they Don't Want you to Know, with the incredible host of the podcast series Mind Games, about sort of the history of hypnosis, more specifically the history of a controversial technique. What was the main thing that we talked about with Zoe Lacaz Thank you, Yeah.
Focuses on the controversial group of tactics called neuro linguistic programming.
Right, and also the types of controversial forms of hypnosis like memory regression therapy and this idea that it can cause false memories to be quote unquote recalled. So it makes sense to me that in the early days of this kind of attempt to scienceify this practice, that it might have been met with some backlash.
Oh right, And this stuff happens well after Bena has passed. At this point where his mentor has an academic downfall and gets hit with Look, his career is basically over. Ben A has to pivot, as they would say in corporate America. So he decides he is going to abandon hypnosis in favor of studying psychological development. This is his big switch, This is the decision that will later change the world. And he starts. There's no other way to
say it. Folks. He starts experimenting on his own children.
Mmmmm, yeah, that's not great. I mean, we just talked about that as well, Ben on stuff that I want you to know in talking about the fine line between scientific advancements in the concept of magic, and we've certainly talked about folks that have gone all mad scientists about things and in the pursuit of progress, but doing some pretty horrific things in that pursuit, like human experimentation or you know, self experimentation. Not great, definitely better than you know,
experimenting on someone who is not consenting. Not really sure what the relationship was with the daughter. Maybe she was into it, but still kind of doesn't matter to be honest.
Yeah, yeah, it's here's the thing. It's eighteen eighty four. Bene Mary's his longtime spouse or a Balbiani, and together they have two daughters, Madeleine and Alice. Madeleine's born in eighteen eighty five, just a year after they get married. Alice is born in eighteen eighty seven. And so this guy is not to be clear, he's not drugging his children. He starts to study how they think, or how they
think about thinking. Their metacognitive processes. And this means that he is the weirdest beat me here, Max, He is the weirdest guddamn dad ever. He's not hurting the kids, but he's asking them very strange questions, and he's making them do little experiments that inform his research on suggestibility and attention. Now he starts saying, how do we measure intelligence? Right? How do personalities or how does lineage affect intelligence? And
he publishes so much stuff at this point. If we fast forward, it's eighteen ninety two, he gets a doctorate in natural sciences from suborne and in eighteen ninety one, Bro, I'm not sure how to say this, he kind of gets a job at the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology. It is a prestigious place, but we're saying kind of because when he got the job it was an unpaid position. He worked for a year and didn't see a dime or a fronk.
Am I even do too much trouble for doing this stuff with his daughters, because I mean it doesn't seem.
Like it's particularly.
You know, invasive of just studying suggestibility and attention. But I guess when I immediately when I hear about someone experimenting quote unquote on their family members, it does make me kind of you know, ra eyebrows a little bit.
It's cringe. And we're right to be skeptical because even if you're just asking the questions, you are never not going to also be their parent, you know what I mean.
That's true, that's true. That can also lead to just you know, it's just not good science, right.
Not great science. Yeah, agreed, And everybody in France disagreed with our conclusion because they said, this guy is great. He works for a year and we don't have to pay him. Let's make him the director of this laboratory. And there he meets his longtime collaborator, Theodore Simone. Theodore Simone works with Bene to do doctoral research under Benet's supervision. Bene does some things that are unequivocably very good things.
He starts the first French journal of psychology in eighteen ninety five, and at first he is a huge fanboy of a guy named Francis Golton. Francis Golton earlier worked in developing what we will call standardized test and his thing was, we can build out a rubric to measure individual differences in a population. So Benee adopted this approach
in his work. He later, I think it's nineteen oh three, he publishes an article that says, hey, guys, have you ever asked your daughters off putting strange questions.
All the time? What have you ever dadd before? Kind of comes with the territory, So Ben, shall we begin ZiT tests?
Ah Wonderbach. Also he got a lot more love for this nineteen oh three article I did about his hypnosis stuff. He was getting there, man, he was doing the work. You know. They were like Al's back, als back so hard. And he and his collaborator, as we're alluding to, they started working on a test that was meant to help the kids, just like Wu Tang. They said, if children have problems in learning, we got to figure out how
to assist those kids. This is what leads to the thing we call the benez Simone Intelligence Scale, and it was a government project.
Yeah, but I thought I'd maybe take a minute real quick here, just as an aside to talk about something that you and I talked about off Mike about this subject in terms of helping kids to learn and this knowledge that kids learned differently and that no two kids are the same. I do appreciate where Bene is coming from here specifically because my kid is given certain dispensations through the public school system here in Atlanta, allowing them
for a little bit more time on tests. And it's not something that you'd go so far as to maybe call a learning disability, but it is something that after an assessment, it is determined that a little bit of
extra time is helpful. And I just really appreciate all the admins and teachers and you know, folks in the school system that advocated for that kind of stuff because to your point earlier, Ben Or we talked about some really smart people just don't test well and it can be a real source of anxiety if someone already has, like say, just generalized anxiety. So just kudos to the teachers, as we always says, and you know, this is a it's been a very positive experience.
That's awesome. Yeah, that's not what's happening in early nineteen hundreds.
Not yet, definitely, not yet, but just again speaking to the idea of you know, help helping the kids.
Yeah, the French government it's nineteen oh four, okay, and the French government says we need to identify special needs in children. Specifically, the Minister of Public Instruction over in Paris says, we have to study existing tests, or we have to create our own tests so that we can ensure intellectually disabled children their words, not ours, can receive an adequate education as best as the state can do.
The minister at the time, or the ministry, i should say, is also concerned that children who have normal intelligence are being placed in classes for disabled children, not because of their cognitive abilities, but because of behavior problems. And so they look around France and they say, oh, former creepy hypnotist fanboy, Alfred Binet, you're the guy who should be in charge of all of this. And he took the reins, he took it went off run And by this point I got to tell you, I think Bene is sort
of a mercurial dude. You go from the law to medicine, to hypnosis to psychology.
That's funny, Ben, because it's like, when I think of mercurial, I guess I sometimes think of somebody who might be like a jack of all trades or sort of a polymath. But I guess maybe that you're meaning more in terms of a little bit on the flighty side.
A little bit. He's a little bit on the flight, you know what I mean. The guy takes flights, but hey, so do we.
So, speaking of which I need to book a return flight before you know it could cost one.
Oh right, yeah, that's a good time. The best time too if you're gaming the system, if you want to take advantage of the AI pricing or dynamic pricing, wake up at like two to three thirty in the morning. That's when that's when the system resets. That is not helpful or well, hopefully it's helpful. It is not relevant to what we're talking about. Our buddy Benet in Classic Mercurial Nature has already at this point rejected his adoration
of Galton and Galton's ideas. He said, look, this guy was onto something with standardized tests, but they're only measuring trivial abilities. They're measuring things like memorization. What we need are tests that measure the more impactful, if abstract things like judgment, comprehension, reasoning. These are much more difficult to measure, and he knew that going in, but he was convinced that doing so would yield more accurate results.
In this.
Question right, and again, this question was entirely about how to set children up for success. Right, should the kids who maybe have learning disabilities, should they go to special classes in regular schools or should they be sent to asylums? And who determines whether a kid has a learning problem in the first place. The psychologists were kind of a cartel at this point in France, and they said, oh, yeah,
you've got to go to our boys. You've got to go to our crew of psychologists and they'll tell you if your child is a broken egg. And Bene and the crew that he led in opposition, they said, no, that's weird. You guys are being weird. Don't get me wrong. I experimented on my daughters as well, But we should use objective criteria because humans are fallible, So what should be the test? And that's where they started to create
what we call the first IQ test. It probably also did not escape this guy, or at least, here's what I like to think, it probably didn't escape him that the future of a lot of children rested on his shoulders, especially since he had those earlier missteps in the world of hypnosis. He had to get this one right, he sure did so. Soon enough, he and Theodore Simone had created an early prototype of the IQ test. Is an early test, a prototype, it has to be, I'm gonna go with that.
It's a type of technology. And this was known as the Benet Simone Tests. But they wanted a little bit more input from some other folks in the field, so they took this early version of the test over to Stanford University across the pond.
Ah. Yes, and here we introduce our friends at Stanford University. So in this sense, specifically, when we say friends, we're talking about another psychologist. His name is Lewis Turman. He built on Bene and Simone's work and he created a version of their test called the Stanford Bene Intelligence Scale, introduced in nineteen sixteen. This is the IQ test. A
lot of people take. It's been revised numerous times. It's administered individually, so you're not sitting in a big room like when you take an SAT, and it assesses individuals as young as two years old. It primarily focuses on children. I just can't imagine giving a two year old a standardized test. What do you tell to you? What are you talking about?
Shapes Yeah, pointing at animals like that. What's that one for dementia that Trump's always bragging about?
Oh, man, woman, person camera, something like that. Yeah, hands on the clock TV man woman person camera. Cool like that, we're clear. We can name five words we heard earlier.
Is this it's a square peg round hole type situation or like one of those ones where you're putting shapes in different order. I mean, I know the square peg round whole thing is it doesn't work. But you know the one where you're like recognizing patterns and things like that.
Yeah, pattern recognition. Like you see a picture in a grid and maybe let's say it's a three by three grid, right, so nine squares and one of the squares is left blank, and you have to pick the image that fits in there. You know, you've got let's say, equilateral triangle and the bottom left corner is missing, and then you have a couple of choices for what image would best complete that full picture of the triangle. That's an example. Then you
know what completes my full picture of a triangle? What's that? You shucks? The full picture of the triangle in my heart? Cool? Shout out to olt j Ed, shout out to Max Williams, man, you're part of the triangle as well.
That oh Max is good, he's done with us speaking of triangles, and oh dear, okay, let's not go. We'll have to get back into Max's good graces. But Ben, speaking of triangles and French stuff, have you heard of this Montreal, This French Canadian band called Angeen de Poitrine. So they have this whole mythology.
You'd love them.
They they wear these crazy costumes, and they purport to be aliens from another planet, and they worship triangles and they play microtonal math rock and they wear these bonkers costumes and they're blowing up right now, and they're a lot of fun. They kind of have King Gizzard vibes. But I just love I know you love a mythology, especially a triangle based one.
Yeah, thank you for the recommendation. What's the name of the band?
They are called Angeen Dipatin, all right, And I'm linking you to their.
I'm linking you to their k XP performance right now. Phenomenal. I love k Look, we also know that this idea of this idea of measuring intelligence is tricky because even back then and in the current day humanity has no universally agreed upon definition of intelligence. So Ever, since nineteen sixteen, the boffins and the eggheads and the very smart badgers have been revising this scale, this Stanford Benet Intelligence Scale. They have also again, it's different from a firearm test
because it is a comparative score. So modern tests are going to use what we call deviation. They're going to assume the average score, like in the middle of the Bell curve is one hundred. We can get into the weeds there later. Let's standard deviation. If I'm not mistaken, Yes, yeah, nailed it. Standard deviation of sixteen. So if you take a test like this and your IQ score is above one thirty, you are considered gifted. If it's below seventy, they're going to look at you a little bit harder
for some sort of intellectual disability, Forst. Gump style. Right.
So, as this concept kind of starts picking up steam and expanding throughout the world, you started to see other sort of folks styling on it a bit, giving it their own spin, which sort of led to some other still to this day pretty well known tests and other kind of ideas around testing, beginning to emerge stuff like the Wes Adult Wessler perhaps I know this one adult Intelligent Scale and the Westler Intelligence Scale for children, which
do yield an overall intelligence quotient score, as well as separate ones for verbal and performance subtests.
Yeah, sort of like how you get yours a gifts right one score for verbal or communicative in your SATs wants one score for quantitative or mathematical.
Well, so, I guess the reason a lot of this stuff rang true to many of us in the audience, including myself, is because, as we're learning, the basis for so many of these standardized.
Tests is in all of this stuff. So even if, to your point, Ben, you haven't taken a quote unquote IQ test, which is less of a thing, it's much more of a spectrum, you've probably taken something that was very much inspired by the work of these folks one hundred percent. You know, for an example of a verbal test, it would be a vocabulary question. Performance tests would be picture arrangement like we described just a few minutes ago.
And for us folks, fellow ridiculous historians, this actually sounds like a lot of fun because neither of those examples requires you to be super good at math, which is where no offense estinal. I think we both crapped the bag a little bit.
Yeah, Now my thing, I got a near I mean not to bragg or anything, but I got a nearly perfect verbal score, as I'm sure you did on the SAT. And I don't even remember what my math was, but it was so bad that my overall SAT score weren't impressive. But taking taking in, you know, as as the verbal one, that's what I always lead with when I'm talking about the SAT, just to.
Be this guy, I was a guy who did much better in math than verbal.
Yes, yeah, And frankly, dude, that that makes sense. You've got a very analytical brain in that respect. But you're also a really good communicator, So go to hell.
It's got good SAT score in general.
So right, get off, get off here and be gone into a well with you and we're not even gonna send last.
Stop kissing up to each other, guys, is not what's happened, and not the gay hockey kind. The decades to go on, right, and as we said, new versions of similar test and merge, these things are continually getting revised. As you pointed out, now some version of this some grandchild of this sort of idea is found in all sorts of places. There is no escaping it. A good score can have a significant impact on your future in terms of your career
path and vice versa. Of course, right, there's a bit of a feedback loop, right, And this is the ridiculous part. These tests have always been controversial since the early nineteen hundreds, and a lot of people are going to tell you, including us, that these tests are far less useful than we have been led to believe. It's never going to die, and so on paper, it sounds pretty nifty, right to put it simply, We love black and white.
We love being able to boil things down to like a formula or a score. It is a human brain thing, but typically we know that stuff can sometimes it be a little too good to be true, or a little too broad to.
Be nuanced, if that makes sense. The idea of quantifying every single member of the human population by bypassing all those things you describe nuance right, the experience right, right, soft skills, The idea that you can just treat a person like a file or a unit and slap a number on their forehead. It turns out that so similar to so many other things that sound like amazing shortcuts. IQ tests fall far short of what they are supposed
to do. I mean, the Stanford Bene test is used to evaluate abilities, but it has also inescapably been used to justify racist a list beliefs and policies.
No callback with phrenology just also just came up pretty recently, typical of these types of again very black and white boiling down, boilings down of something that is a much more complex issue, like feeling the bumps on someone's head and feeling like that allows you to say that they are not a valid member of the human race.
Yeah. Yeah, this is the question efficacy. Efficacy for an IQ test would be asking are these results an accurate measure of a concept that human beings still struggle to fully defy? Can your IQ score really predict your future performance? The answer is, give me a record scratchbacks perfect, not really not skirt skirt not really, not one hundred percent of the time. Not fully. It's fairly common. I will pause it that a lot of us know objectively brilliant
people who could maybe write amazing novels. They can make phenomenal murals, they can do high level math, in their heads without notes. But they still don't have financial or social success. They're not at the top of society. And it's not because they're dumb by any means. It's just because they're good at taking one test, which is not the same thing as being good at life.
Well, it's also, you know, worth mentioning the path dependency maybe the wrong term. I'm a little bit stuck in a conversation we recently had about oil and natural resources and path dependency in that respect, but in terms of the path towards success and this dependency that is sort of pushed historically on kids to follow that path, and including things like college and taking these tests and getting
good scores on these tests. We know that a lot of that too, is sort of just gatekeeping for connections, you know, and the types of people that you might encounter that are ultimately the ones who put you in the right rooms and get you, you know, a leg up towards perhaps that journey of success. But these days, I don't know, man, those paths are a little bit less relevant than they used to be. And we know that if you make the effort and put yourself out there,
you can find your people. You can find those connections on your own, just by being part of the world and being interested in stuff and perhaps being part of Reddit groups or you know, making Internet content, or just like hanging out and going to clubs and stuff like that. So I'm not saying don't go to college, but I'm also just saying that I think it's coming around. The general knowledge maybe is that it's not exactly the only way.
Yeah, yeah, And part of that is because IQ tests measure a very narrow slice of what we can call mental horsepower. Right. It looks at your logic, your pattern recognition, short term memory, problem solving. So these tests can tell you how good you are taking an IQ test. They can tell you how fast you can solve a puzzle, but they don't they don't measure They're not able to measure how you would do things like raise kids, or stop your friends in the middle of a fight, or
even survive a week in the woods. The soft skills are the key, Right. You can score incredibly high on all sorts of tests, but you might not have emotional intelligence. You might not be good at reading and understanding the needs, perspectives and actions of others. Right. If you're very good at math. But you don't feel that other people also are equal entities in the world, then folks at your job aren't gonna like you. You also might not be
good at hand stress. These are key things to success, and I love what you pointed out there about things like networking. IQ tests don't measure that, they don't measure interpersonal intelligence.
Well, and we certainly all remember the No Child Left Behind scandal and how inevitably scandal maybe is a strong word, but how when these quotas are pushed upon already strained educational systems, you're going to end up with a whole lot of teaching the tests, which again is not a good indicator of what that test is actually supposed to measure in the real world.
One hundred percent. You know, Bene's original test was meant to be a diagnostic tool, not some kind of leader board. But the issue is, by the time it hit the United States, the test and versions of it were being used to brank people to gatekeeper opportunities and even to justify eugenics programs like they would use the IQ test results to to justify another pseudoscience up there with phrenology,
the idea that some people have to be sterilized. The idea that you're perceived race means you are superior or inferior to others.
And man, I'm not trying to be get on a political soap box here, but that sure feels like the flavor of the way the President is thrown around that term, because he's often using it to refer to people of color and referring to them as low IQ individuals and stuff like that.
It just it just has echoes of what you're talking about there, ben Oh, oh no, don't yield. We we can, we could break, but we will not. Then it just grows.
It's again, not even if it's it's any political observation, it's it's it's not nice. It's just rude and at at at its very least and racist that it's at its worst.
Yeah. In the early nineteen hundreds, Uncle Sam started using uh these tests descended from Benay to sort students into programs. So if you got a score on their version of the IQ test that was above one hundred and fifteen, that was your quotient, your deviation from the norm of one hundred, then you were considered gifted and you then got higher education opportunities. So you can make the most
of your abilities. If you're a normal kid, your score is between seventy to one hundred and fifteen at this time, you stay where you are. If your score is under seventy for one reason or another and you don't often get to retake the test, you are considered special needs. You are sent to state schools, you are sent to institutions. People begin to think that these special needs kids are not fit for society. Only a few of them actually
had a cognitive disability. A lot of these kids were from foster care, right, they didn't have earlier educational opportunities. Their parents or their relatives may have substance issues, they may have had their own sort of mental issues. These kids get carted off to abusive foster homes and institutions. And since we're a family show, can we just leave it at this horrific stuff happened to these children, all the kinds of abuse that you can imagine, and also sterilization.
Oh yeah, yeah, and there's you know, if you want to dig deeper into that very disturbing topic, we've done episodes about that very thing, on stuff that it wants you to know. As well as our sister podcast stuff you missed in history class, who have done I think several episodes on sterilization and on this kind of horrific treatment of children through these very types of programs that we're talking about.
One hundred percent. Yeah, and these controvert continue in the modern day. Critics will tell you intelligence tests have a strong cultural bias, a favor people for more affluent backgrounds. They discriminate against people from minority groups, right, whether that be racial, ethnic, social, et cetera. We also know that psychologists are responding to this by developing what they call
culture free tests, and the idea seems like very basic stuff. Say, say, for instance, if we're testing kids who grew up in the inner city, then we're going to use when we ask questions, we're going to use urban or city settings instead of like an outdated rural pastoral thing. Right like, I'm I'm a kid in Queens, I'm an upper Queens. Why are you asking me about this? Farmer? And is rutabagas stop it? Ruda begas?
We love rudebaks. I still don't really fully understand what
they are do. Check out stuff they don't want you to knowse Weekly Listener Mail episodes for a brand new root of Bega Banger every single week from our incredible super producer Dylan the code name Tennessee pal Fagan, And I just wanted to really quickly mention that the specific episode that I was referencing from stuff you missed in history class is about the Calikak family and the study of hereditary feeble mindedness, which is another really gross term
that was thrown around and tied to these types of standardized test scores.
Yeah, that was weaponized language, for sure, But what we're telling you is eugenics aside, cultural gatekeeping aside. There is hope for the IQ test. These tests are not total garbage, but they have and continue to have massive issues. They've been weaponized, flagrantly misused. The results have been overestimated, and on and on and on. And here's one of the things I wish more people talked about when we talk about IQ tests. This is one of the most ridiculous
flaws in the Origin story Noel Max. There is this old adage in writing fiction, which is this, it is incredibly difficult to write a super smart character because any character can only be as intelligent as the author that created them. IQ tests. I will posit cannot be immune
from that law. So the creators are very smart people, right, the folks who make these tests, But they're probably not the smartest people ever, ever, ever in history, and they're probably not even the smartest people in their own lifetimes, so they quite possibly are not the best candidates to make these examinations in the first place. We need the smartest people ever writing the test, and these are not them. No,
they're usually now, No they're not. And there's no statistical association between your IQ score and hard measures like your wealth. So look, this is a crazy thing. Humans are still figuring out intelligence. We didn't even get to the Flynn effect, which is kind of good news. Maybe we end on that. Noel, have you heard of the Flint effect?
No, not till just now when I clocked it in the outline. But please tell us about the Flint effect.
All right, here's the pickle. This is fascinating over time, over decades and decades and decades, more than a century now, IQ scores have shown a consistent increase across generations. It's called the Flint effect because a guy named James Flynn first first popularized this in the nineteen eighties and it looks like people are scoring a higher on IQ tests, not because they're necessarily getting smarter, but because the tests
themselves are changing. People have improved access to education and information, and people, perhaps most importantly, have better health and nutrition. The one thing that hasn't changed is genetic lineage. Your genes have very little to do with your IQ test. It's true, it's true. And so where do we land on it? Guys? I know, always coming in a hot and saying IQ tests are kind of beat the air max bullshit, They're kind of dark, they're just overblown. They're over blown.
It's true, and we already kind of knew that in terms of these types of tests for the very reasons that we mentioned, just the idea of it's really hard to.
Boil down the individual, unique snowflakedness that is a human person into a number.
But then you do end the episode with a think, a question that maybe on all of our minds is.
But who's the best, Who's got the best one, who's the smartest? Remember when we were kids too.
That's why I think it's so funny that Trump throws that around, where we used to probably make fun of people by saying your IQ's negative zero or stuff.
Like that, not fully understanding anything about this world.
So who's got the highest IQ in the whole wide world of sports?
Oh? Yeah, yeah, Oh, I've got to do one joke for please, one joke for our Irish American friends. This might get us in trouble, but let's do it and Max get a MIC for this one. Hey, guys, what's three miles long and has an IQ of forty? The Saint Patty's Day Parade?
Because they're all really, did we even talk about what the scale is?
Though?
The numerical scale like forty would be pretty bad, right, forty is bad? And then we're talking about a cumulative school or of forty. So man, they really whoever wrote that joke really stuck it to the Irish?
Huh? It was probably a British guy, Probably it was not us. So yes, to answer your question directly, as as we can find in the research. Currently, we don't know the actual smartest homo sapient alive right now, but as of twenty twenty four, a doctor named Jung Hun Kim has established the world record title for the world's highest IQ person. Now, his intelligence quotient has been verified as two one hundred and seventy six. I'm impressed. That's
what's a big number. I mean, does he do We're not saying he's brilliant, No, you might just be very good to take you the.
Test Crackerjack test taker. And good on you, doctor Junghun Kim. And by the way, I do love the idea of the non non Olympic record.
Yes, yeah, the International Non Olympic Committee. Yes, the International Non Olympic Committee. It's very niche, very very specific. Yeah. Yeah, like, oh uh, it's my first time going to committee meeting. What are you guys about, well, you know, the Olympics, Yeah, pretty much, nothing related to that. Everything else, everything, everything else. In our house.
We also, of course have the World Memory Championships, the World Memory Sports Council. These are wild Ben and the official World Record trademark, right, yeah, whatever the R. What's the R registered trademark? Yeah, it's the registered trademark. I should remember that from our intellectual property series.
But Ben Man, excellent.
I don't know how what kind of test taker you are, but you're sure good a research doc writer and this was a fun one.
Ah shucks. Well, big big thanks to everybody for tuning in big thanks to our super producer mister Max Williams. A big thanks to Jonathan Strickland, who I bet will lie about his IQ scores.
Maybe, and I bet he knows it too. He's the type of guy that knows definite and that keeps it. You know, He's probably a guy that written on the back of his Mensa Carden.
Big thanks to aj Bahamas, Jacob's. Big thanks to Leave's Jeffcoat and Christopher Hasiotis who else, who else? Who else?
All the people jeez Luise the Lovely Humans over a ridiculous crime. If you dig our show, you will absolutely dig theirs Alex Williams and composer our theme.
If you already said it, I'm staying in a second time, I'm doing it. Oh, I'm just doing it. Good, Save good, save forgot that one and one thing one thing I never want to forget is a big thank you to you, Noel. You're one of the smartest people I know and it's always a pleasure to hang out with you.
Oh Ben same, you are the missing piece in the triangle pattern recognition test of my heart.
Let's see you next time.
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