WTF Is IQ?

Morning Smarty Pants!

This… is the average Joe:

And his IQ is 104.

And this is Albert Einstein:

His IQ is 160.

And THIS… is YoungHoon Kim:

 The SMARTEST person ever recorded, with an IQ of 276.

But what actually is IQ??

Well, take us back to school, in 1905, France.

See, French schools realize that some kids need a little more help than others.

So they hire these 2 psychologists dudes:

Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon.

Their job?

To design a test to figure out who these kids were.

So they get to work designing questions to assess their verbal reasoning, working memory, and visual-spatial skills.

Then they combine all those into one simple score!

And ta-da… the IQ test is born!

This quickly becomes more standardized, with a score of 100 being the “average”.

But… things start taking a DARK turn.

This idea of ranking people’s intelligence is used by certain people to justify some very nasty things…

For example, one place starts testing their people’s IQ and forcibly sterilizes the ones who score low.

Where is this place?

Virginia… in 1924.

(Yes… really)

This is a decision supported by the United States Supreme Court, too.

Crazy…

But then, we have the Nazis, who take it a step even further.

They start ranking children based on IQ, and if you score too low…

Jeez.

Anyway, after a while, the Civil Rights movement crushes all this stuff.

(Thank god)

Nowadays, IQ tests are just seen as a kinda bad way of calculating general intelligence.

Because, in reality, IQ is really only good at 1 thing…

Telling you how good you are at… taking IQ tests!

Lol.

Stay Cute,
Reece, Henry & Dylan 🌈

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