just curious, what's your IQ.

The last time I took an I.Q. test, I scored 120 to 125.

test your IQ here, and compare to others....

- quoting myself from this thread: https://www.debateart.com/forum/topics/2499

Last time I checked, my IQ was 107.

You're baaaack

Yes, I am. I doubt I'll quit again actually but you never know.

This website is now what I always wanted it to be for me psychologically; a passion and pleasant hobby. It's not something I 'work at', it's not something I 'have to do' and it's not some place I need to 'prove my worth over all the rest'. It's not that thing for me, I have that elsewhere in life and I am very happy and calm.

I basically detox'd myself (on top of that other 2 week break i took) from this website and an addiction I had formed over time. I realise what this is and what Internet rivalries in general are and have way more perspective than ever before. I am at ease now, it feels good.

Why do people place such high importance on intelligence? I mean, it's nothing to be proud of. It's not your effort put into a great accomplishment or something. It's something either given to you by God, or evolution. 

I put a lot of effort into increasing my intelligence. Then again, if you're arguing that it's fate and everything is inevitable then so is the pride one feels for having it so that's a non-sequitur.

How can you increase your intelligence? I thought that was impossible.

The same ways you can lose it over time. Have you never noticed people get more and less creative, logical and whatever else in 'ups and downs' throughout life? Well, it's true that for the average human, intelligence stays stagnant; because most people see the brains as the means and joy/peace as the end but some people mix it up a bit. They see themselves as machines almost, I'm not quite that extreme. When you start valuing thinking critically and correctly over being happy, angry, loving, hating etc you start to get discipline and form habits that slowly increase your actual pathing in the brain's efficiency and much else. Hormones, nutrition and such matter too. People who work out a lot physically never ever (figuratively never) are the most intelligent people in the room and the reason is that they aren't flexing their brain enough, instead of their body. This means in a cutthroat situation with the mind, they will screw up. Similarly, the hacker genius or whatever will screw up in an emergency physical combat scenario and the elite emotional manipulator / warrior will flounder in both those scenarios. The forte of some is the downfall of others.

You cannot ever truly be intelligent in all ways. Pick your specialties but then find ways to branch them out to compensate, regardless. A wide-spread but still somewhat pillared intelligence in some categories that aims to be 'truly weak' in no way at all but only 'super smart' in some select few ways it regularly 'works out' by thinking it at a high level in a fast-paced scenario, is the true peak intelligence according to me. You can train that, yes, but if your nutrition and upbringing were too brutally bad (starving kid, meth-head parents who never let you see anything informative or go to school) you can end up irreparably unintelligent, that is true.

How do you learn to think "critically and correctly"?

Okay, so for instance right here right now, ask yourself why you're engaging me in public instead of in private. If the motive isn't to 'expose me' or something, then why not just make a topic on it unrelated to me?

I am asking you to answer this in your head, not 'calling you out' for it. After doing that, ask the questions you just asked me (all three) to yourself. Try, grasp at straws in your head (I am not mocking you, everyone does this when they start out truly thinking for themselves)...Try so hard to answer it yourself. Use a search engine, textbooks and anything at your disposal other than the direct asking of another human being. Try it. It will pain you at first, anger you, sadden you... Discard those emotions. Do not stop until you begin instinctively saying to yourself 'I will only ask the question, if the answer is something either impossible for me to attain without inside-knowledge and/or too expensive to attain, given my bank account.'

Do anything you can to increase your habitual thinking in itself, it will hurt at first. I am talking about actual headaches, tiredness, stress. It is not possible at the start to truly do it, you are addicted to experiencing answer-spoonfeeding. The first withdrawal symptom will be lack of trust in others, before the headaches really matter, before the tiredness kicks in, before any nightmares begin or whatever. You will begin to trust no one, at all. Stop that. It's probabilistically insane to think that just because you haven't truly thought for yourself on a regular basis that there was that huge of a security flaw and that willing of an adversary that suddenly now your life will be turned upside-down for realising how vulnerable your thought process was. Just because they're unreliable in a true sense of intellect, doesn't mean that those around you that you trusted are all untrustworthy but given probability and trends, I guarantee you that when you truly pursue this journey you'll 'fall out' with 3 friends and/or family members that you didn't realise were toxic and dragging you down with their negativity and/or stupidity. You will start seeing a world and reality where you rely on yourself and others interact with you to help you or to hurt you and you need to work out which and why. Do not punish the helpers, do not reward the hurters. You can't do this perfect at first, heck no one ever really can. Do this more and more in daily life.

Around 3-4 weeks into this attitude, you'll begin to notice you are developing new voices in your head, or at least two voices that are both your own. One voice may even turn into images etc, please I don't want to discuss mental health here but logically if you never ever had hallucinations before, you won't get them afterwards either. If you did, take notes, use critical thinking to notice your hallucinations. Do not feel fear, seek help, strategise how to get it as good-quality but also cheap as possible and if need be get medication. I doubt you will be developing a new hallucination though, this new voice/imaging system in your brain is confused for being ADD/ADHD, it's just your IQ increasing on a hardware (brain) that's become used to thinking dumber. You need to keep the second thought-strain running. It will help you not only multitask but maximise usage of time and effort if you're doing one thing at once while processing background thoughts. You will notice that it will hit a wall at three simultaneous thoughts and that it will work best if two discuss/interact with each other on one activity while the third deals with 'hmm what will I eat later, hey what do I have to do later today?' avoid pushing memories and thoughts about traumatic experiences to the background thoughts. If you are having PTSD or flashbacks, they won't stop until you bring them to the forefront and deal with the 'why me' stuff head on.

Around 3 months in, you'll start to notice that people genuinely, categorically and objectively are dumber than you. Don't feel pride yet, focus on those who are on your level or above it. Your competition will keep you on your toes and make you able to exercise the brain to its true maximum. You are at this point a very intelligent human but not a genius. To become a genius, if you want to become one, you need to get a hobby that is brain demanding and introverted. You cannot ever be a genuinely extroverted genius. They cannot and do not exist in any race, culture etc. You must learn to love your own brain, be your own best friend and this will help you better pick a close friend and/or lover other than yourself. Do not think your intelligence over others entitles you to mistreat them; remember the 'help' concept? Save your energy for helping those who help you at calculated times. Be the one who helps them when no one else will, it will let you make a little effort go along way into that bond and ironically you'll actually be helping them more than anyone else has/could for a long time due to how desperate they were. The same critical thinking that lets you see flaws, pain, agony in your allies will then work on your adversaries who you should turn into neutrals, allies or people who are irrelevant to your enjoyment in life and ability to do what you do. If/when you meet an adversary who is neither of those 3 things and who you can't 'turn' you have a new peak to reach in critical thinking.

After a year or 2, the competition will wear off. You won't even think 'I won' you will think 'they lost and hopefully are on their journey to become a genius as well'. It's no longer about beating people by then, you're on a whole other level where it's about you, yourself and the mental power you can unlock if you keep at it. You may even cure some disease and win a nobel prize along the way but that's more circumstance and 'form of intelligence' than anything else. There are all kinds of geniuses, don't try to be the one you don't have the 'natural edge' at, it's pointless.

Ok, I get that your saying that trying to think through things first will help improve your thinking skills.How about math skills? For instance, say a person simply can't comprehend how to do it at all. What if this person tries and tries, but simply can't "get it". They can work through a problem, but can't set up a problem. They just draw a blank. It goes over their head, no matter how much they try. What would this person, who can't comprehend, do to make things "click"? This person currently has an average I Q. 

Actually they probably have below-average IQ if they're like that. That's their burden to bear, what do you want me to say?

I didn't deny it's natural selection at play. I didn't deny some have unfair disadvantages. Life is not fair, the game is rigged in a true deterministic outlook and even if it isn't rigged it's still 'inevitable' so, as I said before:

124 and

3.5milliratmans

This person is me, and my I Q is average. I don't understand why I can't comprehend math, and yet have normal reading comprehension and skills. I always got A's in English. Yet I have trouble learning new languages. I also have a real difficulty learning new things. Real difficulty. 

Then your natural forte will clearly be use of the English language, do not disregard that or think I doubt it. Good for you, now use English to understand mathematics. Think of the logic in words, not symbols and numbers, utilise all your complex ingenuity with grammar and spelling to comprehend algebraic logic, statistical sums and algorithmic sequences, push your natural edge to the maximum and let it overflow into other areas.

iq is a fraud

How so? It at least correlates with success in life and school.

It doesnt account for military and street smart

Then why does the military require a certain minimum I Q?

"street smart" is a pretty vague term, and has more to do with dealing with people.

It doesnt, the retarded people fight the wars, while the smart move up

I doubt the military would enlist retarded people. 

Well, like not as smart

I might be wrong about minimum I Q to join the military, now that I think about it. 

I think it's just if your fit, but I the smarter people move up

There are also tests, like the asvab you have to pass. I think that would correlate with intelligence somehow.

hmmm,yeah maybe

There is no IQ requirement to join the military. The ASVAB is scored as many sub-sections but the overall percentile-based score is what most people are talking about when they refer to an ASVAB score. For example my ASVAB overall score was 99, meaning I scored higher sub-scores than 99% of people that took the test.

The minimum overall score to join varies depending on whether one has a high school diploma or GED (requirements are higher for those with GEDs) but is generally pretty low (anywhere between 36 and 65 depending on level of education and which branch you are trying to get into) Many MOSs have minimum sub-section score requirements of course, being a firesupportman for example is a much more technical job than being an an admin clerk and so has several requirements in addition to the minimum required to enlist.

Although it is not an IQ test it is based on the same percentile principles as an IQ test so a rough conversion is possible. Someone that scored a 36 for example is in the top 64 percentile of ASVAB testers, the top 64 percent of IQ testers score an IQ of 95 or higher so it can be said that the military has a bare minimum IQ requirement of 95, although people scoring in that range will be relegated to simpler jobs due to their low score.

Anyone that thinks the military only accepts stupid people can take a free practice ASVAB online and post their overall score here. Since the overall score is a percentile it literally compares you directly with the rest of the tested population.