[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: So, what are we saying here?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We are saying even if you take a shift from IQ tests and controlled psychometric psychological testing center case for the proper test into the real world, other confounding factors in the real world could make metrics that can use a naturalistic setting like a business technology invention or discovery success questionable in and of themselves. So, in either case, it becomes a problem of opaqueness up to a point.
Rosner: IQ tests were initially designed to fairly quickly tell you how smart somebody is so you can get them what they need, generally educational resources. And you can ask, “Is this helpful?” A teacher in a reasonable academic setting, let’s say a third-grade teacher with 28 students, has IQ scores for those 28 students, is going to be helpful as the teacher, by working with the students after the first couple months, be able to figure out who’s smart and who isn’t. Or do IQ tests to find hidden gems where there might be a kid who’s underperforming, but maybe that kid’s parents are getting a divorce, and that kid’s all fucked up but is smart, or the kid is fucking up because the kid is bored. I’ve never seen a study, not that I’ve looked for one, that tries to answer whether IQ tests are needed. I think they’re still kind of administered as a matter of course in schools at some point. By fifth grade, you’ve probably taken some kind of IQ test. Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s certainly not the big deal that it was when I was a kid. What do you think?
Jacobsen: It seems people use it in formal settings like the army, a little less in college admissions and so on.
Rosner: So there’s the ASVAB in America, Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. It’s an IQ test to see whether you get a shot at being enlisted to go to officer candidate school. In the NFL, they used to give a test called the Wonderlic. I think they phased that out because they decided it was racist. It was a 50-question IQ test, and somebody looked at it and decided this fucks over people from poor black kids, maybe. Those people may not be considered quarterbacks because quarterbacks are supposed to be the smartest players on the field and have the highest scores on the Wonderlic. If the NFL can do without the Wonderlic, everybody else can do without IQ tests, I don’t know.
Ultra-high IQ tests serve no diagnostic purpose and, in my mind, are best considered as a sport, and I’ve pitched this fucking sport a bunch. And also, I’ve been a part of four TV Pilots that try to turn thinking into a fucking sport, and it’s very frustrating because you could make a decent show about this kind of shit. That’s what it’s for meaningless performance, like the world’s strongest man competition. You take all these ridiculous fucking events holding like 300-500 pounds picking up balls that are like 30 inches in diameter and weigh 300 pounds. Very unwieldy; who can pick up the most balls and put them on pedestals in one minute? Who can drag a train, you know, to the farthest in one minute? These things that you have to be strong are shit to do, but it’s still a ridiculous fucking thing. You can do the same thing with mental acuity of some sort, and the people have tried to do this, and no fucking network has ever picked it up because they’re idiots.
Now that I think about it, when you look at the networks that have been pitched this shit, now there’s a deal, it’s a rule I developed; I would think that other people have the same rule that the development execs at the middling TV networks A&E, Nat Geo, Bravo; if they were better at their jobs, they wouldn’t be at these fucking middling networks. They’d be at Netflix or whatever the hot fucking network at the moment is. So these dumb fucks, which is where these brain shows get pitched, maybe those shows don’t go anywhere because they are being considered by dumb fuck because some of these shows are perfectly fine and would make for shows that are at least as good as other reality competition shows and maybe better if it’s a reality competition plus a personality revealing thing like Survivor but with smart people.
Another principle that I’m well familiar with, no fucking development exec, is that smart people can be just as asshole-ish as other people and just as interesting in their assholery. There you go; that’s what super-high IQ performance measures are for. It’s a fucking sport that hasn’t been turned successfully into a sport because the people with the power to turn it into a sport are fucking dumb shits.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 