Is intelligence overrated?

The kind of key thing that people were trying to predict with iq, and then the definition of intelligence kind of followed that afterwards. I think that's so interesting because I think when people think of intelligence, they think of iq. How do you even test for that? And what does the number you get at the end of that test mean? So IQ can be measured through. There's lots of different tests that you can do. They all kind of basically correlate very strongly. So they all seem to be largely measuring the same thing. Some of them are totally non verbal. So you would have these spatial puzzles that you have to solve. It might be asking people to kind of mentally rotate a cube. Imagine there's a cube sitting on a table. There's a red dot on its top face. Tip the whole cube a quarter turn towards you. Now tip it a quarter turn towards your right. Is the red dot on the top, the bottom or the side facing you? Or it can also be things like tests of working memory. That's our short term memory, tests of focus and concentration, vocabulary, all of those things. Our next test was first pioneered by J. Jacobs in 1887. It's called the digit span test. I'm going to say some numbers, listen carefully, and when I'm through, say them right after me. 3, 8, 6, 3, 8, 6. And then what you do is you get this kind of single factor that looks at how all of the different elements are related to one another and that is meant to represent this underlying brain power or general intelligence. So, you know, you still have very many people who have an average IQ of 100. And then as you increase the score, it gets rarer and rarer. And so an IQ of over 140, which is often considered the kind of borderline of genius that is meant to be very rare in the population. Indeed. Why did we start testing intelligence in the first place? And why did we start using this to rank people? So Alfred Binet, the French psychologist who came up with the first intelligence test, he very much was not trying to rank people. In fact, he spoke quite openly against the very idea. He was much more concerned with identifying the people who need extra support in their education and ensuring that that.