I grew up being shamed for my intelligence. I spent my childhood wishing I was more intelligent and being jealous of the cool “intelligent” around me.
I have never passed IQ tests. I highly suspect that the way I proceed information isn’t suitable for IQ tests. I’m bad ar math and I think slowly and deeply, while IQ tests require you to be quick.
The thing with IQ tests is that you can game the system by training yourself to be familiar with the problems. It doesn’t accurately measure how “intelligent” you are. Anything that you can game isn’t worth it.
To drive home to the point, I know a friend who aces almost every single IQ problem. We were helping another friend with some intelligent tests. The IQ friends solved every single IQ problem nicely. But when she came across a problem that didn’t require “IQ”, she was stunned and couldn’t understand what she was required to do, and it took us 3 tries to finally explain to her the problem successfully. The problem was: there was this string of numbers, add each two numbers and write down the last number of the result. Repeat until you were done with the string of numbers. For example: 16494. 1+6=7. You write 7. 6+4=10, you write 0. Repeat the process and you have 7033. It only took me less than half a minute to figure out what they required.
This begs the question: what is “intelligence” anyway? People often use IQ to measure intelligence, but how would that explain my story above? How could someone who aces IQ tests utterly failed to understand a simple problem?
These days I stop obsessing over intelligence and focus more on critical thinking instead. I observe the real world and ask questions, and try to listen to people with different opinions.
At least critical thinking can be learned and measured, unlike the vague thing which is intelligence.