Coming up later today: How I jumped from a ledge into ice-cold water in a cave the size of Maine, bounced off a tree into another tree after peeing into the woods at night, drank Jameson’s and laughed about the fact I was laughing with my Kretek cigarette buddy, risked my life clambering around on a sheer rock face three hundred feet above a lake, and nearly vomited when Fedex arrived with a particularly tightly-wrapped package.

In the meantime let me say this. It seem to me an IQ test is one of the stupidest ways to measure intelligence, something obviously unquantifiable. This is not because I’ve received a particular harsh score; it just occurred to me yesterday that any number of questions will fail to quantify intelligence because every person is different and every person will express their intelligence or lack of intelligence in a different way. Or more to the point, an IQ test essentially seeks not to define how intelligent you as the individual are, but what intelligence itself is. After all, you need criteria to develop the test, and why should I believe those who develop these tests are unbiased? What if they decide that being smart is mainly about being good at math, or identifying patterns? I’d be sunk like a Spanish Galleon. I’m bricks when it comes to math.

Personally, I’m of the opinion that IQ tests can only really establish that an individual is better or worse at certain tasks than the average. And beyond that it’s quite meaningless.

Tags: opinions