Scott Barry Kaufman

There's a lot of people involved in the early days of applying IQ tests.

It's really the application part here we're talking about, using it to sort people in America that betrayed the original philosophy.

They made it into multiple choice tests and gave it out to entire school systems.

gave it out to in the army gave it out they used it in lots of ways to send back people coming in from Ellis Island right like you know you're too feeble-minded to come to America you know never mind that a lot of these tests had verbal components to it and you're giving people who English is not their first language it's you know it's mind-boggling the extent to which

this test, which did have some potential for real utility, how much it was abused in the earliest days of use of those tests.

Mathematically, there's a formula that a lot of people started using in America, which I think is indicative of the way they thought about intelligence, right?

In order to understand the formula, you have to understand the difference between mental age and chronological age.

But they're basically saying you could be 13.

That's your chronological age in terms of your biology, in terms of your mental age can be below that or above it.

So your mental age, you could be a 13-year-old with a mental age of 7, and they called you backwards.

That was the term they used.

You're backwards, if that's the case.

But you're gifted if your mental age far exceeds your chronological age.

McIntosh was a traditional British psychometrician.

I mean, that's as traditional IQ as you get on paper and pencil.

But his personality and his demeanor and everything about him just signaled a pure, pure love of science.

No agenda.

No agenda on Nick McIntosh's part.

He wrote a textbook, The Science of IQ.

which I remember reading and it almost instantly made me a, I won't say convert.