Want Your Country to Thrive? Give Geniuses a Universal Basic Income
<i>UBI for geniuses might work something like this. Schoolchildren would be given a succession of IQ tests during their schoolyears: IQ tests because they are the best method we have of assessing raw intellectual ability rather than school learning. A succession because everybody can have an off day — the physicist Richard Feynman liked telling people that he had only scored 124 in an IQ test. Children who score 145 or above would then be offered a life-long genius award.</i><p>These people have no idea what they are talking about.<p>IQ tests are <i>tools</i>. In order to properly assess very high IQ children or twice exceptional -- gifted and disabled -- children, they need to be administered by a qualified professional. Most IQ tests only go to 145. Very high IQs can only be meaningfully assessed by about age 7.<p>If the tests get overused and it becomes common knowledge what is on them, they stop being useful metrics because now they can be gamed, essentially. Last I heard, we were having trouble updating our IQ tests for various reasons and, also, IQ tests are highly culturally biased. An IQ test for Americans won&#x27;t effectively assess a Brit or Canadian.<p>IQ tests are extremely controversial. The first test, created by Binet, that became the starting point of modern IQ tests was not intended to assess <i>intelligence</i>. It was intended to assess <i>school readiness</i> in children in France in an era where not all kids had birth certificates, so you couldn&#x27;t use age as your metric, and rural kids tended to be less ready for public school than city kids for cultural reasons.