What Would Someone Smarter Than Me Do?

"What would Jesus do?" is a question some might ask themselves when faced with a moral dilemma. Jesus, to them, represents a moral expert or virtuoso, a standard to judge oneself by, a paradigm of virtue to aspire to. I like to ask the intelligence version of this question. I imagine someone brilliant, in every sense of the word: an Einstein, Rachmaninoff, Hegel, Joyce, Buffet, Brin and Page, etc. all rolled into one. And then I ask myself, "What would that very smart person do?" And I don't just ask myself this when I hit a dilemma. I ask myself all the time, "What would someone very smart be thinking right now?" While reading the paper, while reading a book, while listening to music, while talking with people, while waiting for the light to change, I wonder. In any situation, at any given moment, the inquisitive genius sees a much richer world than I do, of which I constantly strain to catch a glimpse.

How Do Standardized Tests Stay Consistent?

The Flynn Effect says IQs have been observed to increase from one generation to the next. But who's to say the IQ tests themselves haven't changed? How do we make IQ tests that are consistently equally difficult, especially down to the precision of tenths of an IQ point? The metric that should determine the difficulty of the test itself is, at the same time, the very metric the test is measuring. We have a causational loophole in standards. The same applies to reports on how today's American high school students are scoring on the SAT now compared with past students. The dual relativities of intelligence and intelligence tests make standards of comparison logically impossible.