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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Today I Learned
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This is a myth. There IS a test, called the "Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB)", which is a competency test to see what jobs you would be suited for, but that is NOT an IQ test.
Sure, if you score badly on that test you will LIKELY have a low score on an IQ test, probably because something like 40% of American adults are illiterate or have low-literacy and that would impact your ability to do any test.
But the military does not IQ test.
It is a percentile-based test against others who've tested on it. So it's similar to an IQ test in that regard.
Sure... But it's a DIFFERENT TEST, on a different population of people, with the goal of measuring military-specific factors.
This is essentially a semantics argument and doesn’t make this post a “myth.” The military aptitude tests are effectively an intelligence quotient, just not a standard “IQ test”
And if low iq folks are more likely to seek enlistment, the distribution could be significantly lower than iq/the population at large.
Eh, I met plenty of very smart people while serving. I also met plenty of very fucking stupid people. I'd say the ratio is about the same as the general population, since the military offers a lot of very attractive financial incentives to poor and middle class folks alike. Although, free college is the number one reason most enlist, in my experience. I know it was the main reason I did it. Gotta love a society that allows colleges to price gouge tuition so badly in the first place...
Personally I agree that the military is as good of a sampling of intelligence as the general population, but there is something to be said about the potential issue of a normal distribution bias. (Up or down) If there was an analysis on it I'd wager that the correlation coefficient would be very close to 1. I just wish that the critics of this simplification would avoid portraying the ASVAB as having NO correlation with IQ.
People mention that there's some dumb mfers in the military. My friend included.(I'll let you decide on which side of that assessment he's on lol) but I think it's a familiarity bias. You're forced to work with(and against) those individuals no matter your intelligence level in the military. In contrast, people in the general population tend to work mostly with people that are around their own level of intelligence unless it's customer service.
Heh, never thought about this before, but that probably explains why both people in either customer service or the military tend to be jaded, cynical people, lol.
The GI bill was a very nice perk indeed. That and the VA loan has helped me out quite a bit.
The VA loan is legitimately the thing they should be promoting the hell out of instead of college.
I bought my first house mostly with mostly cash I'd saved up in the army, also it was cheaper than my wife's current vehicle. But when we got married and started thinking about buying a house, she learned about the VA loan and creamed herself. Sure it's a lot of extra paperwork, but no down payment and no mortgage insurance, goddamn it was a godsend.
Indeed, aside from the GI Bill, which I initially signed up for, I later found out about the VA Home Loan program and it was a huge lifesaver for us and has helped us secure a home loan twice now (not simultaneously).
One night on radio watch, I dug through the laptop we were keeping a log in and found a spreadsheet containing everyone in our company's asvab scores. It was a fascinating thing to look at. We were MI, and this was back when there was a combat arms MOS in MI still, which I was. And we were always made fun of because we had the lowest asvab entry score (65) while many people had masters degrees. 7 out of 10 of the highest scores were were in my squad. We also had the lowest, but that's a given. I think I remember I had the highest in the sqaud and my team had the highest average.
You can still be very intelligent and still want to roll around in the dirt and play with the big guns.
Yes, there is absolutely a sampling bias here
There are probably ways to correlate the military test with a standardized IQ test, and which point the military test might be a rough proxy for IQ. If that was the case, the 80 IQ rule might be roughly accurate.
I don't know if that's been done though. Just playing devil's advocate.
I think there have been studies on the correlation between ASVAB scores and IQ scores. The correlation is supposedly 0.8.
This stack exchange post has a few sources linked
https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/20220/to-what-extent-does-afqt-correlate-with-iq
Different than what exactly? There isn't one single IQ test.