Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "How Believing In Brain Training Games Changes Results" video.

  1. That's something that people whose IQ wasn't as high as they wanted say. The truth is that for what IQ is intended to measure, it does a fine job of it. The problem comes when you try to use it for things other than predicting success in school. A person's IQ is going to fluctuate on a daily basis depending upon how their brain is doing on that day. If you get a bad night sleep, you're not going to do as well as if you had been sleeping well. IQ itself does get over stated, I tend to believe that a moderately high IQ is more useful than one that's actually genius caliber, but bad mouthing IQ doesn't impress anybody.
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  2. I'd like to see some evidence of that. IQ is purely for the purpose of identifying people that are more or less capable of dealing with a specific academic environment. Nothing more, nothing less. People complain about it, but the only real problems with IQ is that it's a narrow set of tests and it's routinely misapplied to prove whatever fool notion people have about different groups of people. But, within it's intended use, it's a perfectly fine measure.
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  3. Sort of. It's easy to convince yourself you're stupid and incapable of learning, so I'd expect some degree of sampling bias in that direction for people that don't believe they can improve themselves. It's pretty easy to sabotage the educational process. People who believe that they can increase their total capacity are more likely to take steps necessary to make it happen. I don't think there's anything placeboish about this. Most likely the results are a result of sampling error or didn't measure the true capacity at the time the study was started.
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