IQ tests - your opinion?

[d4rk3lf]

I've been thinking a lot on this lately.
What is IQ test? What does it proves?
Is it just some mathematical measuring of someone ability to make sense of "put 6 triangles in this tight space", and if that person can't put then in the way the test is created, is that person necessarily stupid?

For example...
(this was when I was teen)
I had 2 friends... their (nick)names are Raka and Lucky.
Lucky failed the test, Raka passed the test... for Mensa.
So what happened next... Raka was so proud of it, that he always blabbered that he is member of Mensa... and bla bla...
While Lucky stayed the same.
When I tell some (ironic) joke, I noticed Lucky was much faster to smile on this then Raka...
(which made me doubt this mathematical approach of testing intelligence)

What do you think?

 

[Deimos]

I've been thinking a lot on this lately.
What is IQ test? What does it proves?
Is it just some mathematical measuring of someone ability to make sense of "put 6 triangles in this tight space", and if that person can't put then in the way the test is created, is that person necessarily stupid?

For example...
(this was when I was teen)
I had 2 friends... their (nick)names are Raka and Lucky.
Lucky failed the test, Raka passed the test... for Mensa.
So what happened next... Raka was so proud of it, that he always blabbered that he is member of Mensa... and bla bla...
While Lucky stayed the same.
When I tell some (ironic) joke, I noticed Lucky was much faster to smile on this then Raka...
(which made me doubt this mathematical approach of testing intelligence)

What do you think?

Funny you should mention this... I was just reading about something related to your post.
I can't explicitly answer your question, but you may want to check this guy out:
The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. He talks about right brain and left brain function.
He specifically discusses things like you observed; that is, why very intelligent people sometimes can't grasp a spoken or written abstract expression, like irony, altho' they can explain what irony is, and give you a Merriam Webster definition of it from memory.

It's like the left side learns things but the right side integrates all the learning and abstracts from it. The left side can't abstract.
The left side is the side that solves all the Mensa problems (if it is very high functioning), but Mensa doesn't test the brains "abstraction/integration function" (the right side).