Since IQ means intelligence -quotient-, you always compare a score to other scores, so it's not an absolute measure by definition - there is no absolute IQ test. I'm also not aware of any respectable existing test for absolute intelligence either,
Right. Unfortunately, whenever someone wants to talk about absolute intelligence, "IQ" is the closest word/concept to that.
When you look at adult IQ tests, the raw score is decent measure of 'absolute intelligence' for most modern humans. Current tests have known problems with exceptional individuals (on either end) and some tests are more interested in determining the shape of someone's intelligence (like, say, the subtests on the Woodcock Johnson) than others (like the Raven's test, which only tests one thing). Comparing raw scores tells you useful things- about the effects of age, about the Flynn effect, about theoretical populations, and even about the distribution now. IQ scores are defined to follow a bell curve, but if the raw scores don't follow a bell curve, that's important to know!
The concept of IQ as a quotient seems rooted in the history of testing children- "this 12 year old has a 16 year old's development"- which isn't very useful for adults. If we give a test for adults to Alice and Betty, and Alice has an IQ of 140 and Betty has an IQ of 100, that doesn't mean Alice is 40% smarter than Betty; it means that Betty is 50th percentile and Alice is 99.6th percentile. But, in practice, we might want to know that it takes Betty 90 seconds to get a problem right 80% of the time, and it takes Alice 5 seconds to get it right 100% of the time, which is data we collected in order to get the official outputs of 140 and 100.
If we picture the concept of absolute intelligence as some kind of optimal information process with certain well defined characteristics whose lower and upper bounds are only determined by the laws of physics, I'm afraid human intelligence will be hardly comparable to it in any really meaningful way.
The Sentience Quotient is the closest thing I can think of, and it's mostly good for describing why humans and trees have few productive conversations (though the upper bound is also interesting).
11/26: The survey is now closed. Please do not take the survey. Your results will not be counted.
It's that time of year again.
If you are reading this post, and have not been sent here by some sort of conspiracy trying to throw off the survey results, then you are the target population for the Less Wrong Census/Survey. Please take it. Doesn't matter if you don't post much. Doesn't matter if you're a lurker. Take the survey.
This year's census contains a "main survey" that should take about ten or fifteen minutes, as well as a bunch of "extra credit questions". You may do the extra credit questions if you want. You may skip all the extra credit questions if you want. They're pretty long and not all of them are very interesting. But it is very important that you not put off doing the survey or not do the survey at all because you're intimidated by the extra credit questions.
The survey will probably remain open for a month or so, but once again do not delay taking the survey just for the sake of the extra credit questions.
Please make things easier for my computer and by extension me by reading all the instructions and by answering any text questions in the most obvious possible way. For example, if it asks you "What language do you speak?" please answer "English" instead of "I speak English" or "It's English" or "English since I live in Canada" or "English (US)" or anything else. This will help me sort responses quickly and easily. Likewise, if a question asks for a number, please answer with a number such as "4", rather than "four".
Okay! Enough nitpicky rules! Time to take the...
2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey
Thanks to everyone who suggested questions and ideas for the 2012 Less Wrong Census Survey. I regret I was unable to take all of your suggestions into account, because some of them were contradictory, others were vague, and others would have required me to provide two dozen answers and a thesis paper worth of explanatory text for every question anyone might conceivably misunderstand. But I did make about twenty changes based on the feedback, and *most* of the suggested questions have found their way into the text.
By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.