Five litmus tests for “this will raise your intelligence” claims
Five litmus tests for “this will raise your intelligence” claims A pocket BS detector for brain-training ads, LinkedIn gurus, and your own wishful thinking. 1. Which dial moved? Intelligence talk smuggles four dials into one word: Dial Rough meaning g / fluid ability Harder to move; overclaimed constantly Knowledge & skill Moves with practice and education Acute sharpness Sleep, illness, mood, substances Long-horizon brain health Aging, disease risk, lifestyle If the claim does not say which dial, it is marketing soup. 2. What was the control? “People got better” is almost worthless. Better than last week of the same game is practice. Better than an active control that also gets attention, novelty, and expectation is interesting. Lumosity-style lawsuits exist because companies sold soup as medicine. 3. Near or far? Near transfer: you got better at this and close cousins. Far transfer: the effect jumped to something distant (school grades, matrix reasoning, life outcomes). Far transfer is scarce. Second-order metas on cognitive training keep finding near yes, far ≈ no once bias is handled. That is not cynicism. It is how human learning usually works. 4. Who was the sample? A processing-speed protocol that helps older adults does not automatically mint IQ points for a 24-year-old optimization bro. Deficient populations respond differently than well-nourished ones. Age and baseline matter more than branding. 5. Is the score flattering the seller? If the outcome is “our app score,” the app got better at measuring app use. Prefer outcomes that hurt to fake: standardized batteries against active controls, academic scores, carefully logged real-world performance. What I built instead of another vanity mini-game IntelligenceMax is a live reasoning gym: frontier models write fresh distinction-style items at your edge, and scoring is transparent / IRT-style. That is deliberate practice under honest difficulty, not a clinical IQ battery and not a promise that general intellige