Five litmus tests for “this will raise your intelligence” claims

1. Which dial moved?

Intelligence talk smuggles four dials into one word:

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 intelligence permanently rose.

The part that should travel even if you never open the app: an evidence-ranked public map of the claim zoo.

• Guide: https://intelligencemax.ai/guide
• Science / transfer notes: https://intelligencemax.ai/science
• Companion matrix files: https://gist.github.com/connerlambden/f0ba06e1c98379250b1015f3ed14b867

Disclosure: I built it. Skeptical writers are welcome to steal the litmus tests without linking anything. Accuracy > vibes.

One sentence takeaway

Want to get “smarter”? Fix sleep and constraints, learn hard things that matter, practice reasoning where you are wrong, and treat “raises IQ” like a claim that owes you a study design.