A pocket BS detector for brain-training ads, LinkedIn gurus, and your own wishful thinking.
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. “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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
Disclosure: I built it. Skeptical writers are welcome to steal the litmus tests without linking anything. Accuracy > vibes.
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.