# Five litmus tests for “this will raise your intelligence” claims > Source: > Published: 2026-07-14 03:24:51+00:00 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.