from the maybe-they-only-surveyed-the-nimnobs dept.
Why can we talk about PISA results, comparing the performance of students in school, but we are not allowed to talk about differences in IQ? Bring this subject up, and you are immediately accused of racism. And yet. And yet, if there are substantial differences in intellectual capability, might this not explain some of the world's problems?
An update of a massive "study of studies" is underway; this article summarizes the work to date, and provides links to the work in progress. A quick summary of the answers to the questions no one dares ask:
- Eastern Asia (Japan, China): IQ around 105
- Europe/North America: IQ around 98
- Middle East: IQ around 85
- Africa: IQ around 70
In the first instance, it doesn't even matter why there are differences. They may be genetic, or disease related, or nutrition related, or something else. If these differences are real (and the evidence is pretty strong that they are), then we need to deal with them. Imagine if the low IQs in Africa turn out to be fixable - what would the impact be, if we could raise the IQ of an entire continent by 30 points?!
Sticking our collective heads in the sand, because the topic is not PC, is not going to solve any problems.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:02PM (34 children)
Why can we talk about PISA results, comparing the performance of students in school, but we are not allowed to talk about differences in IQ?
Because IQ is a load of bullshit?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:20PM (7 children)
IQ is measurable and highly predictive. What more could you ask for?
The fact that we may have trouble expressing the exact meaning of IQ does not make it bullshit. IQ matches up pretty damn well with our observations that some people seem to be smarter than others. Smart people, as determined by ordinary observers, tend to get big IQ numbers. Dumb people get small IQ numbers. These numbers relate to education, employment, and many other things in life.
Sure, we don't have a perfect definition for "smart" or "dumb". As written in the famous supreme court case about porn, "I know it when I see it".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:30PM
> IQ is measurable and highly predictive. What more could you ask for?
Highly predictive? What skills do you to measure for "smart"?
It depends on your context, as correctly explained by Runaway [soylentnews.org] further down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:35PM (1 child)
Something that isn't garbage from the social sciences. We don't even understand intelligence, so we can't say we have a good way to measure it. IQ might be correlated with several things such as school performance, but we don't know how related those things are to one's intellect.
Okay, it means that it has dubious validity.
I agree that some people are more intelligent than others, but there are a million bullshit intelligence test schemes that could match up with a simple observation like that, so this isn't good evidence of IQ.
As determined by ordinary observers? What? So we don't have an objective way to measure someone's intelligence, then? "Ordinary observers" have to get together and decide, subjectively, that the results are legitimate? Now that's scientific!
That supreme court case was full of shit and the vast majority of people probably cannot do such a thing because they don't know what either education or intelligence even look like.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @05:00AM
We sure do have "an objective way to measure someone's intelligence". That is IQ.
IQ measures... something. We can determine that the "something" is intelligence because the numbers match up very well with the concept of intelligence.
You could do the same for other vague concepts like "beauty". Program a computer to interpret relative beauty from photos, giving a numeric result. Validate this by running many tests, showing that the numbers seem to make sense. We could simply rate women 1 to 10 and call it a BQ score. It's valid, even if we can't perfectly say what it means to be beautiful.
It also works for health. Get a bunch of doctors to judge people and to score various attributes. Via statistics, find a way to turn raw measurements into health ratings. Call it an HQ number. This works fine. BMI is in fact a stupidly simple version of this; use 100 measurements and proper statistical modeling to get something respectable.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 03 2017, @12:40AM
Mine is 160.
I have many achievements I could point to as evidence of my success, but even at times when I was not symptomatic I screwed up in spectacular ways.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Lester on Friday November 03 2017, @10:42AM (2 children)
IQ measures the performance in certain tests. How much are the results in such tests correlated to intelligence? To compare two persons' IQ they should be in the same environment. You know, ceteris paribus [wikipedia.org]. Illiterate people perform very bad. The same brain having gone to school would have higher IQ
So, what you are measuring is not intelligence, but education level. Particularly, in low developed countries, where the access to education depends on intelligence 0.05% and economic environment 99.95%, IQ tests make no sense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @01:57PM (1 child)
Not really. You can have two individuals in the same environment with the same educational level with wildly varying IQs.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Lester on Friday November 03 2017, @03:14PM
Of course, just what I said :
You could compare college students from USA with college students from Angola; or high school students from USA and school students from Angola. Even in such cases it is difficult because education systems are not always comparable, so except for genius and dumps, differences will be non-significative.
Pretending to get the average IQ of a country messing people of different education levels makes no sense. Let alone in countries with a lot of illiterate people. Comparing two different nations, you get mostly education level differences.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:24PM (4 children)
Famously, IQ is a measure of how well someone can answer IQ test questions. Meaning it doesn't measure raw intelligence, but the ability of the person who takes the IQ test to understand what answers the designer of the IQ test expects.
Well, guess what: successful people learn to bullshit their way through school. It doesn't matter if you're smart, what matters is getting the test right. Same thing as the IQ test.
Bullshiting and answering what the other party wants to hear is the singlemost important lesson one learns from the education system. That lesson served me well during my military service, and to rise through the ranks of my inept company by being mildly efficient but highly pleasing to my superiors. Guess who's getting the fat paychecks?
So I posit that the IQ test measures how well someone has learned that vital skill at school, and how much they'll earn with unimpressive performances but big social engineering abilities.
By my premises, the results of the study seem quite fitting.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @07:33PM (3 children)
I scored 157 when I was teen, and where did that get me, I'm now a lousy AC on some no-name website that barely stays in business.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @07:47PM
It's not in business, it's on charity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:27PM
Yeah. Scored 150 and had the same net outcome. IQ must be predictive after all.... :-)
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Friday November 03 2017, @01:15PM
At least you are smart enough to post as AC though.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:28PM (18 children)
MENSA isn't all bad. I was a member year's ago. I met some nice people there. I also met some assholes. Mostly, my experience with MENSA made me doubt the legitimacy of IQ tests.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Thursday November 02 2017, @07:04PM (17 children)
The thing that made me realize that MENSA wasn't all it's cracked up to be is the realization that MENSA members, unless they've been diligently hiding their association with MENSA, have zero correlation with other highly successful people in society, and have no real accomplishments to speak of.
For instance, Marilyn vos Savant has supposedly the highest-measured IQ. What has she ever accomplished, other than that incident about the Monty Python question? Her career has been as a small-time columnist on the back page of some section of the newspaper, answering puzzle questions.
It just shows that very high IQ is not correlated at all with any really useful ability in society, and in fact these people may be handicapped in being able to do anything really productive which involves working within society (as any normal job does). Being able to sit around and answer clever riddles doesn't exactly earn you a big paycheck.
(Score: 1, Troll) by jmorris on Thursday November 02 2017, @07:44PM (1 child)
We live in the age of the Internet and you write something that dumb? No wonder you want to poo poo the idea some people are smarter than you. First learn to use a search engine, then you shall be permitted to request reentry into adult discussions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @01:06AM
You've been excluded from the grown up table, no amount of shifting blame will get you no where.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @07:54PM (5 children)
Famous(?) pornstar, and a mensa member. How do you explain that, huh, smartguy?!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:22PM (2 children)
According to Wikipedia she got multiple scholarships as a child. So it's a safe bet she was smart before she started in p0rn. Then her career ended, she moved to Utah, her husband died and she became an alcoholic. High IQ people do stupid shit to ... Next question?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:08PM
"Smart" doesn't mean "no mistake". At least hers is a case of extraordinary life.
(Score: 1) by snmygos on Friday November 03 2017, @07:28AM
As soon you are governed by you emotions and not you reason, intelligence (and IQ) does not matter.
(Score: 4, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:23PM (1 child)
"I like fucking" + "I like money" + "I don't want a real job" = "Make porn"
Seems logical to me.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 03 2017, @12:43AM
Or at least she did back when the sins of the flesh dominated my eternal spirit.
At the time anyway, she was also married.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by BasilBrush on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:09PM (1 child)
Presumably you mean the Monty Hall problem.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @02:20AM
Not the "Monte Carlo" problem?
Or the "montebank" problem?
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:19PM (2 children)
Well, yeah. It measures intelligence not wisdom, ambition, creativity, social prowess, or any number of other factors of human life. There's no reason to read anything but raw intelligence into an IQ score. For that it's quite accurate though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @01:08AM (1 child)
It is not that great at raw intelligence, you listed quite a few of the reasons yourself. NEXT!
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 03 2017, @01:53AM
Those have nothing to do with intelligence.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Thursday November 02 2017, @10:21PM (2 children)
Success is 80% determination, stubbornness, getting your ass out of bed in them morning every morning, eating right, courage, raw fucking will power. 15% luck. 5% ability and "talent".
Intelligent, unmotivated, lazy people fuck up at life 99% of the time.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday November 02 2017, @10:33PM
Yeah, I realize all this; everyone here has probably heard the saying "success is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration". I'm just pointing out that my beef with MENSA is that these people basically have this group for themselves and go to meetings together and basically sit around and congratulate themselves for being so intelligent, yet collectively what have they really accomplished, compared to any group of people picked at random? They're not famous for anything; they're not fabulously wealthy, they're not highly accomplished academically, they just don't have any actual accomplishments to speak of, beyond what many other people of allegedly lesser intelligence have done. It just seems like a group of people who want to stroke theirs and each others' egos for scoring high on a silly test, instead of doing something useful. The truly gifted people are likely too busy actually doing things to be bothered with such stuff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @02:22AM
For crafoo, 100% of success is not stepping in poo you did not lay down yourself. Jus' saying!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @08:17AM
To become a highly successful person in a financial / career sense, you need to be a psychopath. Being intelligent is not enough 99% of the time. On the other hand, being a psychopath and of average intelligence does not stop people, all you need to do is convince intelligent people to do the hard work for you, then screw them over.
A psychopath with high IQ may do better than one with average IQ, but there isn't a lot of correlation between high IQ and being a psychopath, so you won't see a lot of high IQ people among the highly successful. If one percent of people are psychopaths and 10% are considered high IQ (depends on where you put the line for "high"), only 0.1 percent of people are likely to be high IQ psychopaths.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @07:30PM
IQ as a metric of individual intelligence is indeed bullshit. But in large samples, it can help identify societal problems.
Consider the state of an individual's state of mind or health when IQ test is conducted. The scores will fluctuate wildly depending on how well-rested they are or if they had a meal prior. If country A scores low on IQ tests overall, but sees no glaring faults in the quality of their education system or average caloric intake, it can be deduced that a widespread lifestyle problem may be a factor (too much work, not enough sleep, lack of high-skilled jobs for sustained brain stimulation, etc). On the other hand, if country B scores low but sees the overall health of their populace to be satisfactory, then they might look into revamping their educational system or attracting high-skilled jobs through regulatory changes. So on and so forth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @04:11AM
Calling it bullshit is ignorant, the measure is perfectly fine for what it intends to measure. The main problem comes when people try to expand the meaning to cover other things that it's not meant to predict. IQ isn't meant to predict success in life in general, it's meant to measure the suitability of a particular person to the kind of education that was going on in Europe at the time that it was first developed. Using it for other things leads to questionable results.
Most people calling it bullshit are less intelligent than they think they are and complain about the test because it didn't tell them what they wanted to hear.
Personally, I've got a high IQ and I don't put much stock in it, mainly because the situations where the skills measured by the test are that important are few and far between. Most of the time, you'd be better off with a slightly lower IQ and some grit.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by meustrus on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:10PM (27 children)
There's a very simple reason that this kind of argument has become discouraged: it is associated with racists. Not "alt-right" type "these political opponents of mine are racist" racists, but actual academics that believed that non-white people were part of discrete races that were objectively inferior to white people. It's the kind of thought that leads to eugenics and genocide, because the assumption was never that the difference was fixable.
I'd like to think that this time it's different, but human nature, sadly, may not be fixable. This kind of data will inevitably be co-opted by white supremacists. The drive will be to exterminate the inferior people, not to educate them. And if somebody does try to fix the
IndiansAfricans...let's just say I wouldn't want my kids going to those schools, and not because of the other kids.If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by requerdanos on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:29PM (4 children)
Looking at the geodistribution of white-looking people against the table of IQs, it looks like the white supremacists *are* the inferior people, and it's the east asia supremacists who are at the top of the numbers.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:53PM
Lots of people claim that whites are over-represented in Facebook and Google, but they are wrong.
Speaking of distribution the average/mean and median are useful for some stuff but not all. Often it's the outliers that matter more. Few care how fast on average white or black person runs. Whereas more people know who Usain Bolt is. Same for Einstein vs some random physics teacher.
But in many democracies the average person's vote often counts as much if not more than the outliers...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @07:50PM
Of course. But to be fair there is a significant part of population in China that never gets to take this test. Think about people from rural China who pull their pants down on a crowded train and shit right on the floor thinking it is OK, because where they are from they shit anywhere they want (yes China, not India, although obviously that happens there too).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by KiloByte on Friday November 03 2017, @01:31AM
Actually, Ashkenazi jews fare significantly better than east asians.
Lemme recall, which race was considered to be the worst not so long ago? But that was not even contemporary science -- they followed the likes of Mme Blavatsky rather than those who actually tried looking at data. It's mind-boggling how even an early-20th century anthropologist would not know what an "Aryan" race is: with Germans murdering Gypsies, there's only one Aryan race between the two. (Such people live in Persia, northern India, some parts of Afghanistan, etc).
So yeah, there's a nasty tradition of people using pseudo-science for some massive discrimination.
And today, there's racism and discrimination all around. Some hate Jews. Some hate white males with no gender-related mental illness. Some hate... pretty much any group.
But, the data in this article gives us an important conclusion: if you pick candidates (be it for a job, an elected office, etc) based on merit, the results will have racial/gender/ethnicity ratios much different from general population counts. And that, as individual variance is higher than racial differences, any method to pick that's not 100% race/gender/etc-blind is unfair.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @11:02PM
Maybe, but at least for the US, only 73% of the population is white, and 5% Asian, so you're not really getting the 'White' sample from US/NA/Europe. You need to separate out the races in the countries that are more mixed if you're going to correlate some race statistics
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:33PM (7 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @07:43PM (5 children)
There is no censorship here, just sharing historical information about how these "intelligence tests" have been created and used in the past. The intention of these tests in the past was to create a plausible framework to justify racism and genocide. Practically these tests server no purpose, otherwise MENSA would be a power rivaling the biggest transnational corporation. How come we never here this "many sides" rationale for Codes of Conduct and Affirmative Action? Nope, those are just WRONG so we can't address them. But eugenics lite? Well that just gives some science to the prejudice and we must hear it out. Mhmmm right.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:24PM
The basic problem is the assumption that there is a unitary measure of intelligence. I believe this is false unless you tailor your definition of intelligence to be the same as some particular unitary measure that happens to exist. And this is what IQ tests do. Note that different tests on the same people will give answers that, while correlated, are significantly different. And that learning skills is always at least partially environmentally determined.
Now there do exist particular measures of certain features that contribute to intelligence. But although these features are usually correlated, they are not necessarily proportional in any one individual, except that certain problems can indeed cause a correlated, approximately proportional, decrease in function.
As one particular example consider facial amnesia. Some people can readily remember a person's face, others have more trouble. And there are specific physical problems that can cause people to suffer total amnesia with respect to faces. Thus this is clearly a separate feature of intelligence. (Granted this isn't often used by intelligence tests, but it's a clinically demonstrated example.)
It is my assertion that what we call intelligence is a combination of a multitude of such faculties that are essentially independent, but which often use the same underlying processing structure, so that there are correlations between some of the measures. These faculties can only generally be readily demonstrated by the sudden occurrence of a physical problem. One interesting exception is a family where about half of the people are unable to learn to speak, but are otherwise of normal intelligence. And the other half of the family speak normally. This allows the tracking of one particular genetic change (FOX P, IIRC) between humans and chimpanzees as crucial for speech. (Note: necessary but not sufficient.)
I believe the evidence generally backs my viewpoint. The problem is there is a huge interaction between basic genetic capabilities, environmental effects, and epi-genetics. Epi-genetic changes are particularly troublesome to disentangle as they can persist for multiple generations, though it's also true that some of them don't even survive the lifetime of the affected person. There's also the problem of parasite load, which decreases most measures of intelligence.
So intelligence tests measure the likelihood that you will succeed in school if not environmental changes occur. This is the normal case, so it appears invariant, but see the Flynn Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect [wikipedia.org]
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:37PM (3 children)
Dihydrogen Monoxide FAQ [dhmo.org]
A retrospective telepath, in our midst?
Or just a big fat liar?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:01PM (2 children)
Nope, just a literate human with a functional memory.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:09PM (1 child)
Then prove that functional memory with some functioning links, why don't you? Does your literacy extend anywhere past bullshitting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:16PM
For someone who linked to dihydrogen monoxide you have a lot to prove. No I don't care to find supporting links for some jerkoff AC, go do your own searching.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday November 02 2017, @11:03PM
You don't correct such misunderstandings by rendering discussions of them verboten, quite the opposite is true.
Whew! For a second there I thought this discussion thread was real.
It's quite a relief to know this is all a dream.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by zocalo on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:47PM (1 child)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 4, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday November 02 2017, @11:04PM
All the PC/SJW types get start getting their torches and pitchforks out...
Scientists do that too when people lie about data.
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Thursday November 02 2017, @07:34PM (9 children)
Asians of course do the best, not white people.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:33PM (8 children)
They also have the highest percentage of neanderthal DNA on average of any race while sub-saharan africans mostly have zero percent. I'm thinking it might be time to quit thinking of the neanderthals as dumbasses who cro magnon out-performed by mental superiority and start wondering why a possibly more intelligent species of hominid died out in favor of a less intelligent one.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday November 02 2017, @11:10PM (1 child)
My guess would be that the smarter guys weren't as ready to opt for the brute force method, hoping instead to resolve things in a more sophisticated way.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 03 2017, @01:55AM
And there lies the stark difference between intelligence and wisdom.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @05:09AM (5 children)
Neanderthals had shoulder joints that sucked for throwing spears.
Neanderthals were sort of autistic, with good visual processing ability but poor verbal ability. This affected cooperation.
Neanderthals got big brains by continued post-birth growth, while others depended on a large pelvis to pass a large head that wouldn't grow that much afterward. Hybrids babies would kill the mother during childbirth; Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA is extinct.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 03 2017, @09:53AM (4 children)
You're doing science wrong. Most of those are assumptions and you're presenting them as facts. You may very well be entirely correct but I can't take you seriously if you're going to take the climate change alarmist approach to science.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @02:47PM (3 children)
Oh sweet irony...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 03 2017, @03:14PM (2 children)
Do please point out what facts I presented so that the community may also see the irony. Or come up with a zinger that actually makes some semblance of sense.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @05:36PM (1 child)
You state opinion as fact all the time, like ALL. THE. TIME.
As for the climate change alarmist bit, well I'm not too sure. However, climate change is real and it is very alarming, so I guess the irony could be you using a terrible example that just highlights your own ignorance?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday November 03 2017, @10:11PM
Do you have actual proof or "scientific consensus"? Because that second one is by its very nature an opinion.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 03 2017, @12:47AM (1 child)
I've met plenty of people with small heads who were powerfully intelligent.
I'm told some guy was measuring the skull capacities of the various racists by filling them with small seeds, then pouring the seeds back out and measuring their volumes.
With most such skulls he would just pour until the skull was full, but with a white man's skull he tamped it down so as to pack in as many seeds as possible.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @05:04PM
you would not believe how big gods head is! it's like twice the size of an elephant!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:12PM (8 children)
unz.com: The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection
A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media
WIth such gems as "Geezers Don’t Care! Marc Faber Defies AntiRacist Moral Panic", "Libertarianism, the Alt-Right and AntiFa: A Libertarian Strategy For Social Change", "Harvey Sweinstein and Hollywood's Hos", "How I Got Fired: Exposing Jewish power in America has real consequences", and of course "Anti-Togetherness: The Virtues of Disunity".
This was a nice bit from the last one
This submission is garbage, IQ tests have been repeatedly shown to be culturally dependent and NOT a good measure of full intelligence. Gee, the countries with the most focus on education score the highest!
Take your eugenics-lite somewhere else bradley13, your comments on this site show you to be one of the most distasteful alt-righters, though you probably claim "libertarian" without the slightest hint of irony.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:35PM (7 children)
This. I'm really surprised to see such low-caliber logic make it onto Soylent News.
Submitter seems to claim objectivity by stating:
without even asking if the differences are an systemic from of the test itself? It's not as if people on this site can't objectively deal with the potential difference between people. It's that this site is good at having people who can recognize the application of a tool that works with caveats cannot always be extrapolated to any random situation. This realization isn't racism or political-correctness. It's just logic.
An explanation of the cultural bias present within IQ tests is on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Test_bias_or_differential_item_functioning [wikipedia.org]
If you've ever taken an IQ test and can remember the questions, you may well be able to think of a question that someone from Africa cannot possibly get "correct."
And, even taking the submitter at face value, the answer to low IQ is always fixable: apply education. There's a difference between "sticking your head in the sand" and "knowing how powerful education is". We *know* what to do. It's the *how* that is challenging. The submitter seems to be gleefully ignoring this reality in order to claim some sort of superiority that they can validate with a veneer or objectivity and compassion.
There are plenty of places on the internet for that; I just liked that Soylent News didn't reward it so much.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @07:00PM (1 child)
Apparently you don't read history, and trying to play this off as
is pretty terrible. You can have Nazi 2.0 if YOU like, I guess you'll be one of the scientists that says "well, there is something to this data" and next thing you know you're gassing millions of people. Yes that is the end-goal of eugenics, with shades of gray in between depending on the strength of the moral compass.
Don't play this off as some attempt at science, and speaking of veneers of superiority take a look in the mirror. Trying to high road with "I just liked that SN didn't reward it so much" is the stupidest thing I've read today. Nice attempt at being "rational" though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:57PM
Different AC. You seem to have thoroughly misread the comment.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 03 2017, @12:51AM (4 children)
Select two children of equal IQs. Give just one of them an enriched education such as I had as a result of qualifying for California's Mentally Gifted Minor's program.
When they are adults, this latter child will have an IQ 20 points hire than the child whose education was not enriched.
I can't supply a citation. One of my shrinks told me this.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @01:40AM (3 children)
So which one will know the difference between 'hire' and 'higher'?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @02:57AM
That's easy, if you want the first spelling, best to avoid the second spelling.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 03 2017, @06:25AM (1 child)
yhgiuyfgvkhghv
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @05:40PM
No kidding, it couldn't even get your prayer to Cthulu right!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheReaperD on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:13PM (6 children)
Let's say, for argument, that this is correct and IQ isn't bullshit, as said above, this could easily lead down the "we know what's best for you" approach that has been done in the past with disastrous results. The treatment and indoctrination of Aboriginal people in Australia are one of the better examples of where this mentality has led. Now, if there is something environmental that we can fix, that may be another matter.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 03 2017, @12:55AM (1 child)
It hasn't always been such a forward-thinking nation:
First nation's children were taken from their families then sent to boarding school so they could learn all about white society without having any influence from the culture they were born into.
The Inuit used to live off the seals they hunted. Now they live in comfortable homes that were provided by the government. The result of no longer having satisfying work led to the problem of their children inhaling gasoline vapor from Hefty bags.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by quacking duck on Friday November 03 2017, @04:37PM
And the "result of no longer having satisfying work" can be laid at the feet of (mostly-)white, first-world privileged people in organizations like PETA that conflated clubbing of cute baby seals with sustainable seal hunting, leading to the near-total collapse of the industry that allowed Inuit to stay on their ancestral lands while still living a modern lifestyle. And PETA are still at it, trying to force indigenous peoples restaurants to close because they serve seal, and naively claiming those living in the north can just change jobs [theguardian.com].
It's not a stretch to say PETA and similar organizations are attempting cultural genocide.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @04:19AM (1 child)
Sigh, IQ isn't bullshit, it's just that it's a narrow measure of intelligence and there isn't usually any extra resources given to people who exhibit higher scores on the test. Around here the extra resources were given based on even less reliable testing done at an extremely young age. Any attempts to identify the gifted from the normal children before about age 10 are subject to huge problems where children with normal or below normal intelligence, but larger working memory get selected over the children that grow up to be the geniuses that create most of the interesting innovations.
IQ itself is mainly a measure of suitability to a particular academic system that was in place when the tests were first being developed. It doesn't mean that people with a lower score are necessarily unintelligent, it means that whatever cognitive abilities they have aren't necessarily ones that match with the test as designed and administered.
Because of that, people with lower scores tend to rail against the test as a horrible measure of intelligence when the real problem is that it's measuring something that's of less importance now than it was in the past when academic settings were more closely aligned to the traits covered by the test.
It's also a test that cannot be used across cultures in a meaningful way. It has to be normed for the population taking the test, hence these apparent discrepancies even in cases where they don't make sense. Asians are not statistically smarter than other groups. I've met many of them and they really aren't any smarter or dumber than other groups.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @05:08PM
there's a chance that doing A.I. .. errr ... IQ test alot will make you better at it.
a curious fact, for me anyways, i cannot "unhear" a language that i learned to understand.
thus, maybe a IQ test is a test that programs your mind and you cannot unlearn it.
if it is for a sinister purpose, just say: do this test and it will tell you how smart you are?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Wootery on Friday November 03 2017, @09:37AM (1 child)
And your fallacies are:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @05:45PM
IQ isn't 100% bullshit, but it isn't 100% solid either. It is somewhere in between, but history has shown us that categorizing humans in that manner is a bad idea that doesn't help much of anything.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:13PM (2 children)
Suppose that guy from Uzbekistan hadn't run over people in New York.
He still had no hope of being non-negative for the USA. Based on the size of his family and our typical per-person income, his family would need to earn $229,600 per year to break even. He was an Uber driver. Worse yet, he sponsored an additional 23 people. They'd need to earn about $1.3 million for us to break even.
Even the left is waking up to these hate-facts:
https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2017/11/01/how-was-the-immigration-of-sayfullo-habibullaevic-saipov-supposed-to-benefit-native-born-americans/ [harvard.edu]
Simply put, each such person makes America worse. Keep that up long enough, and our civilization falls. We'd be 3rd-world. A nation is not merely a piece of land and set of laws; it is a people with culture and innate ability. The more awful people we add, the more awful our population becomes, and much of the world is pretty damn awful. This is how you get stonings, genital mutilation (already happening), honor killings (also happening), and LGBT chucked from rooftops.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 03 2017, @12:58AM (1 child)
I know two Polish women who immigrated to the US. One of them because she was employed by the US embassy, the other because she won the diversity lottery.
The first got a degree in Computer Engineering while raising a young boy - that is, as a single mother. That young boy is now a grown-up defense engineer.
The second was very determined to be a dentist. I attempted to date her but she wouldn't have me because she felt it would interfere with her studies.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @05:12AM
Poland is packed with bright and industrious people. Polish people kick ass. We could probably absorb the entire country of Poland without long-term trouble. After 50 years, things would be better than before.
Uzbekistan is another story entirely. That is just pure badness.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:22PM (15 children)
IQ is a useful indicator of a person's potential. That is, IF IQ is accurately measured. Unfortunately, we don't have an accurate measure.
No matter how smart you or I may be, though, that intelligences has little if any value in a situation where you lack any training. Take your typical disaster. Some of the smartest people around become liabilities because they don't know what to do. Even real doctors can get in the way in a disaster response, because they are out of their element. The typical doctor doesn't have to pick through the mud to find his patients. Firemen, paramedics, and EMT's are trained to deal with such situations.
Discipline. You learn tasks, you learn them well, and you perform amazing feats. Taken out of your element, you're just another dumb dick, getting in the way.
Because Euros and Americans value certain training and discipline over others, we have decided that people with those disciplines are really, really smart. But, all those very very smart Euros are poorly equipped to cope with life in Africa, now aren't they? And, they don't compete very well with the Innuit in the Arctic north. And, Euros haven't taken over in the mideastern sands.
How about we stop the nonsense with IQ, and recognize people's abilities? All of us can recognize a smarter person when we meet him/her. But, there is no reliable measure of intelligence. Somehow, we've accepted that people with good paying careers must be "smart". Nonsense. A person who is good at making money may or may not be "smart". He probably isn't really stupid, but he may not be smart either. He has learned to manipulate money, like his daddy taught him, and his granddaddy taught his daddy. Hmmmph. Funny thing. I think I see some part of the roots of the hatred of Jews. Seems I read somewhere that the Jews took the jobs that were beneath Christians, long, long ago. And, those jobs ended up paying well. And, the jobs were passed down generation to generation, accumulating wealth within the family . . . and making it appear that the Jews were especially smart.
Discipline. It's all in what you've been taught. If your parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles spent all of your life teaching you to wrest a living out of the African savannah, you're probably not prepared to make a killing on Wall Street. Obviously, you're not "smart". But, if those Wall Street executives find themselves on the savannah, they aren't going to look especially smart either. They might make good bait though, depending on what the tribe is hunting.
Show of hands: How many here thinks that reading the signs on the savannah is less complex than reading the signs on Wall Street?
I'm going to buy my defensive radar from Temu, just like Venezuela!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:50PM (11 children)
As you say, IQ shows your potential. Specifically, it shows your ability to perform certain kinds of thought processes. Thought processes that are useful for abstract thought, for problem solving, for language, for the kinds of things that have led to advanced civilization.
You say that there is no reliable test for IQ. First, I grant you that IQ is a poor term; I kept it in the submission, because it's used in the article. A better germ is g factor [wikipedia.org], which is what the psychologists try to measure independent of culture and education. And the problem is the opposite of what you state: it can be measured too reliably. The results are so unwanted that psychologists keep cooking up different ways of testing - and they keep coming up with the same results. From the Wikipedia article:
"Wendy Johnson and colleagues have published two such studies.[47][48] The first found that the correlations between g factors extracted from three different batteries were .99, .99, and 1.00, supporting the hypothesis that g factors from different batteries are the same and that the identification of g is not dependent on the specific abilities assessed. The second study found that g factors derived from four of five test batteries correlated at between .95–1.00"
Those are huge correlation values. You can find the practical correlation in virtually any field of endeavor:
"The practical validity of g as a predictor of educational, economic, and social outcomes is more far-ranging and universal than that of any other known psychological variable. The validity of g is greater the greater the complexity of the task."
You mention hunting on the Savannah? That may require things in addition to intelligence. It may require keen senses, good reflexes, an ability to run fast. But if you want to make a better spear, you want intelligence.
Whether you call it "g factor" or "IQ", intelligence is a very real attribute, and it can be reliably measured. Denying reality makes it impossible to deal with the consequences of that reality.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @07:05PM
Dog breeds also vary in intelligence. There are variations of course but some breeds tend to be dumber than others.
In many cases an obedient trainable dog is more important and useful than a clever intelligent dog. And lots of people think an obedient trainable dog is very smart because it can be more easily trained. But some non blindly obedient dogs can be smarter than the obedient ones. They have a mind of their own.
The differences in human breeds are likely to be less distinct. But I'd be surprised (suspicious even) if there are no differences.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Thursday November 02 2017, @07:07PM (3 children)
And as a practical matter, any limiting factors for G are things we want to find an reduce as much as possible. But if the answer always comes back to genetics, what then? Eugenics leads to spectacularly awful places.
For UN outreach/nation building/actual well intentioned efforts to help: Western or Asian methods of improvement may require average IQ of near 100 to work, so those solutions would be doomed to fail in a place with a lower average IQ. This information could reduce the frequency of do-gooders causing harm, and points out that research/studies/trial or pilot programs should be done to make sure you're not doing harm with outside aid and to search for the best way to actually help. (avoiding famine; war; oppression etc)
It's a tough, emotionally charged problem wrestle with politically.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:47PM (2 children)
Gravity does too; people fall to their death every single day.
But even if we forbid every mention of gravity, we'd not gain the power of spontaneous flight.
Wilful ignorance is damaging. Always.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @09:11PM (1 child)
And never before has any comment on SoylentNews been such an exquisite example of the very point it is making! Gravity is racist! Ha! So are sharks, with or without lasers on their fricking heads.
You should have went with a car analogy. Like so: Some car owners are just stupid because they buy stupid cars. Take the "Juke" for example. Alright, that doesn't work, because ugly is not the same a stupid. How about the Lamborgini "Diablo"? Not so much stupid, but for some reason the majority of these vehicles do not wear out, but are totalled in high-speed crashes. Stupid car. And then there is any GM product. Especially Chevy trucks. So why do we not talk about this? We are not going to solve the problem of stupid car owners if we just try to sweep Chevy pickem-up trucks under the carpet of silence!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @11:27PM
Ford F-1fixme owner detected!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @07:21PM
Seems not everyone in the field agrees, and reducing something as complex as human intelligence down to a single number is just stupid. Just cop to the fact that you're a bigot looking for an excuse to hate other groups already. Why does racism enter into this "science"? Because this "science" has a history steeped in bigotry, but some sad brains keep grasping for some objective way of determining human value. Such people are not rightly called human and should be referred to as homo sapiens at best since they've apparently lost or never had their own humanity.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday November 03 2017, @04:45AM (4 children)
Many people are saying that IQ tests are biased. Indeed, in some cases specific tests have been analyzed and specific forms of bias have been pointed out. With that being the case, I wonder if anyone has tried to deliberately design a test with a different bias.
If the old tests were bunk, we should be able to prove it by coming up with a new test that turns the results upside down.
(Score: 3, Informative) by jcross on Friday November 03 2017, @04:02PM (3 children)
I remember reading a story about anthropologists giving a test to African hunter-gatherers, where the idea was, given pictures of a number of objects, to group like things together. So for example, the knife would be grouped with the axe because they're both tools, and the potato and carrot would be grouped together because they're both vegetables. The subjects always grouped things functionally, so the knife is next to the potato and carrot because it's used to cut them up. When the researchers showed them the "right" answer, they were pretty derisive and said sure, that's how an idiot would group these things, but any practical person would put the knife next to the potato. I think it illustrates how just the grading of a test could incorporate unwarranted cultural assumptions.
I remember being impressed with the apparent neutrality of Raven's Progressive Matrices the first time I took it, but even there the result depends on how much you give a shit about abstract arrangements. For someone living a hand-to-mouth existence, they really don't matter as much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @05:48PM
Thank you, that is the best example of how something that seems simple is actually a complicated issue tied into the very foundations of culture.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday November 03 2017, @08:35PM (1 child)
Your example of grouping knives with potatoes rather than with axes is not special to African hunter-gatherers. I might group things in that way myself (I am not a hunter-gatherer myself BTW), or at least I'd ponder over whether the person who set the test thought that was the better answer.
In fact I noticed when I did them back at school, that IQ questions often had more than one valid answer. For example the next in the series 2-5-10-? Could be 50 (previous two multiplies together) or could be 17 (squares plus one). That is merely a symptom of a badly designed question, not of someone with a racist agenda trying to catch out Africans.
(Score: 2) by jcross on Sunday November 05 2017, @11:06PM
I think your numeric series example is excellent because it highlights the extent to which a test is unintentionally what Schelling calls a "coordination problem", in that when finding the "right" answer to the series, you have to model the thinking of the writer of the test and figure out which answer they'd be most likely intend. I suspect almost any such short series would look somewhat ambiguous to a number theorist, who might for example discard the simple answer in favor of a more interesting solution, and be graded wrong for it by the simpleminded test-maker. Anyway, any kind of coordination problem is going to work better the better the two parties understand each other, so I think tests will tend to lose their predictive ability when crossing cultural divides, even without any intentionally biased formulation. It might be possible to overcome this, but it would take a kind of care and deep thought that I doubt is generally spent on IQ tests, given that test writers seem satisfied if their test just correlates well with previous tests that are assumed to be good.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 03 2017, @01:02AM (1 child)
I have a friend whose grandfather was a successful stock market investor.
He told my friend that the lowest-paid jobs require working with tools - coding is the high end of that. People who work with people come in second: I know a physicist who turned down a $250k job as an engineering manager.
At the high end comes people who work for money.
Trump is wealthy but Bill Gates puts him completely to shame.
I regard Jeff Bezos as the spawn of Satan but I am forced to admit that his evil deeds have been effective.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Friday November 03 2017, @07:32AM
You can never be too rich. I'm very rich, believe me. With a very high IQ. Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest -- and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 03 2017, @01:05AM
-terest. That was considered the sin of usury.
The Jewish faith has no such law. The availability of credit is widely recognized as stimulating to the economy.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:32PM (2 children)
So wait, why is IQ score comparisons subject to racism? You do not explain this and yet state we're not allowed to talk about such difference because the speaker is immediately accused of racism? who? where? in what context?
Are you projecting something?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @08:39PM
Allow me. It's associated with the scientific racism that was so prevalent in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Especially by association with the Fabian eugenics movement. [theguardian.com]
Here's a short segment on co-founder of the UK Labour party George Bernard Shaw. [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @04:22AM
Standardized tests in general cannot be applied across cultural divides if you expect the results to reliably rank the people. How people approach the tests has a huge impact on how well they do, even though they may not have a different level of intellect. For example, some cultures handle rhetorical and unreal questions as if they're invalid, and others handle them as if they're real questions. In both cases, you'd get different results from test subjects that were asked to answer them.