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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.