SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 2) by Arik on Friday November 03 2017, @09:11AM
Eh, not exactly. The average entry in the calibration dataset will be 100. You might expect that point to be a bit above population average, as these are usually college students and you might not have much experience with college students, but in fact it tends to go slightly the other way. Which is very convenient as people who are told their IQ is not above average tend to feel somewhat insulted, and sometimes they are in a position to hurt your career. Binet himself recognized this and was always careful to recruit as many near-morons as possible for the calibration group.
Anyway, it's not the average person, it's the average of the calibration dataset, which is theoretically a statistical equivalent to a population average. That population is not the entire human population. It's typically a national population (US) or a national and/or regional population (EU research) not a human average.
The placement of 100, politics and insulted people hurting your career aside, is an entirely arbitrary zero-point. You can use any zero-point you want, convert all the figures, and have the conversation again - absolutely nothing significant will be different.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?