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: 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.