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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: 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.