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Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
They measure intelligence and a ton of other things.
The other things dominate unless the person taking the test is one whom the test is biased toward.
What things? Are you saying someone who performs a logic puzzle better than another person, can do mental rotation more accurately, or has a larger vocabulary and better comprehension is reflecting something besides intelligence?
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
Are you saying there's no cultural bias in IQ tests (in the last 100 years)?
I don't even know what to say to such a clearly absurd statement being delivered unironically.
I'm not sure we understand each other's use of words on this one.
Yeah I don't think we are. I was referring to the kinds of knowledge you get as a function of growing up in a particular culture, like the baseball example I used.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
What counts as intelligent behavior in the poorest communities is not equivalent as what counts as intelligent in the most affluent communities. The way intelligence expresses itself is a function of the values of the culture.
How do you fairly compare the streets' smartest thug and the city's smartest CEO?
Ah, ok.
"Street smarts" or more generally, "wisdom" are forms of social intelligence. I'm referring here to cognitive intelligence (i.e., the kind tapped into by IQ tests, and what most people mean when they use the word 'intelligence'). These are largely independent as far as I know and in fact rely on different parts of the brain. Happy to elaborate on that if you want.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
It's not that those ideas are different. It's the assumption that the knowledge of those ideas is indicative of intelligence that is wrong.
A person growing up in an impoverished community and/or abusive home values very different things than those you've stated. Their lack of skill in those tasks is not related to their intelligence, but reflecting that they don't have the luxury of security that the test takes for granted.
If you don't have the time or motivation or security to develop your intellectual abilities, then it's not surprising you become less intelligent. It doesn't follow from that that IQ tests aren't measuring intelligence.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
That's just it, though. You can't provide that. You can only assert as much and hope you're right.
You can make a test that accurately measures the intelligence of thugs, and one that does similar for CEO's.
Comparing those results, though... It's basically mysticism.
You can do very straightforward tests that measure cognitive abilities and provide very clear data about them, which is in fact as clear as a measure of a person's height or weight. For example, if you measure someone's reaction times or decision-making times to onset of stimuli, or measure their ability to inhibit a response to a stop signal. You can measure their working memory capacity. You can measure their visuoperceptual acuity. The results you get are measured in milliseconds or items of memory, so very precise. A person's scores on these kinds of tests correlates very highly with their scores on more conventional IQ tests.
The smart brain is very likely operating in a quantitatively better way than the dumb brain. It's faster and more accurate, and so can learn more and learn it better.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
It's the inherent flaw in trying to boil something so vastly interesting and complex down to a single number, IMO.
It's important to keep in mind that a number like IQ is only measuring certain kinds of intelligence that are cognitively-rich and closed-ended and so on. But it's still measuring intelligence.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
Then how can we compare thugs and CEO's? How can we compare farmers and city-folk? How can we compare prisoners and ... um... non-prisoners? Missourians to Congolese?
Why can't you compare them? The only problem I see is comparing Missourians to Congolese, if there are differences in language that make translation impractical. Otherwise you give them all the same test and see how they do. Note again you're only measuring cognitive intelligence (verbal, math, reasoning, logic, spatial) and not other kinds (social, motor, creativity, musical, etc. etc.) with conventional IQ tests.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
How can you assert that IQ's are "generally increasing over time" or however you phrased it?
Because when they give the same test to large groups of people across long time spans, the scores go up over time. Do you find this hard to believe? Education gets better, people stay in school longer, people have better nutrition, more access to learning materials, etc. I don't think it's surprising we get smarter (as a group) over generations.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
No. That's how you disenfranchise impoverished communities.
You give the same test to affluent communities as you give to the impoverished communities.
That's only fair, right?
Then you show that the artificially lowered scores of the impoverished communities and the artificially boosted scores of the affluent community are the reason those communities are what they are.
Of course [minority] live in slums... they're not as smart.
Of course [minority] doesn't deserve our sympathy. They're genetically predisposed. We can't change that. Not our fault.
Elitism.
I agree with you. And I wouldn't make those arguments. I would say the lower IQ in the slums reflects the lack of access to proper education/nutrition/etc., not a genetic inferiority.
But we are talking about what IQ tests measure here, not the social ramifications of how they can be abused by people with bad intentions.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
In order to do so, it must presuppose your environment and project a value system which delineates what is "worth knowing."
Sure.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
"basically" - meaning it's not the same.
"[...] through practice alone" - I find that hard to believe.
What psychologist is testing the same patient with the same test multiple times?
I was tested a few times, but never with the same test twice.
You were tested in school I presume? So was I. Those tests are geared towards the age of the children they're testing. That's why they don't have grade 11 math questions on a grade 5 test.
Psychologists' tests for the general public of adults are applied more rarely, usually following brain injury or assessment of dementia (remember the test Trump took?) but there's lots of them, and they are cross-validated (at least the good ones are), meaning that if three tests say your IQ is 100 and the fourth one says it's 140, the fourth one is invalidated and people stop using it.
And yes, a lot of the questions are basically the same. It's fairly clear that, e.g., 4x+2y=8 is functionally equivalent to 2x + 6y = 10 in terms of who can and can't solve it.
For vocab tests, they test a large number (say 30) words, and in the next test a large number of words matched on difficulty. And in both, there will be some people who score higher than others.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
The tests change to reflect advances in the relevant psychological fields of study. Among them is the acknowledgement that changes in the cultural background in which the testee has lived render certain questions useless.
This has been known for a long time. When the US entered WWI in 1917, they used an IQ test that asked a lot of culturally-biased questions (such as 'how many are on a baseball side'). Not surprisingly, people born in the US scored higher than immigrants from English-speaking countries, who scored higher than immigrants from non-English speaking countries). Also not surprisingly, racists abused these results for their own ends. Also not surprisingly, the test has since been modified to avoid these kinds of problems. Even the army learned it's lesson on that one.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
So you agree that access to education and nutrition are significantly relevant factors!?
I wish you'd lead with that.
Of course they are. So is exercise and whether or not you smoke and if you're slim or a fatty. All factors relating to health affect the brain.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
Do you agree that those 2 things vary wildly across even the population of a single city, let alone a nation or the world?
Do you agree that variance in those 2 factors is more often indicative of cultural status of the community in which the testee was raised than anything related to the intelligence of either the testee or their parents?
I agree with all of this, yes.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
Do you agree that those 2 are not the only confounding factors in these tests?
Only if you ascribe test scores purely to genetics and not acknowledge the impact of these other factors. But this question is different from 'what does an IQ test measure?' This question assumes it measures some kind of cognitive abiity(s) and describes the source of a person's IQ score as being purely innate as opposed to what it really is, a combination of genetics and environment.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
Lol. I disagree about how it's used.
When someone bring up their own IQ, it's never intellectually honest.
Well in our convo, Ong brought up my IQ, not his own. Not sure what you think that means but anyways...
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
I bet if I followed you around for a day, I could list more than a handful examples of your lack of intelligence.
Letting you follow me around for a day would be the first one. And sure, you'd see some examples of things I do that aren't very smart. I'm fairly sure you'd also see more than enough examples of things that are smart enough to convince you that overall, I'm smarter than the average bear.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
I'm good at some things, OK at some things, and terrible at most things. Just like the rest of us.
I don't think most people are terrible at most things. They're certainly not expert at everything, but that's not what IQ is measuring.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
Just because we test well, and have a skillset that makes us better than most at book-smarts, doesn't mean we're smart.
It pretty much does though by the standard definition of intelligence.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
It's more that we're lucky the things we're good at are valued as "smart" by the cultures we've lived in.
I agree it's more fortunate to be smart than to not be smart.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
If you don't, you're not being intellectually honest, and are probably virtue signalling, IMO.
Maybe, but it remains the case that most people think of the term 'intelligence' in terms of cognitive abilities rather than those other things. So it's not disingenuous to use the word in that sense imo.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
If you don't, it's hard to interpret any direct relevance or predictive power of the IQ score, anyway.
It predicts a lot of things. It predicts that it takes an intelligent person less time to read and understand something. It predicts they can follow a chain of logic. It predicts they are good at math.
Originally Posted by MadMojoMonkey
It's not indicative of a person's dedication, commitment, loyalty, leadership, etc.
It's not indicative of whether a person has capacity for good or bad.
It's not indicative of how observant, patient, empathetic, or compassionate a person is.
Nor was it ever meant to indicate any of those things. It's an intelligence test, not a 'how good a person are you' test.
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