No it doesn’t. Does and IQ test measure how good you are at fixing an engine? Finding your way around rough country? Does IQ measure how good you at building something? Growing food? Parenting? All these things involve an aspect of intelligence. IQ tests are all based on words and number puzzles. Lots of standard questions that you can learn to answer with a bit of practice. IQ tests are very good at measuring how good you are at IQ tests. Suggesting that this skill is transferable to other situations is a very dubious. :dubious:
IQ tests are little more than an arbitrary tests to restrict access to those job hunting certificates peddled by academic institutions.
I don’t know about parenting, and maybe not navigating rough country, but yes, I’d place good money that IQ corresponds with the rest of them. I’ve worked with farmers, I know a fair number, and agriculture (when done well) demands a fair amount of intelligence.
The thing about China’s corruption is that there’s actually an organization which attempts to rank corruption by country – Transparency International. And according to their 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index, India ranks slightly better than China. India, of course, doesn’t rank well on the index, but by bringing up China as a comparison point, filmstar-en once again shows us that he doesn’t even have basic knowledge about the topic. If he did, he would have come in knowing that the rebuttal to this claim would be the Transparency International index.
This is dumb. The PISA is an educational assessment test, it’s not an IQ test, despite your claim that it “correlates with IQ.” You cannot use the PISA to determine anything about IQ. And you can’t use IQ to determine anything about innate intelligence levels.
Well, let’s go back here, because you started with the PISA. And the PISA is a measurement of educational systems. It’s not designed to measure intelligence or IQ. If the claim is that the Indian educational system overall isn’t that great, well, I don’t think anyone’s going to disagree. They only rolled in universal, compulsory education a little over a decade ago (although a few states had it before), and I’d be surprised if they could build essentially a nationwide public education system for that many people within a decade. Of course, there are many people in India who do get a really good education: for example, the Indian Institutes of Technology are widely held to be excellent educational institutions. But, yes, the PISA indicates that that the educational system for the wider population (who don’t get tracked into systems like IIT) needs to be improved. But that’s about the educational system. It’s not about IQ.
As for IQ, do I really need to get into all the criticisms about IQ? Wiki provides a good summary:
But, I’d say, the biggest criticism of IQ is the Flynn Effect.
I took a course on the comparative economic development of Russia, Japan and India at LSE back during the 1980s. One week was devoted to the impact of colonialism on India. The consensus was, “Yeah, initial reports indicated that it was negative but now we don’t think it’s that clear.”
It’s not clear at all. The industrial revolution was born in the UK and spread to Europe and the US. In the absence of colonialism, it’s unlikely that India would have built a railway system across the subcontinent, let alone had a full scale and subcontinent-wide industrial revolution before 1870.
My personal take is that the end of colonialism was a given: people don’t like being ruled by foreign powers. Whether it was a net positive or negative for India is something I am agnostic on. Mainly because my memory of the subject is dim, the research dated and my books elsewhere.
I can’t prove for now that the extremely low PISA scores are due to low IQ, or that low intelligence is at least partly due to genetic factors, but that’s my prior for the time being.
Oh, but there was actually no industrial revolution in India during the colonial period. As I’ve pointed out many times before, the industrial revolution in India happened after independence.
As for railwyays, meh. The Ottomans had railways. It wouldn’t have taken that long for railways to spread to India.
Agriculture doesn’t demand “intelligence”, it demands specific knowledge. I guaranfuckingtee that if you were to buy a farm, a goat and a few sacks of seeds and figured “whelp, I’ll just pick it up as I go along, I’ve got an IQ of 250” you’ll be back in NYC penniless a couple years of failure later.
Same goes for engineering, survival in harsh places, architecture…
I’d do terribly, personally, because I’m not a farmer. (Though I probably have more relevant experience than the typical urban american). I’d bet that a typical American or Russian farmer would pick things up faster if you moved them to India than the other way around.
I shouldn’t think so.
I mean, yes, they’d have the general concepts down ; but I don’t see how being really good at predicting an early frost or picking up the early signs of a corn parasite would help when dumped in India and tasked with dealing with completely different crop under completely different weather and climate conditions (and monsoon season), different parasites, different insects & other annoying wildlife, different animal diseases…
If you’re really into proving that hur durr Indians are dumb and inferior (for whatever reason, such as “you just jumped into our era through a Victorian steampunk time machine” :rolleyes:) a better comparison basis would be professions where the knowledge set is universal - engineering, computer science, science period, chess…
Flawed trust in IQ tests, IMO. A farmer can be illiterate and still be a great, smart farmer. OTOH, that farmer will suuuuck at IQ tests.
Education and intelligence are two distinct concepts.
We know that individual intelligence depends on a number of factors, many of which are not genetic, such as nutrition, early socialization and education. We also know that performance on tests generally is influenced by test taking instruction (ie, education as to how to take tests of a particular nature). We have no idea yet how all these factors fit together. Pointing at IQ tests as an innate measure of intelligence is nonsense, since IQ tests are not designed to take in all these other factors into account, and since we don’t even know yet how all these other factors interact.
On top of that, IQ scores have been steadily rising in certain parts of the world. Are those parts undergoing some rapid intelligence-related genetic shift? That’s ludicrous.
But aside from all this, the PISA isn’t even designed to measure IQ or individual intelligence. All of this is racist nonsense.