In another thread, you said:
“The only thing that any so-called IQ test can measure is someone’s ability, on that one occasion, to get a score on that particular IQ test.”
and
“Does scoring well on an IQ test correlate to anything that is useful and seems like intelligent behaviour in real life? No.”
I asked “Cite?” and you didn’t respond. Would you please tell me what reputable source gave you this information?
You seem to have posted that message today. Has it occurred to you that people have lives outside of the Dope and may not be able to respond to you within, what was it, 2 1/2 hours of you posting? Surely it doesn’t take a very high IQ to realise that while you’re online, they may be sleeping, working, shopping, washing their dog or any number of other things not involving the SDMB?
Lame.
I first asked him for a cite on 04-05-2006, 05:25 AM. That’s a lot more than 2 1/2 hours ago by my counting.
I also don’t think Ianzin is a major browser of the PIT BTW.
Got a link to the actual thread for the nosey amongst us?
SOrry, I should have posted the thread link at first.
Ta muchly
http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/page1/98/03/16/iq.html
It rather depends upon what you define intelligence, if it is the ability to take a type of problem and improve your performance, perhaps, but it does not necassarily mean another type of intelligence, where one has to gather data, interpret it, use it to predict outcomes and perhaps come up with a more general thesis.
Its also true that the more you perform these tests, the better you become, however such skill is pretty specialised, and trying to then use the IQ test to make some assessment about overall abilities, especialy in novel situations, is at best, very crude.
One reason that IQ tests are criticised heavily is because in the past they have been used by eugenicists and racists as basis to support their discredited platforms, and its also true that IQ tests are know to have cultural weaknesses, but would a poor performing bushman be considered less intelligent for a poor performance in such tests, when the absolute overwhelming majority of the rest of us would have a problem surviving unsupported for a week in the kinds of environments that our bushman would consider normal.
http://www.awa.com/w2/DAC/dac-2.7.html
What it was originally intended to do was to discover individuals who had an innate intelligence, and the test was supposed to be intuitive, however, in the example of the bushman who score badly on the IQ test, but yet can live in a hostile world, our intelligence is not intuitive or instinctive in that way, but is learned and developed.
The whole point of the IQ test is to attempt to measure the innate ability of an individual, and so it must divorce itself from anything that could be construed as a ‘real world’ conundrum as the latter would then be dependant upon learned knowledge, even so, IQ tests have been dropped around the world by educationalists because they tend to have cultural bias.
Ianzin Is from a generation in the UK that were subjected to the 11+ tests, which supposedly tested the ability of children to answer certain questions.
If you didn’t pass the tests then you were condemned to very often second rate education to fit you for the role of manual and skilled manual work, and those passing were supposed to go on to the better schools, and perhaps University and become our great and good.
The truth is that the 11+ test was very distinctly class biased, I distinctly remember one question
" What is a decanter made from"?
Which is one heck of a class related question, given that not many working class, council estate living children of 10 and 11 years old would be likely to know, or even know what the hell a decanter was.
Anyone from that generation in the UK who was condemned to often second rate eucation on the basis of such a spurious and class ridden testing system will be immediately suspicious of testing regimes that have cultural bias that are used value a person, rather than undertaking the much more accurate method of assessing the quality of work produced by a student.
Or put another way, if our 11+ test system was so good, then why has Britain slowly drifted from world leader to its current postion, given that our great and good undertook such a selection process successfully.
I would have absolutely no problem with Ianzin position about IQ tests, you may dislike the definative way he says it, rather than as an opinion.
I can certainly find plenty of quotes from more learned folk than myself, who are not trying to sell anything, such as snobbery, or a corperate assessment product or other assorted snake-oil salesmen.
http://www.thrivenet.com/articles/iqidiocy.html
The mere fact that the same person can take several differant IQ tests that run on differant styles and end up with widely differing IQ counts by over 20 points ought to clue anyone just how inaccurate and spurious they are, and most definately show that the evidence produced by them is so variable as to be worthless as a predictive tool, especially when you actually take the much better, though admittedly far more expensive methods of psychological profiling, behavioural profiling, and monitoring of previous work output.
Well, much if not most of England hasn’t used the 11+ for a long time, having gone over to the comprehensive system. So I’d suggest you rather ask what’s wrong with that.
I am attempting to give a possible explanation why the subject of the thread might be suspicious and hostile to some spurious test that could be used to try to define abilities of individuals, the 11+ was one such method, and there are those who somehow believe that the IQ test is another means of doing this, or worse still, to find some justification for discrimination based on some false application of Darwinian models.
I took a look at at the citations you gave could not find any support for the two claims that ianzin made. Can you quote the exact language for me?
Anyway, I believe that studies have been done that look for correlations between IQ and various life outcomes. Why can’t you cite one of those studies to back up the claim?
Why not start a GQ thread instead of taking this to the Pit?
Anyway, lanzin is right. From college psychology courses, I got the understanding that nobody in that field takes IQ tests seriously as a measure of intelligence. I’m sure the cites in this thread are more convincing than what I’m saying, but I thought I’d chip in.
The only value I’ve personally gotten from my IQ score is a snappy retort to family members who I feel are talking down to me. I guess that counts for something.
lskinner, I believe that what you’re driving at is that studies have shown a fairly strong correlation between IQ and performance in school and to a lesser extent success in life.
THe problem with that is, don’t you see, that these “life outcomes” are also culturally biased. So, yeah, IQ tests will, at least for now, probably do a moderately good job of predicting how well a student will perform in an American (or any other technologically advanced) environment. What they don’t tell us is much of anything about the person’s innate ability if they were raised outside of that culture, whether by virtue of the geographic region from which they came or the socio-economic class in which they were raised. These people weren’t raised with the same “general knowledge” that those raised in reasonably affluent circumstances in a technical society were. Poor performance doesn’t necessarily indicate innate stupidity, although it might - a very stupid person isn’t going to score highly regardless of his/her upbringing. But a very bright person may score very low if they share nothing of the knowledge and cultural associations assumed by the IQ test. How good are you at distinguishing hundreds of types of vegetation from one another, knowing their properties, where they could be found, and so on? Probably not very, and a hunter/gatherer would probably find you stupid to the point of idiocy. IQ tests usually don’t rely quite that blatantly on knowledge, but make no mistake - knowledge is definitely an element of the tests. I’ve taken them in adulthood, and was surprised at just how knowledge-based they were!
And it’s not just a matter of the individual personally being born and raised in the “right” circumstances. It can take anywhere from one to many generations to get past your family history, depending on how insular the culture of origin, the motivation to acquire the new culture (dependent not only on family, but peers; it’s not easy to get a good education when your community scorns the value of such), and, I’m sure, other factors.
This is pretty easy to see for say, hunter/gatherers living in the Amazon. It’s less easy to see for the poor socio-economic levels living within a high-tech society. But try, just try, to imagine growing up in a situation in which you were never, ever exposed to the cultural givens that the rest of us take for granted. Sure, a few kids find sources of inspiration outside of their families and their immediate peers. But most don’t. Why would they? By the time they’ve gotten old enough to wise up and realize that it would be valuable, it’s usually too late - they are already pretty much locked in to the same lifestyle that their parents and community had. And so the ignorance and cultural poverty (by our terms, not theirs) continue, and so do the IQ scores that depend heavily (but subtly) on that knowledge.
I’m not sure that’s true. I suspect that if you asked psychologists what they think about the effects of lead paint on IQ scores, or whether low-IQ prisoners can ethically be executed, you’d get some pretty passionate answers; wouldn’t these be because the psychologists believe IQ indicates something about intelligence?
(With apologies to Steven Pinker)
Daniel
I started looking at your cites, but I didn’t see ANYTHING to back up ianzin’s claims. How about quoting the part you think does?
Because it looks to me like ianzin is an ignorant fool.
Cite?
Not every statement needs to be backed up by a frickin’ cite. A lot of the debate with IQ testing is speculation. Deal with it.
You want a cite for my impression? Get fucked. I’m tired of being asked for cites when I’m stating my opinion or giving my understanding of other people’s opinions. If I’d said categorically that nobody takes the things seriously, you’d be right to ask for a cite. If you thought that was what I was trying to say, I hope we’re clear now: during those courses, I was given to understand that IQ tests are not considered useful by psychologists.
Seems to me to address your point, this from my last quote, and there is a good deal more.
Reading through the links I provided you must surely come to some doubt about the consistancy and repeatability of the tests, because all the IQ test does is compare you against others, it is not an absolute test in any way, but what is worse is that your score can vary dependant upon the test you take, or even from the person who decides what the norms are, and thus how you stack up against them.
Now if the norms against which you are compared are very differant to yourself, you will have a skewed result, yet if the normalising group were tested against a differant group, then this would change too.
Such a test is psuedoscience, the results depend upon the particular test itself, the scorer, the group with which you are scored against, you cultural background, and given that it is supposed to measure innate - inborn intelligence, there is a huge amount of learned content required, so it is not even a measure of what it purports to measure.
This is exactly why your first quote from Ianzin works, and his second quote is true because the system is so unreliable, and so subjective and thus is only a vague approximation of a persons ability, when there are far better methods of determining the abilities of an individual around anyway why would one use such a crude tool?
The reason is that it is an unskilled system, you can provide a list of puzzles to an agency or HR department, which can then score them using a chart provided and it gives an illusion of competance.
The truth is that such a test is cheap compared to assessing an individual professionally, psychology does not come cheap, it takes a lot of time to carry out.
You might as well use mildy cryptic crosswords, or perhaps other word puzzles to determine intelligence, because IQ tests are only differing versions of mind puzzles, perhaps we should select for intelligence using Sudoku puzzles.
These are the category of pastimes to which IQ tests truly belong, if you want serious research, then you use behavioural psychologists, you interview them, you put test subjects into certain scenarios to examine their responses, a few marks on a piece of paper in a multichoice quiz is hardly a realistic way of determining intelligence, whatever ‘intelligence’ actually is.
You’re tired of being asked for cites? I’m sorry. I don’t buy it. You’ll have to back that up with a cite.
ducks
You have to admit someones opinion is a pretty fucking stupid thing to ask for a cite on.
Or rather admit it was funny…
I think we can all see you thought it was pretty stupid.