But they’re still being made exclusively by the same people, right? (a people characterized as being over-confident in their own objectivity, even).
As much as you could say that they’re still made by psychologists…
However that’s over two generations different and includes a lot more research, testing, and refining later. You could just as well say that the people making steam engines are the same people as make corvettes. “Mechanical Engineers!”
I meant people from the same cultural background, not professional background.
…okay.
So we shouldn’t trust the IQ test to be any indicator of intelligence, because it was made by Western Civilisation?
But, I’m not exactly seeing why it should matter who is asking how many cubes there are? There are the same number of cubes regardless of who you are or how you were raised. If you’re not able to anwer that, then there’s something preventing you from answering it that doesn’t need to be there, be that low-intelligence or a lack of having your intellegence be cultivated.
I think that, especially in today’s lower-education establishment, which proclaims every student’s individual worth and tries its darndest to venerate even the mediocre, any objective measure of intelligence is going to find a great deal of resistance. The actual arguments used against it (ranging from the “intelligence is not quantifiable” to “multiple intellegence” and "tests are flawed arguments) are secondary; protecting the self-esteem of individuals is the paramount concern.
And to actually answer the OP, yes.
To single out an example, I find it amusing that RealityChuck automatically assumed that there had to be nice cookie-cutter cultural biases in an IQ test, not bothering to familiarize himself with the test in question. It’s a classic case of fitting facts to theories instead of the reverse.
Yes. Why is that so ridiculous?
What’s absurd is the idea that one group of people can be trusted to accurately appraise the entire rest of the world’s population regarding an vaguely defined abstract concept.
Would it mean anything to you if an association West African tribes came up with some codification of beauty, and found that Northern Europeans were technically the ugliest people on Earth?
I don’t know anything about your cubes example, except that I’m sure that entire tests aren’t made up of it. And sure, I can see why you think it’s a perfect example of a bias-free question. But I also see why that just makes you a textbook example of someone who takes his own biases for granted. Have you ever even considered that testing of this type itself is culturaly biased? Why should it mean anything to most people in the world for a Westerner to approach them and ask them how many cubes there are in a drawing?
I’ll freely admit that I can cite nothing besides my recollections of the academic process.
I majored in sociology, so my psychology background is rather limited.
Funny how all the dummies are against the IQ test 
IQ tests, from what I remember, basically test mental horsepower. For example, it tests skills like solving problems, recalling strings of numbers and/or letters, memory, and what have you. These are quantifyable, measurable qualities that are non-culture specific.
It’s just like measurements of physical attributes like 100 yard dash speed, benchpress strength and so on. Would you argue that a person’s ability to leg press a certain weight is culturally specific? You either can lift the weight or you can’t. You can remember 20 numbers in a row backwards or you can’t.
Those are just basic skills or abilities. They don’t tell you if a person will be able to use them. Just like being fast, strong and agile doesn’t mean you’ll be a great football player, having a high IQ doesn’t mean you’ll be the next Einstein.
Fair enough.
In interest of full disclosure, my information is about 10 years old, based on general psych, child development and education classes taught by some old dude responsible for one of the more widely used IQ tests at the time. I have no idea how they’ve changed (or how general ed teaching has changed) since and if they are still accurately predictive of success in school as they were designed to be.
I was very impressed with the test, tester (who was black, urban, effeminate and gay, pizzabrat, so it ain’t all a white man’s game) and results of my son’s testing this past summer - very adequately expressed what I know of him intuitively, as well as how he’s done in school so far and where his areas of weakness lie. The strange learning disability he has was very acurately pinpointed by the tester who knew nothing of his prior history. There were still lots of words on it, as well as the visual and spatial parts, so I don’t see how all bias could have been eliminated, however.
By and large I agree with the OP, though I can see that a “socially adept” person might be better at thinking outside the box, and using that skill to solve problems. Still, such a person would do well on the IQ test, wouldn’t they?
And I agree there are different types of testable intelligence. If 1000 people make the same score on the same test, they wouldn’t all miss the same questions, would they?