But "Binet" never claimed that his test "measured intelligence". That's a myth.
Binet took the French school syllabus and arranged questions from various years. The goal was to estimate what school level children were at. The original Binet score increases as you got older, because you learned more stuff and could complete more of the test. Binet in particular never claimed the test was measuring anything innate about you. The entire point was to pinpoint students who were falling behind so that they could receive extra tuition, so Binet understood that the test was merely reflecting your skills at that moment in time, and that ability is a fluid thing that can be cultivated.
Later, some guy decided to divide your Binet score by your age (the "quotient" part) and sold it as an "intelligence test", with the claim that it predicted some innate quality of a person. This was completely contradictory to what Binet himself designed the test for: which was to pinpoint who needed help. Merely taking the formula: "take your score on this arbitrary maths quiz, then divide by your age" is not a convincing basis for "measuring intelligence".
By dividing your Binet score by your age, then interpreting the result as "innate intelligence" it resulted in the weak being reassigned to the dustbin, rather than getting the academic help that Binet had intended the test for. It also had the unfortunate effect that people older than 20 appeared to "regress" into stupidity, even if their test scores were actually much higher than a young person, due to the "divide by age" part of the IQ score. Binet had not intended the test to be used past school age.
It was bullshit plain and simple, basically. Ever since then, they've been rigorously polishing the turd to make it shinier.
After all of the response to my starter, a lot of them had made logical sense. The whole 'mental state' thing I had described means any amount of imbalances of chemicals and neurotransmitters in my brain could have been happening at that time, so the entire facet of the test Reelya described if I understand it correctly is that, if it could be applied to my scenario I described, it merely was a result of my psychological state at that time, which was very temporary, and years ago. Maybe the mental state resulted in me having the ability(if, for however long, temporarily), which just like Binet(supposedly) described was variable and could be changed or cultivated. Thank you everyone for participating in that conversation.
. It was something I could never really even remotely understand, and neither could anyone else.
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Topic: SCIENCE, Gravitational waves, and the whole LIGO OST! (Read 515701 times)