Why are people so quick to dismiss IQ tests, I wonder?
There's a reason IQ tests are on the way down. Once upon a time, IQ tests were
everywhere the promise is that they'd help employers pick better people to hire, and schools to decided which kids would do best as college. etc. etc. But everyone on the spectrum from employers to schools
just stopped doing IQ tests at some point. Why do you think that is?
Kagus did a test that was sponsored, e.g.
paid for, by a private club dedicated to telling people that people with high IQ scores are superior humans. There's a reason that basically nobody but that one club are using these tests these days. When was the last time anyone required you to sit for an IQ test?
I mean, I could in fact go and get sources critiquing IQ tests and point at the history of IQ testing and some of the points against them, e.g. how they "calibrate" the tests to give the same score for different groups who score differently on different type of question, purely due to circular logic ideology that those groups
should be the same, so we shuffle the test around and change question weightings
until they are. It's just not science when you manipulate the data until it "conforms" to the result you wanted. And then people make assertions like "these groups are equal" or "these groups are not equal" in intelligence. But since "equal" in some cases is a result of direct and deliberate manipulation of the scoring system, how can we trust either "equal" or "not equal" results then?
This isn't science, the questions in IQ tests are not proven to be "intelligency" any more than other questions - they're based on 1900 French school exams* because that's what Binet was trying to predict - future performance in the French school system,
not intelligence. The idea that by giving someone pre-existing school tests you're "measuring intelligence" is circular logic in itself. Why not ask questions about things that aren't math? Maths students would then fail and some other group would
seem to be more intelligent. We've just
decided "Western math = intelligence". "Psychometry" e.g. the 20th century science of measuring "intelligence" is little more than phrenology but with more equations and statistics manipulation, and less head-bump-reading.
* There are things like Raven's Matrices which are supposed to be "universal" to get around the problem that the older tests are all ingrained with school curriculum questions, thus are not culture-or-education-independent, but the way that the Raven's Matrices was created was an iterative process: make a
whole lot of randomly-selected visual puzzles, then test people on them. Then, compare the results against the same people's score on a Binet IQ test. Then, work out
which visual puzzles are the best predictors of people's Binet score. e.g. there
were puzzles that some other people did better on, but if they weren't
also the people who did better on a Binet test, those questions were thrown out as "not predictive of intelligence". So, over successive iterations of testing, the scores can be made to resemble Binet scores on a person by person basis, by removing any questions which showed otherwise.
Then, you select a new bunch of kids, and repeat the process with the new Raven's test. And then, they turn around and say "Binet-style tests are vindicated - see? Raven's tests
don't even include any math or English questions, and they give very similar results to the Binet test". But the problem here is that "Raven's" test questions weren't picked independently due to some "great theory of intelligence" they were carefully hand-picked because the chosen questions mimic the Binet test. Circular logic again.
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