this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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It's correlated to a very narrow subset of skills that are a small part of intelligence. It's a predictor of successful outcomes in the broad sense, but considering the strong correlation to access to education and other similar environmental prerequisites to healthy development, claiming there's a particularly strong causal relationship between IQ and success is relatively bold.
My whole assertion is that using IQ as a value measurement is fundamentally not very useful. In the specific case of race (or cultural background, or whatever), there's no functional way to control for the confounding factors, so you can't really draw any conclusions about the "merit" of the relevant population at all, even if IQ did that.
The people who defend it use it because it's racist. That's why they want it used more.
Like I said IQ should never, ever be used as an entry exam or any other kind of social determinant. Not least because of the racist/classist history. However, it does have a signification and legitimate uses, and to pretend otherwise is scientific negationism. We do not have to listen to racist conspiracy theories about why some populations have a lower IQ than "us", when we have known and repeatedly demonstrated for many decades that differences in IQ at the population level is entirely predictable by education and health (the Flynn Effect). That's it, that's the necessary and sufficient counter-argument to the racist arguments you're referring to.
Put another way, education does not just make people educated; it makes them more intelligent. Someone who has gone through standard schooling is empirically proven to be statistically better at novel abstract thinking than someone who never went to school. Which is kind of obvious when put like that, but you can't prove or study that phenomenon scientifically without the use of tools like the IQ test.
Poor african countries have a lower IQ than the world average, and that is an irrefutable fact. Does that mean:
a) Life outcomes are not shaped in anyway by socioeconomic background, therefore [insert racist theory here]
b) I refuse to look into the possible causes and therefore IQ tests are racist
c) We can infer that poor populations would benefit from increased financing of childcare and education, it's a winning move for literally everyone.
The topic of IQ tests is really uncomfortable because it unearths the really uncomfortable fact that socioeconomic and geopolitical factors have not given us all an equal shot at life, even down to how intelligent we are likely to become as adults. It challenges the myth that anyone can just pull themselves up by the bootstraps, work at mcdonald's, and become a triple harvard graduate. But it's not neuroscience's fault that the world is unfair.
It's not just racist, it's also ableist and sexist too
Controlling for confounding factors is, like, half the point.
Racists will tell you
[x country]is lower IQ than[y developed country]. Which is probably true. What they won't say is that that average IQ is probably the same as[y developed country 100-200 years ago]. IQ being affected by education is the whole fucking point; widespread access to a good and long education provably leads to a more intelligent population, which we have seen time and time again with industrializing countries (including in the West since the IQ test is old enough that we can see the average IQ rising since the industrial revolution).No, it provably leads to a country that scores higher on an IQ test.
IQ is not intelligence.
Can you please give a definition of intelligence that does not correlate with IQ? Because scientists have been trying, and as far as I know, failing.
Or I guess we can keep pretending that intelligence is fully inquantifiable and therefore we won't be able to quantify how socioeconomic background affect people's wellbeing. I guess that does have the upside that we don't have to face the hard truths of our world, that unequal access to healthcare and education does affect people's cognitive abilities and that the worse life outcomes of poor people being self-inflicted is a myth perpetuated by the ruling class to justify their continued oppression. No, it must be the IQ tests that are racist.
The fact that it's affected by environment is the evidence that it's not intelligence. Intelligence is not malleable. IQ is.
[citation needed]
"Sex, Lies, and Brain Scans" talks about IQ and the problems with IQ. There's also "Delusions of Gender" by Cordelia Fine, and "Neurolinguistics and Linguistic Aphasia."
First, I have had a neuropsych evaluation done and an IQ test. It has areas that are subjective and open to interpretation by the test administrator, already making IQ tests suspect. There is no way to quantify intelligence using actually measurable data. Sound is measured in Hz, light in nanometers, and these things fit nicely on a scale with numbers. Intelligence doesn't require something so discrete. Octopuses, parrots, elephants, all have different brain anatomy from us and each other and are all quite intelligent. It's hard to say what the secret sauce even is, let alone measure it quantifiably.
Many neuropsych tests aren't actually able to prove anything substantial about the brain itself or a person's abilities, short of serious cognitive tests like the clock test which is also fallible. The reason for this is that most human intelligence is pretty close to each other and it's actually hard to find substantial, consistent differences in the population. Think of how close in intelligence a bear is to a human - trash can design at Yellowstone is famously difficult because bear and human intelligence overlap so much. Humans are much more alike cognitively with each other than a bear.
Second, we have the issue of implicit bias and priming. That tells certain groups if they are allowed to be "good" at something, if something is "meant" for them, if they will do well at it. When controlled for cognitive bias, IQ levels across most groups are equal and IQ tends to start to measure persistence/"resiliency" between the groups - which can be affected by something as simple as a coffee that morning or bad sleep.
Last, we have actual medical conditions that make it hard to communicate and pass an IQ test, but the person's IQ is intact/normal for them. There are musical geniuses that aren't picked up by IQ tests, as well as athletic geniuses (Wayne Gretsky), artistic geniuses, and social geniuses.
And when the scores rise, they're adjusted to the mean. Because 100 means of average intelligence, and the average intelligence rises, so the average is adjusted for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect