Dingus_Incel said:
They aren't a pseudoscience. They're probably one of the most reliable things psychologists have actually created and have been around for about 1 century now. They are far too well correlated with life outcomes like longevity, income, family stability, sexual deviance, and crime.
They aren't culturally biased either. You don't need to translate them at all because the majority of questions are puzzles and matching shapes and looking for patterns. Much of an IQ test is based on the ability to rotate objects in ones mind or seek out patterns. If they were culturally biased in favor of "whites" then East Asians and European Jews shouldn't outperform white people. In fact white people shouldn't outperform other white people in the Balkans or the Mediterranean. The tests are meant to be as universal as possible, I have yet to see anyone point to specific examples of modern how IQ tests are culturally biased. I have only heard allegations.
Every nations already has an IQ of 100. Each test has its score normalized to that that by default. If a nation is shown to have an average IQ of 85, thats the score relative to the white mean. Globally, all the international IQ tests average 85-90, assuming relative to the white European mean.
Ask yourself this. If IQ is a pseudoscience, would you rather have your child be able score a 70 on an IQ test, or a 130?
They absolutely are a pseudoscience because there isn't even a consensus on what intelligence is, so how can one create an objective measuring tool for it? You can't. What you cited - the "complete the pattern" and rotating objects mentally are testing two aspects of intelligence (specifically logical/mathematical and spatial) and ignore many others. One of the more prominent theories of why this is inadequate is Gardener's Multiple Intelligences: there are nine of them, according to him. Others have gone as far as 13 if I recall correctly. In order to accurately measure all of them you would have to complete a wide arrange of tasks, not all of which are culturally intersectional (like the example I listed with the Amazonian chief and the public transportation analogy, which measures a different type of intelligence - logic/mathematical in combination with linguistic). Yet others believe that there are only three types of intelligence, and your proposed format doesn't satisfy even those. What you're testing with the metrics you described can predict whether someone would be well-suited for an education in engineering or physics, but not if they would make a good philosopher, or writer, or historian, or many other professions, each of which can contain what would be considered very "intelligent" people. By your definition of intelligence, a blind person couldn't be intelligent, because you are basing intelligence and its metrics purely on visual recognition. That is pure hogwash.
As such, a truly universal IQ test would measure all of the various types of intelligence, which includes culturally-sensitive issues. Even if such a test were constructed, the demands of certain cultures have made it such that different peoples need to be better at different things in order to succeed. Of course an Amazonian warchief will suck at things that first-world white capitalists designed, just as they would suck on a test of hunting patterns, tracking, and plant identification that is designed by the Amazonian warchief. Trying to use the IQ tests designed to be taken by Americans and Europeans to measure the intelligence of other cultures makes the already questionable practice of measuring "intelligence" and grading it on a normalized curve even more suspect; comparing to the "European mean" is scientifically dishonest. Even if the Amazonian warchief scored highly on the metrics you proposed, that doesn't help make him more successful in his immediate surroundings and thus is a completely pointless metric to his life and abilities.
Remember that correlation is not causation. There are confounding variables which are far more likely to contribute to the metrics you listed - for example, people with higher IQ scores are likely to come from wealthier families. Also, using the argument that they've been around for 100 years is no argument at all. Flat-Earthers have been around for thousands of years, doesn't make their bullshit any more valid. Reliability is not validity, anyone who has taken any statistics ever will be able to tell you this.
But if you don't believe me, take it from the experts who in the past few decades have been discovering the culturally sensitive nature of IQ tests and thus their lack of validity as a comparative tool:
"On the one hand, mindless application of the same tests across cultures is desired by no one."
"Some cultural differences in intelligence play out on a global scale. In "The Geography of Thought" (Free Press, 2003), Richard Nisbett, PhD, co-director of the Culture and Cognition Program at the University of Michigan, argues that East Asian and Western cultures have developed cognitive styles that differ in fundamental ways, including in how intelligence is understood."
"practical and academic intelligence can develop independently or even in conflict with each other, and that the values of a culture may shape the direction in which a child develops."
"They also agree with studies in a number of countries, both industrialized and nonindustrialized, that suggest that people who are unable to solve complex problems in the abstract can often solve them when they are presented in a familiar context."
"Are "culture-free" or "culture-fair" intelligence tests possible, or is success on a test inevitably influenced by familiarity with the culture in which the test was developed?
Moreover, is it desirable--or even possible--to adapt Western tests to non-Western cultures, or should new tests be designed from the ground up to measure skills and abilities valued by the culture in which they are to be used?
Many psychologists believe that the idea that a test can be completely absent of cultural bias--a recurrent hope of test developers in the 20th century--is contradicted by the weight of the evidence. Raven's Progressive Matrices, for example, is one of several nonverbal intelligence tests that were originally advertised as "culture free," but are now recognized as culturally loaded.
Patricia Greenfield, PhD, of the University of California, Los Angeles, argues that nonverbal intelligence tests are based on cultural constructs, such as the matrix, that are ubiquitous in some cultures but almost nonexistent in others. In societies where formal schooling is common, she says, students gain an early familiarity with organizing items into rows and columns, which gives them an advantage over test-takers in cultures where formal schooling is rare.
Similarly, says Greenfield, media technologies like television, film and video games give test-takers from cultures where those technologies are widespread an advantage on visual tests, while test-takers from cultures where the language-based media are more common have advantages on verbal tests."
http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/intelligence.aspx
"Sternberg, in contrast, has taken a more direct approach to changing the practice of testing. His Sternberg Triarchic Abilities Test (STAT) is a battery of multiple-choice questions that tap into the three independent aspects of intelligence--analytic, practical and creative--proposed in his triarchic theory.
Recently, Sternberg and his collaborators from around the United States completed the first phase of a College Board-sponsored Rainbow Project to put the triarchic theory into practice. The goal of the project was to enhance prediction of college success and increase equity among ethnic groups in college admissions. About 800 college students took the STAT along with performance-based measures of creativity and practical intelligence.
Sternberg and his collaborators found that triarchic measures predicted a significant portion of the variance in college grade point average (GPA), even after SAT scores and high school GPA had been accounted for."
"Should we even be using intelligence tests in the first place?
In certain situations where intelligence tests are currently being used, the consensus answer appears to be "no." A recent report of the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education (PCESE), for example, suggests that the use of intelligence tests to diagnose learning disabilities should be discontinued.
For decades, learning disabilities have been diagnosed using the "IQ-achievement discrepancy model," according to which children whose achievement scores are a standard deviation or more below their IQ scores are identified as learning disabled.
The problem with that model, says Patti Harrison, PhD, a professor of school psychology at the University of Alabama, is that the discrepancy doesn't tell you anything about what kind of intervention might help the child learn. Furthermore, the child's actual behavior in the classroom and at home is often a better indicator of a child's ability than an abstract intelligence test, so children might get educational services that are more appropriate to their needs if IQ tests were discouraged, she says.
Even staunch supporters of intelligence testing, such as Naglieri and the Kaufmans, believe that the IQ-achievement discrepancy model is flawed."
http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/intelligent.aspx
As to your final question, it is ludicrous in nature. Of course every parent wants their child to be a 200+ IQ-on-every-metric genius Chad who gets straight A's and is an all-star athlete with the world for their taking. However, realistically speaking, your question is flawed on an even more fundamental level: you never specified the IQ test that is taken (much like your misleading infographic failed in the same department). If my child doesn't score well on visual pattern recognition and spatial rotation (the latter of which has been proven to be more favorable to male test-takers, what if my child is female?), then I don't care - as long as they have some other skills that they are driven to improve. If my daughter is a brilliant writer, charismatic, and has a good social life with many connections, then I'm happy. Fuck, if my daughter is happy, then I'm happy. I don't care if she can't spin a lego block mentally. This all presuming I'd ever have children, which was another fallacious element of your leading question but I'm willing to entertain the hypothetical.
TL;DR: Research says you're wrong.
fukmylyf said:
lmfao
