Even worse than language difficulties, I would think, would be large differences in cultural framing of questions. Every culture brings a different set of background issues to the types of questions asked in many psychological studies. The problem has mostly been solved for IQ type tests, but, even without considering the amount of work involved in developing the cross-cultural IQ tests, framing would be a bigger problem for personality and other “softer” tests. (I have, but have only leafed through, Jensen’s “Bias in Mental Testing”; I can already tell it’s going to take a lot of work, and it’s a bit dated, so I’ve been putting it off since it’s only a peripheral interest.)
“Arthur Jensen Replies to Stephen Jay Gould : THE DEBUNKING OF SCIENTIFIC FOSSILS AND STRAW PERSONS ” , http://www.debunker.com/texts/jensen.html , is a good place to start. It’s a detailed criticism of Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man” by one of the best psychometricians around. It’s got a good bibliography, but is rather dated being from 1982. No matter what you may think of his politics, Steve Sailer also has a lot of good, and more recent, information in his essays on IQ, especially on international comparisons, on his website, www.isteve.com . Richard Lynn’s books are supposed to be very good also, but I haven’t read them (too many interests, too little time and money).
The very title “debunking of scientific fossils and straw persons” makes it sound like it has limited use. Johnicholas asked for positive statements, but a debunking is purely negative. Just because Gould lied about X doesn’t make his position wrong.
I suspected from your first comment that all you meant was that people who attempt to prove cultural bias in IQ tests have failed. That is certainly true, with some surprising findings, like that the American black-white gap is larger on questions that are, on the face of them, more culturally neutral. But relying on an opposition you don’t trust to do the research is a highly biased search strategy. It is not a great political victory to say that Raven’s matrices are culturally biased, so few say it, but that doesn’t make it false.
Right now, my best source for “answers to Arthur Jensen” is Cosma Shalizi. My understanding is that performance on IQ tests is mostly related to culture—even though that was (to some extent) Gould’s position.
performance on IQ tests is mostly related to culture
Shalizi simply doesn’t say that.
There are two things you could mean by it. One is that some cultures make you smart. The other is that the IQ test mostly screens for culture and not useful abilities. It is certainly true that culture affects the difference between performance on Raven’s matrices and other tests. In particular, the Flynn effect is stronger for Raven’s matrices than other tests. Also, sub-saharan Africans do dramatically worse on RM than on other estimates, where they’re closer to African-Americans (who do slightly worse on RM than on common tests). In applying this information to the two possibilities about culture, you’d have to decide which testing approach you liked better, which would depend on what you’re trying to measure. “g” is not the correct answer to this question.
Even worse than language difficulties, I would think, would be large differences in cultural framing of questions. Every culture brings a different set of background issues to the types of questions asked in many psychological studies. The problem has mostly been solved for IQ type tests, but, even without considering the amount of work involved in developing the cross-cultural IQ tests, framing would be a bigger problem for personality and other “softer” tests. (I have, but have only leafed through, Jensen’s “Bias in Mental Testing”; I can already tell it’s going to take a lot of work, and it’s a bit dated, so I’ve been putting it off since it’s only a peripheral interest.)
What evidence do you have that “the problem has mostly been solved for IQ type tests”?
Sorry, that sounded challenging, and it isn’t meant to be. Would you please point me to any books, papers, and so on?
“Arthur Jensen Replies to Stephen Jay Gould : THE DEBUNKING OF SCIENTIFIC FOSSILS AND STRAW PERSONS ” , http://www.debunker.com/texts/jensen.html , is a good place to start. It’s a detailed criticism of Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man” by one of the best psychometricians around. It’s got a good bibliography, but is rather dated being from 1982. No matter what you may think of his politics, Steve Sailer also has a lot of good, and more recent, information in his essays on IQ, especially on international comparisons, on his website, www.isteve.com . Richard Lynn’s books are supposed to be very good also, but I haven’t read them (too many interests, too little time and money).
The very title “debunking of scientific fossils and straw persons” makes it sound like it has limited use. Johnicholas asked for positive statements, but a debunking is purely negative. Just because Gould lied about X doesn’t make his position wrong.
I suspected from your first comment that all you meant was that people who attempt to prove cultural bias in IQ tests have failed. That is certainly true, with some surprising findings, like that the American black-white gap is larger on questions that are, on the face of them, more culturally neutral. But relying on an opposition you don’t trust to do the research is a highly biased search strategy. It is not a great political victory to say that Raven’s matrices are culturally biased, so few say it, but that doesn’t make it false.
Right now, my best source for “answers to Arthur Jensen” is Cosma Shalizi. My understanding is that performance on IQ tests is mostly related to culture—even though that was (to some extent) Gould’s position.
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/494.html
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/495.html
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html
Shalizi simply doesn’t say that.
There are two things you could mean by it. One is that some cultures make you smart. The other is that the IQ test mostly screens for culture and not useful abilities. It is certainly true that culture affects the difference between performance on Raven’s matrices and other tests. In particular, the Flynn effect is stronger for Raven’s matrices than other tests. Also, sub-saharan Africans do dramatically worse on RM than on other estimates, where they’re closer to African-Americans (who do slightly worse on RM than on common tests). In applying this information to the two possibilities about culture, you’d have to decide which testing approach you liked better, which would depend on what you’re trying to measure. “g” is not the correct answer to this question.