IQ test may or may not measure intelligence, they measure doing well at what’s usually called abstract thinking pretty well. They don’t really measure cultural knowledge, at least real IQ tests don’t.
Cultural bias being behind the observed gaps isn’t really something that seems very likley to most psychometricians. From a paper titled “Mainstream Science on Intelligence” published to clear up public misconceptions about expert opinion during the debates surrounding the publishing of Murray’s book the Bell Curve.
Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings — “catching on,” “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do.
Intelligence, so defined, can be measured, and intelligence tests measure it well. They are among the most accurate (in technical terms, reliable and valid) of all psychological tests and assessments. They do not measure creativity, character personality, or other important differences among individuals, nor are they intended to.
While there are different types of intelligence tests, they all measure the same intelligence. Some use words or numbers and require specific cultural knowledge (like vocabulary). Others do not, and instead use shapes or designs and require knowledge of only simple, universal concepts (many/few, open/closed, up/down).
… Intelligence tests are not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born, English-speaking peoples in the U.S. Rather, IQ scores predict equally accurately for all such Americans, regardless of race and social class. Individuals who do not understand English well can be given either a nonverbal test or one in their native language.
Some experts of course disagree with this. And common sense. I can sort of see why Askenazi Jews do better on IQ tests than other European Americans because they are culturally literate, wealthy and more educated, rather than high IQs leading to cultural literacy and education. But why do East Asians? In Asia even? I suppose it could just happen to be that stuff that goes with high status in Western society has the same function in East Asian societies. In basically every developed country ever.
That then brings us dangerously close to considering that some cultures may be objectively better at making a working, prosperous and safe technological society, maybe, we should work to change those aspects among immigrants, perhaps even their native countries to improve their quality of life? Oh but that’s a no no you nasty nasty cultural imperialist utilitarian!
But leaving this last tangent aside, the “IQ tests are biased and thus don’t suggest actual differences in intelligence” is far from the ultimate argument against such policies, that we all know it would be used as such against any proposal to limit immigration to any Western country with IQ testing. Funny how formal education as a criteria for immigration isn’t ever put down with the same argument.
At this point lets once again for the sake of argument say that the dissenting experts are right. Even so, the test still accurately measure how well large groups of people do in Western type societies, since they are positively correlated with everything from health to education attainment to low criminality to high income. Any country trying to craft the best policy for its citizens would find such a measure useful, since it measures something as trivial as … you know… how well the people are actually probably going to do, as it is, nothow well society wants to pretend they are likley to do.
Hence my sarcastic comment, aimed at the kind of objections that would be used to oppose such a no-brainer (pardon the pun) policy.
But leaving this last tangent aside, “{some claim that people actually make}” is far from the ultimate argument against such policies, that we all know it would be used as against any proposal to {do some thing}. Funny how {vaguely analogous thing frequently criticized with equally analogous arguments} isn’t ever put down with {equally analogous arguments}.
That then brings us dangerously close to considering that some cultures may be objectively better at making a working, prosperous and safe technological society, maybe, we should work to change those aspects among immigrants, perhaps even their native countries to improve their quality of life? Oh but that’s a no no you nasty nasty cultural imperialist utilitarian!
I actually have not seen anyone go down the argument branch you’re talking about here. I mean, are there people who are actually against foreign aid programs aimed at improving school attendance or literacy rates? On any grounds besides finding a more efficient charitrons-per-dollar scheme, I mean.
I actually have not seen anyone go down the argument branch you’re talking about here.
Do you mean that you haven’t seen anyone here (on LW) go down this branch? Or that you haven’t seen anyone (in general) go down the branch that CJ is, here (in this thread), talking about?
The latter. I’ve heard arguments along the lines of “We shouldn’t do X because it’s imperialist” before, but usually in regards to artistic or military interactions, not foreign aid work.
For my own part, it depends on which “aspects” CJ is talking about.
For example, I know some people who argue that Christian cultures are objectively better at making a working, prosperous, and safe society, and that therefore we should work to convert immigrants and their native cultures to Christianity. And I know people who object to such interventions on the grounds that this is nasty cultural imperialism.
Of course, CJ is not talking about Christianity, so that’s irrelevant; I mention it only as a concrete example the kind of pattern I’m thinking about.
CJ is talking about some other aspect of certain cultures… call it X. As I understand it, CJ believes X encourages abstract thinking, which explains higher IQ scores among residents of X-rich cultures, and explains high status among X-possessors in just about every developed country ever.
I’m not sure if anyone actually proposes bringing X to cultures that lack it, nor if anyone actually criticizes such X-proselytizers as nasty cultural imperialists, though. That’s because I’m not sure what X actually is.
Since you mention Christianity, here is an example of the transformation power of introducing new memeplexes on the practice of killing cursed (“mingi”) children:
Missionaries first came to the Banna decades ago, and the Christian church here is larger than any other among the tribes of this region. Still, their numbers are small; Banna’s Christians make up just 1 or 2 percent of the tribe’s population.
But their collective efforts have been enough to almost eliminate mingi killings within their tribe. With little money or other means of support, Banna’s Christians have accepted responsibility for nearly all of the tribe’s mingi children. Many, like Kaiso, are already caring for one or more mingi boys and girls. One family has taken in 17 foster children.
Whether the slow end of the killing of children because of superstition constitutes objective working or prosperous society is a matter of debate (population growth and all that Jazz). I find it hard to deny that this kind of “cultural imperialism”, seems right to me.
Much like, and this goes partially against my principles, I wouldn’t mind, in a different branch of our universe, forcibly converting modern day Aztec’s still sacrificing thousands of people to the Sun each year to Christianity (or Islam for that matter).
In the context of CJ’s original post, I suspect this is tangential, though as above I’m not entirely sure… infanticide, superstition, or some combination thereof might be the mysterious X. (Or, rather, their negation might be.)
If X is anti-infanticide, I think the original claim is simply wrong, but I do agree that real people do propose bringing X to cultures that lack it (as you describe with the Banna). And there’s probably someone somewhere objecting to that as cultural imperialism, though probably not with much support.
If X is anti-superstition, the original claim might be right and is worth experimenting with, and I’d grant that people like Hitchens and Dennett and Dawkins could be construed as proposing bringing X to cultures that lack it, including my own. (And they are definitely objected to as an analog to cultural imperialists.)
For example, I know some people who argue that Christian cultures are objectively better at making a working, prosperous, and safe society, and that therefore we should work to convert immigrants and their native cultures to Christianity.
Strictly enforced monogamy by Christianity coupled with strong rules against inbreeding (extending beyond cousins!) perhaps are something that fits the bill . Obviously modern Western Christianity seems to be slowly abandoning both, with the exception of fundamentalists.
I’m pretty sure that if one could push a button that would convert the non-Islamic population of Africa to Christianity instantly one would see an improvement in the measurable standard of living. Doing the same for the Muslim population might or might not (one would have to weight its effect on the spread of AIDS vs. the gain women would enjoy).
Will probably produce different societies, not to mention values. In many respects Western “humanism” is deeply infected with “Christian” memes, it partially serves as a refuge for atheists to shepperd the ones they liked from Christianity into it.
For me, the most obvious candidate for X is literacy and mathematics education, so that’s what I was thinking about. However, you’re right that religion fits CJ’s pattern a lot better.
The important difference may be that religion is usually proposed as a method of increasing a society’s morality, rather than its level of comfort or wealth. Perhaps that’s what makes it more apt to be seen as imperialist: Compared to metrics for safety or prosperity, morality metrics are easier to see as a relativistic thing that societies ought to define internally. The resistance against IQ as a metric to focus on internationally may be similarly explained.
Okay, I was three when I got an IQ test, so I can’t give a detailed account, but I clearly remember thinking at the time that the test mostly measured my parents’ ability and willingness to teach me math and reading.
Okay, I was three when I got an IQ test, so I can’t give a detailed account, but I clearly remember thinking at the time that the test mostly measured my parents’ ability and willingness to teach me math and reading.
I’m not sure how much I would trust a 3 year old’s understanding of psychometrics and population dynamics.
A child’s IQ test at very early ages like 3 is a very poor indicator of later life performance on IQ tests and has even poorer predictive power (once controlled for parents) for other things IQ is generally good at predicting. The correlation is just around 0.4 or perhaps 0.5. Some kids develop faster than others, peaking early, some are prodigys and mediocre adults, others get hit on the head.
I’m not really sure why anyone would give their 3 year old an IQ test.
Let alone an adult’s recollections of when he was 3… I barely remember anything about when I was that young, and as for those few memories I have, I’m not 100% sure they are genuine (as opposed to me having reconstructed them from stories my parents told me/videos and photos they showed me/etc.).
Back then I thought prodigies were so rare that this was an acceptable heuristic, and if I needed to prove my competence to an adult I could just talk to them for five minutes. Then I read about signalling.
Trust their competence in a given domain, yeah. To take a non-IQ-related field, I would have said “It’s fair to assume a six-year-old, or even an adult, doesn’t understand much about economics and therefore their opinion of it is worthless. Most don’t. And that’s okay, because if I need to prove I can explain it, I’ll just do. And then they’ll trust my understanding of it and listen to the opinions I base on it.”.
And that’s true to an extent. But an adult can pick up so much cheap credit condescending to children that they just don’t start trusting them. If a kid demonstrates their understanding of economics to an adult, the adult will praise the child, but not even think that the child’s opinions on economic policy (as opposed to, say, a pundit’s) should carry any weight.
Do you expect to see those sorts of objections here?
No. But I’m disappointed people are so naive to actually suggest that testing for IQ directly may be more politically doable than just rigging the country and education quotas to get the same effect.
What do you seek to accomplish with your sarcasm?
Same as any person who uses sarcasm.
But to be a bit less confrontational, I’m just bloody tired of the whole debate. And I’m tired with the whole magical thinking that surrounds squishy social knock off effects that certain truths may or may not have. Having to constantly reiterate the basic arguments and taking people by the hand and leading them over the data and literature, only for people to eventually quiet down perhaps mumbling something about how its probably true but we can’t ever talk about it because it will make things so much worse… And this is the very best case scenario! Even on pretty reasonable sites with high standards lots of people instantly go into arguments as soldiers mode.
The debate literally has nothing new of interest to offer, since I’ve visited all the branches of that conversation and LW rarely searches more than two or three levels into that space. I keep having to explain the same elementary principles over and over and over again (LW is better in this regard but only by degree or two, I mean heck you still get people trying to claim intelligence dosen’t matter for socio-economic outcomes or confusing the remaining “nurture” as in non-heritable factors with something that is automatically fixable by some social policy, instead of a confusing sea of many different crazy random stuff like what you get in nearly every biological system in animals that we have even less idea how to influence without nasty side effects than splicing its genes).
Rereading the original reply I made, sure perhaps its a bit harsh and maybe I should have just been quiet, so perhaps my emotions got the best of me. Usually I try to invest some effort into the replies I give on this site. Today I just went with the accurate, fun and perhaps a somewhat bitter thing to write.
No. But I’m disappointed people are so naive to actually suggest that testing for IQ directly may be more politically doable than just rigging the country and education quotas to get the same effect.
I suspect they were discussing desirability, not feasibility. If we, say, limited Indian migration to the US to just Gujaratis, we wouldn’t get as good results as if we limited Indian migrants to the US to just those above IQ 120, even if Gujaratis are disproportionately represented among high IQ Indians.
I suspect they were discussing desirability, not feasibility. If we, say, limited Indian migration to the US to just Gujaratis, we wouldn’t get as good results as if we limited Indian migrants to the US to just those above IQ 120, even if Gujaratis are disproportionately represented among high IQ Indians.
IQ test may or may not measure intelligence, they measure doing well at what’s usually called abstract thinking pretty well. They don’t really measure cultural knowledge, at least real IQ tests don’t.
Cultural bias being behind the observed gaps isn’t really something that seems very likley to most psychometricians. From a paper titled “Mainstream Science on Intelligence” published to clear up public misconceptions about expert opinion during the debates surrounding the publishing of Murray’s book the Bell Curve.
Some experts of course disagree with this. And common sense. I can sort of see why Askenazi Jews do better on IQ tests than other European Americans because they are culturally literate, wealthy and more educated, rather than high IQs leading to cultural literacy and education. But why do East Asians? In Asia even? I suppose it could just happen to be that stuff that goes with high status in Western society has the same function in East Asian societies. In basically every developed country ever.
That then brings us dangerously close to considering that some cultures may be objectively better at making a working, prosperous and safe technological society, maybe, we should work to change those aspects among immigrants, perhaps even their native countries to improve their quality of life? Oh but that’s a no no you nasty nasty cultural imperialist utilitarian!
But leaving this last tangent aside, the “IQ tests are biased and thus don’t suggest actual differences in intelligence” is far from the ultimate argument against such policies, that we all know it would be used as such against any proposal to limit immigration to any Western country with IQ testing. Funny how formal education as a criteria for immigration isn’t ever put down with the same argument.
At this point lets once again for the sake of argument say that the dissenting experts are right. Even so, the test still accurately measure how well large groups of people do in Western type societies, since they are positively correlated with everything from health to education attainment to low criminality to high income. Any country trying to craft the best policy for its citizens would find such a measure useful, since it measures something as trivial as … you know… how well the people are actually probably going to do, as it is, not how well society wants to pretend they are likley to do.
Hence my sarcastic comment, aimed at the kind of objections that would be used to oppose such a no-brainer (pardon the pun) policy.
Hey, look, it’s every Robin Hanson post.
No no that is just a special case of Robin Hanson posts, this is the general rule.
I actually have not seen anyone go down the argument branch you’re talking about here. I mean, are there people who are actually against foreign aid programs aimed at improving school attendance or literacy rates? On any grounds besides finding a more efficient charitrons-per-dollar scheme, I mean.
Do you mean that you haven’t seen anyone here (on LW) go down this branch?
Or that you haven’t seen anyone (in general) go down the branch that CJ is, here (in this thread), talking about?
The latter. I’ve heard arguments along the lines of “We shouldn’t do X because it’s imperialist” before, but usually in regards to artistic or military interactions, not foreign aid work.
Gotcha.
For my own part, it depends on which “aspects” CJ is talking about.
For example, I know some people who argue that Christian cultures are objectively better at making a working, prosperous, and safe society, and that therefore we should work to convert immigrants and their native cultures to Christianity. And I know people who object to such interventions on the grounds that this is nasty cultural imperialism.
Of course, CJ is not talking about Christianity, so that’s irrelevant; I mention it only as a concrete example the kind of pattern I’m thinking about.
CJ is talking about some other aspect of certain cultures… call it X. As I understand it, CJ believes X encourages abstract thinking, which explains higher IQ scores among residents of X-rich cultures, and explains high status among X-possessors in just about every developed country ever.
I’m not sure if anyone actually proposes bringing X to cultures that lack it, nor if anyone actually criticizes such X-proselytizers as nasty cultural imperialists, though. That’s because I’m not sure what X actually is.
Since you mention Christianity, here is an example of the transformation power of introducing new memeplexes on the practice of killing cursed (“mingi”) children:
Whether the slow end of the killing of children because of superstition constitutes objective working or prosperous society is a matter of debate (population growth and all that Jazz). I find it hard to deny that this kind of “cultural imperialism”, seems right to me.
Much like, and this goes partially against my principles, I wouldn’t mind, in a different branch of our universe, forcibly converting modern day Aztec’s still sacrificing thousands of people to the Sun each year to Christianity (or Islam for that matter).
In the context of CJ’s original post, I suspect this is tangential, though as above I’m not entirely sure… infanticide, superstition, or some combination thereof might be the mysterious X. (Or, rather, their negation might be.)
If X is anti-infanticide, I think the original claim is simply wrong, but I do agree that real people do propose bringing X to cultures that lack it (as you describe with the Banna). And there’s probably someone somewhere objecting to that as cultural imperialism, though probably not with much support.
If X is anti-superstition, the original claim might be right and is worth experimenting with, and I’d grant that people like Hitchens and Dennett and Dawkins could be construed as proposing bringing X to cultures that lack it, including my own. (And they are definitely objected to as an analog to cultural imperialists.)
Strictly enforced monogamy by Christianity coupled with strong rules against inbreeding (extending beyond cousins!) perhaps are something that fits the bill . Obviously modern Western Christianity seems to be slowly abandoning both, with the exception of fundamentalists.
I’m pretty sure that if one could push a button that would convert the non-Islamic population of Africa to Christianity instantly one would see an improvement in the measurable standard of living. Doing the same for the Muslim population might or might not (one would have to weight its effect on the spread of AIDS vs. the gain women would enjoy).
Also I think I need to point out that:
African tribal religion > Christianity > Atheism
African tribal religion > African tribal religion > Atheism
Will probably produce different societies, not to mention values. In many respects Western “humanism” is deeply infected with “Christian” memes, it partially serves as a refuge for atheists to shepperd the ones they liked from Christianity into it.
For me, the most obvious candidate for X is literacy and mathematics education, so that’s what I was thinking about. However, you’re right that religion fits CJ’s pattern a lot better.
The important difference may be that religion is usually proposed as a method of increasing a society’s morality, rather than its level of comfort or wealth. Perhaps that’s what makes it more apt to be seen as imperialist: Compared to metrics for safety or prosperity, morality metrics are easier to see as a relativistic thing that societies ought to define internally. The resistance against IQ as a metric to focus on internationally may be similarly explained.
Okay, I was three when I got an IQ test, so I can’t give a detailed account, but I clearly remember thinking at the time that the test mostly measured my parents’ ability and willingness to teach me math and reading.
I’m not sure how much I would trust a 3 year old’s understanding of psychometrics and population dynamics.
A child’s IQ test at very early ages like 3 is a very poor indicator of later life performance on IQ tests and has even poorer predictive power (once controlled for parents) for other things IQ is generally good at predicting. The correlation is just around 0.4 or perhaps 0.5. Some kids develop faster than others, peaking early, some are prodigys and mediocre adults, others get hit on the head.
I’m not really sure why anyone would give their 3 year old an IQ test.
Bragging rights?
Let alone an adult’s recollections of when he was 3… I barely remember anything about when I was that young, and as for those few memories I have, I’m not 100% sure they are genuine (as opposed to me having reconstructed them from stories my parents told me/videos and photos they showed me/etc.).
A persistent problem with investigating childhood amnesia.
Back then I thought prodigies were so rare that this was an acceptable heuristic, and if I needed to prove my competence to an adult I could just talk to them for five minutes. Then I read about signalling.
I find this interesting-seeming but confusing. Could you elaborate?
You thought it was acceptable to not trust the young, but that if you talked to the old you could get them to trust you?
How does signaling enter in?
Trust their competence in a given domain, yeah. To take a non-IQ-related field, I would have said “It’s fair to assume a six-year-old, or even an adult, doesn’t understand much about economics and therefore their opinion of it is worthless. Most don’t. And that’s okay, because if I need to prove I can explain it, I’ll just do. And then they’ll trust my understanding of it and listen to the opinions I base on it.”.
And that’s true to an extent. But an adult can pick up so much cheap credit condescending to children that they just don’t start trusting them. If a kid demonstrates their understanding of economics to an adult, the adult will praise the child, but not even think that the child’s opinions on economic policy (as opposed to, say, a pundit’s) should carry any weight.
Among other things it can make the old not trust the young even after they have been given sufficient evidence of their expertise.
Do you expect to see those sorts of objections here? What do you seek to accomplish with your sarcasm?
No. But I’m disappointed people are so naive to actually suggest that testing for IQ directly may be more politically doable than just rigging the country and education quotas to get the same effect.
Same as any person who uses sarcasm.
But to be a bit less confrontational, I’m just bloody tired of the whole debate. And I’m tired with the whole magical thinking that surrounds squishy social knock off effects that certain truths may or may not have. Having to constantly reiterate the basic arguments and taking people by the hand and leading them over the data and literature, only for people to eventually quiet down perhaps mumbling something about how its probably true but we can’t ever talk about it because it will make things so much worse… And this is the very best case scenario! Even on pretty reasonable sites with high standards lots of people instantly go into arguments as soldiers mode.
The debate literally has nothing new of interest to offer, since I’ve visited all the branches of that conversation and LW rarely searches more than two or three levels into that space. I keep having to explain the same elementary principles over and over and over again (LW is better in this regard but only by degree or two, I mean heck you still get people trying to claim intelligence dosen’t matter for socio-economic outcomes or confusing the remaining “nurture” as in non-heritable factors with something that is automatically fixable by some social policy, instead of a confusing sea of many different crazy random stuff like what you get in nearly every biological system in animals that we have even less idea how to influence without nasty side effects than splicing its genes).
Rereading the original reply I made, sure perhaps its a bit harsh and maybe I should have just been quiet, so perhaps my emotions got the best of me. Usually I try to invest some effort into the replies I give on this site. Today I just went with the accurate, fun and perhaps a somewhat bitter thing to write.
I suspect they were discussing desirability, not feasibility. If we, say, limited Indian migration to the US to just Gujaratis, we wouldn’t get as good results as if we limited Indian migrants to the US to just those above IQ 120, even if Gujaratis are disproportionately represented among high IQ Indians.
I understand and sympathize.
On the matter of desirability I tend to agree.