I don’t buy the way that Spencer tried to norm the ClearerThinking test. It sounds like he just assumed that people who took their test and had a college degree as their highest level of education had the same IQ as the portion of the general population with the same educational level, and similarly for all other education levels. Then he used that to scale how scores on the ClearerThinking test correspond to IQs. That seems like a very strong and probably inaccurate assumption.
Much of what this post and Scott’s post are using the ClearerThinking IQ numbers for relies on this norming.
It occurs to me that the ClearerThinking data provides a way to check this assumption. It included data from 2 different groups, crowdworkers and people in Spencer’s social network. If college-degree-level crowdworkers did just as well on the ClearerThinking test as college-degree-level people in Spencer’s network, then it becomes more plausible that both did about as well as college-degree-level people in the general population would have. Whereas if the college-degree-level crowdworkers and Spencer’s network people scored differently, then obviously they can’t both match the college-degree-level general population, so there’d be an open question about how the groups compare and direct evidence against the accuracy of Spencer’s method of norming the test.
I don’t buy the way that Spencer tried to norm the ClearerThinking test. It sounds like he just assumed that people who took their test and had a college degree as their highest level of education had the same IQ as the portion of the general population with the same educational level, and similarly for all other education levels. Then he used that to scale how scores on the ClearerThinking test correspond to IQs. That seems like a very strong and probably inaccurate assumption.
Much of what this post and Scott’s post are using the ClearerThinking IQ numbers for relies on this norming.
It occurs to me that the ClearerThinking data provides a way to check this assumption. It included data from 2 different groups, crowdworkers and people in Spencer’s social network. If college-degree-level crowdworkers did just as well on the ClearerThinking test as college-degree-level people in Spencer’s network, then it becomes more plausible that both did about as well as college-degree-level people in the general population would have. Whereas if the college-degree-level crowdworkers and Spencer’s network people scored differently, then obviously they can’t both match the college-degree-level general population, so there’d be an open question about how the groups compare and direct evidence against the accuracy of Spencer’s method of norming the test.