Thank you for clarifying your points. I mistakenly interpreted “often enough” as indicating some threshold of frequency of false positives beyond which it would not be appropriate to take the problem seriously. I apologize for arguing a straw man.
I was considering mostly the difference among people of different races in the United States, as I assumed that would minimize the effects of cultural difference (though not eliminate it) on the intelligence of the participants and their test results. I would anticipate that cultural influences do affect a person’s intelligence—the hypothetical quality which we imperfectly measure, not the impact that quality leaves on a test—as it can motivate certain avenues of self-improvement through its values, or simply allow access to different resources.
I am not surprised that there are IQ differences among racial groups. In fact, I would be shocked to learn that every culture and every natural environment and every historical happening in the entirety of human civilization happened to produce the exact same level of average intelligence. I would be surprised, but not shocked, to learn that there existed a strong, direct causation between race (as a genetic difference rather than a social phenomenon) and intelligence.
I did not mean to imply that because a test outputs different results for different racial groups, that it must be biased. I merely meant to say that bias can exist, though I am not certain whether or not it does, or to what degree. All in all, I seem to have made rather a fool of myself, jumping at shadows, and for that I am sorry.
Thank you for clarifying your points. I mistakenly interpreted “often enough” as indicating some threshold of frequency of false positives beyond which it would not be appropriate to take the problem seriously. I apologize for arguing a straw man.
I was considering mostly the difference among people of different races in the United States, as I assumed that would minimize the effects of cultural difference (though not eliminate it) on the intelligence of the participants and their test results. I would anticipate that cultural influences do affect a person’s intelligence—the hypothetical quality which we imperfectly measure, not the impact that quality leaves on a test—as it can motivate certain avenues of self-improvement through its values, or simply allow access to different resources.
I am not surprised that there are IQ differences among racial groups. In fact, I would be shocked to learn that every culture and every natural environment and every historical happening in the entirety of human civilization happened to produce the exact same level of average intelligence. I would be surprised, but not shocked, to learn that there existed a strong, direct causation between race (as a genetic difference rather than a social phenomenon) and intelligence.
I did not mean to imply that because a test outputs different results for different racial groups, that it must be biased. I merely meant to say that bias can exist, though I am not certain whether or not it does, or to what degree. All in all, I seem to have made rather a fool of myself, jumping at shadows, and for that I am sorry.