Do you believe in IQ tests?

Discussion in 'Science & Society' started by S.A.M., Dec 1, 2008.

?

I believe that IQ tests are an accurate reflection of social realities.

  1. Yes

    27.8%
  2. No

    50.0%
  3. Some other opinion

    22.2%
  1. John99 Banned Banned

    Messages:
    22,046
    i suppose information can be useful from IQ tests. my example was a little extreme and basically i was saying that an abused child wont care about IQ tests or that this line has an A on it and this one has a B on it.

    It's not just that test but the thing is that in grade school is where you will learn how to perform on these tests into the future. They are all basically the same. The numbers change slightly, the patterns changed but i think that at some point you be able to associate the test content to what you already have come across. When an adult takes this test, who woukd fall into theh category referenced in the first paragraph then...

    blah, blah, blah...this may be a little different than what the OP is asking. On the other hand anything that measures beyond basic skills would need to take into account the learned or experence edge.

    My IQ varies from 50 to a little under 200.
     
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  3. John99 Banned Banned

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    i believe that an IQ test <b />needs to be administered soon after birth and the toddlers need to be in a controlled environment.
     
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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The schizo ones are theists.

    That is not only a joke.
     
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  7. w1z4rd Valued Senior Member

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    When I think about it.. due to habitat (home environment, education, human rights) and genes.

    Are not black males on average able to produce better athletes?
    Are not Eastern (Chinese/Japanese) people on average more intelligent than Caucasians?
     
  8. phandentium Greatest title Registered Senior Member

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    Wouldn't it just be better to call an IQ test a Knowledge Quotient?
     
  9. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    23,053
    No, it's better to keep using the old IQ tests ....it gives all of us something else to complain about and write silly posts on Internet forums like sciforums.

    Geez, if everything was perfect in the world, what could we complain about?

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  10. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    Are or are likely to be? Not the same thing. Are they also lefthanded? Cos lefthanded people are more likely to be both intelligent and insane. Any idea if there is a correlation between handedness and athiesm?

    Or superstition and atheism?

    See? empirical evidence.

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  11. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    I've never seen a reliable study on that.

    And the non-vernacular, logical argument difference between "likely to be" and "are" vanishes in any discussion involving you and religion. (The tendency of some Jews in many places to band together and live near each other, for example, becomes "Jews isolate themselves" ). You don't even keep the direction of logical implication straight, justifying when called (if you bother) by pointing to the absurdities of the people you are responding to.
    Works for me. Right up there with 10% of "atheists" praying to a "higher power" every week, and 21% of "atheists" believing in heaven.

    BTW: The common trivialization of superstition and magical thinking when it escapes from formal religious regulation is famous. (Dawkins discusses it in his books).

    But we apparently have some reportorial bias in your quote. This is ridiculous:
    Membership in a conservative denomination and increased church attendance has a nearly 100% positive correlation with paranormal beliefs, probably because the services, practices, and exhortations found there are millenia-refined methods for inculcating them.
     
  12. John99 Banned Banned

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    knowledge is tested all the time.
     
  13. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Scientific American named it best: it's called a "Quot test", and the number is your "Quot Score".
     
  14. S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

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    I've maintained all along that atheism is a belief system. I'm not the one claiming any rational basis for it.
     
  15. (Q) Encephaloid Martini Valued Senior Member

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    Maintaining fallacies is your entire argument.
     
  16. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    You are the one claiming, when convenient, that anyone who worships or prays to a "higher power" is a theist, that in fact anyone with a religion is a theist.

    And then you post that above, and attempt to draw conclusions from it.

    So by the evidence you haven't been maintaining anything at all about "atheism", partly because you have no idea what it is, whose "belief systems" would be part of it, or how to tell when you are faced with an example of it.

    Theism appears to be coextensive - even synonymous - with prosocial behavior, in your mind - or as I've pointed out before, if you set up a deity it will take the credit (and deflect the blame) from then on. This is crippling to reason, of course - and anything dependent on reason, such as an investigation into prosocial behavior in humans or the many other social animals.

    Which may be one reason IQ tests score very theistic people lower, on average. Or maybe not.
     
  17. ecneics Registered Member

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    2
    ond (1924) early last century pointed out that the average IQ scores of African Americans from several northern states were higher than those for whites from many southern states (Bond, 1924a, p. 63). He argued that African Americans who migrated to the North must have left their "duller and less accomplished White fellows in the South." Indeed, at that time upward of 85% of African Americans resided in the South, as most still do, to do this day. Bond also believed that IQ test scores reflected social and educational training. Inline with this belief, Jenkins's (1936) reported the results of IQ tests given to Black and White children in Illinois, and found that the proportion of students with scores over 130 was the same among Black and White children when environmental influences were comparable. A study involving Caribbean children would essentially replicate these findings. For example, this study found that when raised in the same enriched institutional environments as white children; black children demonstrated superior IQ test scores. The IQ’s of the children in this particular orphanage were: Blacks 108, Mixed 106, and Whites 103 (Tizard et al, 1972).


    In the United States, when matched for IQ with Whites, American Blacks have been shown to demonstrate superior “Working Memory” (Nijenhuis et al., 2004). This is an interesting finding, as African Americans are typically taught by less qualified teachers (e.g. non-certified teachers and teachers with limited experience) than their white counterparts, and are provided with less challenging school work (Hallinan 1994; Diamond et al., 2004; Uhlenberg and Brown 2004). In Chicago, for example, the vast majority of schools placed on academic probation as part of the district accountability efforts were majority African-American and low-income (Diamond and Spillane 2004). Thus, it is somewhat surprising that African Americans should outperform white Americans on any portion of a paper and pencil test designed to mimic the structures of western style schooling (Richardson, 2000, 2002).
     
  18. Liebling Doesn't Need to be Spoonfed. Valued Senior Member

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    IQ tests give you a good idea about Logic and Reasoning skills of any individual, which is a big sign of a head that can think clearly and intelligently.

    It does make sense that some groups score lower if you also look at their general actions in life and society really. It doesn't surprise me that women score lower than men, or that it goes blacks>whites>asians either if you look at the advancement in those countries and how each country is structured. The US wants to think that it's ahead of everyone else in all fields, but the honest part about that is that Japan and China are both more advanced in many ways, they just don't show their cards.

    There is some validity to an IQ test, but it doesn't discover creative genius, or the specific genius of highly specialized individuals.
     

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