Do you believe in IQ tests?

[John99]

They're two completely different things which would show how such a test may be regarded as inefficient. You could be a brilliant artist of your time, though a test may show you have a low IQ.

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.

 

[John99]

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

 

[iceaura]

So the world has a preponderance of intelligent atheist Asian men with schizophrenia.

The schizo ones are theists.

That is not only a joke.

 

[w1z4rd]

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?

 

[phandentium]

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.

Wouldn't it just be better to call an IQ test a Knowledge Quotient?

 

[Baron Max]

Wouldn't it just be better to call an IQ test a Knowledge Quotient?

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?

Baron Max

 

[S.A.M.]

The schizo ones are theists.

That is not only a joke.

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?

"The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won't create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that's not a conclusion to take on faith -- it's what the empirical data tell us."

"…[the study] shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

"The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?

"While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did."


"This is not a new finding. In his 1983 book "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener," skeptic and science writer Martin Gardner cited the decline of traditional religious belief among the better educated as one of the causes for an increase in pseudoscience, cults and superstition. He referenced a 1980 study published in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer that showed irreligious college students to be by far the most likely to embrace paranormal beliefs, while born-again Christian college students were the least likely."

"Surprisingly, while increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs, higher education doesn't. Two years ago two professors published another study in Skeptical Inquirer showing that, while less than one-quarter of college freshmen surveyed expressed a general belief in such superstitions as ghosts, psychic healing, haunted houses, demonic possession, clairvoyance and witches, the figure jumped to 31% of college seniors and 34% of graduate students."

"We can't even count on self-described atheists to be strict rationalists. According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's monumental "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey" that was issued in June, 21% of self-proclaimed atheists believe in either a personal God or an impersonal force. Ten percent of atheists pray at least weekly and 12% believe in heaven."

http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2008/09/gallup-poll-ath.html

See? empirical evidence.

 

[iceaura]

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.

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.

Or superstition and atheism?
- - - -
See? empirical evidence.

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:

"Surprisingly, while increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs,

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.

 

[John99]

Wouldn't it just be better to call an IQ test a Knowledge Quotient?

knowledge is tested all the time.

 

[iceaura]

Wouldn't it just be better to call an IQ test a Knowledge Quotient?

Scientific American named it best: it's called a "Quot test", and the number is your "Quot Score".

 

[S.A.M.]

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.

I've maintained all along that atheism is a belief system. I'm not the one claiming any rational basis for it.

 

[(Q)]

I've maintained all along that atheism is a belief system.

Maintaining fallacies is your entire argument.

 

[iceaura]

I've maintained all along that atheism is a belief system. I'm not the one claiming any rational basis for it.

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.

 

[ecneics]

I believe that everyone is different and some people are better at having a good memory than others because most tests are based on memorization of stuff. There are also many people who do poorly on certain tests than others. I don't think that any test should be able to tell everyone whether you are a smart or a genius.

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).

 

[Liebling]

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.