Re: IQ AND RACE. The taboo subject.

Fury (fury@dartmouth.edu)
13 Feb 1995 01:41:24 GMT

In article <D3uqE6.3nM@eskimo.com>
lajoie@eskimo.com (Stephen Lajoie) writes:

> If you have IQ but no access to education, you score poorly on the SAT. If
> you have access to education but no IQ, you score poorly on the SAT. If
> you have IQ and access to education, you score well on the SAT.

Er, not true. I can only presume that by "IQ" you mean that which is
measured by an I.Q. test (since that is the measure being discussed
here, whatever the quality being measured might be), and that to "have
IQ" you mean to score well on an I.Q. test. Have you ever seen or
taken an I.Q. test? If you have no access to education, you will by no
means "have IQ" by your definition. I.Q. tests are designed to measure
in part how well children and adults have absorbed education (without
truly taking into account what sort of education was offered them). A
person with no formal schooling, while possibly scoring well on some
sections, would be doomed to fare poorly on an I.Q. test overall. A
person with a poor introduction to society's broader expectations of
them - e.g., what to do should you witness smoke floating from a
neighbor's window, with all the steps in the "correct" order, a
question that does appear on the WISC, a common I.Q. test for those
under 16 - would fare even more poorly.

> The old IQ test are not like the new IQ test. Most of these bias have
> been eliminated. The differences in mean score between the "social
> categories" remains.

There is no one "old IQ test" or "new IQ test." There are a large
number of I.Q. tests, some more or less popular, which measure
different sets of skills with different weights. You should also not
be so quick to assume bias has been removed. If a psychologist is
attempting to determine how well someone is adapted to society's
expectations, including education, and is looking for clues as to where
difficulties may lie, questions that determine that person's
familiarity with and absorption of societal rules are fairly useful.
Whether or not such tests measure the more nebulous quality of
"intelligence," heedless of the effects of environment, is another
matter.

--

"But the first thing next morning we reflected | fury@dartmouth.edu

 If one by one we counted people out           |

 For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long   | -- Robert Frost,

 To get so we had no one left to live with."   | "The Star-Splitter"