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killbilly:
Never called you a racist,at all, first off.
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You implied I was racist several times, please do not pretend otherwise.
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I don't know why you are being rude and belligerent to me when I'm one of the only people who really hasn't attacked you.
Second, studying intelligence has always been an imperfect science because so many factors contribute and there are still many things we don't even understand about the brain. No theory is perfect, especially in a field like this. If you want to know more about what we don't understand, google/wikipedia the myriad of theories surrounding the functions of the neocortex, intelligence, etc. etc.
This basic 'mental reasoning ability' you speak of is not cut-and-dry. Sure, you can test for the recognition of patterns. Sure, you can test for understand of reading passages. But the layout, language, and structure of those examinations can severely affect who does well. Not to say there is no value in tests like the SAT or IQ tests. But to use them as the sole indicator of intelligence period is inaccurate.
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Read the stuff I posted from the other site:
oups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments ... proponents of ethnic and racial differences in the past have been targets of censorship, violence, and comparisons to Nazis. Large swaths of the intellectual landscape have been reengineered to try to rule these hypotheses out a priori (race does not exist, intelligence does not exist, the mind is a blank slate...)
Steven Pinker - The Edge Annual Question - 2006. "What is your dangerous idea?"
Of course pointing to the testing data alone is hardly sufficient to quell these latter-day inquisitors. There is, sadly, an infinite regress of obscurantist objections designed to intellectually moot these issues entirely. These objections are not scientific, and are at odds with the data, logic, and, more often, both.
Systematic media misrepresentations of psychometric science have been occurring for going on 40 years.
In 1988 Stanley Rothman and Mark Snyderman published The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy. Along with data from their 1987 study of over 1000 scholars in fields familiar with IQ testing, such as psychology, sociology, and behavioral genetics, Rothman and Snyderman took a quantitative look at media coverage of IQ and demonstrated how this media coverage habitually diverged with mainstream scholarly opinion.
This is particularly egregious during times of IQ controversy.
Media reports and editorials were quick to attack Watson on the premise that any statement about intelligence measures is scientifically indefensible, because science cannot study something so immeasurable and indefinable as intelligence. Cornelia Dean reporting for the New York Times did just this:
[T]here is wide disagreement about what intelligence consists of and how - or even if - it can be measured in the abstract.
Laura Blue in Time Magazine asserted:
... science has no agreed-upon definition of "intelligence" either - let alone an agreed-upon method to test it. All kinds of cultural biases have been identified in IQ tests, for example. If there is something fundamental in our brains that regulates our capacity to learn, we have yet to separate its effects from the effects of everything that we experience after we're born.
Similarly, Steven Rose in the New Statesmen:
... the question of what constitutes 'intelligence' is itself problematic - the word has much broader and diverse meanings than what can be encompassed in IQ tests.
Robert Sternberg in the Chicago Tribune:
Sternberg, a critic of traditional intelligence testing, believes intelligence can mean something different for different cultures. In parts of Africa, a good gauge of intelligence might be how well someone avoids infection with malaria -- a test of cleverness that most Americans likely would flunk.
In the same way, for many Africans who take Western IQ tests, "our problems aren't relevant to them," Sternberg said."
First of all, an intelligence test cannot and is not designed to tell you the reasons people score differently. So the fact that the test by itself has nothing to say about genetics is not a failure of the test. Second, the assertion of widespread chaos within science over intelligence is false. The statement that there are a number of theoretical differences about the concept of intelligence is only trivially true. In the practical context of research, provisional understanding, and 'normal science' this is rhetorically equivalent to underlining evolution as "only a theory" in media reports. Intelligence as a working scientific research concept and tool is both widespread (as a search for terms such as 'IQ', 'Intelligence' or 'cognitive ability' on PubMed, Google Scholar, or similar publication databases will show), and broadly consistent in approaches and shared theory, methods, premises, and data. The American Psychological Association's 11 member 'taskforce', assembled for a consensus statement on intelligence research, reported:
... [M]uch of our discussion is devoted to the dominant psychometric approach, which has not only inspired the most research and attracted the most attention (up to this time) but is by far the most widely used in practical settings.
Third, "All kinds of cultural biases" certainly have not been reported in IQ tests. The tests are not "biased" in the sense that psychometricians use this term. Again the APA taskforce showed consensus on this issue:
... the relevant question is whether the tests have a "predictive bias" against Blacks, Such a bias would exist if African-American performance on the criterion variables (school achievement, college GPA, etc.) were systematically higher than the same subjects' test scores would predict. This is not the case. The actual regression lines (which show the mean criterion performance for individuals who got various scores on the predictor) for Blacks do not lie above those for Whites; there is even a slight tendency in the other direction (Jensen, 1980; Reynolds &:Brown, 1984). Considered as predictors of future performance, the tests do not seem to be biased against African Americans.
Similarly Robert Sternberg argues that the tests are biased because they allegedly don't measure the sorts of abilities that are necessary for Africans to succeed in their unique environmental niche. This statement is not only a patronizing and idyllic caricature of African needs, but is also empirically false. This idea was addressed by psychologist Earl Hunt in his peer commentary on Rindermann:
There are two reasons that national-level differences in intelligence have been disregarded. One is that it can be argued that intelligence, as evaluated by these tests, is a Western concept, and that the abilities evaluated by the tests may not be the ones valued by non-western societies. This is a spurious argument for two reasons. First, the economic indicators we are trying to relate to intelligence are also Western concepts. As the commentator Thomas Friedman has said, the world is flat. We are not asking whether or not various national populations have the ability to compete in their own societies, we are asking about their ability to compete in the Western-defined international marketplace. The tests are appropriately designed to address this question. (p 727)
In fact, economists Eric A. Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann report that the association between economic outcomes and measured intelligence appear to be even higher within developing African countries than within Western countries. (pp 13-15) Similarly, at the national level, psychologists Earl Hunt and Werner Wittmann found that the relationship between GDP and national average IQ was stronger for the mostly African developing countries than it was among the developed industrial countries. (0.70 vs 0.58)
In their literature review, Kendall, Verster, and Von Mollendorf found that correlations between employee performance and educational outcomes and cognitive ability did not differ for blacks and whites in Southern Africa. In other words, at school or on the job, an African white with an IQ score of 70 will perform no different than an African black with the same score. Similarly an African black with an IQ of 115 performs the same as an African white with the same score.
So "our problems" certainly are relevant to Africans, and certainly are "their" problems. Unless issues such as child mortality, health, sanitation, rule of law, political stability, material comfort, global influence, and life expectancy are somehow not relevant to Africans.
Appearances to the contrary, the mendacious Robert Sternberg is, in fact, implicitly agreeing with Watson, while nevertheless shouting him down in the media. Sternberg does not deny that psychometric general intelligence is as low as reported in Africa, nor does he deny that this psychometric intelligence has the academic and economic consequences that the "racist... know-nothing" Watson implied it did. In fact, Sternberg himself has conducted intelligence studies in East Africa, and found the same characteristically 70ish IQ scores, as well as correlations between IQ and academic achievement in this region similar to the correlations reported in developed countries. Thus Sternberg's reply to Watson in The New Scientist:
The tests as they stand show some differences between various groups of children. The size of the differences and what groups do best in the tests depend on what is tested. For example, with various collaborators I have found that analytical tests of the kind traditionally used to measure so-called general abilities tend to favour Americans of European and Asian origin, while tests of creative and practical thinking show quite different patterns. On a test of oral storytelling, for example, Native Americans outperform other groups.
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Ok, so Sternberg agrees that people of European and Asian descent do better on the analytical and general ability tests that reflect the skills vital for functioning in a first-world globalized economy, and therefore must be claiming that Watson is a racist ignoramus only for privileging these general abstract reasoning abilities with the designation of 'intelligence' over the 'oral storytelling intelligence' of Native-Americans, or the 'mosquito dodging intelligence' of sub-Saharan Africans! But if oral storytelling or mosquito dodging are not useful "intelligences" for lifting an individual or a nation out of 1 dollar a day poverty, then Watson can hardly be faulted for expressing concern about the kinds of intelligence not abundant in Africa.
Sternberg is perhaps the most blameworthy scientist to publicly condemn Watson, because he is familiar enough with the data to know Watson is right. His condescending statement that dodging mosquitoes is what characterizes the extent of African needs, is itself seemingly more "racist" than, if not completely identical in substance to, what Watson said. At least Watson appeared to show some sort of concern for what Africans countries require to industrialize, while Sternberg appears to be relativistically dismissing there are problems at all: "Africans are perfectly intelligent... for living like Africans!"
Actually, I believe Sternberg is taking the stage to condemn the factually correct Watson for his own petty academic reasons: Sternberg believes his own unpopular 'practical intelligence' (PDF) model could become more popular if the dominant psychometric model becomes increasingly professionally and personally dangerous to touch. Like Howard Gardner's empirically unimpressive 'Multiple Intelligences', there is an intellectual market for politically correct ideas like Sternberg's model, and fanning the flames of controversy around psychometrics is one way these ideas can cheat to become more popular.
Media red herrings about the supposed ineffability of intelligence or lies about the scientific worthlessness of intelligence testing are designed to moot honesty and openness on this issue, and simply side step the uncomfortable facts. But avoiding facts does not change reality or help shape it to our liking. Intelligence measures predict the kind of social and personal outcomes that people the world over agree are important and desirable. For this reason we need to start engaging this data instead of shooting the messengers. Especially when the messengers we are so casually discarding are important figures like James Watson.
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Now, you may say something like 'Link? You don't have data.*insert rudeness*" Data to prove the inaccuracy of intelligence tests? I don't assume things are accurate until we prove they are competely inaccurate.
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Except I posted a huge amount of data on intelligence tests. thanks
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These tests are the closest things we have thus far to measuring intelligence, but they are not perfect because our understanding is limited.
Now, if you have something you would like to respond with that acknowlegdes that I have not attacked you or called you a racist, please be my guest.
OH, and do you have a link for the whole 'poor whites score better than rich blacks' thing.
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It is among the data I already posted. Read it
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