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If I'm understanding your objection correctly, it'd be summarized as "objective cross-cultural tests are impossible", right? And at least to me... Spatial reas

If I'm understanding your objection correctly, it'd be summarized as "objective cross-cultural tests are impossible", right? And at least to me... Spatial reasoning, color comparison and differentiation, and formal logic would all be parts of general intelligence. Penalizing someone for being innumerate might not capture a person's theoretical intelligence if raised in a different culture, but that doesn't make it inaccurate as a test of how they are now.

joshuamorton 7y ago
I'm not sure I'd go as far as saying impossible (perhaps for true objectivity, yes?) but certainly really, really, really difficult. And as a corollary, for things that aren't designed explicitly as fair-ish cross cultural tests, we really shouldn't go about trying to draw cross-cultural conclusions. I'll be fully transparent, this does make the question of "well how can we judge people without insisting on equality of outcome" rather tricky. I resolve this personally by just concluding that the precise judgement of people such that we'd need a good test like that is rarely actually important in day to day life. In other words, I'm okay with wider error bars for the reduction of implicit bias.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  > I'll be fully transparent, this does make the question of "well how can we judge people without insisting on equality of outcome" rather tricky. I resolve this personally by just concluding that the precise judgement of people such that we'd need a good test like that is rarely actually important in day to day life. In other words, I'm okay with wider error bars for the reduction of implicit bias. Isn't this just "I'm OK with error bars in the direction I favor", which happens to be equity? Unless you're saying you're OK with accepting the tests we have, with error bars that might err too far on the side of "other racial/cultural groups are less intelligent".
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    > Isn't this just "I'm OK with error bars in the direction I favor", which happens to be equity? Unless you're saying you're OK with accepting the tests we have, with error bars that might err too far on the side of "other racial/cultural groups are less intelligent". Not exactly: Precisely, I'd prefer error bars that are equally sized for everyone, instead of error bars that differ based on cultural factors, especially if we aren't capable of acknowledging the cultural disparity in distribution of those error bars (and IME, people generally aren't). In other words, if you have a test that has an error of X when comparing 2 white kids, and an error of X when comparing two black kids, but an error of 3X when comparing a white kid to a black kid, you don't have a test with a precision of X, you have a test with an error of 3X (or worse: you have a test with a precision of X, but that consistently biases in favor of one group). If on the other hand we have a test that has errors of 2X, but has that across cultural boundaries, that's a better test and we should use it instead. This is because the errors are randomly distributed across the population (so anyone has the same chance of being positively or negatively impacted by the test's imprecision) instead of culturally tied. If we're willing to acknowledge the different distributions of error, then maybe we can make do, but consistent problems with things like affirmative action suggest that, at a macro level, we aren't.

joshuamorton 7y ago

I'm not sure I'd go as far as saying impossible (perhaps for true objectivity, yes?) but certainly really, really, really difficult. And as a corollary, for things that aren't designed explicitly as fair-ish cross cultural tests, we really shouldn't go about trying to draw cross-cultural conclusions. I'll be fully transparent, this does make the question of "well how can we judge people without insisting on equality of outcome" rather tricky. I resolve this personally by just concluding that the precise judgement of people such that we'd need a good test like that is rarely actually important in day to day life. In other words, I'm okay with wider error bars for the reduction of implicit bias.

DuskStar 7y ago
> I'll be fully transparent, this does make the question of "well how can we judge people without insisting on equality of outcome" rather tricky. I resolve this personally by just concluding that the precise judgement of people such that we'd need a good test like that is rarely actually important in day to day life. In other words, I'm okay with wider error bars for the reduction of implicit bias. Isn't this just "I'm OK with error bars in the direction I favor", which happens to be equity? Unless you're saying you're OK with accepting the tests we have, with error bars that might err too far on the side of "other racial/cultural groups are less intelligent".
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  > Isn't this just "I'm OK with error bars in the direction I favor", which happens to be equity? Unless you're saying you're OK with accepting the tests we have, with error bars that might err too far on the side of "other racial/cultural groups are less intelligent". Not exactly: Precisely, I'd prefer error bars that are equally sized for everyone, instead of error bars that differ based on cultural factors, especially if we aren't capable of acknowledging the cultural disparity in distribution of those error bars (and IME, people generally aren't). In other words, if you have a test that has an error of X when comparing 2 white kids, and an error of X when comparing two black kids, but an error of 3X when comparing a white kid to a black kid, you don't have a test with a precision of X, you have a test with an error of 3X (or worse: you have a test with a precision of X, but that consistently biases in favor of one group). If on the other hand we have a test that has errors of 2X, but has that across cultural boundaries, that's a better test and we should use it instead. This is because the errors are randomly distributed across the population (so anyone has the same chance of being positively or negatively impacted by the test's imprecision) instead of culturally tied. If we're willing to acknowledge the different distributions of error, then maybe we can make do, but consistent problems with things like affirmative action suggest that, at a macro level, we aren't.