5 ms·

Well, there are certain mission critical kinds of areas -- like medicine or bridge engineering -- where this knowledge is actionable. Certainly people here on

by temphn 16y ago

Well, there are certain mission critical kinds of areas -- like medicine or bridge engineering -- where this knowledge is actionable. Certainly people here on Hacker News don't need to be convinced of the value of finding elite engineers, or the very real wealth they can generate from book learning. The problem is the doublethink that allows the IQ elite -- graduates of highly selective institutions like Harvard and Stanford -- to pretend that there is no such thing as an IQ elite, while simultaneously selecting their peers (coworkers, marriage partners, fellow students, etc.) from that very same ostensibly nonexistent IQ elite. The contrast is whiplash inducing. One minute IQ doesn't matter, the next minute everyone is talking about how all these "idiots" can't solve FizzBuzz... Very big blind spot here, which many Asian countries don't share in the same way.

sethg 16y ago
I took an IQ test in fifth grade. I will never forget one of the questions on the “general knowledge” section: “Who discovered America?” Aha, fifth-grade-me thought, a trick question! “The Indians,” I said confidently. The woman administering the test rephrased the question: “Who is generally credited with discovering America?” Even though I scored well enough to qualify for the “IQ elite”, that experience gave me a livelong skepticism about how seriously to take IQ tests. I don’t need to ask for someone’s IQ scores before deciding whether or not to work, hang out, or have sex with them. The comparison with FizzBuzz is not apposite, because nobody is claiming that FizzBuzz is a measure of general intelligence or even a measure of general programming aptitude. If candidate A solved the FizzBuzz problem twice as fast as candidate B, no sane hiring manager would conclude that candidate A is going to be twice as good at programming.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  I'd be extremely surprised if you aren't misremembering. IQ tests are never supposed to have sections like "general knowledge", "history", "celebrity gossip", etc. "Who discovered America" is a textbook example of a non g-loaded question. If such a section was used on a test they described as an "IQ test", it was almost certainly there only for statistical validation purposes. There have been a number of studies done which ask obviously knowledge based questions, obviously g-loaded questions, and unknown questions. They then compare the statistical distribution of answers to the unknown questions to the obviously bad questions ("who discovered America") and the obviously good questions ("you want to carry a fox and two goats across the river in a 2 seated boat, but if you leave the fox alone with the goat the fox eats the goat..." [1]). If you aren't misremembering, I suspect you were participating in such a study. [1] This is unbiased because all information is given. You don't need to know what a fox or goat is, or have ever seen a boat. It could be rephrased "you want to transport a X and two Y's from location A to location B. But if you leave an X and a Y alone, you fail."
  - sethg 16y ago
    I don’t think I am misremembering and I don’t think I was part of a study. This would have been around 1980, so the test was probably the WISC-R, which was published in 1974; maybe they got better about eliminating loaded questions in the WISC-III (which wasn’t published until 1991). When I Google “who discovered america? wisc-r” I get several hits mentioning this test question.
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      Upon further googling, you seem to be correct. Apparently the people designing WISC-R never bothered to read up on the theory of intelligence. This isn't even a new idea - it dates back to the original Spearman paper from 1904. Start reading on page 65. http://www.similima.com/books/psychologybooks/psych7.pdf http://www.similima.com/books/psychologybooks/psych7.pdf
      - jbooth 16y ago
        Not to mention that the answer which gives you more points of IQ, hence meaning you're "smarter", isn't even correct. You can start with the native americans, go through to the vikings, and I read a book recently that made a very convincing case that the Chinese sailed to South America in 1421-1423 before they shut themselves off from the world for 400 years.
  - metageek 16y ago
    >This is unbiased because all information is given. In this case, though, it is biased because some people will have heard the puzzle before, and having heard it before is tied to culture rather than to intelligence.
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      Very true, this is why it's important to come up with new questions each time.
      - 16y ago
roshni 16y ago
In those mission critical areas you mention, how does the knowledge of average IQ of the race/group the candidate belongs to give you any more information than the actual IQ of the candidate?
ahoyhere 16y ago
There is plenty of evidence that, at least in the US, that simply thinking "black people don't do well on this test" or "women aren't good at math" lowers the test scores of both black people and women. Since these are both "common knowledge," that is a very good reason to exclude those tests. This is called "stereotype threat". The good news is that there's also emerging research showing how test scores for blacks & women can be raised by exposing them to certain facts/examples that reduce the effect of "stereotype threat".
chc 16y ago
You're conflating different things. "These idiots can't solve FizzBuzz" isn't a complaint about performance on IQ tests — it's a complaint about their skill as a programmer. The only way that proves anything is if we assume that IQ scores are strongly correlated with programming ability, which begs the question.

by temphn 16y ago

sethg 16y ago

I took an IQ test in fifth grade. I will never forget one of the questions on the “general knowledge” section: “Who discovered America?” Aha, fifth-grade-me thought, a trick question! “The Indians,” I said confidently. The woman administering the test rephrased the question: “Who is generally credited with discovering America?” Even though I scored well enough to qualify for the “IQ elite”, that experience gave me a livelong skepticism about how seriously to take IQ tests. I don’t need to ask for someone’s IQ scores before deciding whether or not to work, hang out, or have sex with them. The comparison with FizzBuzz is not apposite, because nobody is claiming that FizzBuzz is a measure of general intelligence or even a measure of general programming aptitude. If candidate A solved the FizzBuzz problem twice as fast as candidate B, no sane hiring manager would conclude that candidate A is going to be twice as good at programming.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
I'd be extremely surprised if you aren't misremembering. IQ tests are never supposed to have sections like "general knowledge", "history", "celebrity gossip", etc. "Who discovered America" is a textbook example of a non g-loaded question. If such a section was used on a test they described as an "IQ test", it was almost certainly there only for statistical validation purposes. There have been a number of studies done which ask obviously knowledge based questions, obviously g-loaded questions, and unknown questions. They then compare the statistical distribution of answers to the unknown questions to the obviously bad questions ("who discovered America") and the obviously good questions ("you want to carry a fox and two goats across the river in a 2 seated boat, but if you leave the fox alone with the goat the fox eats the goat..." [1]). If you aren't misremembering, I suspect you were participating in such a study. [1] This is unbiased because all information is given. You don't need to know what a fox or goat is, or have ever seen a boat. It could be rephrased "you want to transport a X and two Y's from location A to location B. But if you leave an X and a Y alone, you fail."
- sethg 16y ago
  I don’t think I am misremembering and I don’t think I was part of a study. This would have been around 1980, so the test was probably the WISC-R, which was published in 1974; maybe they got better about eliminating loaded questions in the WISC-III (which wasn’t published until 1991). When I Google “who discovered america? wisc-r” I get several hits mentioning this test question.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    Upon further googling, you seem to be correct. Apparently the people designing WISC-R never bothered to read up on the theory of intelligence. This isn't even a new idea - it dates back to the original Spearman paper from 1904. Start reading on page 65. http://www.similima.com/books/psychologybooks/psych7.pdf http://www.similima.com/books/psychologybooks/psych7.pdf
    - jbooth 16y ago
      Not to mention that the answer which gives you more points of IQ, hence meaning you're "smarter", isn't even correct. You can start with the native americans, go through to the vikings, and I read a book recently that made a very convincing case that the Chinese sailed to South America in 1421-1423 before they shut themselves off from the world for 400 years.
- metageek 16y ago
  >This is unbiased because all information is given. In this case, though, it is biased because some people will have heard the puzzle before, and having heard it before is tied to culture rather than to intelligence.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    Very true, this is why it's important to come up with new questions each time.
    - 16y ago

roshni 16y ago

In those mission critical areas you mention, how does the knowledge of average IQ of the race/group the candidate belongs to give you any more information than the actual IQ of the candidate?

ahoyhere 16y ago

There is plenty of evidence that, at least in the US, that simply thinking "black people don't do well on this test" or "women aren't good at math" lowers the test scores of both black people and women. Since these are both "common knowledge," that is a very good reason to exclude those tests. This is called "stereotype threat". The good news is that there's also emerging research showing how test scores for blacks & women can be raised by exposing them to certain facts/examples that reduce the effect of "stereotype threat".

chc 16y ago

You're conflating different things. "These idiots can't solve FizzBuzz" isn't a complaint about performance on IQ tests — it's a complaint about their skill as a programmer. The only way that proves anything is if we assume that IQ scores are strongly correlated with programming ability, which begs the question.