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What is the quality of online tests? People taking them are likely distracted or in poorly controlled conditions.

by api 4y ago

harry8 4y ago
Well a decade or more ago the idea of an online iq test was in the realms of "maybe iq is pretty dumb but there's no harm in doing this online." Nowadays I think most of us think more along the lines of "How stupid would you have to be to do an online quiz like this?" Is it phishing? Is it goog-facebrick spying? Can the people serving this keep it secure? Will it screw up a loan application or health insurance in 10 years time? Self selection criteria have changed for the same population. IQ tests are sometimes good at identifying people with very real intellectual problems, I'm told. The bottom tail. Utterly useless for anything else in science. People still love them, much of psychology still acts more like a religious cult than science and still venerates them. For anyone interested in something more than "feelings as evidence" and "bullshit to get a TED talk invite" dismissing any study using iq out of hand with extreme prejudice is likely to save you some time. Are there any at all? The preface justifying iq test usage as evidence in the face of so much junk science would be necessary and something to read. /me waves to the psychologists who believe (believe so hard) they're about to respond with the usual tropes of "you just embarrassed yourself" before sending the link on their slack channels to make sure it's properly downvoted. How's the replication crisis guys? Your 101 textbooks all still full of the stanford prison experiment? The brain is fascinating, psychology is poetry masquerading as science about it. Clean up your discpline's act or just move to liberal arts and stop defiling real science. "Not me, I don't..." Then call it out, loudly. Starting with the 101 textbooks at your institution. Count the discredited studies that make "great stories" for freshmen that have been totally discredited. The correct number you should get to in your count is zero in case that isn't clear. I enjoyed that little rant. Should be more of them about such garbage as iq.
- api 4y ago
  "Psychometrics is a soft science with serious replication problems except for IQ which is as hard as physics and reliable enough to be used to stereotype large groups of people and draw broad sweeping conclusions about politics, ethics, and sociology." - The IQ crowd
gs17 4y ago
The paper mentions a similar issue: > Beyond inconsistencies in demographics across the sample, another factor that could be accounting for lower scores for more recent participants could be due to a decline in motivation. As the SAPA Project is advertised as a personality survey, individuals seeking out the SAPA Project may not be fully engaged with items not measuring temperament at the capacity as they are with more typically considered personality items. A bigger issue to me is > it should also be recognized that the SAPA Project relies on participants finding or seeking out the survey; meaning members of the population do not have an equal probability of being recruited into the survey (Condon, 2018). Thus, selection bias has likely been introduced into the sample due to those voluntarily taking the survey being non-representative of the target population I could see the result simply showing that the Internet (and/or college) has become more accessible since 2006 and sampling the online population reflects this. If we did online IQ tests starting the in late 80s, I'd imagine we would see a bigger downward trend during the 90s. On the other hand, King of the Hill was making fun of online IQ tests in 2002, so maybe they wouldn't be so hard to access.

What is the quality of online tests? People taking them are likely distracted or in poorly controlled conditions.

by api 4y ago

What is the quality of online tests? People taking them are likely distracted or in poorly controlled conditions.

Well a decade or more ago the idea of an online iq test was in the realms of "maybe iq is pretty dumb but there's no harm in doing this online." Nowadays I think most of us think more along the lines of "How stupid would you have to be to do an online quiz like this?" Is it phishing? Is it goog-facebrick spying? Can the people serving this keep it secure? Will it screw up a loan application or health insurance in 10 years time? Self selection criteria have changed for the same population. IQ tests are sometimes good at identifying people with very real intellectual problems, I'm told. The bottom tail. Utterly useless for anything else in science. People still love them, much of psychology still acts more like a religious cult than science and still venerates them. For anyone interested in something more than "feelings as evidence" and "bullshit to get a TED talk invite" dismissing any study using iq out of hand with extreme prejudice is likely to save you some time. Are there any at all? The preface justifying iq test usage as evidence in the face of so much junk science would be necessary and something to read. /me waves to the psychologists who believe (believe so hard) they're about to respond with the usual tropes of "you just embarrassed yourself" before sending the link on their slack channels to make sure it's properly downvoted. How's the replication crisis guys? Your 101 textbooks all still full of the stanford prison experiment? The brain is fascinating, psychology is poetry masquerading as science about it. Clean up your discpline's act or just move to liberal arts and stop defiling real science. "Not me, I don't..." Then call it out, loudly. Starting with the 101 textbooks at your institution. Count the discredited studies that make "great stories" for freshmen that have been totally discredited. The correct number you should get to in your count is zero in case that isn't clear. I enjoyed that little rant. Should be more of them about such garbage as iq.

api 4y ago
"Psychometrics is a soft science with serious replication problems except for IQ which is as hard as physics and reliable enough to be used to stereotype large groups of people and draw broad sweeping conclusions about politics, ethics, and sociology." - The IQ crowd

gs17 4y ago

The paper mentions a similar issue: > Beyond inconsistencies in demographics across the sample, another factor that could be accounting for lower scores for more recent participants could be due to a decline in motivation. As the SAPA Project is advertised as a personality survey, individuals seeking out the SAPA Project may not be fully engaged with items not measuring temperament at the capacity as they are with more typically considered personality items. A bigger issue to me is > it should also be recognized that the SAPA Project relies on participants finding or seeking out the survey; meaning members of the population do not have an equal probability of being recruited into the survey (Condon, 2018). Thus, selection bias has likely been introduced into the sample due to those voluntarily taking the survey being non-representative of the target population I could see the result simply showing that the Internet (and/or college) has become more accessible since 2006 and sampling the online population reflects this. If we did online IQ tests starting the in late 80s, I'd imagine we would see a bigger downward trend during the 90s. On the other hand, King of the Hill was making fun of online IQ tests in 2002, so maybe they wouldn't be so hard to access.