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When IQ tests were invented folks didn't know about tests, at least in the US. They were rural immigrants who could maybe read. So when asked logic questions, t

• pseudo0 4y ago
  That theory could be plausible, except Flynn used results from Raven's Progressive Matrices, which is just pattern recognition. There are no questions about elephants or text-based questions that could introduce cultural bias. It's simply picking the shape that matches the pattern presented in a grid. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Progressive_Matrices https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Progressive_Matrices
  • WalterBright 4y ago
    I've often heard from humanities academics that STEM majors do not confer critical thinking skills.
    • Godel_unicode 4y ago
      The irony of demonstrating a lack of critical thinking ability by claiming to be the great teachers of it has always been extremely amusing to me. Don’t correct them, it’s honestly better this way.
      • all2 4y ago
        Both the beauty and horror of non-stem courses is that they require a degree of abstract reasoning on par with computer science. What one does with that reasoning is up to them (and it is often twisted in laughable ways, see the portion of an abstract I posted up-thread). Often times the brightest thinkers have been from 'soft' sciences like history or sociology. I think it is because of the abstraction required to reasonable think about these subjects.
    • emodendroket 4y ago
      Have you, or is this a very uncharitable gloss on what they actually were saying?
      • WalterBright 4y ago
        Yes, many times, from many of them. Google "stem majors lack critical thinking skills". To drive the point home, google will autocomplete it for you.
        • tonyarkles 4y ago
          This is where The Algorithms have a fun hidden place in our daily lives. I tried a number of variations of that phrase and couldn't get Google to autocomplete it for me without getting to "stem majors lack crit". Before that it was suggesting math/calculus and chemistry skills without any mention of critical thinking.
        • emodendroket 4y ago
          Google will autocomplete it for me but then pretty much all the results I see are STEM proponents refuting this supposedly common criticism.
          • stametseater 4y ago
            Completions for "stem majors lack cr": crossword, crossword clue, critical thinking skills, creative Completions for "humanity majors lack cr": crossword, crossword clue No humanity majors refuting the claim that they lack critical thinking skills, maybe because that is never claimed in the first place?
            • emodendroket 4y ago
              A bit of a logical leap in my mind to infer from that that there a bunch of of people saying STEM majors "lack critical thinking skills."
    • FreakLegion 4y ago
      If we interpret the claim charitably as 'STEM majors do not confer critical thinking skills to a greater degree than other majors', I don't think it's obviously unfair, with some caveats. Solving a problem with one or more right answers is very different from critical thinking. Anecdotally I've seen people coming from a heavy STEM background struggle with nuance and ambiguity more than people coming from a well-rounded or heavy humanities background. I doubt the programs themselves are worse for critical thinking (good luck controlling for confounds), but it's not obvious they're better, either.
      • throw0101c 4y ago
        > Anecdotally I've seen people coming from a heavy STEM background struggle with nuance and ambiguity more than people coming from a well-rounded or heavy humanities background. It could also be that folks that dislike nuance and ambiguity self-select to go into STEM fields because the problems and answers/solutions are more clear-cut and 'concrete'. Also: * https://xkcd.com/451/ https://xkcd.com/451/
      • bawolff 4y ago
        > Solving a problem with one or more right answers is very different from critical thinking. Its also very different from what STEM majors do. In life there are no specific right answers just ones that aren't wrong. STEM majors dont live in a world of binary right/wrong problems any more than anyone else does.
        • whatshisface 4y ago
          STE majors might not, but I am not sure I can go along with you on the M. ;)
          • bawolff 4y ago
            Math is all about making proofs. There are infinite ways to prove something, and proofs are often asscesed partially based on aesethetic value. If anything, i think it applies to the m more than the ste.
    • snapplebobapple 4y ago
      As a humanities graduate i can confirm there is almost no critical thinking going on in that department outside economics. I wouldn't put too much stock in anything a contemporary humanities academic says.
      • zen_1 4y ago
        Maybe they're confusing critical thinking with critical theory? That's an unfortunate near collision of names if there ever was one
        • watwut 4y ago
          To make it worst, the majority of people who complain about critical theory have no idea what it is and never studied legal theory. They just react to moral panic they see around them.
          • snapplebobapple 4y ago
            I think the more accurate description is that the people pushing critical theory purposefully make it as obtuse and confusing as possible because if they say plainly that a critical theory is distinguished from a regular theory by being activist in nature seeking emancipation from some poorly defined slavery/injustice people will point out that activism by definition has a result in mind and is inherently not rational in the face of observation, as the conclusion has already been decided so it is, at best, an abuse of words to call this crap a theory. The collision of names is likely on purpose because there is no validity to the "solutions" proposed by the "theory" (although there is some validity to some of the observations of injustice, as with any good lie there is a kernel of truth) This isn't made any better by the two semi distinct historical roots of the modern schools of this crap bringing in either marxism by way of the frankfurt school or postmodernism (or increasingly some combination of the two). In general it becomes pretty obvious that it is a self contradicting mess that has no place in society, let alone at institutions of higher learning.
    • stametseater 4y ago
      Maybe that's true, but seems reasonable to retort that humanities majors do not confer empirical investigation skills.
    • worrycue 4y ago
      I really wonder what do the people in humanities consider “critical thinking”. Mathematics and formal proofs are the epitome of logical thought IMHO - while arguments in the humanities often don’t have the same level of rigor; nor are their p-tests as stringent as in the physical sciences. So what exactly is it that’s they think is missing from STEM? Edit: Don’t just downvote. Explain. That’s what we are here for.
      • all2 4y ago
        Rigor in modern non-STEM academics is extremely abstract at best, and clouded with clique-derived "registers" of language that only the in-group shares. This language spills out into some drivel like the following I found the other afternoon: This article utilises feminist technoscience studies' notions of bodily 'materialisation' and 'ontological choreographies', offering a cyborg feminist account... And it goes on. Modern academia outside of most STEM programs leads to things like this. I've seen a few English 101 professors that valiantly try to get their freshman past a 5th grade reading and writing level (to some success) and to actually think critically. But once you enter the hallowed halls of academia and begin to learn the language and methods of reasoning, which are lacking. I can call out one such methodology (it has a name that I've long forgotten) that allows one to make claims and assertions about the contents of a text without considering the authorial intent at all. It is essentially a codified method of casting aspersions. So-and-so becomes a gay lover, such-and-such is an allegory for communism, and so on. I'll go ahead and blame 'process philosophy', the rejection of the absolute, the rejection of the spiritual, the obsession with a mechanistic existence, and the blind faith that -- somehow -- humanity is getting better all the time. Where our reasoning faculties are now has been centuries in the making, even the founding fathers of the United States argued about rationalism and its rejection of the divine. But the rationalists prevailed, and after them Marx, Lenin, Freud, and others. And now we're here.
        • skissane 4y ago
          > Rigor in modern non-STEM academics is extremely abstract at best, and clouded with clique-derived "registers" of language that only the in-group shares. This language spills out into some drivel like the following I found the other afternoon: There's still a significant chunk of philosophy which isn't like that at all. Sure, there's a lot of "Continental philosophy" which ends up looking largely indistinguishable from the "critical theory" cant to which you object (although, maybe, it is unfair to tar all of it with that brush). But philosophy in the analytic/Anglo-American tradition has maintained much of its immunity against that disease. Similarly, there's still plenty of work published in fields such as history, economics, sociology, political science, etc, which (mostly or entirely) sticks to good old-fashioned factual arguments. For example, sociology of religion – try reading the late Rodney Stark's work on applying rational choice theory to the study of religions, or Eric Kaufmann's contributions to religious demography – you won't find any "cyborg feminism" in either of them.
    • analog31 4y ago
      Every subject claims to teach critical thinking. If I learned it anywhere, it was from my parents, both scientists. Observing my kids, the high school classes that seemed to teach the most about critical thinking were in English and social studies. Unfortunately, STEM was heavily burdened by test prep.
      • WalterBright 4y ago
        > STEM was heavily burdened by test prep That's the wrong way to learn STEM, and is the fault of your high school. Sadly, I know some highly educated STEM professionals who rigorously use the scientific method to separate truth from crap in their field. Outside their field, the scientific method goes right out the window and they rely on emotional arguments and wishful thinking.
        • Apocryphon 4y ago
          In a rapidly overcomplicated world where people are forced into hyper-specialization, everyone compartmentalizes.
        • analog31 4y ago
          >>> That's the wrong way to learn STEM, and is the fault of your high school. Indeed, but I would say the high school "system" as a whole, burdened by pressure from parents. And pressure from the state, which was rewarding and punishing schools for test scores and other metrics. Middle class parents were just gaa-gaa over pushing their kids into STEM programs at top colleges, to the point where it was kind of overbearing. I might have been one of those parents, but my neighbor, a high school math and physics teacher, talked me out of it when my kids were younger. At the same time, some of the non-STEM classes were pretty hard nosed, like the one were they took apart media and advertising. Fortunately my kids learned the scientific method at home, same place they learned to read. But it was for the love of knowledge and learning, not to get ahead. That's also how I learned it.
    • canadianfella 4y ago
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    • antisthenes 4y ago
      If anything, it's the exact opposite, although either proposition seems dubious at best. Critical thinking skills are conferred to children in a much earlier age than the decision whether to pursue humanities/STEM or even go to college at all. I've certainly met people for whom having a PhD would be like putting lipstick on a pig.
  • ramblenode 4y ago
    Good point about the Raven's Progressive Matrices, but I still think the parent's hypothesis that we have improved at test taking is relevant. Outside of verbal reasoning there are a lot of soft factors that influence test taking ability. People who haven't taken a timed test before would probably perform worse than expected simply because it is an unfamiliar context, and unfamiliarity tends to create higher stress/anxiety which is known to be bad for cognitive performance in novices. A group that has taken hundreds of tests will probably score better on a test in an unfamiliar subject than another unprepared group that isn't used to taking tests simply because they have some meta-knowledge about test taking.
    • aeternum 4y ago
      Yes, I think unfamiliarity might actually be the main explanation here. IQ tests in general were popular 20 years ago and have since fallen out of fashion quite significantly: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=IQ%20test https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=IQ%20tes... The lower performance may simply be due to people being less familiar/trained on the type of questions that IQ tests tend to ask.
• emodendroket 4y ago
  Call me dishonest then but that seems like failing to actually apply logic.
  • np- 4y ago
    Is it though? It’s pretty easy to read the first line as something like “Elephants are not native to Germany” and then assume the Munich question is a trick question. In fact the person who answers 1 or 2 because of the possibility of a zoo is actually using smarter logic than someone who takes it at face value.
    • emodendroket 4y ago
      But it doesn't say "elephants are not native to Germany." It says "there are no elephants in Germany." I don't see what's so much "smarter."
      • kweingar 4y ago
        There is still a specific “logic puzzle” mindset you need to have. Out of context, a sentence like “there aren’t penguins in Texas”, could be synonymous to “penguins aren’t native to Texas”, at least to my ear. It takes some familiarity with these kinds of questions to know that you’re meant to interpret these premises as axiomatically true and then derive a conclusion purely from the premises.
        • emodendroket 4y ago
          If taking statements at face value is a "logic puzzle mindset" then I guess I have one. I don't know what to tell you. I find the other way perverse.
      • np- 4y ago
        Ok… but you seem to be completely missing the fact that there literally ARE actually elephants in Germany. In zoos. So if you know this fact a priori, and the test says the statement “there are no elephants in Germany. How many elephants are in Germany?” - are you just blindly still going to take it at face value and answer 0 (which is incorrect in the real world) or do you think maybe the test is trying to trick you or is simply getting the base facts or wording wrong? You’d only answer 0 if you knew this was very specifically a logic puzzle (which is evident to us now, but not so evident to someone who has never seen a logic test before).
• mock-possum 4y ago
  But… why would they answer B or C when they were just told the right answer was A? That doesn’t make any sense. They don’t need to ‘figure’ anything when they’ve been told that there are zero. That’s not even a puzzle, that’s just series of statements. That’d be like if you told me a tree was 10 feet tall, then asked me how tall it was and I said “10 feet 1 inch” because I figured it had grown at least an inch in the interim. Why figure when you should already know?
  • yamtaddle 4y ago
    > But… why would they answer B or C when they were just told the right answer was A? Because there's a decent chance the initial statement isn't true. [EDIT] To clarify, it's the difference between a seasoned test-taker understanding implicitly that they're looking at a (very simple) logic puzzle, not a question about reality, and someone taking the question at face-value (and assuming the first statement's some kind of trick, or simply an error). In a sense, answering it "correctly" demands that you act dumber. [EDIT 2] I just checked, out of curiosity, and in fact the person who answers it "wrong" is closer to correct than the person who answers it "right", in actual reality. In a not-unreasonable sense, the "moron" who gets this wrong is more-correct than the trained monkey who answers zero. There's a zoo, evidently within the borders of Munich, and they do have elephants.
    • hnfong 4y ago
      To augment your points - This example makes me recall a Ted Talk by James Flynn (Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents'). There's a very relevant case he discusses, which I'll copy a snippet of the transcript: [quote] Now let me give you a sample of some of his interviews. He talked to the head man of a person in rural Russia. They'd only had, as people had in 1900, about four years of schooling. And he asked that particular person, what do crows and fish have in common? And the fellow said, "Absolutely nothing. You know, I can eat a fish. I can't eat a crow. A crow can peck at a fish. A fish can't do anything to a crow." And Luria said, "But aren't they both animals?" And he said, "Of course not. One's a fish. The other is a bird." And he was interested, effectively, in what he could do with those concrete objects. And then Luria went to another person, and he said to them, "There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is a city in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?" And the fellow said, "Well, if it's large enough, there ought to be camels there." And Luria said, "But what do my words imply?" And he said, "Well, maybe it's a small village, and there's no room for camels." In other words, he was unwilling to treat this as anything but a concrete problem, and he was used to camels being in villages, and he was quite unable to use the hypothetical, to ask himself what if there were no camels in Germany. A third interview was conducted with someone about the North Pole. And Luria said, "At the North Pole, there is always snow. Wherever there is always snow, the bears are white. What color are the bears at the North Pole?" And the response was, "Such a thing is to be settled by testimony. If a wise person came from the North Pole and told me the bears were white, I might believe him, but every bear that I have seen is a brown bear." Now you see again, this person has rejected going beyond the concrete world and analyzing it through everyday experience, and it was important to that person what color bears were -- that is, they had to hunt bears. They weren't willing to engage in this. One of them said to Luria, "How can we solve things that aren't real problems? None of these problems are real. How can we address them?" Now, these three categories -- classification, using logic on abstractions, taking the hypothetical seriously -- how much difference do they make in the real world beyond the testing room? And let me give you a few illustrations. [/quote] --- We're educated to think that "abstract thinking" is a "good thing". But it doesn't really have to be the case. Of course I understand that for some complex real problems, the solution lies in finding and exploiting abstract connections, but I'd argue that a lot of modern society's problems lie in leaky or flawed abstractions that do more harm than good, but we still believe in those abstractions over real things. For example, we tend to cling onto "pretty" theories even when contradicted by factual data. We fight imaginary enemies all the time. We classify things into abstractions and apply generalizations, forgetting the nuances that differentiate them in the first place. The polar bear example was particularly striking to me, because for somebody who hasn't seen a polar bear before, it probably sounds like a trick question testing whether you're gullible enough to believe there are pink little men on Mars. Yet with modern "seasoned test-takers" they'd just take whatever premise given to them without asking questions -- probably the exact opposite of what you'd actually want from a person that knows how to think critically.
• Freedom2 4y ago
  Sounds like the test markers should take a note from the Hacker News guidelines! > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
• crazygringo 4y ago
  This is interesting but do you have a source for this, is this authoritatively known? Or is it just an theory you came up with? I can't quite tell which way you're trying to present this.
• fiftycents 4y ago
  So they don't understand that logic gets rid of the "reality thing". OK. A lot of people don't get it.
• zsz 4y ago
  Here is a bulleted GPT summary of the "Practical Validity" section of the "g factor" Wikipedia article (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) ): -General intelligence (g) is the best predictor of job performance. -The predictive validity of g is higher than work experience. -G facilitates the acquisition of job-related knowledge, resulting in better job performance. -G provides predictive validity for all jobs, regardless of complexity level. -Specific aptitude tests tailored for each job do not add predictive validity over general intelligence tests. -These findings could impact employee selection and training practices in various industries.
  • throwaway173738 4y ago
    What if what we’re really measuring is a person’s ability to play along with poorly explained rules?
    • hnfong 4y ago
      "Poorly explained" probably, but culturally indoctrinated among middle-upper class city dwellers to the detriment of rural, under-educated classes.
• aaron695 4y ago
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