13 ms·

> That's because in the past, the IQ tests were not fair, objective and colour-blind, but were set up in such a way as to bias against poorer people (which will

> That's because in the past, the IQ tests were not fair, objective and colour-blind, but were set up in such a way as to bias against poorer people (which will be mostly black in the USA). This isn't true at all. They haven't been shown to be biased, merely that blacks score lower. Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites. "Disparate impact" merely means that blacks score lower, not that the tests are biased. > This is easy to do with IQ tests, just ask lots of questions that require good schooling and education (e.g. word questions). The black-white gap is as large or larger on tasks that require very little education, e.g. "reverse digit span", which merely requires that you repeat a sequence of numbers in the reverse order from the direction you heard it. > and has hence probably improved equality. I've never understood why eliminating one of the few objective measures and making the hiring process entirely subjective was an improvement.

jberryman 15y ago
> Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites. This says nothing about whether an IQ test is biased when used for other purposes than predicting future achievement (such as a job interview), and a supposedly-but-not-actually-objective test is a very dangerous thing; there's a lot of ugly historical baggage where science has met race in the past.
- moldbug 15y ago
  Job interviews aren't for the purpose of predicting future achievement? Say again? there's a lot of ugly historical baggage where science has met race in the past. There is indeed: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/meta/gould-morton-lewis-2011.html http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/meta/gould-morton-lewis-2... If that isn't ugly, what is?
  - whyenot 15y ago
    Here is a link to the actual paper instead of someone's highly editorialized blog post. http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071 http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal....
    - moldbug 15y ago
      You're really doing Professor Hawks a disservice by imagining him as some kind of foul right-wing agitator. He's actually bending over backward to be fair. Here's how a slightly more partisan biologist (Peter Frost) responds to the same material: http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2011/07/arroseur-arrose.html http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2011/07/arroseur-arrose.html Here's the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html
      - ktizo 15y ago
        Other than stating that the blog post was highly editorialised, there was absolutely no indication given by whyenot about what Hawks biases might be. To be honest, your comment reads strongly as though you are projecting.
Tichy 15y ago
"They haven't been shown to be biased" When I think about that question, I think about questions that would be harder for me (white caucasian) than somebody from another "race" or culture. That is easy: for example imagine selecting some kind of image puzzles involving kanjii symbols, or telling apart chinese faces. They are just images, right, so no bias? But it will be much more easy to tell them apart for somebody with a chinese background than for me. If such questions exists that are biased against me, it seems at least very plausible that other questions could be biased against other "races" and cultures. Another example I read about is how different cultures see the drawing of a box (a 3d wireframe). Apparently in western cultures people would see it as a drawing of a 3d box, whereas some poor test takers in Africa just saw a 2d drawing. This was then interpreted as Africans being less intelligent, when really they were just as correct as the people who saw the 3d shape. It just wasn't such a common meme where they lived to draw 3d shapes like that.
- timwiseman 15y ago
  You make an excellent point, but I think it may be dangerous to conflate race and culture. I suspect for instance that a person of Japanese heritage that grew up in the US and spoke only English might have almost as much trouble with the Kanji characters as I would.
  - Tichy 15y ago
    I guess culture is the main point - if you live in China, you probably get better at telling apart Chinese faces. And vice versa - I can only guess that telling apart western faces might be hard for people from other cultures, too. I should add that I live in Europe, I think in the US there is a higher mix of people from different backgrounds, so my example is perhaps not as convincing.
  - mistercow 15y ago
    Well in this case, the conflation of race and culture is virtually a requirement. As far as we know, you can't do much really to bias an aptitude test in terms of biology because there is little correlation between race and biology¹. On the other hand, culture and race are relatively tightly correlated, so if you want to bias an aptitude test with respect to race, the surest way to do it is to bias it with respect to culture. A great example is Jim Crow era voting rules. Black people obviously are not biologically disinclined to be able to read, but in 1900, it was a simple fact of southern American culture that a white person of voting age was less likely to be able to read than a black person of voting age. A black southerner of voting age was usually either a former slave, or the child of a former slave, and slaves did not have access to basic education. So a literacy test was, at that time, a racially biased test. --- ¹ This is unsurprising when you realize, for example, that the combined population we put in the single box of "black" is more genetically diverse than the combined population of all the races we put outside of that box. Even though populations of different specific geographical origins do often have characteristic biological traits, the social concept of "race" is not strongly correlated with geographical origin.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
egiva 15y ago
> This isn't true at all. They haven't been shown to be biased, merely that blacks score lower. Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites. I think you illustrate the danger of making assertions without being entirely informed - that is to say that what you state here is the beginning of the truth, but taken out of context. There was (and in many cases still is) a heavy cultural bias built into standardized IQ testing. Traditionally, most tests were developed and tested against middle-income, white children. Black children traditionally tested one standard deviation below their white counterparts, even when controlling for income, etc. However, many experts agree that this is due to cultural bias and environmental factors, agravated by the strong corelation between income and where you live geographically in the US, including resources (or lack thereof) in corresponding school districts. Example: children in troubled, inner-city schools would often have less access to rigourous IQ testing when compared to their urban, middle-class counterparts. There is also the complicating factor of single-parent or broken homes and the roll that plays in a child's lack of overall intellectual development. This also correlates to income and geographic area (i.e. innercity versus urban environment). > I've never understood why eliminating one of the few objective measures and making the hiring process entirely subjective was an improvement. That's another subject and worth talking about. I'm simply stating that you should be very careful when talking about the black-white gap in IQ scores. There are too many factors at play to make a clear case for IQ differences between races. For an informative article with really enlightening references, see this: http://theafrican.com/Magazine/IQ.htm http://theafrican.com/Magazine/IQ.htm
- mc32 15y ago
  >There is also the complicating factor of single-parent or broken homes and the rol[e] that plays in a child's lack of overall intellectual development. This also correlates to income and geographic area (i.e. innercity versus urban environment). I may not be understanding your argument properly, but doesn't IQ _try_ to measure intellectual development? I understand cultural bias being problem and that makes sense --but this doesn't make sense to me. "The problem with measuring intelligence is it measures intelligence?" What difference does the lack of intellectual development have to do with whether it was genetic, educational, physiological, mental, etc?
- 15y ago
smsm42 15y ago
Most IQ tests - at least ones I've seen - are highly trainable, both in general (you learn to think certain way) and in particular (you learn to solve specific type of test). So while tests aren't race-dependent and there's no reason to think they might be, they definitely can be culture-dependent and income (or, more precisely, education level and type) dependent. So while the test is an objective measure, it in an objective measure of test performance, which may not be strongly correlated with the actual work performance. Remember those "move the mount Fuji" interview questions which were so in fashion some years ago? I'm not saying banning them completely the right answer here, but putting too much faith into these tests can be dangerous too.
- adrianhoward 15y ago
  I've taken a bunch of IQ tests over the years with some wildly different scores. I score pretty well. I'm also very sceptical of their general utility. The between the lowest and highest score I ever received on an IQ test is 45 points. That really doesn't sound like an objective measure of anything much (The lowest was when I was stressed, running on no sleep, the test was sprung on me with no warning and had US cultural aspects when I'm from the UK - things like talking about quarters and dimes. The highest was when I had practiced math & logic problems to win a bet that I couldn't add ten points to my IQ :-) I find the idea of anybody using an IQ test as a factor in employment laughable. As far as I'm concerned any company using an IQ test is hanging a big red sign on the front of their organisation that says "we don't understand what kind of employees we want".
  - smsm42 15y ago
    Such tests can play the same role as the famous FizzBuzz test - to quickly filter out obviously unfit candidates without spending much resources. But this is usually fit for very big companies that hire a lot of people, sometimes without proven experience, and have somehow to reduce costs of that.
philwelch 15y ago
> They haven't been shown to be biased, merely that blacks score lower. Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites. Now, now now. You've forgotten Political Logic. Political Premise: There are no significant differences in intelligence between blacks and whites. Empirical Premise: Blacks score lower than whites on IQ tests. Conclusion: IQ tests are biased. The first rule of Political Logic is to never question the political premise!
- logjam 15y ago
  Oh, look: an appeal-to-emotion on "political logic" consisting of ignoring eight hundred years of the racist "political premise" (extending to present day) that whites are superior to blacks, followed by straw man, followed by false premise. A tutorial in basic logic is more in order.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    Ignoring? Not at all. I'm just pointing out that the notion of racial differences is so taboo in contemporary academic culture that it's impossible to honestly discuss the question. To honestly address the question, you have to be open to the possibility of any answer, which frankly we aren't. If certain racial differences don't exist, that's fine, but if they did exist, no one would say so anyway. So we can't take the claim that racial differences don't exist at face value, because that's the only palatable conclusion open on the question. The taboo is a completely understandable and largely inevitable reaction against the open and largely fallacious racist claims of academics in the recent past, but it's still a taboo that inhibits honest inquiry. Perhaps in another 50-100 years.
willvarfar 15y ago
When I joined Motorola, I had to fill in some kind of aptitude test that obviously came from the states. This was in Sweden but I'm an Englishman; pity the Swedes. The English wasn't English English and it frequently used words that sounded like American sitcoms and which, in the context of a test where one answer is write and another wrong, I was quite unsure of the distinctions between. I guess I scraped through by luck.

jberryman 15y ago

> Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites. This says nothing about whether an IQ test is biased when used for other purposes than predicting future achievement (such as a job interview), and a supposedly-but-not-actually-objective test is a very dangerous thing; there's a lot of ugly historical baggage where science has met race in the past.

moldbug 15y ago
Job interviews aren't for the purpose of predicting future achievement? Say again? there's a lot of ugly historical baggage where science has met race in the past. There is indeed: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/meta/gould-morton-lewis-2011.html http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/meta/gould-morton-lewis-2... If that isn't ugly, what is?
- whyenot 15y ago
  Here is a link to the actual paper instead of someone's highly editorialized blog post. http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071 http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal....
  - moldbug 15y ago
    You're really doing Professor Hawks a disservice by imagining him as some kind of foul right-wing agitator. He's actually bending over backward to be fair. Here's how a slightly more partisan biologist (Peter Frost) responds to the same material: http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2011/07/arroseur-arrose.html http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2011/07/arroseur-arrose.html Here's the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html
    - ktizo 15y ago
      Other than stating that the blog post was highly editorialised, there was absolutely no indication given by whyenot about what Hawks biases might be. To be honest, your comment reads strongly as though you are projecting.

Tichy 15y ago

"They haven't been shown to be biased" When I think about that question, I think about questions that would be harder for me (white caucasian) than somebody from another "race" or culture. That is easy: for example imagine selecting some kind of image puzzles involving kanjii symbols, or telling apart chinese faces. They are just images, right, so no bias? But it will be much more easy to tell them apart for somebody with a chinese background than for me. If such questions exists that are biased against me, it seems at least very plausible that other questions could be biased against other "races" and cultures. Another example I read about is how different cultures see the drawing of a box (a 3d wireframe). Apparently in western cultures people would see it as a drawing of a 3d box, whereas some poor test takers in Africa just saw a 2d drawing. This was then interpreted as Africans being less intelligent, when really they were just as correct as the people who saw the 3d shape. It just wasn't such a common meme where they lived to draw 3d shapes like that.

timwiseman 15y ago
You make an excellent point, but I think it may be dangerous to conflate race and culture. I suspect for instance that a person of Japanese heritage that grew up in the US and spoke only English might have almost as much trouble with the Kanji characters as I would.
- Tichy 15y ago
  I guess culture is the main point - if you live in China, you probably get better at telling apart Chinese faces. And vice versa - I can only guess that telling apart western faces might be hard for people from other cultures, too. I should add that I live in Europe, I think in the US there is a higher mix of people from different backgrounds, so my example is perhaps not as convincing.
- mistercow 15y ago
  Well in this case, the conflation of race and culture is virtually a requirement. As far as we know, you can't do much really to bias an aptitude test in terms of biology because there is little correlation between race and biology¹. On the other hand, culture and race are relatively tightly correlated, so if you want to bias an aptitude test with respect to race, the surest way to do it is to bias it with respect to culture. A great example is Jim Crow era voting rules. Black people obviously are not biologically disinclined to be able to read, but in 1900, it was a simple fact of southern American culture that a white person of voting age was less likely to be able to read than a black person of voting age. A black southerner of voting age was usually either a former slave, or the child of a former slave, and slaves did not have access to basic education. So a literacy test was, at that time, a racially biased test. --- ¹ This is unsurprising when you realize, for example, that the combined population we put in the single box of "black" is more genetically diverse than the combined population of all the races we put outside of that box. Even though populations of different specific geographical origins do often have characteristic biological traits, the social concept of "race" is not strongly correlated with geographical origin.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

egiva 15y ago

> This isn't true at all. They haven't been shown to be biased, merely that blacks score lower. Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites. I think you illustrate the danger of making assertions without being entirely informed - that is to say that what you state here is the beginning of the truth, but taken out of context. There was (and in many cases still is) a heavy cultural bias built into standardized IQ testing. Traditionally, most tests were developed and tested against middle-income, white children. Black children traditionally tested one standard deviation below their white counterparts, even when controlling for income, etc. However, many experts agree that this is due to cultural bias and environmental factors, agravated by the strong corelation between income and where you live geographically in the US, including resources (or lack thereof) in corresponding school districts. Example: children in troubled, inner-city schools would often have less access to rigourous IQ testing when compared to their urban, middle-class counterparts. There is also the complicating factor of single-parent or broken homes and the roll that plays in a child's lack of overall intellectual development. This also correlates to income and geographic area (i.e. innercity versus urban environment). > I've never understood why eliminating one of the few objective measures and making the hiring process entirely subjective was an improvement. That's another subject and worth talking about. I'm simply stating that you should be very careful when talking about the black-white gap in IQ scores. There are too many factors at play to make a clear case for IQ differences between races. For an informative article with really enlightening references, see this: http://theafrican.com/Magazine/IQ.htm http://theafrican.com/Magazine/IQ.htm

mc32 15y ago
>There is also the complicating factor of single-parent or broken homes and the rol[e] that plays in a child's lack of overall intellectual development. This also correlates to income and geographic area (i.e. innercity versus urban environment). I may not be understanding your argument properly, but doesn't IQ _try_ to measure intellectual development? I understand cultural bias being problem and that makes sense --but this doesn't make sense to me. "The problem with measuring intelligence is it measures intelligence?" What difference does the lack of intellectual development have to do with whether it was genetic, educational, physiological, mental, etc?
15y ago

smsm42 15y ago

Most IQ tests - at least ones I've seen - are highly trainable, both in general (you learn to think certain way) and in particular (you learn to solve specific type of test). So while tests aren't race-dependent and there's no reason to think they might be, they definitely can be culture-dependent and income (or, more precisely, education level and type) dependent. So while the test is an objective measure, it in an objective measure of test performance, which may not be strongly correlated with the actual work performance. Remember those "move the mount Fuji" interview questions which were so in fashion some years ago? I'm not saying banning them completely the right answer here, but putting too much faith into these tests can be dangerous too.

adrianhoward 15y ago
I've taken a bunch of IQ tests over the years with some wildly different scores. I score pretty well. I'm also very sceptical of their general utility. The between the lowest and highest score I ever received on an IQ test is 45 points. That really doesn't sound like an objective measure of anything much (The lowest was when I was stressed, running on no sleep, the test was sprung on me with no warning and had US cultural aspects when I'm from the UK - things like talking about quarters and dimes. The highest was when I had practiced math & logic problems to win a bet that I couldn't add ten points to my IQ :-) I find the idea of anybody using an IQ test as a factor in employment laughable. As far as I'm concerned any company using an IQ test is hanging a big red sign on the front of their organisation that says "we don't understand what kind of employees we want".
- smsm42 15y ago
  Such tests can play the same role as the famous FizzBuzz test - to quickly filter out obviously unfit candidates without spending much resources. But this is usually fit for very big companies that hire a lot of people, sometimes without proven experience, and have somehow to reduce costs of that.

philwelch 15y ago

> They haven't been shown to be biased, merely that blacks score lower. Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites. Now, now now. You've forgotten Political Logic. Political Premise: There are no significant differences in intelligence between blacks and whites. Empirical Premise: Blacks score lower than whites on IQ tests. Conclusion: IQ tests are biased. The first rule of Political Logic is to never question the political premise!

logjam 15y ago
Oh, look: an appeal-to-emotion on "political logic" consisting of ignoring eight hundred years of the racist "political premise" (extending to present day) that whites are superior to blacks, followed by straw man, followed by false premise. A tutorial in basic logic is more in order.
- philwelch 15y ago
  Ignoring? Not at all. I'm just pointing out that the notion of racial differences is so taboo in contemporary academic culture that it's impossible to honestly discuss the question. To honestly address the question, you have to be open to the possibility of any answer, which frankly we aren't. If certain racial differences don't exist, that's fine, but if they did exist, no one would say so anyway. So we can't take the claim that racial differences don't exist at face value, because that's the only palatable conclusion open on the question. The taboo is a completely understandable and largely inevitable reaction against the open and largely fallacious racist claims of academics in the recent past, but it's still a taboo that inhibits honest inquiry. Perhaps in another 50-100 years.

willvarfar 15y ago

When I joined Motorola, I had to fill in some kind of aptitude test that obviously came from the states. This was in Sweden but I'm an Englishman; pity the Swedes. The English wasn't English English and it frequently used words that sounded like American sitcoms and which, in the context of a test where one answer is write and another wrong, I was quite unsure of the distinctions between. I guess I scraped through by luck.