• they/them

i am into accessibility and game design. i go by sysopod on other platforms as well



pervocracy
@pervocracy

"IQ tests are fake" doesn't mean "everyone has an IQ but conventionally used tests fail to accurately reflect it." It means that the underlying thing being tested for--a single number that representd someone's inherent smartedness--is a silly idea for babies.


Posting this mostly to preach to the choir, but it seems like it's something even a lot of people who are critical of IQ-based bigotry don't fully understand. A culturally biased IQ test is a tool for giving a different fake number to people from different cultures... but a culture-neutral IQ test would just be one that distributes fake numbers fairly.

Obviously people have talents in different degrees and those can be tested, but the test only shows what it shows. A math test shows someone's knowledge and ability at math*, a language test shows their knowledge and ability at language**, and the composite score shows the composite of their knowledge and ability at math and language. But you can't use this to derive a generalized Smartness Factor that also tells you whether this person can manage an office or fly a plane or knit a sweater.

I used to get real mad that my school gave grades for gym class. (Not just participation grades. You could pass on participation but to get an A you had to run a mile in a certain time, do so many pushups, etc. It was scaled by gender and age but not height or weight.) That shouldn't count, it's not smartness! And it's not. But why did I think shit like "ability to label the Parts Of The Cell" was smartness?

(because I was good at that and bad at running.)

Have you ever noticed a lot of online "IQ tests" involve really ponderous tasks? I tend to look at them and think yeah, I could figure out the next step in all 50 of these block-sliding puzzles but it'll take me like an hour and I'll be none the richer for it. Is my lack of persistence a lack of smartness? It is a property of my brain that prevents me from completing the test. Why shouldn't it count?

Anyway, the point is, something like blood type testing reveals an underlying reality: whether you've had it tested or not, you still have a blood type, and any competently administered test will show the same one. IQ testing is not like that. It doesn't matter how clever the test***, there is no inherent intelligence factor just waiting to be revealed.

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*and at notation... hence all those online "math tests" that are like "4 ÷ 2 x 2 = ???" as if that's a math problem and not just the numbers equivalent of asking "what does the abbreviation CBT stand for"

**or at standard writing conventions, which is sometimes a useful skill, but almost a completely separate one from using the language to communicate

***they're never that clever, anyway. every "culture-neutral IQ test" is always like, well we didn't ask any specifically Western history questions on our test that assumes you are of course familiar with the structure of a school test with numerous sequential questions which each have a single correct answer which you must answer alone and from memory within a time limit

EDIT: I dug into "culture-fair IQ testing" a little more and it's much, much worse than I thought


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in reply to @pervocracy's post:

Very good rant. My kid has a diagnosis of moderate intellectual disability and was still in my face at two years old, trying to show me how to do allistic facial expressions. I'll be solving the math problems, but I know who I'm asking if I need [whole list of stuff kid is good at that I'm not, actually].

we always take an opportunity to bitch about how fake iq tests are! hell yeah! oh you got a big number on your test? guess you're ready to advance to the first grade by a curve for some reason, you silly creature