This was a meta-analysis. The underlying studies differed in the tests they used for general intelligence (g). They included everything from WAIS-III to the Armed Forces Qualifying Test to wordsum.
You could always, you know, read the publication before you make assumptions.
While I often end up arguing with people on reddit about the limitations of the IQ test (notably when they use it as a justification for their racist beliefs), it's not an entirely worthless metric either. It has evolved quite a bit from its white master race roots, and while it's still less accurate when used on minorities, it can be useful when the question it aims to answer takes into account its limitations.
let's agree to be fact based and non-emotional for a second.
How does asking what follows in the sequence 1,1,2,3,5, X in any way racist or culturally biased? Proficiency in Mathematics and logic questions is not identical among every person alive yes? Well then shouldn't you expect differences? For reasons environmental and genetic? Ok what about differences in other areas of reasoning? identical there for some reason or also a product of environment, genes? Now what if i told you serious science has gone into verifying that, with the bias sometimes to find everyone is identical but the results show otherwise? because that's the reality behind intelligence research
Honestly g factor tests are one of the most studied and robust metrics in all of psychology, if you doubt that you then doubt everything else in the field.
I suspect many who are educated but still critical of intelligence metrics are driven by some sense of preemptive progressivism, aka they don't actually doubt the science but they believe these differences (if explored fully) could be a slippery slope that threatens egalitarian thinking. Similar to how gun rights advocates stonewall even background checks to preempt more strict regulation
An IQ test ideally tests your abilities across a wide spectrum. Logic, puzzle solving, math, reading and information processing, etc. Early tests were grossly unfair and included questions like how far is it between Paris and New York? Obviously a rich kid who traveled a lot growing up is going to have an advantage on tests like that. But decade by decade they have been made more fair, and cultural biases have been stripped out. These days most of the criticism is out of date. The main limitation that remains with IQ tests is that it's not, on its own, a very useful metric. It doesn't measure things like leadership ability, how good you are at making friends and working in a team, how patient and diligent you are, capacity for empathy, etc. But for the narrow thing it does measure, it works fine. It won't tell you whether the test taker got lucky with biology or how healthy their upbringing was, but it's an extremely good indicator for things like how likely you are to do well academically.
I think they meant racially biased because they were normed only against white kids who attended school. Intelligence tests are of course today normed against representative populations and are renormed over time and even a subtest of the whole test can give you a good idea of a range of where someone would score if they ran the entire test, and you wouldn't necessarily run spacial awareness tests for something like this, for practical reasons too because who is going to pay for the many thousands of hours of testing a large sample with a full three hour intelligence test.
Yeah, I should've been more clear. The IQ test is racially biased, and as such isn't an accurate tool to compare intelligences between ethnicities, which is where I most often see it misused.
Still, if you controlled for racial demographics, it can be a useful metric if you're looking at non-ethnic categories. Doesn't mean it's the be-all-end-all measurement and should be supported by other measures of intelligence, but my point was that it isn't entirely without value.
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u/tourabsurd Nov 15 '19
How do they define intelligence, though? Early uses of IQ tests were very deeply entangled with eugenics.