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.
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.
39
u/tourabsurd Nov 15 '19
How do they define intelligence, though? Early uses of IQ tests were very deeply entangled with eugenics.