Test sophistication

Posted by Frogs on March 26, 2006, 03:34 AM | #

I would be interested to know how South Korean children score on the problems that are loaded most highly on ‘g’, given their extreme focus on education and studying.

If they are like other Northeast Asians (they probably are), they do best on visuospatial problems, which have fairly low g-loadings, and worst on verbal problems, which have high g-loadings.

Posted by Søren Renner on March 26, 2006, 04:40 PM | #

Following the links one discovers that at one time JJR thought that improved obstetrics was responsible for the Flynn effect—specifically, C-sections and episiotomies, by reducing or eliminating the twisting and crushing of the brain during delivery. Tristram Shandy‘s father had the exact same idea—as one of his hobbyhorses.

Posted by Amalek on March 26, 2006, 05:09 PM | #

I’m afraid we’ve got it wrong about this intelligence business. Today’s Sunday Times, profiling Dr Frank Ellis (see below), explains it all to you:

Psychologists have pounced on his pronouncements with glee, pointing out that IQ tests have been discredited as a reliable measure of intelligence because they were developed by white researchers and tested on white populations, so were unsuitable for other cultures.

Similarly, the Bell Curve has been dismissed as an outdated theory that showed lower achievements among the black population because its members were economically worse off. A study of pre-school children in 2002 by Birmingham local education authority found that black children were second only to white middle-class children in achievement. One conclusion was that parenting was more important than genetics.

So there. You can all go back to sleep for another fifty years. De black folks, dey comin’ along jes fine.

Posted by Phil Peterson on March 26, 2006, 07:01 PM | #

De black folks, dey comin’ along jes fine.

LMAO

Posted by Phil Peterson on March 26, 2006, 07:05 PM | #

A study of pre-school children in 2002 by Birmingham local education authority found that black children were second only to white middle-class children in achievement

It is remarkable how the Bell Curve, which is a veritable tome of research, gets “discredited” by a teensy weensy “study” about pre-school children in sunny Birmingham.

Posted by Amalek on March 26, 2006, 10:19 PM | #

As to the Sunday Times on Ellis: one can imagine the thought processes of the poor young liberal hack who was tasked with a hasty mugging-up of the issues:

Got to be anti-racist. Got to find reasons why the test figures are wrong and we’re not the Master Race, like those nutters they made that movie with Ralph Fiennes in it about. I’ve got it! IQ tests are devised by whites, so naturally whites always score highest. Don’t they? Well, assume that’s what Ellis said, therefore blacks are unfairly handicapped. Their brains are too different to cope with White Man’s Exams. Hang on a minute, though, doesn’t that mean that there are inborn differences between races? Oh sod it, deadline’s coming up, I’ve got no quotes yet and nobody’ll notice any gaps in the logic, they just want to hear how loathsome this arrogant white creep is.

But some academics have been found to ‘discredit’ (mot du jour) Ellis. Here’s Dr Jon May, a psychology lecturer at nearby Sheffield University, in a letter to The Independent:

I do not understand why a scholar of Russian and Slavonic languages should feel the need to pronounce academically on putative racial differences between sub-Saharan and North-American populations, when very few of either group speak Slavonic. The fact is that no psychometric test can identify between-group differences in the way Ellis claims, because by definition they have to be normalised within each group, so that the average score of each group is 100. That is what IQ means.

Not really mainstream even in the mid-90s, but just about arguable. But there’s more:

Anyone who uses a psychometric test on a population for which it has been neither designed nor normalised is doing so for a political reason, not a scientific one. If sub-Saharans score low on a test designed to tap intellectual differences within the North American population, I would not be surprised. Nor would I be surprised if North Americans performed poorly on a test designed to tap differences within the sub-Saharan population. This does not mean that either group is intellectually superior or deficient, merely that they perform differently on tests designed for each other.

This is the vintage ‘Mismeasure of Man’-era blather about culture-unfairness to which the Sunday Times profiler glancingly alludes. Let us suppose that Ray is right to think that ‘western’ IQ tests are never adapted to the abilities of foeigners or those with language difficultues. (Clue: he’s not.)Other MR contributors would know how to counter such a conjecture, even without venturing into confirming indicators of the robustness of cross-racial comparisons of IQ, both sociological and genetic. Rushton, Lynn, Jensen et al. have been furnishing a ceaseless torrent of such correlations since before Gould knocked off punk-eek to peddle his unhistorical fallacies about Jews being rated as morons to stop them getting into the States.

Beyond that, the same objection arises: if there is truly such a great gulf fixed between white and black ‘cultural’ attitudes to calculating the next number in a sequence or fitting pieces of a puzzle together, what does that tell us about, say, the arithmetical capabilities of Africans? If verbal IQ tests unfairly require too detailed a knowledge of English from African Americans who have spent their whole lives speaking a version of it, what should we infer about their innate capacity for understanding and comparing the meanings of what are usually pretty humdrum words? Isn’t Dr Ray, in his anxiety to draw contrasts between one race’s gifts and another’s, making the same ‘East is East and West is West’ assumptions as the most diehard racial purists?

Posted by Voice on March 26, 2006, 10:43 PM | #

yes, I am surprised that at least Ellis didn’t define “Black” as Negroid.

In the UK you are black if you aren’t European descent.  This adds a lot of confusion and allows the idiots in the media tojump all over him quoting Indian performance in O levels and A levels.

He should have defined this better for the layman..

Posted by Al Ross on March 27, 2006, 12:53 AM | #

Educate the man : 

Posted by Robin P Clarke on March 27, 2006, 01:58 AM | #

Jon, you’re wrong that Richard Lynn was the discoverer, his 1982 thing explicitly failed to recognise the internationality of the increase, whereas JF was already on the ball .  Sure RL is a greater scholar than JF, but give the latter his due, he rightly worked up this thing, and has put honesty and a fair amount of competence into pursuing it, more than can be said for other opponents of IQ. 

I too recently looked at Rushton’s 1999 thingy, but have to say that its conclusion is utterly trumped by other data.  Rushton 1999 is confined to the WISC (measuing GC) which is actually the less powerful sensor of the Flynn effect anyway - it is much stronger on the matrixes tests (gf).  Looking at his table 1 (of Flynn’s data), one can see how erratic-flaky it all is, clearly not neatly explainable away as you’d suppose.  And when one looks at a broader data-set, and with more sophistication distinguishes between gf (fluid) and gc (crystallised), one sees that gf has far greater gains than gc, and indeed in Norway while gf was going up, gc was going DOWN!  (Flynn 1987 Psychol Bull 101, 171-191)

Furthermore, Nettlebeck et al 2004 doi:10.1016/S0160-2896(03)00060-6 “The Flynn effect: smarter not faster” found that inspection time speeded up by 123/116, notwithstanding their title.  All this and more suggest that there actually has been a real change in brains rather than the sort of surface effect proposed by Jon and others including JF himself.

Posted by David B on March 27, 2006, 06:48 AM | #

Robin P Clarke is right about the terminology.  Lynn has no more right to the credit for discovering the Flynn Effect than numerous other psychologists who had noticed over the years that this or that IQ test showed increasing scores.  It was James Flynn who first systematically documented and publicised this, and Herrnstein and Murray, in The Bell Curve, who sensibly suggested calling it the Flynn Effect in recognition of this.  I did a post on this subject some time last year on gnxp.

Posted by Amalek on March 27, 2006, 08:40 AM | #

On his personal website Dr Jon May writes:

I continue to collaborate with colleagues from the Amodeus projects, notably David Duke now at Computer Science in Leeds

No, it couldn’t be… could it? And isn’t Leeds where that vile racist bigot wotsisname hangs out?