Test sophistication

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.

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Similarly, the Bell Curve has been dismissed as an outdated theory that showed lower achievements among the black population because its members were economically worse off.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.

De black folks, dey comin’ along jes fine.

LMAO

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?

“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.” (—Prof. Jon May, quoted in Amalek’s post)

First, IQ tests have been exhaustively gone-over and purged of anything that could be called racial or cultural bias.  So it’s not true that they were “designed for a specific race.” Furthermore, this Prof. John May couldn’t possibly believe the falsehoods and sophistries he’s spouting here because they’re such elementary and transparent falsehoods it’s impossible to become professor of psychology and not have the wit and knowledge to see they’re the most laughable nonsense.  Therefore he’s spouting what he knows to be laughable nonsense in order to keep the public pig-ignorant of the truth on these matters.  It’s like if your young child suddenly blurts out in company that a certain individual is ugly-looking you’ll shut him up, saying it isn’t so, the person in question is very nice-looking even though you know he’s ugly as sin and the child’s right.  Later on at home you’ll tell your child he must never say anyone’s ugly as it hurts others’ feelings.  What Prof. May is doing is “soothingly” telling all the faint-hearts who read The Independent we must never say someone or some race has a low IQ because it hurts feelings, and truth be damned in a case like this, just as truth has no importance in the other case of the ugliness, so he thinks he can say anything, any nonsense at all, to smoothen things over and make everyone feel “nice” again, sort of taking away their distress at hearing uncomfortable truths about the world.  Just as plastic surgeons who may be consulted in regard to the ugly person’s facial defects may rightly deliberate in hushed tones among themselves as to what’s not right in his looks, strictly out of earshot of the poor patient of course, professional psychometricians and other professionals may deliberate in hushed tones amongst themselves, strictly out of “public earshot,” concerning some of these truths about group IQ which make us all feel so uncomfortable to hear (especially women voters).  If one of the plastic surgeons accidentally slips and says something within earshot of the individual concerned, it’s proper to contradict him out loud to keep that individual from feeling hurt.  It’s in that way that this professor is lying deliberately and knowingly.  He’s soothing the public’s feelings and implicitly scolding Prof. Ellis who, he thinks, ought to know certain things aren’t discussed out loud even if true.  If Prof. Jon May is Jewish there’s even less of a surprise here:  Jewish academics routinely lie in the furtherance of what they see as anti-racist political goals, even Jewish academics at the highest levels in their fields.

Educate the man : 

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.