If you have the time, I'd be curious to know your answers to the following (95% confidence intervals if you want):

1. how many seconds did it take you to think up this refutation of IQ tests? 2. how many psychologist/psychometrician man-years do you estimate go into developing any particular IQ test like the RAPM or BOMAT? 3. what probability do you give that psychometricians have not also thought of your objection? 4. conditional on their thinking of it, what probability do you give that they have done nothing to cope with it? 5. how many seconds would it take you in Google or Wikipedia to find the real answers to 3 & 4? 6. how many seconds did it take you to write your comment?

It was several years ago (15), but I actually took the time to read "the Bell Curve" and even to find some of the actual twin studies that tend to be cited in the discussions. Those I found rather underwhelming - for example the sample sizes tend to be low and not very comparable, and sometimes they are clearly exaggerated. For example one mentioned twins who gave their kids the same names and wore the same clothes even though they didn't know each other.

Over the years I have read a lot of articles on the subject - as did many others, I guess, it is a popular subject after all.

I'd say it took me more than a few seconds to come up with my example.

Ok, now I have some more time.

First of all, the thing with the 2d vs 3d drawing was an actual real world example that I read about. So clearly there are some psychologists/psychometrians who were wrong about the interpretation of their tests.

As for 5: if it only takes a few seconds to find those answers, why don't you do it and give the answers to us?

Edit: I just tried googling "RAPM cultural bias" and didn't get any useful results. You really should provide the links. Of course your tone makes it likely that discussing with you is probably a waste of time anyway :-/

> Of course your tone makes it likely that discussing with you is probably a waste of time anyway :-/

Not really. I ask these questions because I've noticed that astonishingly often, people online will write a definitive refutation of some scientific position or new study, which took them only a few seconds to think of and which is wrong; but why do they do this?

I can think of many possibilities, and I'm never sure what it is: do they think so poorly of the scientists conducting the study (anti-intellectualism)? do they think so highly of their own thoughts (Dunning-Krueger)? are they too stupid to realize any of this (low IQ)? are they too lazy to look up the answers in Wikipedia or Google Scholar? or is it a cynical ploy for getting upvoted comments where they count on their fellows not being knowledgeable enough to call them on it?

Hence, I ask questions to try to isolate what might be the issue and incidentally point out to the more reflective readers why comments like yours are fundamentally bad ideas.

Sometimes the spectacle is just horrifying; on a mailing list with a fairly high level of discussion of cutting-edge research on working memory and dual n-back, someone posted proudly about how they thought IQ tests were biased against Africans, and though I point out that this was obvious to him and me, even more obvious to psychometricians, he never once looked up how the tests might have been defended against or corrected for cultural biases, despite me sometimes explicitly naming the names he could punch into Google or Wikipedia.

What makes you so sure that the research around IQ is not flawed? Never mind that there are probably thousands of researchers with differing opinions.

I am still waiting for your refutations. But honestly, your initial assumption that every internet commenter is wrong will make it difficult for you to communicate or learn stuff.

Frankly, I fail to see how pointing out possible flaws in a theory can ever be "a bad idea". In my opinion to doubt everything should be the default stance of a scientist.

You mentioned RAPM, I looked it up and it says it was invented 1934 in an attempt to avoid cultural biases - therefore it uses more graphical elements than language. My examples show that even graphical elements can have a cultural bias. So while it is a nice attempt, you can not be sure RAPM succeeded, even if their intentions were good.

The 2d box vs 3d box thing is an actual event from the history of IQ research, where IQ testers apparently got it wrong. So these people are fallible, too. Finally, cultural bias is one of the standard mistakes people (Even if they are scientists) make.

Note that I didn't even claim the IQ tests are flawed. It bores me if people confuse my comments with stuff other people said.

You make an excellent point, but I think it may be dangerous to conflate race and culture. I suspect for instance that a person of Japanese heritage that grew up in the US and spoke only English might have almost as much trouble with the Kanji characters as I would.

Well in this case, the conflation of race and culture is virtually a requirement. As far as we know, you can't do much really to bias an aptitude test in terms of biology because there is little correlation between race and biology¹. On the other hand, culture and race are relatively tightly correlated, so if you want to bias an aptitude test with respect to race, the surest way to do it is to bias it with respect to culture.

A great example is Jim Crow era voting rules. Black people obviously are not biologically disinclined to be able to read, but in 1900, it was a simple fact of southern American culture that a white person of voting age was less likely to be able to read than a black person of voting age. A black southerner of voting age was usually either a former slave, or the child of a former slave, and slaves did not have access to basic education. So a literacy test was, at that time, a racially biased test.

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¹ This is unsurprising when you realize, for example, that the combined population we put in the single box of "black" is more genetically diverse than the combined population of all the races we put outside of that box. Even though populations of different specific geographical origins do often have characteristic biological traits, the social concept of "race" is not strongly correlated with geographical origin.

> A black southerner of voting age was usually either a former slave, or the child of a former slave, and slaves did not have access to basic education. So a literacy test was, at that time, a racially biased test.

That wasn't the whole problem. The literacy tests were only administered to black voters in the first place because of a "grandfather clase"--anyone whose father and grandfather both had the right to vote had the right to vote automatically, and since the literacy tests were only implemented at the end of slavery, in practical terms they only applied to the black population. Naturally, since the test itself wouldn't disenfranchise whites (except for immigrants, but fuck them too) they were free to make it as difficult as possible.

That's true. I was simplifying because even without a grandfather clause, any literacy test would have been racially biased at that time.

I guess culture is the main point - if you live in China, you probably get better at telling apart Chinese faces. And vice versa - I can only guess that telling apart western faces might be hard for people from other cultures, too. I should add that I live in Europe, I think in the US there is a higher mix of people from different backgrounds, so my example is perhaps not as convincing.

What I remember of my first-grad year in psychology (in Europe and I changed orientation after that year), anthropology course: The picture shows a black person in a room and you're looking at it in such a way that you don't see any perspective lines (3D construct), only a flat surface for the Wall. A square is drawn on the wall and filled with a scenery. "White/Occidental" people think the square represents a window and "Black/African" people think it's a painting or a hanging frame. Because, when the study was conducted, in that particular part of africa where it was conducted, people didn't have windows in their house.

So, that's another example of that cultural bias but it demonstrates we don't need something "complex" to make it stand out.

PS:Sorry for this atrocious use of english, it has been a long day.

I think there was a study (do not know if it had agenda or was neutral) that indicated that most of the disparity was attributable to socio-economic status rather than culture.

That is to say that general knowledge spread btwn cultures (ethnicities) was less pronounced than non-culture based tests (such as abstract concepts). Again, I don't know how valid that conclusion was.

* Another example I read about is how different cultures see the drawing of a box (a 3d wireframe). Apparently in western cultures people would see it as a drawing of a 3d box, whereas some poor test takers in Africa just saw a 2d drawing. This was then interpreted as Africans being less intelligent, when really they were just as correct as the people who saw the 3d shape. It just wasn't such a common meme where they lived to draw 3d shapes like that.*

This is an excellent example of the way IQ tests can indeed succumb to cultural training effects. It's pretty clear that this is what's going on with the Flynn Effect, for instance, which is not a real increase in intelligence since not g-loaded:

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/2010%20Editoria...

It's also why Raven's matrices don't work as well as they used to (IMHO). I think my own childhood IQ score is 10-20 points too high, because I'd seen too many IQ-test-like problems.

So, certainly a problem with all IQ tests. But a minor problem, or an existential major one? If it was a major one, these tests would lose their predictive validity - which remains quite high.

This is a great summary you've written here and worth a second read. In deed there are confounding cultural factors built into standardized IQ testing. You wouldn't expect a white European student, even from another English-speaking country like the UK, to arrive at one of our school and test as highly as children born in the US. There will always be some exceptional cases, but in general environmental and cultural factors make IQ testing highly culture-specific.

What we need to ask ourselves here in the US is why some children get left behind culturally, or why some children live in disadvantaged environments, broken homes or single-parent households. Solving those problems would quickly close the IQ gap by giving more equal opportunity to all children.

Don't be too optimistic:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/us/21latina.html

As I said, the confounding factors exist, but they seem relatively minor. Attempting to effectively homogenize the diverse human gene pool through education is anything but a new effort. If it was possible to educate the Mbuti pygmies of the Congo into the cognitive equivalent of Great Neck Jews, don't you think someone would have tried this already?

Imagine that the remedy proposed was not educational, but rather pharmaceutical. Someone's selling you a drug that purports to turn Pygmy populations (mean IQ 55 or so - but let's be generous and add 10 points for cultural bias) into Ashkenazi populations (mean IQ 115 or so).

You might ask: has this drug ever been tried before? Is there any evidence that it can work? And what happens if the Beastie Boys take it - do they become the world's leading physicists? These would all be very rational questions.

"If it was possible to educate the Mbuti pygmies of the Congo into the cognitive equivalent of Great Neck Jews, don't you think someone would have tried this already"

Who would try that? The benign, wise rulers of the Congo?

I have another rational question for you: if an Ashkenazi family adopted a Pygmy baby and raised her, how smart would she be?

So white parents lower Asian children's IQs to below average?

That subsample size is too small - it's just noise.

Although I suppose the Asian adoptees available, as probably with all races, weren't exactly the pick of their gene pool. Blood runs true, you know - on average.

(Ironically, the perspectives on human heredity generally held in the premodern era are generally more accurate than those taught in modern schools today. The traditional ideas of "blood" were after all consistent with a broad cultural understanding of animal husbandry, and the mechanisms of heredity aren't any different in humans than in pigs.)

I think part of the problem has always been calling them IQ tests. If they predict X (say, success in some given profession), perhaps it can't be argued with. It just doesn't follow that it predicts "intelligence". I guess if they claim to test intelligence, they try to limit people to some inherent trait. Like they could never become good at profession X, because their intelligence simply isn't sufficient. In reality there might be lots of other reasons why some people tend to do worse in profession X than others. They can still be predicted, but a prediction is not necessarily a final verdict.