name
Jedi Master
I've found two texts about IQ which I thought would be interesting for the readers here.
The first text is titled "The Outsiders" and is about the correlation between (high) IQ and and social maladjustment. It an article published in "Gift of Fire", the magazine of the Prometheus Society, an association of people with high IQs.
Some short excerpts
More articles --> http://prometheussociety.org/articles/index.html
The second text compares IQs of the black, white (and asiatic) races. It is a research paper titled "THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY" and was written by Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen. Below is the abstract
I am posting this text here despite having some reserves about it because I think that they are possibly drawing their conclusions based on invalid premisses b/c the tests used on African ppl were possibly not appropriate in first place b/c they were not understood by the subjects. There is a comment thread about this paper (here http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003930.html - click on 'Comments' down left). Look for "Flumo and Yakpalo" and the comments following it, which illustrate perfectly what I suspect is the case. A short quote:
The first text is titled "The Outsiders" and is about the correlation between (high) IQ and and social maladjustment. It an article published in "Gift of Fire", the magazine of the Prometheus Society, an association of people with high IQs.
Some short excerpts
Article --> http://prometheussociety.org/articles/Outsiders.htmlGrady M. Towers said:Children with IQs up to 150 get along in the ordinary course of school life quite well, achieving excellent marks without serious effort. But children above this mental status become almost intolerably bored with school work if kept in lockstep with unselected pupils of their own age. Children who rise above 170 IQ are liable to regard school with indifference or with positive dislike, for they find nothing in the work to absorb their interest. This condition of affairs, coupled with the supervision of unseeing and unsympathetic teachers, has sometimes led even to truancy on the part of gifted children
...
A second adjustment problem faced by all gifted persons is due to their uncommon versatility.
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A third problem faced by the gifted is learning to suffer fools gladly.
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The single greatest adjustment problem faced by the gifted, however, is their tendency to become isolated from the rest of humanity. This problem is especially acute among the exceptionally gifted.
More articles --> http://prometheussociety.org/articles/index.html
The second text compares IQs of the black, white (and asiatic) races. It is a research paper titled "THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY" and was written by Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen. Below is the abstract
The full paper (PDF) is here --> http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdfRuston and Jensen said:The culture-only (0% genetic–100% environmental) and the hereditarian (50%
genetic–50% environmental) models of the causes of mean Black–White differences in cognitive ability are compared and contrasted across 10 categories of evidence:
the worldwide distribution of test scores,
g factor of mental ability,
heritability,
brain size and cognitive ability,
transracial adoption,
racial admixture,
regression,
related life-history traits,
human origins research,
and hypothesized environmental variables.
The new evidence reviewed here points to some genetic component in Black–White differences in mean IQ. The implication for public policy is that the discrimination model (i.e., Black–White differences in socially valued outcomes will be equal barring discrimination) must be tempered by a distributional model (i.e., Black–White outcomes reflect underlying group characteristics).
I am posting this text here despite having some reserves about it because I think that they are possibly drawing their conclusions based on invalid premisses b/c the tests used on African ppl were possibly not appropriate in first place b/c they were not understood by the subjects. There is a comment thread about this paper (here http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003930.html - click on 'Comments' down left). Look for "Flumo and Yakpalo" and the comments following it, which illustrate perfectly what I suspect is the case. A short quote:
Mortimer in GNXP said:"if we accept the hypothesis that African people are simply not oriented towards IQ-type tests"
I could't find anything on Google. Here's what Stephen Pinker wrote about research done in Liberia in the '70's:
For many years, the psychologist Michael Cole and his colleagues studied a Liberian people called the Kpelle. They are an articulate group enjoying argument and debate. Most are illiterate and unschooled, and they do poorly on tests that seem easy to us. This dialogue show why:
Experimenter: Flumo and Yakpalo always drink cane juice (rum) together. Flumo is drinking cane juice. Is Yakpalo drinking can juice?
Subject: Flumo and Yakpalo drink cane juice together , but the time Flumo was drinking the first one Yakpalo was not there on that day.
Experimenter: But I told you that Flumo and Yakpalo always drink cane juice together. One day Flumo was drinking can juice. Was Yakpalo drinking can juice?
Subject: The day Flumo was drinking can juice Yakpalo was not there on that day.
Experimenter: What is the reason?
Subject: The reason is that Yakpalo went to his farm on that day and Flumo remained in town that day.
The example is not atypical: Cole's subjects often say things like "Yakapalo isn't here at the moment; why don't you go and ask him about the matter?"
...
Also, these Liberians that were studied in the '70's were "unschooled" and "illiterate" and presumably it is schooling that develops the "orientation" needed for IQ tests, but the Africans mentioned in the Rushton and Jensen article apparently were schooled. Maybe IQ test orientation is a matter of degree, but then it seems likely that there would be different item structures for oriented vs. non-oriented groups, and apparently that is not the case. Maybe one thing they could do is try to extract a working memory component from the results of tests on the Ravens, estimate it's heritability, and then determine if that genetic component plays a major role in producing these low scores. But it is not necessarily obvious that working memory is more heritable than conceptual representation, or how to separate one from the other. Perhaps the reason why this issue has not been fully resolved is that people are afraid of what they might find if they investigate it thoroughly.