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Are IQ tests based on circular logic? A reply to Race Realist

12 Thursday Dec 2019

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 90 Comments

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IQ, Not Politically Correct, predictive validity, Race Reailist, social class, test construction, the BITCH test, the g factor

Commenter Race Realist (RR) wrote yet another article claiming that IQ tests are based on circular logic and just measure social class. He writes:

In sum, what these tests test is what the test constructors presume—mainly, class and racial bias—so they get what they want to see. If the test does not match their presuppositions, the test gets discarded or reconstructed to fit with their biases…At best, IQ test scores measure the degree of cultural acquisition of knowledge; they do not, nor can they, measure ‘intelligence’—which is a cultural concept which changes with the times. The tests are inherently biased against certain groups; looking at the history and construction of IQ testing will make that clear. The tests are middle-class knowledge tests; not tests of ‘intelligence.’

RR is right that IQ tests were originally designed to confirm existing prejudices of who was smart by deliberately selecting test items that so-called smart people did better on. This is ironic because the whole point of creating an IQ test was that teachers’ judgments were considered too biased to trust, so why did the first IQ testers rely on teachers to decide who was smart?

Psychometric tasks are great at being objective, but they’re not always great at measuring intelligence. By contrast teachers are great at judging intelligence, but they’re not always objective. Thus by selecting only those test items that most confirmed teacher judgement, they got the best of both worlds: An objective scale that was great at measuring intelligence.

Of course RR might argue that the teachers were just judging social class, not intelligence, and by extension so were the tests. Further he would argue that if the tests predicted socioeconomic success, it was not because smart people rise to the top, but rather because SES is all the tests were measuring in the first place.

However we now know that IQ tests predict life outcomes, not because they correlate with teacher’s judgments, but because they correlate with g; the general factor of IQ tests.

Thomas R. Coyle writes:

g is one of the best predictors of school and work performance (for a review, see [7], pp. 270–305; see also, [8,9]). Moreover, a test’s g loading (i.e., its correlation with g) is directly related to its predictive power. In general, tests with strong g loadings correlate strongly with school and work criteria, whereas tests with weak g loadings correlate weakly with such criteria. For example, Jensen ([7], p. 280) found that the g loadings of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) subtests were directly related to their predictive power for school criteria (e.g., school grades and class ranks). WAIS subtests with stronger g loadings generally predicted school criteria well, whereas subtests with weaker g loadings predicted such criteria poorly. Consistent with these findings, Thorndike [10] found that g explained most of the predictable variance in academic achievement (80–90%), whereas non-g factors (obtained after removing g from tests) explained a much smaller portion of variance (10–20%). Similar results have been found for job training and productivity, which are robustly related to g but negligibly related to non-g factors of tests (e.g., rnon-g < 0.10, [7], pp. 283–285; see also, [9,11]).

From Non-g Factors Predict Educational and Occupational Criteria: More than g

g is whatever variable(s) causing all cognitive abilities to positively inter-correlate. RR will tell you g is circular logic because any cognitive ability that doesn’t correlate with g is excluded, but this is false.

As Arthur Jensen (1998) noted, there are very clear rules on a) what is an ability, and b) what is a cognitive ability, and none of them require a correlation with other cognitive abilities.

A test measures ability if it a) measures voluntary behavior, b) has temporal stability, c) has a clear standard of proficiency, and d) some generality. There is another set of criteria that determines whether a particular ability is mental or physical.

IQ skeptics can cite tests that don’t correlate with g, but these tests don’t qualify as ability measures. One example are so-called creativity tests where you’re asked to name as many uses for a brick as you can think of in two minutes. Such tests often lack a clear standard of proficiency because silly answers (i.e. use it to comb your hair) get the same credit as good answers (use it to smash a window).

No one to my knowledge has come up with a mental test that actually qualifies as an ability test yet does not correlate with g with the possible exception of the BITCH test (ironic name for a test that’s supposed to fight anti-black bias) however the BITCH test is clearly culturally biased. None of the major IQ tests are culturally biased against any of the founding racial subgroups of the United States (at least as defined by psychometric criteria).

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IQ, social environment & DNA

17 Thursday Oct 2019

Posted by pumpkinperson in Uncategorized

≈ 156 Comments

Tags

Arthur Jensen, equal environment assumption, IQ, James Flyyn, shared environment, social class

Commenter RR argues that IQ tests measure social class. If by social class he means the home one grew up in, the following author begs to differ:

First, family has little effect on whatever cognitive abilities you have after the age of 17. While family environment is potent early on, its effects fade away to low level by age 17 and become insignificant by maturity. As you grow up, you move outside the family and go to school, become a member of a peer group (your close friends), find a job, and marry. You enter a current environment that swamps the lingering effects of family environment. Current environment is surprisingly self-contained: it influences one’s current cognitive abilities with very little interference from past environments. Most of us assume that your early family environment leaves some indelible mark on your intelligence throughout life. But the literature shows this simply isn’t so.

Second, once the influence of family disappears, the cognitive quality of your current environment tends to match your genetic quality. This is often called the tendency toward “gene-environment co-relation”. This means simply that if your genes are at the 90th percentile for cognitive ability, your current environment tends to be at the 90th percentile of the population for cognitive quality…In other words, chance events aide, genes and current environment tend to match, so whatever genetic differences exist predict cognitive performance without any need to take current environment into account.

You might think the above was written by Arthur Jensen, but it was written by Jensen’s most formidable opponent, James Flynn. It’s from pages 5 to 6 of Flynn’s book Does Your Family Make You Smarter?

Evidence in support of Flynn’s comments is a 2010 study by Haworth et al, where an astonishing 11000 pairs of twins from four different countries were intelligence tested. The results: heritability was 41% at age nine, 55% at age 12, and 66% by age 17.

66% is very similar to the WAIS IQ heritability found in the Minnesota study of twins reared apart, but Haworth et al compared the IQ correlation of MZ twins raised together with the correlation of DZ twins raised together (the classical twin study). If one assumes that both types of twins are equally similar in their environments (including prenatal), the greater IQ similarity found among MZ twins can only be explained by their greater genomic similarity. This is known as the equal environment assumption.

Critics claim that MZ twins raised together enjoy more similar environments than DZ twins raised together and so genes are getting undeserved credit for an environmental effect. However Arthur Jensen notes:

…some same-sex DZ twins look much more alike than others. In some cases their parents even wrongly believe that their DZ twins are identical twins, and they treat them as such by dressing them alike and giving them the same hairstyles and so on. But DZ twins whose parents and others had mistaken them for MZ twins are no more alike in IQ than other DZ twins or ordinary siblings who don’t look much alike.

Source: Intelligence, Race and Genetics by Frank Miele, pg 98

Indeed if people think MZ twins have more similar environments than DZ twins because they look identical, then it follows that same sex DZ twins should have more similar environments than opposite sex DZ twins because they too look more similar (and are treated more similarly) and yet the IQ correlation between same sex and opposite sex MZ twins are virtually identical.

Further support for the equal environment assumption comes from a study of 1,030 female-female twin pairs from the Virginia Twin Registry with known zygosity. About 15% of the twins disagreed with their actual zygosity, however perceived zygosity had no impact on the correlation between twins when it came to any of the five psychiatric disorders studied.

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