At 11:28 PM 10/17/01 -0000, Dr. Evil wrote:
Every once in a while even cpunks need a little respite from ranting, and some refreshing topic which hasn't been beaten to a painful ad-hominem-death a thousand times already... so here's the topic.
What methods are there for doing non-verbal, cross-cultural IQ tests?
This has "beaten to a painful ad-hominem-death a thousand times already" in other circles, however. Not that this prohibits the following rant: When I came to calif for grad school I encountered a very bright quasi-native (Puerto Rican ethnically, though an Angelino, and now a Prof) who complained about the following on the SAT: furnace:basement::blah:blah as being geographically biassed towards cold-weather folks (e.g., Princeton, NJ), as Californians don't have basements and furnaces are in walls or attics. I was astounded that Calif's didn't have basements (though their necessity if you have something called a frost-line (brrr) has been explained here within the last year) and instantly convinced, for the first time, of some geographical cultural bias[1]. However, this isn't enough of a problem to discredit so-called "abstract" (e.g., geometric) tests, such as the Stanford-Binet IQ, or SATs, which I *do* think are largely valid[2]. Though it helps if you can figure out what the test-makers' point is; this is always a help. In any case, Dr. E, if you're still working on the 'exclude robots, include humans' problem and thinking about IQ tests, well, wow. ---- [1] I now have a house in Calif, no basement, furnace in the attic. Hopefully the foundation will float when the local clay "soil" liquefies next; our location wrt liquefaction isn't too bad, compared to northern angelos. [2] The SAT attempts to predict college performance not actual intelligence IIRC. IIRC it does so reasonably well. This too has been beaten to death.