I ordinarily enjoy reading John J. Ray’s Dissecting Leftism blog, except when he talks about IQ. It seems to me that he’s wrong about results showing that blacks have lower IQs, since IQ as measured depends on motivation, and the motivation of blacks on these tests (especially here in America where blacks have decided that being good in school is acting white and something to be avoided) seems unlikely to be as high as that of whites and Asians. (This criticism would not have occurred to me if I hadn’t had a roommate in college who told me that once on an IQ test he came to a section on math, and because he didn’t like math, he skipped the whole section. I was flabbergasted.) Anyway, today’s lead post on his blog (here) refers to a study that shows that one can improve the IQ scores of people who aren’t very motivated to take IQ tests if one can somehow get them to be motivated. Ray’s remarks about this article seem beside the point to me.
Having said that, let me say that his opinions don’t bother me as much as they once did. I have since come to realize that some leftists, while condemning the use of IQ tests to measure intelligence, have their own flawed measure of it: being admitted to an elite school. In their eyes, if you manage to achieve this, you are smart, and if not, then you’re not. Since being admitted to an elite school is very much correlated with how wealthy one’s parents are, this seems like an odd measure of intelligence for leftists to adopt, but adopt it they have. I have run into such people many times in academia, and there’s really no hope that they will ever change their minds on this subject.
This is just one of many reasons why I moved away from orthodox leftism and am trying to construct something better.
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04/27/2011
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Your roommate probably took a group IQ test, such as the Cogate. Most of us in the field don't view them with any statistical accuracy. There are very accurate IQ tests out there, but they are administered by psychometricians on a one to one basis.
The research that comes from these are very different, and somewhat stunning.
Posted by: Mike43 | 04/27/2011 at 08:14 PM
Not quite IQ but a related anecdote.
My father read well for his age when he was in elementary school and the school double-promoted him, so he skipped over a whole year's work. He didn't like this because the older boys bullied him.
He kept doing well in his studies until he heard that the school wanted to double-promoted him again. With this he dug in his heels and dialed back how well he did until the risk passed.
One of those stories I only heard from him late in life. Ironically he became a school teacher and principal himself.
Posted by: James Drake | 04/27/2011 at 08:57 PM
Motivation varies but many situations are ones where motivations are high and blacks do poorly there too
In one experiment, testees were given extra time after the allowed time. The amount of extra time taken was greatest among blacks -- suggesting that their motivation was high. They still did poorly of course.
Posted by: John Ray | 04/28/2011 at 05:15 PM
John Ray, thanks for responding. I'd argue about this, but it really doesn't mean that much to me anymore, as I explained at the end of my post.
Posted by: John Pepple | 04/28/2011 at 07:17 PM
John Ray, I should say a little bit more. In academia, I've encountered many foreign blacks who are much smarter than their American counterparts. Why? It seems that it's because they weren't hindered by the "acting white" syndrome that afflicts American blacks.
Also, in high school I could easily gauge the intelligence of my classmates. But some of these classmates came alive intellectually when they got to college and went on to do graduate work and get Ph.D.s, which I certainly wouldn't have expected of them from what I saw in high school.
Posted by: John Pepple | 04/29/2011 at 03:51 AM
John Pepple quite appreciative thoughts of yours. We must oppose such kind of orthodox mentality.
Posted by: international couriers | 05/21/2011 at 05:24 AM
Uh, pardon my laziness in not going beyond looking up "adjunct" in a dictionary to determine what "the" adjunct problem is. The dictionary says only that "adjunct" is an adjective meaning "non-essential, secondary, auxiliary". Okay, so what is "the adjunct problem"? That there are too many adjunct professors in universities? Too few? A problem that is secondary to some larger problem? Definition of terms, please.
Posted by: logo design | 08/17/2011 at 02:29 AM
Don't know what is wrong what is rite but i know that every one has there own point of view and same goes to this one
Posted by: Belstaff Winter Coats | 01/01/2012 at 09:16 AM