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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36582 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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The people who designed the original IQ tests included a balance of (I forget the specifics, take these as possible examples) spatial-reasoning tasks which men are better at, and conditional hypothetical verbal problems which women are better at. The number of each kind of question is calibrated such that men and women will both get an average score of 100. But it's a kludge; IQ tests could be more sensibly understood as "intelligence test to grade women against other women" and "intelligence test to grade men against other men" smushed into the same paper.

They did this because they couldn't be bothered to do two separate normalisation operations, but their laziness has had the tragic knock-on effect of giving entire generations the chronic misconception that women are as smart as men.

From what you've said it sounds like IQ is a grab-bag of different things. What does "women are as smart as men" mean? Are you saying:

  1. men & women have "different" intelligences (your post is phrased far more controversially) or;

  2. do IQ tests weight verbal questions more than spatial ones? (are there any other interpretations than the one I'm thinking of??)

I mention question weights because this guy sounds knowledgeable.

Might this be testable?

IQ is valuable as it tracks actual intelligence fairly closely; if you are good at IQ-test-style puzzles you're very likely actually intelligent. This will be detectable in other things like complex creative tasks, and even practical areas like average income, crime rate, and so on. If the test was biased towards one gender by adding questions that the gender did better at, but weren't as strongly correlated with actual intelligence, you'd expect their IQ scores to be less correlated with the downstream effects of intelligence itself than it is for the other gender.

(Theoretical example: If men were a lot dumber than women in general, one could add "ability to lift weights" or the like to the IQ tests until both genders had the same average score. This would however result in IQ no longer being able to predict the ability of men to e.g. lead a company, like it still would for women.)

I don't follow, why give preference to spatial-reasoning tasks when defining who is smarter? Why not the one at which women are better?

I don't follow, who exactly is preferencing [whichever one men were better at] tasks? The IQ test designers didn't preference them, they finely balanced them against the [whichever one women were better at] tasks.

I'd be fascinated to know how men-smart (spatial) the average woman is, and how women-smart (verbal) the average man is.

Also to what degree each correlates to the positive traits IQ is usually held to be associated with (health, income, etc.)

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