Checks out, really.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 10 points 6 days ago (2 children)

IQ is not an objective measure of intelligence. Nothing can be because intelligence is colloquial and subjective. If I told you that I had an instrument that could objectively rank all humanity by beauty, smart people would see the problem immediately.

IQ depends on their being one kind of underlying intelligence. No such thing as 'book smarts' or 'street smarts'. Emotional intelligence is also fake. Just logical problem solving and spacial recognition.

IQ is racist. IQ consistently shows that black Americans have lower IQ than other groups. White supremacists love this fact because they view it as scientific evidence that black people are inferior.

"Race" is biologically incoherent, but "black American" is the most incoherent of all. Barack Obama is a famous black American. But his mama is a white lady named Durham and her people are British. In the Jim Crow era South, 1/16 black ancestry made you 100% legally black. That's one great-grandparent. White and black Americans have been cross pollinating for 400years. Sometimes even consensually.

"Black American" is not a coherent biological category. Therefore, when IQ tests mark differences between these groups, it can ONLY be measuring social difference because their is no biological explanation.

IQ is not an objective measure of intelligence and any study based on it is faulty.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 8 points 6 days ago

    IQ is a reasonably effective metric of certain kinds of intelligence. It doesn't measure all intelligence and has some caveats, but it still highly correlates with certain abilities of one's brain. IQ decreasing over time in the same subject is a cause for alarm.

    And you absolutely can objectively measure certain types of beauty. If you managed to rank all of humanity by facial symmetry, I'd think you were a bit weird, but I wouldn't say that you were wrong.

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 7 points 6 days ago

    The original article wasn't talking about IQ at all - Reader's Digest was oversimplifying the research.

    Cognitive tests included prospective memory (baseline only: n = 171,585), visual-spatial memory (round 1: n = 483,832; round 2: n = 482,762), fluid intelligence (n = 165,492), and short-term numeric memory (n = 50,370).

  • source
  • parent