re: #411 lostlakehiker

Take a look at the results of the last few decades on the William Lowell Putnam mathematical competition, for example.

That is a culturally biased means of measuring creativity and divergent thinking. Go to Korea and ask a room full of highly successful math students, with high IQs, to do an open-ended, non math-related task in front of their peers where the probability of failure is high and where the task requires them to contradict conventional wisdom.

How do you think that might compare to the results with “lower IQ” American students?

My guess (after years of working with such students), is that they would not do well, comparatively.

If the question is who can be trained, by standard methods in a limited time, to this or that Army specialty, they’re not a bad indicator. Training involves reading manuals. Performing the task for which one is trained will again require reading manuals.

IQ tests might be valid as a predictor for some outcomes - but the point I’m making is that the choice of outcomes being measured reflects cultural bias.

Me: There are tests that involve no reading or writing. I’m not a professional in psychometrics, and I don’t know how well regarded these are in the profession. I don’t know what sort of real-world tasks they’ve been validated on either. Or how one might go about validating them.

Let’s take another example - where the testee has never had any experience resembling the test-taking environment. And neither has either of his/her parents, or grandparents. How do you control for environmental influence when compare that individual’s test results with those of someone who spent their early environment being quizzed about their answers to abstract questions, asked by parents and grandparents with Masters degrees?

Me: There’s a lot more to natural aptitude than IQ.

So the, how are you measuring aptitude? Are you measuring it in some way that is generalizable beyond the specific task of the test at hand?

IQ tests are at best a measure of aptitude for the kinds of tasks for which the tests have been validated. On the other hand, IQ tests do have some validity. People who score higher are more likely to catch on at real world tasks such as reading a map, solving an equation, or maintaining an engine. The military has established this much, in controlled studies.

Again - IQ tests reflect cultural bias; you are saying that they are a predictor for performance on related tasks. Reading a map is a “real world” task for some people - but not for someone in a canoe in the ocean who navigates by analyzing myriad, and incredibly complicated variables, but has never looked at a map in his/her life and neither has any of his/her ancestors.