Does everybody in the country get an IQ test in school? Can we just look that up in the public records?
It sure would be useful if it was public and universal. For tracking the effects of lead poisoning for one. Or just factoring it into any big study. We might find something unexpected.
Indeed, hiring from more selective universities is, to a certain degree, a way of laundering hiring based off of IQ, since you can pass the buck to the university itself to not be racially biased.
Why of course I am talking about "white america" in 1900s [1].
[1] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/03/smarter
> Over the past 100 years, Americans' mean IQ has been on a slow but steady climb. Between 1900 and 2012, it rose nearly 30 points, which means that the average person of 2012 had a higher IQ than 95 percent of the population had in 1900.
As soon as IQ becomes a measurable thing, populations that measure it will act in ways that increase it. Shocking, I know.
To make a mistake is to be a bad person. To be stupid is to be bad.
I can call you weak. I can even call you ugly, cowardly or a flibbertigibbet. But if I call you stupid look out!
Like our whole worth as humans is summed in our ability to talk smart and solve riddles like a trained animal.
Which seems pretty stupid.
In fact, they can already seem smarter, even when they're not.
Maybe we can move on to prioritizing humans on other criteria -- like how nice they are to each other, how good they are at making nice art, or skiing an amazing line down a mountain, etc.
This might be a bit peculiar to the HN crowd; calling someone cowardly is fighting-words in many groups.
If you're making material mistakes that hurt the social group you're in, especially things that cost extra work for someone else to undo and redo correctly, then you could be identified as someone ripe for removal from the group. Ostracization means assigning taboo or outsider status to that person, either as a way to get them to shape up and earn back the trust they lost or to remove them entirely with little remorse.
A piece of information that, if it was made public, would be immensely useful in countless ways for the management of our society, But it might also be exploited by bad people. So it is made private.
And the icing on the cake. We say "it's private because privacy is intrinsically good and a basic human right ". Not, "It's private because we fear bad people".
Such as?
Now, maybe if one person had an IQ of 80 and the other contender had an IQ of 105 it seems like it could be useful in some particular fields. But for the most part you'll run into the "I'm 200 times smarter than you because my IQ is 102 and yours is 101".
And there is no icing on the cake. Privacy is a multipolar topic and there are many pros and cons around it.
We have rights not because they are some intrinsic part of the universe, or inalienable text written by a deity, we have rights because people working together and learning from the past mistakes in history have decided that something better than what was is attainable, and the moment we forget it something worse will take its place.
If we were looking for smart people for a role in whatever. There's another.
If we were rating schools. There's a third.
Gee, my imagination is feeling so stretched.
The average is always by definition exactly 100, neither higher nor lower.
Also, this data already exists. The folks who make standardized tests collect it to use for translating raw results to standardized scores.
> If we were looking for smart people for a role in whatever. There's another.
This is illegal. There are ways to get the same result that are not illegal, and are actively used.
> If we were rating schools. There's a third.
Schooling doesn't do much to iq.
> The average is always by definition exactly 100, neither higher nor lower.
The average for the population that the test is normalized is exactly 100. GP was suggesting that if the averaged dropped in a single locality (specifically county, but I'm generalizing), which is completely possible.
I wonder if the thought process even goes that far. Oftentimes, the motive seems more like self-conscious social pressures, e.g., fear of embarrassment.
A chronic ubiquitous anxiety "rationalized" as a fear of everybody for everybody.
Try posting the question on social media sometime. The answers are interesting.
IQ is so much bullshit. Probably why it turns up so often in racist screed masquerading as science. Burn it all down.