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Comment by starwed | Hacker News Reader

>Race, religion, political affiliation, disability are obviously all irrelevant in an IQ test... so in a way, isn't it more equitable?

Except that cultural background is not, unfortunately. And it's highly correlated with the first and probably weakly linked to the second and third classes as well.

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Let's assume a test that isn't culturally biased. The idea behind the test should be to determine the raw underlying intelligence of a person; culture shouldn't play into it at all. The fact that some IQ tests seem to discriminate - referring to the legal explanations above - appears to be a flaw in the tests given in those cases. If a test is biased toward a race or culture, then it's not an accurate measure of intelligence; we can't even call it an IQ test. It doesn't meet the definition of what most people are talking about or referring to when they say "IQ test" -- since "IQ" by definition is measured on a sliding scale in reference to the entire population.

For argument's sake let's assume a test that doesn't discriminate or give advantage to any given race or culture. How is that different from a coding test, other than that it requires more general interest and knowledge, and doesn't overly reward memorization of algorithms?

This is a substantial enough topic that Gould wrote a whole book about it, The Mismeasure of Man.

But directly relevent:

* even if the concept of some sort of underlying general intelligence were valid, we have yet to come up with an unbiased test of it.

* And then if you could somehow prove an IQ test was unbiased and germane to the job, then the court ruling referenced elsewhere in this thread wouldn't prohibit it's use.

So you can't prove anything about anyone. No test can qualify or disqualify anyone. What about writing code? Isn't that a kind of basic test of intelligence? Or do you hold that anyone can write as well as anyone else, and there's no fundamental logic or critical thinking needed as long as they're properly trained? If that's true, why all this bother about who to hire -- can't we just hire anybody, and find them equally useful or useless in their jobs?

You've gotta measure people somehow in order to hire them, right? You can spend all day talking about how unfair any possible test is, but the world will continue choosing people based on a multitude of criteria, most of which boil down to intelligence, and all I'm suggesting is that there are more efficient and less circumspect ways of doing that.

Right, and I said if you could create such a test there wouldn't be objections to it being used. But it is hardly a solved problem! The especial sticking point is actually showing that some general test really correlates with how well you do the specific job.

(Go and read the wikipedia article about the relevent court case: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.)

Yes, and that book would be a wonderful example in a class on polemic because any relationship to the truth is incidental to its purpose. It ignores the modern science of psychometrics and the vast majority of the material it deals with predates the 60s. Outside of the areas where Gould was an expert ([snail] paleontology) I would actively avoid reading anything by him. If its valuable, someone else would have picked it up, but if it's directly from Gould it could be a rehash of something someone else said better more than a decade earlier that he never cited.[0] Please note that in that case I'm assuming incompetent literature review, not plagiarism. But we also have what looks like another example of politically motivated incompetence or fraud[1]. For specific criticism of Mismeasure of Man look here[2]. For criticism of Gould's general importance as an evolutionary theorist, I quite like this

I am not sure how well this is known. I have tried, in preparation for this talk, to read some evolutionary economics, and was particularly curious about what biologists people reference. What I encountered were quite a few references to Stephen Jay Gould, hardly any to other evolutionary theorists. Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there's no there there. (And yes, there is some resentment of his fame: in the field the unjustly famous theory of "punctuated equilibrium", in which Gould and Niles Eldredge asserted that evolution proceeds not steadily but in short bursts of rapid change, is known as "evolution by jerks").[3]

[0]http://lesswrong.com/lw/kv/beware_of_stephen_j_gould/

[1]http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/gould-morton-revis...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man#Criticism...

[3]http://www.pkarchive.org/theory/evolute.html

I was just using that book as an example of how complicated the topic was!

The problem is that, yes from first principals, a biased test is not a true "measurement of intelligence test", however loads of tests that people have been calling "IQ tests", or are found in books called "Big Book of IQ Tests" or "Test your IQ" are biased. So the term has changed, and includes all these biased tests. If you, as a employer tried to do IQ tests, you would probably find it quite hard to find one that you could be sure wasn't biased.

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