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Comment by learc83 | Hacker News Reader

Businesses don't use IQ tests in general because the tests have a racial bias.

Considering that income and debt to income ratio are racially skewed as well, wouldn't credit reports display the same bias, and require that companies prove that there is a legitimate business case in order to use them?

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It's unethical (and stupid) to use IQ tests for hiring decisions because they have very little predictive power with respect to job performance. If a measure has such predictive power, it's not necessarily unethical to use it just because it also correlates with race.

I don't actually know whether bad credit is predictive for job performance, though the story for why it might be is easy to imagine.

The story for why an IQ test would correlate with good job performance is also easy to imagine, but it doesn't appear to match reality. I never see studies finding a correlation between credit scores to job performance when I read about this issue, which makes it puzzling that employers continue to use them.

Could it be that the people making the decisions here are making them based on the credit reporting agencies' marketing rather than concrete data?

I was commenting on a problem with the argument that they shouldn't be used because they may have a racial bias. I don't really have a position on whether credit reports are a useful tool in hiring decisions.

>because they have very little predictive power with respect to job performance.

Care to back that up?

It's unethical (and stupid) to use IQ tests for hiring decisions because they have very little predictive power with respect to job performance.

This is incorrect.

http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...

http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...

http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri...

If a measure has such predictive power, it's not necessarily unethical to use it just because it also correlates with race.

This is true. While certainly ethical, it is still illegal in the US.

If its illegal by definition it can not be ethical.

So Rosa Parks was the bad guy?

A charitable interpretation of walshem's comment would be that he believes her actions were moral but not ethical.

mm I take your point but I would quote sewards "higher law" and the UNHCR as overriding Jim crow laws

Criticizing the leader was illegal in Stalin's Russia. That does not make it unethical.

Rule of law authoritarians can not be ethical.

Um, none of those links explicitly mention IQ tests. Can you tell me which specific parts of the links we should look at?

They're referred to as general cognitive ability tests, general intelligence tests, general mental ability, GMA.

All of the OP's links mention them, just not by the lable IQ test.

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