When you are using a psychological test to determine which people will succeed and which fail, the fact that it was originally developed as part of a seriously unethical program and began from seriously unsafe assumptions should give you pause, surely? Particularly when the racial asymetry in the results mirrors so closely the intentions…
When you are using a psychological test to determine which people will succeed and which fail, the fact that it was originally developed as part of a seriously unethical program and began from seriously unsafe assumptions should give you pause, surely? Particularly when the racial asymetry in the results mirrors so closely the intentions of its original designers?
When I was at uni, there were students from Masai and Yoruba backgrounds on my course. They found it astonishing that most European students found some topics (including subjects like the effects of infinity, and that there were some spaces that were not measurable) so difficult. Their cultural background (which you described elsewhere as more focused on "storytelling than logic") enabled them to understand, while we were floundering.
What you see as "logic" and "obviously the right answer" depends very much on your previous experience. Our disagreement over IQ tests is an example of this playing out. You may wish to pretend that I am being stupid, but I obtained very high scores on, for example, the IBM aptitude test, which I took at their request while working for a company that they supported. I chose not to work for them though, despite getting a very good offer: I had no wish to be surrounded by people who thought that that test was a good way to select a staff team. By your standards, probably a stupid decision - but equally, by your standards, I'm proved to be very intelligent...
No, I turned it down because of WHICH test they used, and what that said about who they wanted to employ & how their employees were expected to conform to approved patterns of thought.
The performance of IBM in the years between then & now speaks volumes about why that was a deeply flawed selection strategy.
As to intelligence, we'd better leave it there. We're going round in circles because we disagree about what we mean by intelligence - you think turning down a high paid job because it wouldn't offer the self-development you want is silly, and I think it's the intelligent thing to do... Which comes down to whether intelligence is the ability to avoid unnecessary problems, or only the ability to solve them when they arise...
When you are using a psychological test to determine which people will succeed and which fail, the fact that it was originally developed as part of a seriously unethical program and began from seriously unsafe assumptions should give you pause, surely? Particularly when the racial asymetry in the results mirrors so closely the intentions of its original designers?
When I was at uni, there were students from Masai and Yoruba backgrounds on my course. They found it astonishing that most European students found some topics (including subjects like the effects of infinity, and that there were some spaces that were not measurable) so difficult. Their cultural background (which you described elsewhere as more focused on "storytelling than logic") enabled them to understand, while we were floundering.
What you see as "logic" and "obviously the right answer" depends very much on your previous experience. Our disagreement over IQ tests is an example of this playing out. You may wish to pretend that I am being stupid, but I obtained very high scores on, for example, the IBM aptitude test, which I took at their request while working for a company that they supported. I chose not to work for them though, despite getting a very good offer: I had no wish to be surrounded by people who thought that that test was a good way to select a staff team. By your standards, probably a stupid decision - but equally, by your standards, I'm proved to be very intelligent...
So you turned down a high-paying job because they used a qualifying test. I rest my case.
I never said you were stupid but your tossing around infinity in this case is not the argument of a well-informed person.
Infinity is dangerous to mathematicians; many who studied it went mad. But it has nothing whatever to do with intelligence testing.
No, I turned it down because of WHICH test they used, and what that said about who they wanted to employ & how their employees were expected to conform to approved patterns of thought.
The performance of IBM in the years between then & now speaks volumes about why that was a deeply flawed selection strategy.
As to intelligence, we'd better leave it there. We're going round in circles because we disagree about what we mean by intelligence - you think turning down a high paid job because it wouldn't offer the self-development you want is silly, and I think it's the intelligent thing to do... Which comes down to whether intelligence is the ability to avoid unnecessary problems, or only the ability to solve them when they arise...