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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

The KKK probably has some.

Also check at the "Inverting cause and effect" department at your local library.

That's a painfully conventional response to the inquiry. Aren't you interested in the data, if it exists?

Not really, especially with IQ being the pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo it is, and culturally biased. And that's before we add the actual damage to cognition nurturing in a poor, in conflict, etc., environment does, or the opportunity gaps said children have growing up...

If IQ is biased to skills that make a society advanced and competitive, is it really a bad way of measuring intelligence?

It's biased to skills that make the creators of the tests (and their class/education/culture) appear best. Not necessarily the skills that "make a society advanced and competitive".

But even if they were the latter, that's no guarantee that they would be a good way of measuring intelligence.

If I keep you up and prevent you from sleeping for 5 days straight, and then give you an IQ test, I didn't test your intelligence in its actual potential. And if I pitted you against a well rested person, the IQ difference doesn't necessarily measure any real difference in intelligence.

Similarly, if one kid A is brought up in a nurturing family, loved, well fed, well treated medically, educated, surrounded by people reading books etc, compared to a kid B from a poor family, with absent parents working all the time, starving occasionally from lack of money, with no intellectual stimulation and role models, etc -- measuring their respective IQ doesn't tell you whether kid A is inherently smarter than B, nor does it tell that kid B is poorer because it has less IQ...

If IQ functions that way, you don't need to measure it because people are already doing what you want it to enable.

Those observations are also consistent with "Inverting cause and effect", but not in your position's favour. So one should want to investigate the directions of causality etc., instead of assuming.

>Those observations are also consistent with "Inverting cause and effect", but not in your position's favour.

Actually, they were meant to be both consistent with "Inverting cause and effect" and in my position's favour.

My position isn't that poor areas can't possibly fare lower in IQ tests than richer areas.

It is that (1) IQ tests are not good indicators of human potential (or even of intelligence), (2) IQ tests are biased against poorer people and cultures, (3) poorer people aren't poor because of low IQ, if anything it's the opposite (both in that such tests are stacked against poorer people with less education, and because poverty related stress, lack of nutrition etc, can stall development and thus make you fare worse in cognitive tests, in ways that the exact same person, genetics-wise, wouldn't if they had a richer upbringing).

> poorer people aren't poor because of low IQ, if anything it's the opposite

What kind of data would you accept as falsifying this belief?

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