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Comment by Tabular-Iceberg | Hacker News Reader

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My sibling comment understates the critique. There is no such thing as "average IQ". Countries don't IQ test representative samples of their population, so hucksters like Richard Lynn just make shit up and pull samples from mental institutions (where IQ tests are used, as they should be, as diagnostics).

This is a pretty simple and obvious observation. Have you ever been asked to take a proctored IQ test to help establish the "average IQ" of your own country? Presumably not. So why do people keep getting took by this silly idea that "average IQ per country" is a thing?

Possible conscripts are usually IQ tested in some way. If you have national consciption, then it would be a pretty good sample of the 18 year old male population.

Some armed forces administer general cognitive tests (like the US does with the ASVAB --- of course, not a random sample in the US, since we don't conscript) but most of these are not in fact IQ tests. Additionally, some western countries have done cross-sectional IQ tests for scientific reasons. In most countries, neither applies. Richard Lynn, responsible for the most widely known and cited "national IQ score" numbers, really did rely on mental health hospitals, and really did impute made-up scores to countries where he found literally no data at all.

What you do see are attempts to synthesize IQ from aggregate economic and educational attainment data. But obviously these are really just proxies for economic development, which then begs the question.

Why the focus on Lynn?

Focusing on his critics is more illuminating and damaging to your presumed position:

Systematic review by Wicherts et al: "In light of all the available IQ data of over 37,000 African testtakers, only the use of unsystematic methods to exclude the vast majority of data could result in a mean IQ close to 70. On the basis of sound methods, the average IQ remains close to 80."

They of course follow it with the conjecture: "Although this mean IQ is clearly lower than 100, we view it as unsurprising in light of the potential of the Flynn effect in Africa (Wicherts, Borsboom, & Dolan, 2010) and common psychometric problems associated with the use of western IQ tests among Africans."

It's always curious how "common psychometric problems associated with the use of western IQ tests among Africans" don't carry over to economics and other things. Wouldn't you expect them to have similar problems with other western "ideas"? Also interesting how Easterners adapted to western IQ tests so well they are better at them than the West.

Part of the point of the Wicherts papers was to refute the Lynn data, observing that even taken on its own premises Lynn's team pretty clearly excluded data unfavorable to the conclusion they wanted to draw. But look at Wicherts 2009, at the samples they're talking about. One of the largest was 800 students in Nigerian high schools (a test arranged by IQ researchers to for a cross-cultural comparison, back in 1981). Lynn's data includes, and is materially influenced by, a sample of 59 Senagalese children who were tested while recovering from malaria. The malaria thing is just funny, but it's the numbers that stick out to me.

I'm not getting further into the details here because the easiest-to-understand point here is that there are not in fact programs to generate reliable "average IQ" numbers in different countries. I am struck by the fact that message board nerds from America believe these programs exist, when almost none of us have ever taken an IQ test.

The purpose of IQ tests is to derive a value that would predict other values. The inverse is also true.

Given a multitude of such values it would even be possible to get back to a precise IQ value.

IQ tests are just factor analysis artifacts. You can dream up 100 questions that you conjecture may have something to do with intelligence and not even know the answers and have 10,000 people answer them. Product of the factor analysis of the answers will yield a normal distribution which you can then center on 100. Calibration can be more complicated than that but you get the point.

The natural circumstances people find themselves in are also just noisy questions.

This argument is basically a rejection of the science of IQ testing and I am here for it.

Those IQ charts look very different depending on who is doing the sampling. One of the famous ones is from a self described "scientific racist".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn

I can't reply to the original comment but it's interesting how tunes change, because even into my youth a very different stereotype persisted: https://achewood.com/2007/02/08/title.html

I suspect accuracy of any IQ test falls off the further you get from 100 in either direction, so I’m not married to any global IQ dataset in particular. But they all show the same trend.

All the politically and economically prosperous countries show as high and the basket cases show as low. And if you sit in on their political discourse it increasingly sounds like you’re in an open air mental institution. (Though regrettably that model has been losing a lot of predictive power in the democratic West lately).

Your whole argument is that low IQ leads to an undeveloped country rather than impoverishment leads to lower IQ. I don't think it is entirely one way.

IQ is also only one (mediocre) signal you are putting a lot of emphasis on. India does not score well, yet it is clearly emerging and has very successful individuals from mathematics to chess.

I don’t think it’s entirely one way either.

Someone mentioned malaria-afflicted test takers before. Of course better healthcare leads to lower disease load, which leads to higher IQ, but it’s only a weak link, simply not leaving old tires with water strewn about the place is free.

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