Chile Forum

Well . . . . Ethiopia has the oldest "high" civilization in sub-Saharan Africa, building complex stone temples around the same time that China was just emergining into the Shang era. But look at its "IQ" score! True, things have gone from bad to worse since the emperor was overthrown; but Ethiopians are, both in the diaspora and at home, more "successful" than that score would suggest.

IQ test scores try to categorise round 3D pegs into 2D square holes.. IMHO

How high does one’s IQ have to be to take any of this seriously, though?

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You can try to ignore reality, but reality doesn’t ignore you.

Thats one of the questions on the test, isn't it?

longjonsilver wrote: did anybody notice that the countries with the poorest, least educated, worst fed populations are near the bottom of the list.

Oh, I certainly did notice that -- as well as the fact that the bottom of the list consists of nations dominated by one particular melanin-rich racial group.

longjonsilver wrote: does this bring up the inherent contradiction of IQ as being a learning based test? and if so what is its value? its well known on standardized tests that you can "teach the test" rather than the subject matter and give a false reading of the level of understanding of the subject.

In spite of the fact that racists love to use IQ tests to bash certain groups in political debates, this is a double-edged sword. After all, Asians and Jews are two groups whom many angry American racists find highly offensive; and yet they cannot dismiss them as stupid and worthless, much as they'd like to. I find this quite amusing.

What's attractive about the IQ test is that it can be a useful yardstick to measure the performance of peoples who are competing or will have to compete on similar terms. Chile, at the end of the day, IS a literate, Western society, relatively homogeneous, resource-rich and capitalist. It will be competing against nations with a similar background. So, from the standpoint of professional educators, I'd think the IQ question is worth pursuing in order to improve test-measurable performance... and ultimately to address the question of developing human capital.

I think I understand Asean's perspective somewhat even if we may not agree on every detail.

For example, suppose that a few Chilean billionaires and millionaires decided that out of exuberant Chilean national pride, they wanted to create a brand new university with the gravitas and grandeur of MIT, Harvard or Stanford -- an intellectual powerhouse of the southern hemisphere. A school whose name would command respect from every university in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas, and eventually the entire world.

The mechanics of actually hiring the staff for such an institution (raiding other top-tier schools for their professors), and recruiting its students, would be heavily test-score-reliant I'd imagine. As a university administrator, you'd be looking at ACT scores, SAT scores, LSAT and GMAT scores -- all of which I believe are very closely related to IQ tests in format and substance. (Please correct me if I'm in error here) So, even though IQ tests are anything but objective, we find ourselves "hooked" on them or their proxies, don't we?

Interesting issues to ponder...

Miles

Asean, with due respect I would say that your approach is very naive, haven´t seen ever how some dumbass turned onto millionaires? there are legions! same as for individuals applies for countries

Asean wrote:Like I said though high IQ does not guarantee success for any nation..however without it means failure in the long run.
Just like having tons of money doesn't mean happiness for you but without any means misery in the long term, go figure!

I believe this absolutely! Especially at the elite level dealing with national governance. Look at how nations develop and implement public policy.

Focus on AIDS for a minute. Africa is the worst-affected continent. The African countries with the worst HIV-infection rates also have some of the most destructive public health measures and/or sexual customs. For many years, the South African president was in denial about the link between HIV-infection and AIDS and he was - allegedly - surfing the internet and trying to do freelance, non-professional, alternative research into the AIDS crisis. I was in a state of mild shock when I first heard of this! Critics claim that *critical* time was lost while the President, who did not major in any science-based field at university, was trying to be smarter than the experts.

Links from the British media:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/720995.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/se ... frica.aids

If that portrayal is accurate, then to a Western mindset, this is irrational or IQ-deficient behavior. Wouldn't a German or Japanese head of state simply make sure that his National Academy of Sciences or his Presidential Science Advisor was the most brilliant mind (or minds) the government could hire, and then ask for expert advice on a public health crisis and proceed from there?

I assume that Chileans approach public policy the same way or in the same general fashion, with politicians respecting professional specialization and expertise. (Please step in here if I am speaking too hastily)

Finally, I try to say these things with some humility and self-awareness as well and not out of total American/Western cultural arrogance; I believe that our current President (Bush) is almost certainly an IQ-deficient person relative to presidential peers such as ex-President Jimmy Carter. I believe that in any nation, including ours, an extended period of low-IQ leadership can be catastrophic - even fatal. Just as it can be for any small developing nation.

The jury is still out on what will happen to us in the USA.

Miles

I'm talking abt the creation of wealth thru knowledge based sectors like software, biotech and space tech that must require an above average IQ groups to perform...
For eg look at thailand the land of smiles...the country never been colonised with natural resources like rice.
It's relatively peaceful except coups by the military..but why did they never go into industries that japan, south korea and taiwan did..cause thais are a more laidback people with a study culture that's not conducive enough to throw out entrepreneurs and engineers to create Samsungs and sonys?even
vietnam a late starter able to attract intel and mircosoft..think abt it

Asean wrote:I'm talking abt the creation of wealth thru knowledge based sectors like software, biotech and space tech that must require an above average IQ groups to perform...

Do you believe that public policy should have a role to play in developing those sectors? Or should it be left to individual creativity and spontaneity?

Flynn effect and his book I've not read..but IQ and EQ tends to be the measurement of the success of nations economies..no one likes to be called dumb but then how many of us can be einsteins?
I believe gifted people are truely a needle in the haystack but IQ tests needs to be broadened other than academic level
And cause your IQ is poor does that mean u prefer your people IQ to be the same or poorer than yours...quite opposite you need higher IQ people be it your friends or family ..

Uhhh Huhh? what? I guess my IQ isn't high enough?

helibel wrote:Uhhh Huhh? what? I guess my IQ isn't high enough?

All kidding aside, it's a really critical factor in problem-solving --- the likes of which the USA has never had a greater need for.

My personal scare is petroleum-based. Gas will cost maybe $8.00/gal within a few years. Maybe even $10.00. In this case the 150-IQ question is: "What do we do to find a viable replacement in order to forestall economic depression?"

Bicycling and taking busses is the easy part. How do industrial users cope? Thank God for brainiac R & D scientists....

IQ is mostly affected by the environment, you just can't judge with the same test someone who didn't get access to good education and another one who did.

Guess the people who can replace oil and still runs the show have the highest IQ

o.k. sorry. I dropped a bomb on this thread early in the morning and then I got dragged away from the computer kicking and screaming by the day's emergencies. I really wanted to explain myself.

Well, first I find it offensive just on an ethical/human level. To be able to generalize to a culture, a race, a nation, a economic class like that is just wrong in so many ways I likely could spend the rest of my life listing them. That is, if the basic assumptions on which it is based are correct in the first place.

I could find more intellectually justifiable merit in a ranking of basketball skills by race, culture, and country than a IQ test as a way to allocate resources and social justice. At least basketball skills (or the lack of them) is something I could say exist (or even does not exist). The IQ test ( specifically the existence of general intelligence as some sort of quantifiable number) has trouble even passing the existential and epistemological smell test. As theoretical type things go that is a fairly low hurdle to get over.

Second, on a personal academic level I find it insulting. I do believe there is such a thing as "intelligence", and perhaps it is measurable in some way. I spent something around 8+ years of my life (philosophy moves a little slower than other fields), and I bet with various government educational subsidies better than $250,000 US at Universities in the States and Europe specializing in areas related to "intelligence", thought, minds, AI, and so on. I am still in a PhD. program, just a little burned and not doing much lately.

So, it really rubs my philosophical intuitions the wrong way to have a bunch of intellectual lazy psychologist arbitrarily declare a definition and the problem solved, and then use it to stick square pegs in round wholes (pun intended).

I was far from the first sucker to step in to that quagmire. We are talking about one of the problems that humanity has devoted likely more thought to solving than any other subject. Perhaps even more than religious thought and God. The issue might even be the source of our desire to know God, or at least intimately related to that urge. There is very good anthropological evidence that the issue was grappled with long before recorded history (e.g. totems, spirits, and so on). So, again it just makes my skin crawl when I hear it used in any context (there are few good ones to use it in).

So to simply assert that X is Y, just does not make it true.

There is no way we can get in to all the gory details on this forum. There are entire regions of the internet devoted to this subject. There are entire libraries, buildings, departments, and so on devoted to it in some way, shape, or fashion filled with people that know a lot more about it than I do anyway.

As far as I have been able to determine, intelligences is first and foremost tied to language. No language, no culture, no mind, no thought, no IQ test. In fact, under the philosophical microscope culture, language, and thought are almost indistinguishable. Intelligence, no matter what else it might be is something that is communicated. To measure it, you must do it through language. That is in part the problem, and why we do not have computers that can Think ( big T ). Talking refrigerators are not problem. No one however in the computer science world working in AI that I know of is considering giving a computer an IQ test. In fact, I think programing a computer to defeat (not simply score well) an IQ test would be a rather trivial programing trick. There would still be no lights on upstairs as we like to say in Philosophy.

Language, at the end of the day, seems to be not much more than a set of norms and behaviors. They are often highly formalized in to what we call English, Spanish, Chinese, and so on, but they do not need to be to qualify as intelligence. I might point to cases such as Helen Keller, Coco the Gorrilla, my cat complaining that it does not like the cheap cat food I bought. All of which exhibit some form of behavior that we would easily identify with as intelligence, but I believe we would have trouble administering a standard IQ test to them with any meaningful results. So too, would we have trouble putting say a random person or group from Africa up against say a random person or group in Chile.

So, at the very least it can not be quantified in the way they claim to have quantified it. Even if they could, there is no World in which I can imagine that we could find a group of say Chinese, Germans, Americans, Chileans so equal in all respects as to make such comparisons of the numbers meaningful.

Sorry, it is too involved for me to fully unpack my thoughts on language and intelligence in any sort of coherent way here, but I would direct anyone who would like to follow up the issue to read the works of Wilfred Sellers. His most important work is EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND for those with better things to do, but still not that much better than reading his other 30 or so books and 1,000 or so articles.

The text is online at this link below. To really work it over you will want a paper copy, and the rest of your life.
http://ditext.com/sellars/epm.html
The shorter versions and biography are here:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/
http://www.ditext.com/sellars/index.html

Honestly, I believe Sellers will go down in history as one of the greatest philosophers ever. Right next to Plato, Hume, and so on. The biggest guns in Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence have been talking about it before he was even dead. In fact, I once pulled a book off the shelf titled something like In honor of the life and works of Wilfred Sellers. He wrote the introduction, and was still alive at the time it was published. If I had found EMPIRICISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND my first year in Philosophy, I likely could have saved a lot of money or at least time. Unfortunately, my mentor played a cruel joke on me and did not hand me a copy until my last year of undergraduate work, and thousands of hours of mental torture at the hands of other thinkers. I almost did not bother going to graduate school because of it.

As Philosophy goes, this is likely one of the shortest and most accessible books ever written that manages to make sense out of almost the entire history of Philosophy and Science in around 400 or so pages (well more than anyone believed could be done in 400 pages). Most people that have never read a Philosophy text in any depth will likely be confused by the how common sense it is. That is likely why philosophers, anthropologist, linguist, computer scientist, and people from just about every other field are still scratching their collective heads over it. It seems the only people that have not found it yet are in psychology departments typing up the latest versions of the IQ test. Perhaps they have, and just prefer to collect their snake oil royalties.