Culture invariant intelligence testing

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Culture invariant intelligence testing
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Culture invariant intelligence testing
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<a href=iq.page.jpg>
<img src=IQ.jpg width=400 align=right>
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Nowdays it is politically incorrect to speak of
a person's intelligence as measured by his/her I.Q.
It is impolite too.
Some people challenge the concept of any measure of intelligence
that is culture independent.
To learn more about this subject I purchased the scholarly but
controversial book, "The g-factor" by Harvard professor Arthur Jensen.

<p>
I display here my adaptation of Jensen's example
of a question of moderate difficulty on such an IQ test.
(You can see the page this came from
if you go to Amazon.com, find the book, and
then search for "colored progressive matrices".)

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Does this look like an intelligence-measuring  question to you?
What's your answer? the same as mine?
We'll all agree the exam can be turned upside-down or sideways
without changing the meaning of anything.

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The classic tests of this kind are called "Raven's Matrices".
For a few more details, click on the picture here.
For still more details, go to
<a href=http://www.amazon.com/> Amazon.com</a> and
look up the book and read all the readers' opinions.
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Another politically incorrect book you might like
to check out while you are at Amazon is
"IQ and the Wealth of Nations"
by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen.

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If you really enjoy politically incorrect materials,
look at all the reader comment about that book too.
Last I looked, you could find there the average IQ's of the various
nations of the world.
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<p>
What's my message to you?
I'm a geophysicist.  That's like a geographer --
look at different parts of the world and describe the differences.
If everywhere everything was the same, there wouldn't be much
work for a geographer to do, would there?
Amazingly, some geophysicists act as though seismic velocity were
complicated (anisotropic) but
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the same everywhere.
</em>
That's like believing that people are complicated but the same everywere.
I don't believe that.
I think velocity (and people!) vary from place to place.
Mapping it and explaining it -- that's my job.
I'm not very good at the people part.
Others are not very honest about the people part
-- just like seismic velocity!
That's my message to you.