this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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The general narrative is that all people are equal, no exceptions.
So the reason some races are more successful or educated or whatever is 100% environmental. As such all countries and people can be brought to the same level of whatever ideal you want e.g. low crime, higher gdp.
But if you look at people, some countries are taller, or heavier, or the best runners come from certain areas etc. So everyone agrees their is genetic differences in physicality. To potentially expand that thought to the brain isn't without some comparison. But the narrative is no, all human races have the same level of intelligence no exception.
If you wanted to test the last point you could do something like an IQ test. Which has been done and shows dufferent races have different IQ.
So the question is, is are IQ tests an accurate showing of intelligence or are they entirely worthless test?
There are multiple problems with IQ tests, but the main one I take issue with is the fact that all they really measure is how well you taken an IQ test.
Consider people who are extremely intelligent, but collapse under the pressure of a test. They might score extremely low on an IQ test, but demonstrate their knowledge in other ways.
Also consider the fact that IQ tests require specific knowledge of the types of questions being asked. Math, just as an example, isn’t something everyone knows. Just like reading. Just like any other skill people consider a normal thing to have. Does that mean the person is inherently unintelligent? Or could it be that they’ve just never been taught that skill?
Bottom line, if you take an IQ test result as anything more than a single point of data among many, you’re using it wrong.
This is a great point. The results of an IQ test aren't really measuring a person, they're measuring a byproduct of that person, which is significantly less informative.
It's important to define was "equal" is in this context. Some people hear "equal" and think they must measure exactly the same in every test, but that's not how the word is being used in this context. It's more that people are so varied from one person to another that no test can truly judge them well enough to differentiate them when it comes to inherent worth.
One person might measure above another in one test, but there are surely many others where the results would be flipped. There are so many different things you could test a person on that in the end none of them really matter; any one measurement is like trying to figure out what an extinct animal looked like from a single tiny piece of a fossil.
That's what the IQ test is doing - it's taking one tiny piece of human intelligence, which itself is one tiny piece of what might be said to make up a person's value, and trying to use that to extrapolate information about them that simply can't be taken from such a 1-dimensional test. It's not worthless, but it needs to be paired with a bunch of other tests before it can really say anything, and even then it wouldn't say much.