Philosophical discussion on IQ measurement and intelligence standards

28 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet? life or death. In Atkins v. Virginia, the US Supreme Court found a person with mental disability, defined as having an IQ of less than 80, cannot be executed. IQ is not really a measurement, in the normal sense. Most measurements in life are absolute, for example, distance, weight, and time. I can prove my house is bigger than yours using a tape measure. We each ensure our measures are the same by calibrating them against a common reference. In the 1900s we could have walked down to the local town hall and checked our measurements against a ‘yardstick. As measurements became standardized, these sticks were compared with a common central reference. For example, the metre was a platinum-iridium bar kept at the Pavillon de Breteuil near Paris. In the 1960s, a laser superseded the metal reference, and today a metre is defined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of krypton-86 in a vacuum. Measurement has become very precise! Intelligence is different. It has no yardstick. If I were to ask, “How much intelligence does it take to design a building?” there’s no simple answer. IQ is not an absolute measurement - it’s a relative score. Test 100 people and list their scores in order. The ones in the middle get a score of 100; the top 5 a score of at least 130 and the top person a score of 140. Similarly at the lower end. A person with a high IQ is probably smarter than one with a low IQ, but it doesn’t tell you if the building they designed will stand up. It’s rather like quoting the odds of a horse winning the Derby. Quoting the odds does not give the speed of the horse, nor often the winner of the race! Despite attempts by test creators to remove cultural bias, it can never be completely eliminated. Certain Amazonian tribes have no concept of counting above five. For them, numbers are an alien idea and serve no useful purpose in their habitat. In the jungle there are always enough trees to make spears, and as a hunter-gatherer you simply need to know where to find your prey. There is no need to count animals into an enclosure at night. Another interesting environment is the Australian Outback. Aboriginal Australians appear to have a remarkable aptitude for visio-spatial memory and can remember maps or collections of objects much better than you or I. Tests for this skill involve playing a variant of Pelmanism. A collection of objects is placed on a tray and covered with a cloth. The cloth is lifted for 60 seconds to reveal the location and type of objects and then replaced. Subjects are then given a bucket full of objects and asked to recreate the tray. You and I do a modest job. Native Australians do this almost perfectly. Why? HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015718