Some people thought it was a hoax

[d000hg]

My maths teacher used to say "IQ tests are a measure of how good someone is at taking IQ tests".

[SueEllen]

My maths teacher used to say "IQ tests are a measure of how good someone is at taking IQ tests".

Yep as unfortunately tests have been found to have cultural biases.

If you think about the indigenous children who survived in Colombia it would be likely they would get a lower IQ score than say a child of Colombian mathematicians. However we all know who we would prefer to be stranded in the jungle with.

[woohoo]

Yep as unfortunately tests have been found to have cultural biases.

If you think about the indigenous children who survived in Colombia it would be likely they would get a lower IQ score than say a child of Colombian mathematicians. However we all know who we would prefer to be stranded in the jungle with.

Spend a few days teaching the mathematician basic survival skills and you may be fine. Spend a few days teaching the lower IQ child advanced mathematics and your rocket ship isn't going anywhere useful.

[malvolio]

Spend a few days teaching the mathematician basic survival skills and you may be fine. Spend a few days teaching the lower IQ child advanced mathematics and your rocket ship isn't going anywhere useful.

That's a specious argument, actually. With the exception of the very rare idiot savants, who can do stuff in their heads without really knowing why or how, the ability to become an advanced mathematician is as much about being taught how to study and how to apply lessons learned on top of a fairly extensive background in the subject matter from basic arithmetic on up. Your Columbian children would have had the same teaching in rather more pragmatic matters, but they would have absorbed a fairly large body of folk lore and learned experience.

Put your two extremes in the same classroom at age four and both may have succeeded equally in higher maths. Despite a damaging change in school curricula in the fifth form, I passed GCE maths with an A, mainly because maths is not based on rote learning of a particular set of sources but applied logic. Things that do need that kind of background knowledge, like history, Eng Lit and Latin, I failed badly.

Intelligence is not a standalone attribute, it's a combination of many factors. I don't think for a moment that today's sixteen year old is any brighter or thicker than I was at that age (not a particularly high bar, to be honest!), but their intellectual curriculum is so limited they struggle with things I and you would have found easy.

[d000hg]

Yep as unfortunately tests have been found to have cultural biases.

Well no, this was 25 years ago before we were woke to such things. His point was you can train to get better at IQ tests, which is broadly the same thing - it's not something you can just show anyone and get a fair metric of anything other than how good they are at the test.

If you think about the indigenous children who survived in Colombia it would be likely they would get a lower IQ score than say a child of Colombian mathematicians. However we all know who we would prefer to be stranded in the jungle with.

I don't really wanted to be stranded alone with children in the jungle. I'm sure for some people that would be lovely though.

[DoctorStrangelove]

Found some GCE O & A level papers the other day: did I really know that stuff?

Even more so the HNC and CEI Part II: did I really know any of that? Particularly the analogue computer programming which has come in so useful over the years.

[TheGreenBastard]

Sure that's it. I really really care about your opinion of me .

Nothing to do with me, but generally you do like to come across wise, when it's nothing further from the truth. Case in point, this brain fart.

[d000hg]

Nothing to do with me, but generally you do like to come across wise, when it's nothing further from the truth. Case in point, this brain fart.

You seem to be the only one taking issue with what NAT said. You've made accusations of deliberately taking a skewed example but not explained what exactly the problem is. When one person provides a worked example and the other responds "that's a bad example, you are trying to look smart" one one has contributed anything of worth.

[NotAllThere]

generally you do like to come across wise.

Do I? I wasn't really aware of it. It does seem to make you little tense though.

[woohoo]

That's a specious argument.

Is it. What about comparing basic or even advanced survival skills with an advanced mathematician? I'm pretty much certain a large part of the population could learn advanced survival skills, evidently that's not true of advanced mathematics.

I was replying to the comment about IQ tests having a bias. They have context. The measure of intelligence in the West at least is competence, so of course you are going to be tested within a context of what's valued.