Sunday, August 18, 2013

Why can’t we talk about IQ?

This article in Politico is my strongest critique to date of how the media handle the IQ issue. I wanted to call it "IQ Deja Vu" to emphasize how the same controversies come up again and again without the media ever learning anything:
“IQ is a metric of such dubiousness that almost no serious educational researcher uses it anymore,” the Guardian’s Ana Marie Cox wrote back in May. It was a breathtakingly ignorant statement. Psychologist Jelte Wicherts noted in response that a search for “IQ test” in Google’s academic database yielded more than 10,000 hits — just for the year 2013.

But Cox’s assertion is all too common. There is a large discrepancy between what educated laypeople believe about cognitive science and what experts actually know. Journalists are steeped in the lay wisdom, so they are repeatedly surprised when someone forthrightly discusses the real science of mental ability.

If that science happens to deal with group differences in average IQ, the journalists’ surprise turns into shock and disdain. Experts who speak publicly about IQ differences end up portrayed as weird contrarians at best, and peddlers of racist pseudoscience at worst.

I’m speaking from experience.
Read the whole thing here.

2 comments:

  1. To judge whether or not people are racists, one has to judge their intention to denigrate others and not simply by judging their actions and behaviour alone, because racism is based on a person's intention to denigrate others, racism cannot be determined simply by judging the words they wrote in a dissertation.

    How People Misunderstood Jason Richwine's Dissertation: Explaining Racial Incompatibility is Different From Denigrating Them
    http://thethinktankguideforsmarterliving.blogspot.sg/2014/04/how-people-misunderstood-jason.html

    ReplyDelete