Fat Happy Buddha said:
Gotta agree with t76 on this one. It seems pretty self-evident that she is only stating the obvious. To insist otherwise is foolhardy.
In the letter of her statement, I agree as well. It's obvious that the tool are not "perfect".
In the spirit of her statement, I disagree. The tools are NOT so imperfect that it fails to do its job. We must accept some degrees of uncertainty and doubt. No tests are perfect.
In the labortory, we perform experiments and we often include any possible uncertainty. However, we never include the "basic" uncertainty: the "inaccuracy of tools". All tools are understood to give a certain degree of accuracy. Beyond that, it's meaningless; but within the accepted degrees of certainty (usually 95%), the results are significant (in other words: meaningful).
In court, we never have to prove that someone commit a crime with 100% certainty. It's call proving beyond a "reasonable doubt". I believe that IQ tests, while imperfect, is "perfectly" capable of generating significant data to classify and catagorize people into IQ groups (as seen in many forms, SATs, the Military's IQ tests... etc...).
Fat Happy Buddha said:
How can low IQ test scores LEAD to poor socio-economic standings if it is a group of six-year-olds that are being tested?
Clearly, if you talking about a correlation between adult IQ and income, you're not really saying much more than "smart people are more likely to make more money." Big deal. Everybody knows that is true.
But if you test 100 rich kids and 100 poor kids, with the result being that the rich kids do substantially better, there are only two conclusions possible:
1) Rich children are innately smarter than poor children; or
2) Environmental and cultural factors came into play.
No reasonable person with an awareness of the world around him would come to the former conclusion, so the latter conclusion is clearly the case.
Fat Budda... That's a very strong point. You analysed what I said, and used logics to support your view.
Well, there's a reason for that. Note the following statement might offend some...
If one stats that "rich children" are smarter than poor children, it is wrong (by itself). But you must take into consideration that: 1. Intelligence is Innate and 2. Most innate qualities are passed to the next generation through genes.
There is certainly a very strong correlation between the IQ of parents and their children (I posted a link to a study that showed this. The research showed that ADOPTED children do NOT show similiar IQ level as their parents while having similiar SE background; on the other hand biological children DO show very similar IQ level as their parents).
Now, take statement [1. Smart people are more likely to be rich] and statement [2. Smart people are more likely to have smart children] and you will see why it's more likely for RICH kids to be smarter. But of course, there are RICH people who got rich without having high IQs, their children obviously would not have a higher IQ. Note that I said "more likely".
I meant low IQ lead to low SE standing as in that: the low IQ parents will have low SE standings, thus their relatively low IQ child will as well.
My view fits into the pattern of IQ results very well. Why does some poor people perform well on IQ tests? As we all know, lots of poor people (relatively) perform very well on IQ tests. So you might ask "Why? If the smart tend to get rich and the rich tend to be smart? How is this happening?"
The answer is: "These high IQ people ARE rich"... in their own countries. Relatively speaking, North America and Western Europe are the richer part of the globe. So the "smart" people who move into these "richer" countries from Eastern Europe, Asia and everywhere esle in the world, will be "poor", comparitively speaking - even if they are educated and came from a very intelligence familly. These are the people who DIDN'T have a chance to get rich YET. They make up the population of "poor" people who score well on IQ tests. Note that, most likely, they will be "rich" within a few generations.
Other than them, there are also some other "smart" people who could be poor for many other personal reasosn (bad luck, never had a opptunity... etc...)
Like I stated before, factors like motivation, nutrition and so forth, DO affect IQ test performance. BUT they also affect just about anything under the sun. If we are to concern ourselves with these things, then no test will EVER be accurate enough for anything. Forget the 100 meter dash ! That only measure how well fed the person is ! Down with the Basketball games ! That's nothing but a battle to see who's better prepared ! Lots of factors affect the outcome of things. If a test was to be employed to measure a certain quality, it is understood that some other minor factor WILL come into play. The point is, the other factors that might affect how a person perform in an IQ test do not pose enough of a "sway" to alter IQ test results.