Re: Is IQ usefully predictive? (not in one case)

From: Miriam English (miriam@werple.net.au)
Date: Sun Aug 26 2001 - 03:10:02 MDT


At 10:06 PM 25/08/2001 -0700, Ken Clements wrote:
<snip>
Love the stories. :-)

>My view is that, except for some special cases in children where you can
>use IQ to tell who needs special help, IQ is bunk, especially in adults.

Back in the 70s I read of an interesting experiment where a class of kids
were given an intelligence test and the experimenters did a weird thing
with the results. They switched the scores of the high half of the class
with the scores of the low half of the class. They misinformed the teachers
as to the results, then went away. I think it was 6 months later the
experimenters did their tests again on the class, and lo! the results now
really did tally with the previously faked results.

It seems that IQ is a measure not only of how well you do IQ tests, but
also how well other people think you will do on IQ tests.

Cheers,

         - Miriam

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Q. What is the similarity between an elephant and a grape?
A. They are both purple... except for the elephant.
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