TimS comments on A Gamification Of Education: a modest proposal based on the Universal Decimal Classification and RPG skill trees - Less Wrong

13 Post author: Ritalin 07 July 2013 06:27PM

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Comment author: James_Miller 08 July 2013 05:19:14PM 3 points [-]

Although IQ tests were initially outlawed by the courts on disparate impact grounds, I believe that Congress enacted these IQ test restrictions directly into civil rights laws so they can't be overturned by courts except on constitutional grounds, which seem unlikely.

The test makers in the Ricci v. DeStefano case you cite went out of their way to have their tests not be just IQ tests.

Comment author: TimS 11 July 2013 04:23:58AM *  1 point [-]

I've looked briefly, and I don't see a federal statutory cite that explicitly prohibits IQ testing. Most employer decisions not to administer an IQ can be almost completely explained by a risk-averse unwillingness to defend IQ tests. Defending lawsuits costs money, even if one wins, and litigation is always a risk.

In short, I think employer behavior avoiding IQ tests is expect-value maximizing for individual employers - for tragedy-of-the-commons reasons, this might be bad for employers overall. Most importantly, I don't think there is a federal law specifically prohibiting IQ testing for employment, it's just expensive for an employer to show that higher IQ is helpful for the specific position the potential employee is seeking.

Comment author: James_Miller 11 July 2013 01:53:13PM *  1 point [-]

See this.

Comment author: TimS 11 July 2013 04:45:44PM *  1 point [-]

That article is consistent with my brief legal research, and increases my confidence that Congress has not explicitly prohibited IQ tests by statute, regardless of whether a potential employee could show disparate impact through use of the IQ test. I think this quote from the article is a reasonable statement of current law:

If one reads between the lines of Griggs and all other disparate impact type cases, one may intuit that the real holding is that any moron can do prole jobs such as repairing electrical power lines, and therefore any type of hiring criteria that tends to discriminate against blacks is going to be illegal. But the rarefied world of upper-middle-class jobs are obvious not included.

I make no comment on whether the current state of the law optimizes what it claims, or what it should optimize in some moral sense.

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