Indon comments on Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 October 2007 09:50PM

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Comment author: Epiphany 13 August 2012 08:19:15AM *  1 point [-]

Ok. Interesting point, but did this group of Asians take English language courses at school? Do they have knowledge of American culture via entertainment channels? Perhaps the Africans who allegedly got low scores were people who grew up living in tribes in the wild, and only came into the city where they ended up getting tested recently. I met a person whose mother fell in love with an African tribesman and I read her memoir on the experience - it wasn't long ago that she met him, a decade or two maybe. There may be a large proportion of people in Africa who literally grew up in a jungle.

In addition to straight up single-culture cultural differences, there are also variations from one culture to the next between which foreign cultures they've been exposed to (if any) and enjoy. Some cultures seek to limit their exposure to the outside (North Korea) while in others, the ideal is to embrace them (USA). For instance, here, there are many fans of Asian culture - think anime, Japanese video games and lovers of Thai food. Do they have a multicultural atmosphere like that in Africa? Sure there are American missionaries around who probably bring teacups and the like, but there's a giant difference between occasionally seeing some white people with some cups they didn't tell you anything about because they were too busy feeding starving children versus being taught their language in a class and spending time absorbing culture from their entertainment products.

Not only that, but differences between one IQ test and another could be gigantic when it comes to how many culture-dependent questions are in them. If you haven't specifically controlled for that during test design, that would be completely random. Maybe the Asians just so happened to get the test that had fewer cultural questions on it, and the Africans got one that was thoroughly based on many obscure pieces of cultural knowledge.

What we really need to be asking here is this:

Has anyone done a culture fair test for multiple different countries, using the exact same test with each one, and controlled for factors like whether the people being tested were schooled as children, whether they ever experienced starvation (that can cause brain damage) and any other important things?

Only if all the factors are controlled for would we have relevant data.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 13 August 2012 12:00:12PM *  19 points [-]

If I'm not mistaken, the most widely used IQ test is the Raven's Progressive Matrices. How is taking English lessons or having been infected with Anglophonic memes going to help you guess which shape goes in the white box?:

Comment author: Indon 15 August 2014 05:40:58PM 3 points [-]

If the first two shapes on the bottom are diamonds, why is the third shape a square?

Comment author: Nornagest 15 August 2014 05:55:55PM 3 points [-]

I think that's meant as a field where you'd draw in the shape, diamond and all.

Comment author: Indon 16 August 2014 03:29:07PM 3 points [-]

And what makes you sure of that? It even looks like the outline for the three boxes along the top.

Our cultural assumptions are perhaps more subtle than the average person thinks.