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A Woman’s Story

raganwald.posterous.com

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Re: A Woman’s Story

#111

Post by lolilives »

mhartl wrote: post #9

There were a lot of questions about numbers such as guessing the next number in a sequence. There were some logic puzzles, the kind where you have to figure out that it’s the baker who rides a bicycle and the mechanic who lives in the house with a red door. There were some strange questions where she was given a sketch of a three dimensional figure such as a cube with some missing pieces, and she had to guess which s…

At risk of sounding like a sore loser, IQ tests, whether or not they are bias, are not a good indicator of success (in fact, I'd question it's ability to measure "intelligence" or "potential"). Scoring well on an IQ test does not mean you will be successful at your job.

It does not measure your willingness to learn. It does not measure your ability to retain information. It does not measure your reception to criticism. It does not measure your ability to play nice with others. It does not measure your interest in the job. It does not measure your ability to work hard. Among others.

As such, I think giving someone an IQ test at a job interview is a fairly bad idea.

What we should have picked up from Gwen's job interview is that she is willing to learn and work hard given a fair chance.

Re: A Woman’s Story

#112

Post by tokenadult »

raganwald wrote: post #26
pleasebehonest wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be surprised. Do you have an example?

There’s a long history of discussion about what exactly intelligence is, how whatever it is is measured, and why some social groups have statistically higher scores than others. Here’s an easy place to start looking into it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence

The Wikipedia article raganwald kindly linked to has an archived set of talk pages that go on almost endlessly, as the article has long been the subject of edit-warring. That article and related pages have been the subject of an Arbitration Committee case (opened at about the time I became a wikipedian, by coincidence)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/...

with ongoing administrative sanctions. In other words, I'm not sure if the article is currently in good enough shape to recommend. The Wikipedia user bibliography "Intelligence Citations"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Intellige...

points to sources that are generally reliable, as does the bibliography "Anthropology, Human Biology, and Race Citations."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol...

Re: A Woman’s Story

#113

Post by rdl »

rmc wrote: post #25
mhartl wrote: post #9

There were a lot of questions about numbers such as guessing the next number in a sequence. There were some logic puzzles, the kind where you have to figure out that it’s the baker who rides a bicycle and the mechanic who lives in the house with a red door. There were some strange questions where she was given a sketch of a three dimensional figure such as a cube with some missing pieces, and she had to guess which s…

This is essentially an IQ test, and what they discovered was that Gwen was highly intelligent. They then did the smart thing and judged her based on her demonstrated aptitude rather than on the prevailing prejudices of the day Actually, if you read the whole thing, they didn't believe her "demonstrated aptitude" because of their "prevailing prejedices". She had to fight to get them to see her demonstrated aptitude. M…

I'm confused. If you read Griggs vs Duke Power Company, it would seem to allow IQ tests if they can be shown to relate to job ability. For a programming job (or, indeed, a lot of jobs), IQ or "g" should be correlated with performance. Is there some other ruling or law which prohibits IQ tests?

Re: A Woman’s Story

#114

Post by roguecoder »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #96
roguecoder wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also not how affirmative action works, even if it was still broadly used (which it's not): http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/02/granting-women-a... Aggregate performance was either unaffected or improved in the presence of affirmative action. This fits with history: until 1972 almost no women were admitted to MIT, but it didn't make the men perform less well for all the affirmative action they received no…

The issue is not that men perform less well because women are admitted into MIT. The issue is that women admitted due to AA might be lower quality than other candidates (men and women who would be admitted without AA), and therefore drag their group average down.

I'm arguing that men who were admitted might be lower quality than women who weren't admitted because their gender exclude them, but that didn't mean those men were unqualified or even necessarily dragged their group averages down. None of our measurements are accurate enough to correctly distinguish 5,000 very good students from the next 5,000 nearly-identically-but-slightly-better students.

Re: A Woman’s Story

#115

Post by rdl »

It sounds like this woman was lucky to both be incredibly intelligent in her own right, and to have an excellent family who believed in her and were persuasive to overcome some societal obstacles. And to live in a place with excellent schools and jobs.

I wonder if she would have gone to work for a big company today, or if she would have tried to do a startup.

Re: A Woman’s Story

#116

Post by mc32 »

egiva wrote: post #102
kahirsch wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's because in the past, the IQ tests were not fair, objective and colour-blind, but were set up in such a way as to bias against poorer people (which will be mostly black in the USA). This isn't true at all. They haven't been shown to be biased, merely that blacks score lower. Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites. "Disparate impact" merely means that blacks…

> This isn't true at all. They haven't been shown to be biased, merely that blacks score lower. Extensive research has show that IQ tests have equal predictive power for blacks and whites. I think you illustrate the danger of making assertions without being entirely informed - that is to say that what you state here is the beginning of the truth, but taken out of context. There was (and in many cases still is) a heav…

>There is also the complicating factor of single-parent or broken homes and the rol[e] that plays in a child's lack of overall intellectual development. This also correlates to income and geographic area (i.e. innercity versus urban environment).

I may not be understanding your argument properly, but doesn't IQ _try_ to measure intellectual development? I understand cultural bias being problem and that makes sense --but this doesn't make sense to me. "The problem with measuring intelligence is it measures intelligence?" What difference does the lack of intellectual development have to do with whether it was genetic, educational, physiological, mental, etc?

Re: A Woman’s Story

#117

Post by yummyfajitas »

roguecoder wrote: post #114
yummyfajitas wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is not that men perform less well because women are admitted into MIT. The issue is that women admitted due to AA might be lower quality than other candidates (men and women who would be admitted without AA), and therefore drag their group average down.

I'm arguing that men who were admitted might be lower quality than women who weren't admitted because their gender exclude them, but that didn't mean those men were unqualified or even necessarily dragged their group averages down. None of our measurements are accurate enough to correctly distinguish 5,000 very good students from the next 5,000 nearly-identically-but-slightly-better students.

I'm arguing that men who were admitted might be lower quality than women who weren't admitted because their gender exclude them...

This is exactly what I'm saying - whichever group gets bonus points/preferences/etc will have lower quality. In the past, that group was women. Now it's usually men, though not always (some nursing schools give preference to men [1], some liberal arts colleges do also).

[1] Defining quality here is slightly trickier since nurses of both genders are needed for specific tasks (mostly related to bathing).

Re: A Woman’s Story

#118

Post by Alex3917 »

moldbug wrote: post #40
Anechoic wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in the state of California it is illegal to give a black child an IQ test even when administered by a school psychologist as part of a professional assessment The issue is that IQ tests were found to be culturally biased against black students and therefore responsibly for placing those students on special-ed tracks that were not appropriate. See: http://www.rcselpa.org/docs/policies/Section%20III%20Evaluat... This a…

"Were found." Passive voice. Following the link, we discover that the "finder" is Judge Robert Peckham in 1979: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/17/us/robert-f-peckham-72-inf... No offense, but who the fsck is Bob Peckham? And why should anyone in 2012 care what he thought in 1979? BTW, he was in a position to "find" because LBJ made him a judge in 1966. Hear LBJ's enlightened racial perspectives here: http://www.youtu…

If you think something has changed since 1979 then the burden of proof is on you to show what that is, you don't get to just assert that everything is magically different now.

Re: A Woman’s Story

#119

Post by mhartl »

rdl wrote: post #113
rmc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is essentially an IQ test, and what they discovered was that Gwen was highly intelligent. They then did the smart thing and judged her based on her demonstrated aptitude rather than on the prevailing prejudices of the day Actually, if you read the whole thing, they didn't believe her "demonstrated aptitude" because of their "prevailing prejedices". She had to fight to get them to see her demonstrated aptitude. M…

I'm confused. If you read Griggs vs Duke Power Company, it would seem to allow IQ tests if they can be shown to relate to job ability. For a programming job (or, indeed, a lot of jobs), IQ or "g" should be correlated with performance. Is there some other ruling or law which prohibits IQ tests?

They're allowed in principle, but in practice the law is so vague that for most companies it's not worth the risk of using an actual IQ test. Thus, we have "puzzles" instead.

Re: A Woman’s Story

#120

Post by moldbug »

nostrademons wrote: post #103
rmc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many IQ tests there is a correlation between wealth and high IQ results (and conversely, poverty and low IQ tests). IQ tests, do no measure 'innate intelligence' (mostly because no-one really knows what that even is or how to measure it). As a result if you have more, and better education and schooling, you more more likely to have a higher IQ. So if you're in a group that has worse and less education, you're mor…

You said correlation, not causation, and that's an important point. Wealth is also correlated with what's presumed to be "innate intelligence", as is education. We don't know what the direction of causation is - whether intelligence causes education which causes wealth, or whether intelligence causes both education and wealth, or whether wealth results in more education which result in higher scores on IQ tests. The…

This is kind of a weird explanation of g.

What g really means is that you can't design a meaningful intelligence test that doesn't correlate with all the other intelligence tests - with slightly divergent axes for verbal and spatial/mathematical skills. Thus, for instance, backward digit span correlates with Raven's matrices, even though these tasks have nothing obvious in common. Someone who's good at one will be good at the other.

It's also very hard to produce training/educational effects that show an effect on g, though dual N-back perhaps has some promise:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back

However, these kinds of brain exercises have very little to do with education as we know it. The obvious null hypothesis is that we're looking at a physiological effect, such as the quality of myelin insulation in neurons.

Obviously, we see the same correlation effect in CPU benchmarks - any benchmark at all will reveal that a Xeon is faster than a Celeron. The obvious null hypothesis is that the Xeon has smaller transistors and more of them. The causality behind neurological g is probably something just as crude and straightforward.

One could argue, however, that when we compare Xeon motherboards to Celeron motherboards, we see faster DRAM and the like. Perhaps it's the fast CPU's environment, rather than its lithography, that makes it faster.

But... this isn't an argument anyone would make without a strong prior conviction that all CPUs are created equal. It's unclear where such an idea comes from in the case of the human brain, but it doesn't seem evidentiary in nature.

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