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Why can't we talk about IQ?
"IQ is a metric of such dubiousness that almost no serious educational researcher uses it anymore," the Guardian's Ana Marie Cox wrote back in May. It was a breathtakingly ignorant statement.
| Ana Marie Cox is a breathtakingly ignorant journalist... |
| Like the New York Times, The Guardian hires journalists who write well. |
| That's one of your best periwinkle snarks yet... |
Psychologist Jelte Wicherts noted in response that a search for "IQ test" in Google's academic database yielded more than 10,000 hits -- just for the year 2013.
But Cox's assertion is all too common. There is a large discrepancy between what educated laypeople believe about cognitive science and what experts actually know. Journalists are steeped in the lay wisdom, so they are repeatedly surprised when someone forthrightly discusses the real science of mental ability.
If that science happens to deal with group differences in average IQ, the journalists' surprise turns into shock and disdain. Experts who speak publicly about IQ differences end up portrayed as weird contrarians at best, and peddlers of racist pseudoscience at worst.
| Instapundit's comment: FUNNY HOW PEOPLE WHO LIVE AND DIE BY S.A.T. SCORES MAINTAIN THAT I.Q. SCORES MEAN NOTHING. |
Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2013-08-13 |
