IQ Tests, Genocide And Fear

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

I decided to give such an unusual name to my new article. It seemed very eye-catching.

The article was born thanks to memories from the time of the first call, when we were sent to the place of the school in an incomprehensible place, in which we were gathered and forced to solve puzzles. And it was at that time so strange, unusual, new …

Therefore, I decided to write about our favorite texts, which many use in schools, when applying for a job, in the military.

So, without passing the test, you will never know if a person is smart enough - not a small number of people think so. In fact, this is not the case. We believe that IQ tests objectively measure the level of intelligence, but in fact they are wildly biased, contradictory, and have little to do with intelligence.

The first IQ test was not designed to measure intelligence. It was designed in 1904 to determine which French kids are doing well in kindergarten. The creator of the test, Alfred Binet, said: "My test is for children. It shouldn't be for everyone."

But everything changed thanks to a man named Henry Goddard. He decided to apply this test to everyone. People loved intelligence tests so much that within a few years the whole of America became obsessed with them. Today we use them to measure intelligence. The only thing that IQ tests show is your skill in solving IQ tests. Early tests focused only on topics that only rich white people know about. We act like they are objective, but in reality they are biased in favor of people with similar life experiences to those of the test writers.

Sorry for the arrogant behavior, but still.

There is no IQ test standard. In truth, the two most famous tests, Stanford-Binet and Wechsler, measure differently and often give different results. The first test says I'm a child prodigy, and this one says I'm a dummy.

So I'm … Average!

You can of course say that these tests are just fun, puzzles that score points. What is the harm?

The harm is that these puzzles were used by racists to discriminate against people of color. I mentioned earlier about Henry Goddard, who popularized IQ tests. He deliberately selected data to justify his racist views. It gets worse.

Goddard was a member of an organization called the Ohio State Committee for the Sterilization of the Impaired. In the 20th century, state governments used poor test scores as an excuse to neuter people:

“- Sorry, but you did not know which sequence is next 2 6 10 14? Which means you're too dumb. Stupid to be fruitful."

When IQ tests were first created, people like Goddard thought it was a good way to get rid of immigrants from Europe who might pass as white. IQ tests were used as an excuse to get the lower class of whites, people of color, and disabled people out of the genetic stock. In 32 states, more than 60 thousand people were sterilized according to eugenic laws, many were sterilized because of a single test. And IQ tests are still used in capital punishment cases to determine who lives and who dies.

Generalizing intelligence to one number, it is very easy to pass it off as proof of innate superiority. Many do not think that intelligence is a composite quality. The essential qualities of human intelligence are curiosity and depth of mind, its flexibility and mobility, consistency and evidence. I will clarify:

• curiosity is the desire to comprehensively cognize this or that phenomenon in essential relations. This quality of the mind underlies active cognitive activity;
• the depth of the mind lies in the ability to separate the main from the secondary, the necessary from the accidental;
• flexibility and mobility of the mind - the ability of a person to make extensive use of existing experience, to quickly explore objects in new connections and relationships, to overcome stereotyped thinking:
• the consistency of thinking is characterized by a strict sequence of reasoning, taking into account all the essential aspects in the object under study, all possible interrelationships;
• evidence-based thinking is characterized by the ability to use at the right time such facts, patterns that convince of the correctness of judgments and conclusions;
• critical thinking presupposes the ability to strictly assess the results of mental activity, subject them to critical assessment, discard the wrong decision, abandon the actions begun if they contradict the requirements of the task:
• breadth of thinking - the ability to cover the issue as a whole, without losing sight of the initial data of the corresponding problem, to see the multivariance in solving the problem.

IQ tests cannot measure intelligence, because they simply cannot cover the entire wide spectrum of this great composite quality.