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The only possible ethical position

 
 
YNH
04:17 / 06.05.02
Deva namechecked Avital Ronell for Tom's wishlist thread up in policy. Check there for related links, and drop a few wishes yrselves.

Anyway, ze's writing about stupidity these days and, given that we've had several related threads over the last year, a relevant 'zine article, and some testimonial regarding intellectual intimidation from posters I figured this might be interesting.

She writes "For the process of screening, testing, and sorting of intelligence carries the burden all by itself of a dreary and terrifying history. This is the history of a selective invention of stupidity which belongs to the registers of social injustice." as you can see, she doesn't think much of the politics behind testing, its history, or the very notion.

At the risk of repeating things (a pint says I am, tho), I wann ask y'all whether testing, while not terribly valid, is important, socially useful, or inevitable. Answers oughtta be open ended enuf to encourage others.

Ronell ends with "If one were to state the only possible ethical position, it would have to be this: I am stupid before the other."
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
09:28 / 07.05.02
Pithy...I want to agree, but it reminds me of the inverse of the epigram about how evil prospers - because the good do nothing.

Perhaps another bon mot: the opposite of a small truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a grand truth is another truth.
 
 
solid~liquid onwards
10:06 / 07.05.02
ive got my highe art practical exam tmrw ...wish me luck.

still being in school, i really hate tests, but if there were no tests, i probably wouldnt do as much work, and just coast

all an exam tests, is how good you are at passing tests :P
 
 
Trijhaos
10:15 / 07.05.02
It depends on the type of test.

If its a test where you're just expected to memorize stuff and then repeat back verbatim, like a little parrot, then no tests are not useful.

On the other hand, if a test is hands-on and tests your ability to do something you learned, whether that's programming, riding a motorcycle, mixing chemicals, or hundreds of other things, then tests can be useful.
 
 
SMS
14:56 / 07.05.02
I've always thought tests were useful. If I'm supposed to know how to solve a particular kind of differential equation, find solutions to the laplacian, or even analyze a piece of poetry, I study for the test, and I get better at doing all of these things.
 
 
YNH
06:13 / 14.05.02
ho hum, this is really too interesting to let y'all off that easily. If I have to post the entire abstract I won't mind, but I'm beginning to suspect it'll only get a few more "i like tests" or "I don't like tests" posts rather than anything addressing the historical, cultural, and ethical reasoning behind IQ testing. I wonder why that is. Are we all too arrogant to accept the possibility we don't know shit?

Or is it, as Nick sugests, merely too simple. Is it an ethical position with no practical application.

I'll play one card here. Without this base, any revolutionary society would be doomed from the outset.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:30 / 14.05.02
The discussion of IQ testing is a fascinating thing, as its adherents pretty much by definition believe it to be an accurate or at least worthwhile measurement of mental acuity, and its critics do not. Therefore almost any disagreement about IQ tests follows something along these lines.

A: I find IQ test scores meaningless, being as they are nothing more than a metatest - a judgement of how good you are at performing IQ tests.

B: Yes, but you would say that. You probably do badly in IQ tests. I, on the other hand, do well in IQ tests, and, unconnectedly, believe this to be a meaningful distinctor of intelligence.

A: That's not the point at all.

B: So what's your IQ?

A: It doesn't matter, as I don't think IQ scores are valid as-

B: So it's really low then.

A: No it isn't, actually. But that doesn't affect my point that -

B: I bet mine's higher.

And so on....the aim of B being inevitably to make A confess either that they have a low IQ (and as such are being bitter) or a high IQ (and as such are being disingenuous), without ever conceding the ground of the relevance of the IQ score in the first place.

Once a form of testing is calcified, how does one motivate change in the methods or metrics?
 
 
SMS
16:14 / 14.05.02
The relevance of IQ testing is easily testable. All that needs to be done is to look at the correlation between one test and various other aspects of life.

If we cannot find any correlations, then the proponent of IQ testing has to claim that IQ tests are relevant, but only in that they test a person's IQ. This is the view of the critic.

Conversations like the one between A and B are unnecessary.
 
 
Lurid Archive
16:17 / 14.05.02
SMS, that would only be relevant if we assume that higher intelligence has a significant impact on the "various other aspects of life". Its not clear that it need to.
 
 
We're The Great Old Ones Now
16:47 / 14.05.02
And that people use all of their capacity, which demonstrably, they do not.

I'm also particularly sceptical of IQ testing because

1. all the questions are essentially the same
2. I get utterly bored answering them, which suggests there's a temperament thing at work
3. there's a bias towards pattern rec etc.
4. I score higher when stoned, because I actually can be bothered to finish the tests

I heard a psychometrician on the Beeb a few years ago saying the tests were basically useless and no one should ever be allowed to know what they scored. Oh, and that since there wasn't a good definition of intelligence, it was unclear what IQ measured.
 
 
SMS
17:42 / 14.05.02
SMS, that would only be relevant if we assume that
higher intelligence has a significant impact on the
"various other aspects of life". Its not clear that it needs to


I think it is. If IQ testing measures intelligence, then we
have to know what we mean by intelligence. If the only
result of great intelligence is scoring high on the IQ testing,
then the test is perfect test with absolutely no significance.
Then we're done. We know the answer. But if intelligence is
supposed to mean more than just scoring high on the IQ test,
then we should be able to test the test. It's not terribly complicated.

Testing, in general, is complicated because of all the social
significance placed upon it. The person who scores 100%
on every test is bound to have a different chemical makeup
than the one who has trouble passing. This is a cause of the
grade, so it means the grade itself is not just a measure of a person's
abilities, but also a contributor. But IQ testing carries less weight in society,
so this one test probably won't interact as much with the subject.
 
 
alas
02:24 / 22.05.02
i'm basically great at taking tests; tend to score very high on them and have long taken my high scores as a point of pride.

. . . then I really really did poorly on the GRE (the Graduate ... um? Record? Exam--the test most US post-graduate programs require) Subject test. Really poorly.

After I made it through a Master's program, retook the offending test and (ahem) more than doubled my percentile score (!), I began to think about such tests and their use.

In the US, especially, all such tests have had a strong socio-economic bias; i.e., rich white kids have typically done better than poor kids of any color. The SATs, which are required by most undergraduate universities in the US, are almost perfectly correlated with household income. And they were in some ways designed at their inception as racist: the people who wrote the test were fearful that Jewish boys, through sheer "hard work" and ethnically-inspired discipline, were unfairly advantaged over lazy white kids from the suburbs who were more "naturally" gifted. They wanted a test that would "even the playing field" so that Jewish kids wouldn't take up "more than their share" of university slots.

Then Stanley Kaplan came along and taught young people how to take the test and score well. And teaching to the test was born.

I think these tests--the college board exams--are the most problematic in the US, because so many people take them, and their use by instittutions of higher learning has extraordinary impact on the social and economic lives of a huge percentage of US citizens--and the students who come here from abroad to study.
 
 
alas
02:25 / 22.05.02
oh. definitely: I am stupid before the other.

(wasn't that kinda Nietzsche's point? But, of course, I'm also stupid before Nietzsche.)
 
 
Morlock - groupie for hire
12:31 / 22.05.02
I think tests of some kind are fairly inevitable in any competitive situation. You want the best person for a job, you test the candidates' skills in whatever you think makes a 'good' candidate. They're not educating you so that you can make the most out of your life, they're trying to find out what you're good at, what they might want to pay you for. That's certainly the impression i got when I finished my degree and wandered off into the real world.

Things get problematic when you confuse the test result with the subject. Someone with a low IQ may well have other, untested aptitudes that have value. Hell, there may even be advantages in stupidity (not that I'm linking this with IQ) in the right situations. Like not analysing yourself up your own arse until you're paralised with indecision. First person to mention Forrest Gump gets a slap.

I bet Stephen Hawking's batting average sucks.

BTW, can someone elaborate on the Big Quote for me, I'm afraid my Philoso-Speak Translator (tm) is on the blink again. I *think* I know what ze means, but I'm not sure.
 
 
YNH
04:35 / 23.05.02
Here's the entire abstract:

Artificial Stupidity

The social rigging of intelligence cannot be limited to some film noir memory of communism projecting hostile fantasies upon capitalism. For the process of screening, testing, and sorting of intelligence carries the burden all by itself of a dreary and terrifying history. This is the history of a selective invention of stupidity which belongs to the registers of social injustice. There have been a few worthy articles devoted to uncovering the sad history of those discourses of psychiatry and psychology implicated in creating theses on heredity and the politics of social selection. The Intelligence Quotient system, as shown in Stephen J. Gould's work on the IQ test, is based on abusively exploited philosophical presuppositions.' What interests me most in terms of the markings and determinations that scar the young student body is the way scores were derived to undermine an entire class of pupils. The grades were construed to show that idiocy, in the testing lexicon, refers to the mental age of three or younger; the imbecile scored a mental age ranging between three and seven years of age. We owe the introduction of the moron to American psychologists, who derived the term from the Greek, to designate light debilitation, just below "average." The term was invented for use in the testing of immigrant children arriving in the United States. These morons were also defined as "incapable of dealing with their own affairs with ordinary intelligence or taking part in the struggle for survival" (Kantor 225). Graded and degraded, the little immigrant was from the start left back. It is important to bear in mind that the bureaucracy of shaming was based on the ideology of scientific testing. These tests at no point make an effort to theorize or even to describe their activity, nor do they try to explain why the "struggle to survive" would not belong to instinctual, inculcated, or partially stupid operations. What is it about survival that it should become a matter of aptitude or intelligence? This valuation, by the way, is a translation of the German notion, Lebensunfahigheit, designating an inaptitude for living. A preposterous axiom, when one considers those highly intelligent interlocutors who could not even survive, in some instances, as they continue to live. If one were to state the only possible ethical position, it would have to be this: I am stupid before the other.
 
 
alas
05:25 / 25.05.02
Morlock/1:
tests of some kind are fairly inevitable in any competitive situation

precisely: the question for me becomes why do we so easily accept that education is/must be a "competitive" situation? I believe it should not be.

For an excellent argument about the use of tests for college/professional school admissions purposes, by Lani Guinier (a Clinton nominee left hanging in the wind when Republicans labeled her a "quota queen") and Susan Sturm at:
http://www.law.upenn.edu/racetalk/reprint.htm

(After all, a critical part of how those poor immigrant "morons" in Ronell's narrative became "average" Americans was by not being "black"--African Americans have been particulalry pathologized as "stupid" in the US).
 
 
Morlock - groupie for hire
12:46 / 27.05.02
Running out of lunch-hour, will try to finish the article later. Thanks anyway, alas, some valuable things in there.

I agree that it would be nice if education could be rebuilt into a system for true personal development rather than the interminable vocational aptitude test it seems to have become. If nothing else, it might boost attendance rates, make it easier to find employment suitable to the student rather than vice versa, and improve the odds of remembering the lessons past graduation. Although that all depends on getting the students to realise the importance of the exercise. Isn't there a school somewhere that encourages students to define their own learning schedules? Can't for the life of me remember details, but I'm sure it's out there somewhere. Here in the UK, I think.

Also agree that current tests are poor at best for determining aptitude for a particular job, and may very well be discriminatory to boot. However, when I put myself in an employers position, I can see the appeal all too easily. You've spent X amount of money getting say a dozen applicants together, and you have to decide which of them is least likely to walk out within a few months, taking with them the Y dollars/pounds you've just spent training them. I can't off-hand think of any non-competitive system that can establish this, since the act of ranking is competitive in itself.

Hmmm.
 
  
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