I used the example to illustrate a point. The tests have a target population that they are constructed for. This is also the reason as to why modern people score really high on old tests, because they are not the target population. The thing is, people aren’t very different, neither across cultures nor across time. We should expect the average person of today to be just as intelligent as the average person of 1924, but they score differently in the test. It’s almost as if the test doesn’t measure intelligence at all! If the tests actually measured intelligence, they wouldn’t need to be specifically designed for a certain population.
When an IQ-test is designed, a number of assumptions are made, e.g., normal distribution, that an underlying factor is well described by the battery of questions and that this underlying factor is the best thing that can explain the variation seen. All these assumptions are debatable at best. I mean, it’s just factor analysis, and all the assumptions of that statistical method applies.
I used the example to illustrate a point. The tests have a target population that they are constructed for. This is also the reason as to why modern people score really high on old tests, because they are not the target population. The thing is, people aren’t very different, neither across cultures nor across time. We should expect the average person of today to be just as intelligent as the average person of 1924, but they score differently in the test. It’s almost as if the test doesn’t measure intelligence at all! If the tests actually measured intelligence, they wouldn’t need to be specifically designed for a certain population.
When an IQ-test is designed, a number of assumptions are made, e.g., normal distribution, that an underlying factor is well described by the battery of questions and that this underlying factor is the best thing that can explain the variation seen. All these assumptions are debatable at best. I mean, it’s just factor analysis, and all the assumptions of that statistical method applies.
And yet, except very specific and rare outliers, people who score low on IQ test are generally dumber than people who don’t.