IQ measures the quality of your cognitive world

Malcom Gladwell writes on IQ and Race in the New Yorker.

(As an aside it is wonderful that this level of intelligent discussion is available for free online).

Social Memory Complex blogs about it here. I had the thing bookmarked to read before Dave Pollard point out the Social Memory Complex link on his Saturday links.

Gladwell says

The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about

Social Memory then comments

My opinion is that the “fuss” is all about making people dependent on the artificial, rationalized, predictable world of abstract systems, which can be mediated and tuned by authority. Because we never look deeply at the assumptions and premises of modern education, we’re apt to take the system’s agenda as the human agenda. It’s not so.

He also namechecks John Taylor Gatto and Alfie Kohn in his comments. Actually I lie. Kohn isn't referenced anywhere - though I swear that I saw his name somewhere in relation to this.

Gladwell's article is worth reading in full.

Flynn then talked about what we’ve learned from studies of adoption and mixed-race children—and that evidence didn’t fit a genetic model, either. If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father. And it shouldn’t make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children’s blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness—of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances. “The mind is much more like a muscle than we’ve ever realized,” Flynn said. “It needs to get cognitive exercise. It’s not some piece of clay on which you put an indelible mark.” The lesson to be drawn from black and white differences was the same as the lesson from the Netherlands years ago: I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in.

That last line is worth repeating

"I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in."