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April 22nd, 2013 at 5:52PM

I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.
Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I’d prove myself a moron, and I’d be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.
Consider my auto-repair man, again. He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me. One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: “Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand. The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?”
Indulgently, I lifted my right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers. Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, “Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them.” Then he said smugly, “I’ve been trying that on all my customers today.” “Did you catch many?” I asked. “Quite a few,” he said, “but I knew for sure I’d catch you.” “Why is that?” I asked. “Because you’re so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn’t be very smart.” —

Isaac Asimov (via skinnybaras)

Anyone who takes the meaning of IQ tests with anything but a shipping tanker sized pile of salt should at the very least read Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (preferably the revised edition so you can get his complete decimation of the racist, sexist tripe that is The Bell Curve). As one example for the kind of bias that tends to be built into these tests, the IQ tests used by the US army in the early 20th century (whose results were later used by others to argue that immigrants and people of color where innately less intelligent than their native-born white counterparts) included a “complete-a-picture” section were:

early items might be defended as sufficiently universal: adding a mouth to a face or an ear to a rabbit. But later items required a rivet in a pocket knife, a filmamet in a light bulb, a horn on a phonograph, a net on a tennis court, and a ball in a bowler’s hand (marked wrong… if an examinee drew the ball in the alley, for you can tell from the bowler’s posture that he has not released the ball). Franz Boas, an early critic, told the tale of a Sicilian recruit who added a crucifix where it always appeared in his native land to a house without a chimney. He was marked wrong.

Ask yourself: if you grew up in a rural region without access to electricity, how the fuck are you supposed to look at a drawing of a clear eggplant shaped object with a bit of metal on the narrow end and know you’re supposed to draw a curly piece of wire in the middle of it? And how the fuck is this supposed to accurately reflect on your abilities to process and apply a range of different types of information?

(via slipstreamborne)