University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test

Intelligence testing is not widely used in employment hiring, despite many attempts. Why is that?

Of course it is[1]. Every single method used to screen a candidate is essentially testing for general mental ability. Being admitted to an Ivy League school is basically an IQ test. Interviews are basically IQ tests. Employers want to hire smart people. The fact that his is even a debate is crazy.

[1] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1998-10661-006

Because the supreme court ruled that it's racist to do so

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

It's used by police, because if you're too smart you might refuse tyrannical orders. Whoops, I meant, you would get bored.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/st...

Actually it is, if you're talking about white collar knowledge economy jobs, like law jobs. Top tier law firms routinely give either actual IQ tests or IQ test-like assessments during interviews.

Your definition of an IQ test seems to be so vague as to be meaningless.

Last time I passed a job interview, on several rounds of interview not one was about general intelligence, or general knowledge, or general anything. It was about my ability to solve the kind of problems they were solving and I had some experience solving. Last time I failed a job interview it was because of a bad culture fit.

I have not looked at the numbers, but I would suspect Ivy league admissions to be more correlated with wealth / geography than possibly anything else, but you probably square that with a belief that intelligence is hereditary as wealth is.

IQ tests measure the ability to solve quickly some abstract problems in an exam-like situation. There is certainly a use case for that, but thinking it captures the whole of "cognitive ability" is like thinking that duolingo captures the whole of litterary.

By the way, anytime one can't understand why $DEBATED_TOPIC is debatable should be an indication that one should switch to a slower though process.

I don't know where you live, but it quite clearly is where I'm from.

Oooh, to be sure they don't call them IQ tests explicitly, but the psychometric capabilities and performance tests they've gotten me to do (mathematical, logical, verbal, reasoning etc) are pretty obviously IQ proxies.

No, the Supreme Court ruled that you have to have a concrete business reason for implementing a test that is disproportionately likely to favour one ethnic group over another:

> The touchstone is business necessity. If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.

>Your definition of an IQ test seems to be so vague as to be meaningless.

This is actually like one of the primary tricks of the IQ perverts. They'll take literally any test, run the results through a transformation function to get it into their bell curve, and start making claims about how IQ correlate with This-Or-That based on it.

In practice, intelligence tests don’t depend on the specific questions asked. If you let a group of people generate their own questions, pool them together, sample randomly, and then rank scores, the same individuals would tend to rise to the top. This is because people with higher general cognitive ability perform better across virtually any cognitive task, a phenomenon first documented by Spearman (1904) and repeatedly confirmed in psychometrics research (e.g., Jensen 1998; Deary 2012).

If you dismiss IQ research, you might as well disregard all of psychology. The psychologists who developed intelligence tests were pioneers in using the statistical methods (e.g. factor analysis) that now underpin the entire field. IQ is defined more precisely than almost any other psychological construct. Discarding it leaves you with poorly defined concepts and no clear way to handle them. [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/D7Kn5p7TP_Y?t=47m50s

So the NBA is discriminating by using physical tests that require height?

Any kind of skill-based testing is obviously racist. Thanks for teaching me.

The NBA doesn't discriminate by height. They have chosen players that are 5'3" over players who are 6'6".

You're welcome for me educating you.

Oh for fuck's sake.

So: the people that developed intelligence tests were not psychologists; lies, damned lies and statistics; "pioneering" the idea of using math doesn't mean that people using math today are doing the same thing; whatever the definition of IQ might be is irrelevant because "IQ tests" are not rigorously defined; however precisely IQ is defined is also irrelevant because it's supposedly just a proxy for "g"; psychology is not psychometry and so discarding IQ does nothing to the field of psychology.

Oh you're right, it is very diverse in the NBA in terms of height and race. Not at all dominated by tall guys.

The Duke Power Company had as many black people in management as the NBA has short players.

Your argument is not even internally consistent.

Isn't that the same thing? Basically a business that believes hiring is better using IQ is not able to do so since the supreme court ruled that is racist.

No. A business that believes hiring is better using IQ is able to do so if they can show that it has a relation to job performance.

No? The quote specifically says “If [it] cannot be shown to be related to job performance”.

Maybe we should implement IQ testing before people are allowed to post on HN.

Yes I'm aware of that, and I had this in mind when I wrote that "IQ tests measure the ability to solve quickly some abstract problems in an exam-like situation." Maybe that was not carefuly worded enough.

I am of the opinion that, although there is some generality in IQ tests, they measure only one specific aspect of cognitive ability defined by: abstract + quick.

My intuition is that cognitive abilities encompass much more than that. Anyone who have ever argued at length with that smart but obtuse engineer who can't tell the forest for the tree will know what I'm refering to. To me, a better test for "cognitive abilities" would also measure how someone is able of nuance, of humor, of seeing things from different perspectives, of introspection, etc, not just solving puzzles that can be described in a couple of sentences.

And I'm not talking about "emotional intelligence" here. To me, E-I is just the other side of that same flawed model that smells too much like modern day phrenology.

The problem is that that is very easy to prove... but really hard to convince a modern judge of.

That is discriminating by ability not height. It happens to be easier for taller people to have that ability but that's secondary.

Duke Power Company was discriminating by IQ not race. It just happened to have been easier for white people to pass the IQ test at the time, but that's secondary. You're using the same logic used by Duke power Company's defense team.

Can you prove it?

> If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is prohibited.

This heavily implies the opposite:

> If an employment practice which operates to exclude Negroes CAN be shown to be related to job performance, the practice is NOT prohibited.

The problem is you’ve got an indicator that appears to favour white people, and a lack of evidence that the indicator shows anything of relevance to the actual position or job content.

Hypothetically, let’s say you were a racist, a nice easy way to do racist things like “disproportionately hire white people” would be to find some metric which disproportionately favours white people, and then evaluate everyone against that.

If you can prove it’s important for the job, you can discriminate still. For example, a Chinese restaurant can require knowledge of Mandarin, a metric which very likely favours people of Chinese descent. They just have to be able to explain why (e.g.: internal communication is in Mandarin, most of our customers speak Mandarin, etc).

No they didn't. There's ~basically nothing to this claim. IQ tests are openly used by several of the largest firms in the US. The companies that provide the tests and testing infrastructure brag about it with logo crawls just like every other company.

Why is this myth so pernicious? It comes up a lot here!

You're all trying to axiomatically derive a result that clearly conflicts with empirical evidence. IQ tests do get used in American hiring; not not that often, because they don't work well for that purpose.

You already posted this. It’s not proof. It’s a meta analysis that suggests that in general cognitive ability might have some role in differences in job performance (maybe up to 25%).

It doesn’t even touch the question of whether IQ tests are good measures of cognitive ability, nor does it only include IQ tests as measures of cognitive ability.

So you just affirmed "a business that believes hiring is better using IQ is not able to do so since the supreme court ruled that is racist" without realizing it. Not being consistent but it's okay. Great job lol

Does your IQ score bring you some sense of purpose or identity? Does someone disagreeing with you or asking question cut at the very core of your sense of being?

In this thread, you have been nothing but rude, condescending, and snarky to your fellow YC users. So, what gives?

I've never taken an IQ test. I just care about intellectual honesty and was responding to someone who called for IQ testing as a prerequisite to posting on this forum. What's the next pivot in the argument?

That’s fair, I shouldn’t have said that, I’m sorry.