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University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test

(planning.e-psychometrics.com)
101 points indigodaddy | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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aDyslecticCrow ◴[] No.45077182[source]
Its an modern open-source and collaborative resource of IQ style questions for research studies. IQ has a lot of flaws, not the least of which is its usage outside of academic research, as a measure of job aptitude and hiring potential (spoiling its utility as a metric since the questions can be trained... setting aside its dubious usefulness as a hiring tool anyway).

It seems like ICAR is spending a-lot of effort to remain scientific, and i feel like a website like this goes against that by spoiling the test utility for future potential participants.

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fsckboy ◴[] No.45077300[source]
>i feel like a website like this goes against that

what do you mean "a website like this", HN? or the destination of the link at the top of this discussion?

The link for this discussion goes to the test on the same site that you link to.

Are you saying people need to make their way to that test from the front page of the site following particular breadcrumbs? that people from HN shouldn't go there till they're ready to participate in a scientific manner? i just don't understand your point...

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aDyslecticCrow ◴[] No.45077490[source]
These tests serve no purpose outside of academic studdies. Distributing them for people to self-score sully their scientific value, and perpetuate their use for unsound usecases.
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1. fsckboy ◴[] No.45078755[source]
so you're saying you have an agenda and you're pushing it.

Psychologists are scientists and the replicability of IQ testing is extremely high and repeatedly confirmed. And despite how much psychosocially challenged nerds here like to complain about psychology, they are in good company: psychology itself is not normie opressors, psychologists are also psychosocially challenged nerds.

before you say anything else, the statistical methods we use today across medical testing were first applied and developed to psychometric testing, so if you are going to attack that, you are attacking all of medical science.

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2. aDyslecticCrow ◴[] No.45081437[source]
Im honestly not sure what you're trying to get across here. IQ is a dated but good scientific tool to measure cognitive differences across large samples of humans.

I never said they're not scientific. They're invaluable statistical tools. I'm saying their use outside of academia for hiring (among other things) is a fundamental missuse of both the tests and statistics.

Online versions of ICAR tests like these serve little purpose for anyone, and at worst encourage people to abuse ICAR in a similar way.

3. tptacek ◴[] No.45086833[source]
No, I think he's closer to the science than this comment is. IQ has validity for its intended purpose of as a diagnostic tool for cognitive deficits. It is in fact not a valid tool for casually ranking ability based on individual tests, both because of test-retest consistency and because ordinality of IQ breaks down as scores get higher.

I think you could have written a reasonably strong argument that the parent commenter overstated their case, but you didn't do that: you just overstated the opposite pole of the argument and then declared the discussion off limits due to politics.

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4. fsckboy ◴[] No.45088373[source]
>ordinality of IQ breaks down as scores get higher

ordinality of any sample from a Gaussian process breaks down as the thin part of the population density is approached, but that will only affect those at least three sigmas above or below, so it's an edge case that doesn't matter for the fat part of the curve.

you are cherry picking pieces of arguments that might threaten your "nobody is better than anybody else" anti-merit ideology. "From those who have the ability to those who have the need" is a merit-based sickle, comrade, and IQ is its hammer, is my argument.

>I think you could have written a reasonably strong argument that the parent commenter overstated their case, but you didn't do that: you just overstated the opposite pole of the argument and then declared the discussion off limits due to politics

I don't think you really think any of that. You are disingenuous if you claim that your (collective (in more than one sense of the word)) side wants to actually discuss the science of IQ; you simply want it removed from the discussion because it does not support your politics. If the economy rewards high IQs, and people have social mobility, you will see an economic sorting from top to bottom, and you don't like that. If IQ has genetic factors (which it seems to) that's a bigger disaster because once the economic sorting takes place, social mobility goes away (the latter half of the 20th century) A true scientific socialist would not try to imagine/censor these problems away in a central committee, but would admit them and try to figure out better ways.

I talked about the science of IQ in my comment something that you did not actually engage with. the correct wording would have been for you to say "g does not exist" and provide some basis for that belief

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5. tptacek ◴[] No.45088388{3}[source]
One way I know that I didn't say "nobody is better than anybody else" is that isn't something I actually believe. I think you have me confused with someone else.

(you edited your comment and added a paragraph to it after I wrote this)