University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test

I still do not understand why we are wasting scientific resources trying to stack rank humans on arbitrarily defined concepts like cognitive ability or intelligence.

After over a century of psychometric research in cognitive abilities and intelligence, what do we have to show for it? Whose life has actually improved for the better? Have the benefits from such research, if any, outweighed the amount of harm that has already been caused?

>resources trying to stack rank humans on arbitrarily defined concepts like cognitive ability or intelligence.

"arbitrarily defined concepts like cognitive ability or intelligence" correlate very well with objective metrics like educational attainment and income.

>the amount of harm that has already been caused?

Like what?

It’s just more of that unbelievably annoying modern attitude that doing no harm is more important than doing good.

I don't see what harm these tests are doing, but I don't see the good either. Could you elaborate?

It stratifies people, so anyone in a strata that isn’t the best is azhkchually being harmed by not being rated equally to everyone else.

You did not answer my question, which was in good faith; instead you seam to keep using a sarcastic way of discussing that we try to avoid here.

Yes I did. “Why is this bad”

“Because it stratifies people, which has the effect of saying some people are better than others in some way”.

I’m not being sarcastic towards you, I’m being sarcastic towards people who think this is truly harmful. I apologize - I should’ve made that more clear.

Apologizes gladly accepted. But maybe my question was not clearly phrased - it was not "Why are tests bad". You contrasted "doing no harm" with "doing good" and I wanted to ask what good have IQ tests done. Because to me the harm is kind of obvious (overinflating the importance of one criteria and ideological agenda) but the good not so much (obviously, I'm not questioning the good of any cognitive ability per see, I'm questioning the good of assigning a numerical value to it and making it a characteristic of some individual).

Oh, I see. A good IQ test would be a good way to help our most promising children get the largest head start. It could help point out adults in your own company that have some type of potential. It could be used for scholarship purposes. Stuff like that.

> A good IQ test would be a good way to help our most promising children get the largest head start.

If that were true, then why are they not administered to every child? IQ tests appear to only to the potentially disabled and potential precocious. If a child is already showing signs of precociousness, then what would an IQ test present that was not already observed?

> It could help point out adults in your own company that have some type of potential.

I highly doubt adults at a company have hidden potential that is unknown. Underused? Sure. It's not like the companies have some sort of hidden genius that no one knows about. If one were a genius, it would have likely been apparent far earlier in their life.

> It could be used for scholarship purposes.

Do you really believe we should be awarding scholarships for meritless human attributes? Why not offer scholarships to other human attributes like height, weight, and beauty while we are at it?

That's thing about IQ, according to the research, it's like eye color, skin color, etc.. There isn't a damn thing one can do to change it (positively). So, I am not certain I am comfortable offering scholarships on raw IQ alone. In fact, isn't the entire purpose behind grades, standardized testing, etc.?

(Yes, I am aware the early SAT was a psuedo-IQ test, but that ended in the 80s or 90s, I believe. ACT was never truly comparable to my understanding.)