Monday, June 06, 2011

Goodbye Taiwan

Tomorrow night I'm returning to the US. My 9 month sabbatical here went by fast!



Here's a drawing I found while cleaning out my desk. The kids can read English and a few Chinese characters, too.




Here are some photos I took at the airport in Macau on my way back from BGI.





My last official activity here at Academia Sinica will be to give a colloquium in the Institute of Physics. Below are two figures of interest, produced by one of my collaborators. No Harvard, MIT or other Boston area students were harmed ;-)


Reaction time and g -- task is to determine whether a number flashed on a screen is greater or less than 45.


Note 1280 is about 90th percentile in the population (IQ 120) whereas 1560 is about 99th percentile (IQ 135 or so).

Huh? What? But, my Sociology professor told me it's just a social construction! 8-(


Three intelligence tests:

10 comments:

Sabine Hossenfelder said...

Have a safe trip!

TheGuyFromEarlier said...

I knew it.  I offered the theory back in high school when I was pwning n00bs in Halo.

:-)

MtMoru said...

"Huh? What? But, my sociology professor told me it's just a social construction!"

I guess a sense of humor isn't g loaded. They are stupid but I doubt any sociology professor has ever said this to you or anyone else regarding differences in intelligence between people.

Do you smell that? Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of BS in the morning.

What Steve isn't telling you or doesn't know: for every one of these supposed elementary cognitive tasks (ECTs) that shows a correlation with IQ there are dozens which don't.

Of course it's obvious that the above ECT isn't that elementary as it relies on having learned to answer "Which number is greater?"

AND it's not even as if the above result would surprise Steve Jay Gould and his ilk OR as if it were somehow an indication of "fundamental" differences in the brains of the high and low IQ groups.

Steve has torched another straw man.

Sam H said...

Ridicule and parody are is the most effective way to combat the ignorance coming from sociologists and other crazy leftists. They need to be laughed at for they deserve it. 

botti said...

A recent paper by Arthur Jensen discussed his work on mental chronometry studies and his theory of intelligence:
 
"Intelligence is the periodicity of neural oscillation in theaction potentials of the brain and central nervous system (CNS)Operationally this hypothesizes that the typical standardpsychometric measures of g are correlated with the oscillationrates of the brain and CNS as measured by various ReactionTime (RT) and Inspection Time (IT) paradigms. (See Jensen,2006)."g are correlated with the oscillationrates of the brain and CNS as measured by various ReactionTime (RT) and Inspection Time (IT) paradigms. (See Jensen,2006)."of the brain and CNS as measured by various ReactionTime (RT) and Inspection Time (IT) paradigms. (See Jensen,2006)."(RT) and Inspection Time (IT) paradigms. (See Jensen,2006).")." http://tinyurl.com/3vzkjsn
action potentials of the brain and central nervous system (CNS)
Operationally this hypothesizes that the typical standardpsychometric measures of g are correlated with the oscillationrates of the brain and CNS as measured by various ReactionTime (RT) and Inspection Time (IT) paradigms. (See Jensen,2006)."g are correlated with the oscillationrates of the brain and CNS as measured by various ReactionTime (RT) and Inspection Time (IT) paradigms. (See Jensen,2006)."of the brain and CNS as measured by various ReactionTime (RT) and Inspection Time (IT) paradigms. (See Jensen,2006)."(RT) and Inspection Time (IT) paradigms. (See Jensen,2006).")." 
http://tinyurl.com/3vzkjsn

botti said...

A recent paper by Arthur Jensen discussed his work on mental chronometry studies and his theory of intelligence:
 
"Intelligence is the periodicity of neural oscillation in theaction potentials of the brain and central nervous system (CNS)Operationally this hypothesizes that the typical standardpsychometric measures of g are correlated with the oscillationrates of the brain and CNS as measured by various ReactionTime (RT) and Inspection Time (IT) paradigms. (See Jensen,2006)."g are correlated with the oscillationrates of the brain and CNS as measured by various ReactionTime (RT) and Inspection Time (IT) paradigms. (See Jensen,2006)."of the brain and CNS as measured by various ReactionTime (RT) and Inspection Time (IT) paradigms. (See Jensen,2006)."(RT) and Inspection Time (IT) paradigms. (See Jensen,2006).")." http://tinyurl.com/3vzkjsn
action potentials of the brain and central nervous system (CNS)
Operationally this hypothesizes that the typical standardpsychometric measures of g are correlated with the oscillationrates of the brain and CNS as measured by various ReactionTime (RT) and Inspection Time (IT) paradigms. (See Jensen,2006)."g are correlated with the oscillationrates of the brain and CNS as measured by various ReactionTime (RT) and Inspection Time (IT) paradigms. (See Jensen,2006)."of the brain and CNS as measured by various ReactionTime (RT) and Inspection Time (IT) paradigms. (See Jensen,2006)."(RT) and Inspection Time (IT) paradigms. (See Jensen,2006).")." 
http://tinyurl.com/3vzkjsn

Assistant Village idiot said...

I don't know about Steve's professor, but my psychology textbook in the 1970's did have a full page on how IQ tests emphatically did have large elements of social construction - it is where I first read the cliched complaint that "regatta" was an example of a culture-loaded term that black kids wouldn't be as likely to know.  (Not true, BTW.  Think coastal cities or other living near other large bodies of water versus lily-white Utah or North Dakota.)

Happy to have you cite those dozens of ECT's with no correlation, though.

MtMoru said...

One source is Flynn's What Is Intelligence? Not well written but very worth reading. For some ECTs IQ is inversely correlated with performance.

It is my guess that in the specific sense your textbooks used the term, IQ tests are "socially constructed". It all depends on what is meant by "socially construced".

Steve himself mentioned how poorly he would do on any standardized test given in Chinese. The heritability of IQ increases with social status, not just the mean IQ but the heritability. Not only do blacks have lower mean IQ but also lower SD. Do they have less genetic diversity? I doubt it. The lower SD indicated that the test is not measuring the difference in ability between blacks as well as it does in whites.

The "regatta" example is another straw man. 

david wyman said...

Unless you have a different meaning of "straw man" than I do, I would submit that an example of purported racial/culture bias that is actually used, and used repeatedly as evidence, but then shown to be poorly correlated with race, cannot be a straw man.

The last sentence of paragraph three does not necessarily follow from the preceding.  It is a possible, but not an inevitable conclusion. It might be my failure of imagination, but I don't see the relevance of the first sentence there.

I don't understand how the second paragraph addresses the issues.

As to the first paragraph, I may have some agreement.  If your point is there is an interactive model, which relies on environmental factors being present, or present at critical periods, rather than a straight genetic model, I partially concur.  However, that is close to saying that IQ can be harmed by an environment (nutrition, disease, understimulation), but not necessarily enhanced.  Flynn says more than that - used to say much more - but one could be pissy about it and say that's all he's really shown (which few ever doubted).  I would actually follow him farther down that road, but I still think it's only points at the margins. 

MtMoru said...

"The last sentence of paragraph three does not necessarily follow from the preceding."
 
No, but the point is that IQ tests in general may be "in Chinese" for many blacks who are not assimilated. For example, have you ever wondered why blacks in northern US cities have retained their southern accents for generations. I'm CERTAIN no whites with ancestors from the south have retained theirs. 
 
The "regatta" example is a straw man because if it was ever actually used by IQ deniers it was a BAD example that doesn't get at what may be the real/deep but untintentional "bias".
 
Who's AVI?

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