Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kapp_in_life 920 days ago
Are they not? Most I've seen tend to be sorts of abstract pattern matching things. As opposed to basing IQ on ability to play piano or other traits less prevalent in poor communities.

Obviously nothing is perfect but it seems disingenuous to claim they're not designed for poor people to be able to complete them.

1 comments

I don't believe that IQ tests are designed with a bias for or against the poor, so I'm not going to argue either side of that.

I would like to point out however that poverty (or even a hypothetical worry about financial matters) has been shown to reduce fluid intelligence (which IQ tests measure) significantly. This is because people facing poverty have less mental bandwidth. The effect is strong enough to bring a person with "superior" IQ down to "average", or an "average" IQ down to "borderline deficient".

If you're interested in the subject, I'd highly recommend the book _Scarcity_ by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir. If you'd like a shorter and more concise version, there's also an article titled "The Science of Scarcity" [0] in Harvard Magazine about the book that summarizes it quite well.

I'm not an expert on the subject though, so if anyone has reference to any evidence that poverty has no effect on IQ testing, I'd (sincerely) be interested to see it, to get a different perspective.

[0]: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2015/04/the-science-of-scarc...