| HN Mirror

    American Psychological Association, 2003
    http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/intelligence.aspx

"People in Western cultures, he suggests, tend to view intelligence as a means for individuals to devise categories and to engage in rational debate, while people in Eastern cultures see it as a way for members of a community to recognize contradiction and complexity and to play their social roles successfully."

"Over the past several years, Sternberg and Grigorenko also have investigated concepts of intelligence in Africa. Among the Luo people in rural Kenya, Grigorenko and her collaborators have found that ideas about intelligence consist of four broad concepts: rieko, which largely corresponds to the Western idea of academic intelligence, but also includes specific skills; luoro, which includes social qualities like respect, responsibility and consideration; paro, or practical thinking; and winjo, or comprehension. Only one of the four--rieko--is correlated with traditional Western measures of intelligence."

"They also agree with studies in a number of countries, both industrialized and nonindustrialized, that suggest that people who are unable to solve complex problems in the abstract can often solve them when they are presented in a familiar context."

"Many psychologists believe that the idea that a test can be completely absent of cultural bias--a recurrent hope of test developers in the 20th century--is contradicted by the weight of the evidence. Raven's Progressive Matrices, for example, is one of several nonverbal intelligence tests that were originally advertised as "culture free," but are now recognized as culturally loaded."

    ScienceDaily, 2010
    http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121155220.htm

"The researchers also claim that African IQ test scores cannot be interpreted in terms of lower intelligence levels, as these scores have different psychometric characteristics than western IQ test scores. Until now, the incomparability of Western and African IQ scores had never been systematically proven."

    University of North Carolina, current curriculum
    http://www.unc.edu/~rooney/iq.htm

"In school settings, psychologists often joke that IQ is what IQ tests measure. There is a lot of truth to this adage. Ideally, IQ tests sample a wide range of experiences and they measure a person’s ability to apply learned information in new and different ways. They do not measure capacity or potential. They do provide information about cognitive skills at a given point in time.

Because IQ tests chiefly measure success in school, they are value-laden. Scores provide a statistical indication of the extent to which a person has critical schools and information, but they should not be directly equated with intelligence. Test scores are a useful index of ability, but they may reflect test-taking sophistication, personality, and attitudinal characteristics as well as learned and innate ability (Plomin, 1989)."

    Further Evidence That IQ Does Not Measure Intelligence
    http://io9.com/5959058/further-evidence-that-iq-does-not-measure-intelligence

"But some thinkers cling to the idea that IQ measures an inborn intelligence that transcends culture and schooling. If that's true, one would expect that the most abstract, "culture free" elements of IQ testing wouldn't be subject to the Flynn Effect. But they are."

"In modern cultures, more emphasis is being placed on abstraction. Students learn algebra at an earlier age than they used to, for instance, but in addition our everyday lives are full of abstractions."

    The Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, UCSD
    http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/Cole/iq.html

"This point was made very explicitly by a Kpelle anthropological acquaintance of mine who was versed in the more esoteric aspects of Kpelle secret societies and medicine (or magic, according to American stereotypes). We had been talking about what it means to be intelligent in Kpelle society (the most appropriate term is translated as "clever"). "Can you be a clever farmer?" I asked. "No," came the reply. "You can be a hardworking farmer, or you can be a lucky farmer, but we couldn't say that someone is a clever farmer. Everyone knows how to farm. We use 'clever' when we talk about the way someone gets other people to help him. Some people always win arguments. Some people know how to deal with strangers. Some people know powerful medicine. These are the things we talk about as clever.""

    Poverty Lowers IQ
    http://www.monitor.net/monitor/5-5-96/povertyiq.html

"Adjustments for socioeconomic conditions almost completely eliminate differences in IQ scores between black and white children, according to the study's co-investigators."

""The study strongly suggests that economic and learning environments of the home are the most powerful predictors of racial IQ differences in 5-year-olds," said Brooks-Gunn."

    Book Review
    http://bryanappleyard.com/flynns-iq/

"Human potential at birth is unchanged; we are not, in any fundamental sense, becoming a smarter species. But the way we live has changed. IQ tests were first established in the 19th century at a time when daily life was concrete and practical. The tests, however, had to be abstract to make them culturally neutral. People, therefore, found them harder because they were unaccustomed to such modes of thought."

"People became better at IQ tests and, steadily, the scores rose. So IQ scores are meaningless unless their date and social norms are taken into account."

(Note that this is a review of a book authored by James R Flynn, the discoverer of the Flynn Effect in IQ measurements. Previous HN commentary on this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4461038)

I could pretty easily come up with a lot more like this. Or, you could strike up a conversation with HN user tokenadult, who is knowledgeable on the subject.

Either way, IQ tests are readily accepted now not to be a test for cognitive ability, and more researchers are adopting the view that it is impossible to separate cultural and environmental influences (and thus knowledge) from any other innate factors in IQ tests.

You really shouldn't assume that the people you're talking to don't know what they mean.