Clever

[liv]

woodpijn is having a discussion about IQ. She says she doesn't want to debate the sociological criticisms of IQ, so I'm following up the discussion here. Personally I am pretty much anti IQ, I am doubtful whether the thing it measures is meaningful and I am very conscious that more often than not it gets used to add quasi-scientific respectability to oppression.

It's reasonably clear that well-designed IQ tests measure something; they're not just random noise like what colour is your aura quizzes or astrology. I think the thing they measure is mostly just ability to do IQ tests, but they measure that reasonably reliably. And 'being good at IQ tests' is not completely uncorrelated with other things. I'm going to refer to the thing that IQ tests and related formal psychometric tests are purporting to measure as abstract reasoning ability, though I'm not sure that's quite the right term. But the point is that I want to discuss the relationship between abstract reasoning ability and, well, intelligence, so if I just call it intelligence the discussion will be impossibly confusing!

It seems plausible that there is some natural variation in abstract reasoning ability. I suppose it's a bit like speed; some people can run faster than others, and training clearly makes a difference but it doesn't account for all the variation. Most people are never going to enter, let alone win, an international racing competition, no matter how hard they train. And some people don't have normally functioning legs (or legs at all), or normally functioning hearts and lungs, or generally you can pinpoint a specific physiological cause for why they will never be fast runners.

People who design tests of abstract reasoning attempt to minimize the confounding effects of things like culture, specific domain knowledge, and certainly if you do that successfully it narrows, but doesn't eliminate, the differences in performance between people who have lots of practice at doing that kind of puzzle and people who are new to the idea. But you know, the instructions have to be delivered in a language and there are variations in how well people process verbal instructions, whether that's written or spoken. And some people are better than others at sitting still and concentrating and repeatedly solving puzzles, which isn't purely a factor of their abstract reasoning ability.

And it's really often the case that attempts to make things culturally non-specific end up favouring the default majority culture, because that's unmarked, people assume it's just neutral or normal, not a culture. Particularly the culture of people who design reasoning tests, who tend to be more educated than average and more part of the mainstream, normative system. A lot of the time test designers aren't even making a serious effort to remove biases, because at some level they're kind of setting out to "prove" what they already believe, namely that white middle-class people who are native speakers of the dominant language or English and don't have disabilities and aren't neurodivergent are in fact more "intelligent" than everybody else. It's incredibly easy, even assuming you've got as far as making a well designed, rigorous test that sticks to the abstract and doesn't rely too much on culturally specific domain knowledge, to expose your test-takers to massive stereotype threat.

In general the thing of using an IQ or similar abstract reasoning scores to rank people and decide who's the most intelligent is not really justified, though it was an inevitable consequence of the numerical score being developed. I'm cautiously ok with using tests of abstract reasoning as Binet's IQ test was originally devised to compare children with the level of attainment expected at their age, or to look at an individual's profile of strengths and deficits. But I'm not really comfortable with using IQ to compare and rank people, and anyway I'm not convinced IQ is meaningful for intellectually nondisabled adults.

On top of that there's a really horrendous history of abuse and eugenics based on scoring intellectually disabled adults by comparing them to the population normal ability in abstract reasoning for children, and then calling the outcome "mental age" and proceeding to treat an adult who has the abstract reasoning ability of a typical five-year-old as if they were actually five, and denying them autonomy. Besides which the tests are designed for mentally and physically abled people, so tend to underestimate the IQ of anyone who can't take the test in the standard way. I mean, it's not inherently evil to notice that a person has difficulties with abstract reasoning, and take that into account when eg presenting information for them to allow them to make medical or financial decisions, but all too often that's not how IQ is actually used.

The top end of the scale, the bit that people get really fixated on, is pretty unuseful for identifying "geniuses". It's just a property of the numbers, really. You lose meaningful sensitivity when you try to measure the difference between someone who's better at abstract reasoning than 99% of the population and someone who's better at it than 99.9% of the population, especially since by definition those people are extremely rare so it's hard to get enough of a sample size to design usefully discriminating tests! I suspect at the high end there's even more bias than in the middle towards people who just happen to be good at taking tests.

I'm one. I over-perform in tests something shocking, always have. I'm good at abstract reasoning anyway, but I'm also good at lots of other things that involve doing a defined task with a known right answer quickly and accurately. I've never actually measured my IQ as such because I had decided it was mostly meaningless long before I got the opportunity to take the official test. But I've done a whole bunch of psychometric tests based on solving puzzles and the more rigorous they are the more I'm likely to get ludicrously high or off the scale scores. A lot of people who I know are better than I am at doing real-world intellectual tasks rather than taking tests get lower scores than me, which is one of the main reasons I'm an IQ skeptic.

I also have a lot of other characteristics and abilities that people associate with being "intelligent". There is a correlation between such intelligence and raw abstract reasoning ability, I'm not denying that. But I think a lot of that is explained by the fact that intelligence is mostly a cultural construct and a lot of the same factors that cause people to be perceived as intelligent are also correlated with doing well in tests of abstract reasoning. Which is not to say that intelligence is completely imaginary, far from it, social constructs absolutely do have real world effects. Having compared high IQ to running fast, I'm going to abuse analogies further and state that describing someone as "intelligent" is like saying that someone is "beautiful". You're referring to a set of real and measurable qualities (symmetry, body type, colouring, grooming skills etc), and most people will roughly agree on a ranking of who's beautiful and who is less so, and people ranked higher will have very different life experiences from people ranked lower. But just as feminists often prefer to say conventionally attractive rather than unqualified beautiful, I think it would be useful to say perceived as intelligent.

As with beauty, a lot of it is confidence, and a lot of it is being the kind of person that people subconsciously expect to be admirable. I'm perceived as intelligent not primarily because I'm good at abstract reasoning, though as it happens I am, I'm perceived as intelligent because I'm white-appearing, because I speak a prestige dialect of English, because the kind of education I've had means that I know all the cultural references and shibboleths that people associate with intelligence. Also because I have always had the belief reinforced that my opinion is worth hearing and my analysis is likely to be sound, and I'm outgoing and socially confident, so I'm happy to enter into debate and state my views forcefully but politely, based on lifelong experience that I will be taken seriously.

I'm also very very verbal; sometimes tests of abstract reasoning explicitly include verbal skills and sometimes they don't because it's harder to make something like a vocabulary test relatively culturally non-specific, but even then the ability to read fast and obtain information from words helps boost your score. But I do in fact have a ridiculously huge vocabulary (which I have tested using instruments designed for serious research into these things and which include progressive testing). And I'm very likely hyperlexic, I fit the profile though again I've never actually been tested formally, but anyway, I was reading meaningfully for information before I was two and I was beyond the scope of the "reading age" system by the time I was eight, I was reading long novels and technical documents intended for adults in junior school. As well as being a really fast reader (in terms of how many words pass before my eyes, yes, but it's in terms of how fast I can extract information that I'm a real outlier), I have an unusually good memory, especially for verbal information, so I have a huge amount of knowledge about all kinds of random topics and however much tests try to eliminate the role of knowledge it's always going to influence reasoning scores. And it certainly influences people's perception of me, the more so since formal grammar (and spelling) come completely naturally to me.

It's very much a self-reinforcing cycle; from childhood I've been perceived as intelligent so I was given lots of educational opportunities. I'm extremely well suited to formal education, and over-perform in timed, delineated tests, so I excelled, which led to more educational opportunities. And now I have twenty years of full-time education and my CV includes things like a First class degree from Oxford and a PhD, both in natural sciences. But I didn't get those things just because of my abilities, I got them because I was well-positioned to benefit from them. The usual advantages, like parents who cared about education and growing up in a house full of books, and financial support to obtain lots of high quality education, and the sort of background where people who have the kinds of abilities I have are expected to attend prestigious universities and go into intellectual careers. I mean, I was at a gathering recently when a teenager described my PhD as a certificate showing I'm smart, and his parents rightly corrected him. You have to have some amount of ability to assimilate and manipulate complex information and ideas to get a PhD, yes, but it's very wrong to assume that people with higher degrees are somehow more intelligent than people without.

oursin has a lovely post in response to the latest iteration of the badly designed privilege-checking meme, which literally attempts to make "privilege" into a numerical score. She points out that some elements of so-called privilege are not about family background but about collective societal factors like the welfare state, grant-funded university education, availability of employment on graduation. I'm the tail-end of that generation (literally the last cohort who got fully tax-funded university education in the UK!) and although I do come from somewhat more financial comfort than oursin a lot of the reason I have all the markers that make me look intelligent is growing up in a relatively functional society, pre-financial crisis and austerity. I took it for granted that I would have enough to eat and a decent standard of accommodation and access to healthcare, even if I took the risk of spending a lot of time learning stuff rather than earning money, and doing that I had a good chance of getting a satisfying intellectual job out of it and not much chance of ending up in debt. That's not the case at all for people growing up in the US now, and it's becoming much less the case for people younger than me even in Europe, unless they come from quite a lot of inherited wealth.

Current psych research says it's a bad idea to encourage children to identify with their intelligence, but I don't think that was well known when I was a kid. Certainly I've spent most of my life being told I'm intelligent or smart or clever. When I was in trouble as a little kid it was "You're supposed to be so clever!", though in fact my ability to deal with complex information was mostly unconnected to my (merely average) ability to consider the consequences of my actions or to stay focused enough to make appropriate decisions. I was often explicitly compared to Roger Hargreaves' Mr Clever who is often so busy thinking of higher intellectual things that he is distracted from mundane practical stuff. My teachers and peers at school often called me clever, and I accepted it, because I kept getting all the answers right and later on when things were more formal, consistently high marks in everything, and that was pretty much my understanding of what "clever" means.

As I mentioned in woodpijn's discussion, fairly soon after I started full-time school I was statemented as gifted by an educational psych person from the LEA. I don't know if she explicitly tested my IQ but people wisely didn't tell me the result if she did; anyway I had to do a bunch of puzzles. I have a very clear memory of "cheating" when the psych asked me if there were more or fewer blocks present when she knocked over the stack; I could read her instruction manual which she had open on her desk but upside-down from my point of view. So although I hadn't started out with a developmentally advanced grasp of conservation, I learned about it by being implausibly good at reading and as soon as I'd seen the comment that the advanced child will understand that the number of blocks doesn't change when they are moved around it became clear to me. Being gifted mostly meant being given a typewriter and a stash of old magazines which I used to make up stories while other kids were doing tasks I found trivial. I was also partly accelerated and did some lessons with kids from the academic year above; both of these kind of cemented my status as "the clever one".

When I was eight I moved to an academically competitive school, where basically everybody was "clever" and being gifted wasn't an issue any more. I understood the rules of the game and I was very good at competing. I got lots of high marks (I can enumerate every single occasion from the age of 8 to 18 when I got less than an A equivalent) and won lots of prizes for being the best at pretty much everything academic. Ten years of that was enough to make it very obvious that being clever like that didn't mean anything very much, it was nice to get lots of praise for it but it seemed mostly a set of completely arbitrary skills that happened to be rewarded, fast reading, good memory, good at exams. So as an adult when I hear "you must be really clever!" when people find out that I went to Oxford or that I have a PhD or that I work in scientific research, my reaction is, yes, but who cares? I'm lucky that I have both the superficial skills that people regard as signs of intelligence, and the opportunities to obtain prestige through having those skills.

I could really easily have fallen into the trap of thinking that people perceived as intelligent are morally superior, more deserving, suited to being in charge. But it's been obvious to me from the start that appearing intelligent is mostly irrelevant to real abilities, ie those that are practically useful in the real world. I have read of people labelled as gifted or over-identifying with their intelligence as children often have problems as adults, but honestly the benefits I have gained from that perception far outweigh any downsides. I have a tiny bit of the typical gifted or smart-identified kid difficulty with perfectionism / procrastination, fear of failure, and loss of self-worth because of not living up to my supposed potential, but only to a very minor extent. I suppose I was never considered a child prodigy or a genius, and I have spent most of my life surrounded by other people who are at least as intelligent as I am, from my birth family to my academic colleagues.

Rather, being seen as intelligent, and being supremely intellectually confident, have massively compensated for any disadvantages I might otherwise have faced due to being female. I'm lucky that intelligence is valued more than appearance, but I don't really think this should be the case, it's just a mix of good luck and being the sort of person society values anyway. So one of the things I'm consciously trying to do is to avoid bias in favour of people who are perceived as intelligent, because that reinforces oppressive hierarchies anyway. For example, I'm trying to cure myself of the habit of using "stupid" to mean "generically bad". I rarely call people stupid, but I'm still working on saying that an idea or situation is stupid when I really mean that it's incorrect or annoying.

That's partly because of ableism; people with low IQs and other intellectual / learning disabilities are very much discriminated against, and to some extent basically all synonyms for stupid are slurs used against such people. And maybe some people are going to be annoyed that I'm being politically correct for caring about that. Just because I've got into trouble over this kind of thing before, let me state explicitly that I am not judging anybody else's language, I'm just talking about the choices that I personally make. Anyway, it's not only that, it's because the sloppy thinking that equates intelligent with meritorious and stupid with bad will lead to me making errors of judgement, and thinking that people with high social status are superior human beings. I mean, there are some actually useful skills that are partially correlated with what's measured or perceived as intelligence, but that's not the point.

Comments

[hilarita]

It's extremely hard to design an IQ test that you can't get better at. And the culture thing is extremely insidious. For a while I did QA for an online test that read all the questions and answers out loud - this was a test that was meant to help do IQ testing with people who weren't that good at reading. And it was sooo bloody culturally loaded. One of the questions I remember was about a dog, and whether you'd keep a dog in the house, in the garden, in a kennel or somewhere else (I can't quite remember where exactly). I think this was meant for 7-yr-olds. So a) this assumed that you were from a culture that thought dogs were pets rather than anything else and b) that the only place you can keep a dog is a kennel, rather than in the house, or in a kennel in the garden, or in a kennel in the house, or whatever. You had to have passed the Peter and Jane indoctrination test, in which Dogs Live In Kennels, to get that one right. And this was a test being used for academic research.

In reality, it's like any other kind of exam. You can game it, and people will overweight what it means, and you can't safely extrapolate from it about how nice someone is, or whether they'll be a good person to work with, or even if they're good at solving other kinds of problems. But it comes loaded with 'scientific' origins, so you have to work extra hard to remind people that it has limitations, especially the limitation that it's not a high score in life, it's a high score in strange abstract reasoning within a time limit, where there's a defined answer to your question.
I always felt it would be better if you had to provide a reason for your answers.

[liv]

Yes, however much you abstract things, simply practising a particular style of test will always improve scores. One of the scary things about medicine at the moment is that half the ranking for newly qualified doctors comes from their entire performance in medical school, and the other half comes from a single multiple choice test called the Situational Judgement Test. It's meant to look at ethical values, and it's supposedly not meant to be something you can practise for. But I'm really dubious about the second assumption, I'm pretty certain that seeing lots of examples of the sorts of answers considered right would help even a very unethical person to choose the answer that makes them sound honest.

And I completely agree, even when you're trying to correct for cultural bias, it's always there. It's there in maths, it's there in pattern matching, it's most certainly there in anything that involves interpreting word problems at all. The Dogs Live in Kennels thing is absolutely typical; I've heard legends about children of immigrants from Eastern Europe to the US being shown a picture of a man digging vegetables and a man sitting in an armchair reading a book and being asked which one was working and which one was relaxing. And being ranked as having low intelligence because their parents were intellectuals who read and study for work and do gardening for fun, but American culture thinks that reading is boring and something you only do if you have to, and manual work is real work...

And yes, IQ has this kind of aura of scientific respectability, so it's that much more uphill to debunk. But even a well-written test is never going to be a high score in life, what a lovely phrase!

Ambiguous IQ Tests

[(Anonymous)]

Here is an anecdote that reinforces your call for providing a reason for an answer. (The explanation of my anecdote is also a good illustration of cultural and factual bias.)

Around 1960, the master asked my class of 15 year olds a question from a real 11 Plus paper (aka IQ test).

Which is the odd-one out:
Cat
Dog
Car
Radio?

The class was equally divided. Our reasons were:

Cat - No licence
Dog - The 2nd letter is not "A" (The 11 Plus examiner's expected answer)
Car - Outside the house
Radio - Three syllables

At that time, in UK dogs and radios required an annual licence, as cars and TVs still do. How many of Liv's generation know that fact?

Southernwood

Re: Ambiguous IQ Tests

[princess]

I thought "radio, it's immobile." So there's that.

(I test well, usually. I can often identify how to game the test from the sample question or questions.)

Re: Ambiguous IQ Tests

[(Anonymous)]

Of course. I was not suggesting that there there was only one reason for any choice. I selected examples from a very wide-ranging class discussion.

The 11 Plus IQ test was notoriously ineffective and, as you say, you could beat the system by practice.

Southernwood

Re: Ambiguous IQ Tests

[liv]

The 11 Plus is a classic example of people who sincerely believed they were setting an "objective" test of intelligence / pure reasoning ability, but at the same time did a very good job of mostly selecting "the right sort" of people to go to grammar school. I mean, did you know that they set the threshold quite a bit higher for girls than boys, because eleven-year-old girls are enough more intellectually mature than boys of the same age that if they'd made the test fair girls would have far outnumbered boys throughout the grammar school system? That's even before you get to subtle things like the advantages accruing to children who came from homes with lots of books and an intellectual climate, and the stereotype threat / low expectations of the test administrators effectively biasing the system against people from the wrong social class.

Re: Ambiguous IQ Tests

[liv]

Yes, that's a lot of why I test well, I'm gaming the test rather than answering the questions. If the test has enough questions to be statistically meaningful, it also has enough for me to figure out how the questions work and answer them far too straightforwardly!

Re: Ambiguous IQ Tests

[liv]

Basically I think odd-one-out questions are useless. The only way to get them right is to read the examiner's mind, (or to have enough experience of that particular type of test that it's equivalent to doing that); there's always several right answers. They're ok when it's three patterns that fit a rule and one that doesn't, but even those have to be carefully designed. Just a list of objects is terrible.

[forestofglory]

I've never taken a formal IQ test. But have taken quite a few tests that measure things like "abstract reasoning" as part of being diagnosed with a learning disability. I also have friend who is training to become some who evaluates children for learning disabilities and other issues. So while generally agree that IQ tests are not very useful, and have been used to promote harmful ideas about people's value, I also think that tests which try to measure parts of intelligence can be useful.

I mean on one hand the main point of LD testing is to qualify someone to receive accommodations. However the tests can also help one identify specific areas of weakness and work on coping strategies to deal with those.

[liv]

Oh yes, I definitely agree that looking at an individual's profile for different aspects of "intelligence" and using that to provide accommodations is reasonable. It's helpful to have a test which can in fact distinguish between problems with decoding words and problems with actually understanding and reasoning about logical questions. But when you start using the outcomes to rank people, that's an issue.

And I am really uncomfortable with the idea that people who are good at abstract reasoning and bad at reading / decoding language are the cool ones because they're "intelligent", but people who have average ability with reading and language, but are worse than average at abstract reasoning are not worth bothering with. If you assume that people with general intellectual, cognitive or developmental disabilities need different accommodations from people who are intelligent but with specific LDs, that's fine and the test is being used for a beneficial purpose. But there are too many instances where ability in abstract reasoning is used in an immoral way to decide who should get basic human rights, and that's not just something that happened in the bad old days, it still goes on.

[whereisirisnow]

I also think that measuring the IQ doesn't necessarily say something about intelligence (just as a degree, as you rightly pointed out, has nothing to do with intelligence whatsoever). When involved in discussions like these, I always like to point out that I took a (not official) IQ test once (as a child, although it was aimed at adults) and scored 90, which I believe puts me on the brink of below average - average, although I don't really would classify myself as below average.

So, really, intelligence and IQ? Maybe there is some correlation somewhere deep, deep down, but not necessarily :)

[liv]

Well, I wouldn't say that a degree has nothing to do with intelligence, that's certainly one of the prerequisites. But it's a lot more to do with opportunity and personality and a whole bunch of other things. But I agree, meaningful, practical intelligence isn't very well related to IQ score at all, though again, there is some correlation. The age-norming aspects of the test always come out really strange, though I can see why people studying these things want to compare children to others of the same age.

[sonia]

Agreeing with all your points! I have a similar set of skills and support, although I don't think I was reading quite that early. I do read upside down though, and hadn't really thought about that.

Back when I was given an IQ test, it was administered individually by a white man. There isn't just bias in the test, but in how it's administered. I still remember, almost 40 years later, that he re-asked a question I was getting wrong. Maybe he did that for all the kids?

I was very much taught that intelligence was a measure of worth, and I didn't question those underlying assumptions until embarrassingly recently, through reading Dave Hingsburger's blog.

[karen2205]

But you know, the instructions have to be delivered in a language and there are variations in how well people process verbal instructions, whether that's written or spoken.

See the Kaufaman - ie. instructions for this test rely on as little verbal language as possible, certainly some of the subtests can be demonstrated, as it is intended to allow for measurement of non-verbal abilities in children with disordered or impaired language development and I think may also be used with children for whom English is a second language.

And some people are better than others at sitting still and concentrating and repeatedly solving puzzles, which isn't purely a factor of their abstract reasoning ability.

And if you spot that whilst administering cognitive testing, you can deal with it in the analysis of the results ie. x score represents the lowest possible level of y's functioning in this area, because their attention/concentration was poor. [And when I'm looking at cognitive testing, seeing the effects of poor attention/concentration is important - because if someone is functioning in a way where they are showing poor attention/concentration in a quiet 1:1 space with a psychologist [how most standardised tests will be administered] the impact of their attention/concentration difficulties in a classroom on their functional skills is likely to be much greater].

With the WISC IV UK I think there's one of the verbal reasoning subtests that's very much affected by knowledge of the dominant culture - the child is asked questions like "what should you do if....". I hadn't thought the rest of the test was designed in a fashion that would favour white/middle class kids over others - what am I missing?

"not inherently evil to notice that a person has difficulties with abstract reasoning, and take that into account when eg presenting information for them to allow them to make medical or financial decisions, but all too often that's not how IQ is actually used.

Shouldn't be. The (English & Welsh) test of capacity is decision specific, so in an of itself an IQ score won't tell you if someone has capacity or not to make a particular decision, but it can be useful information. There are more useful tests of functional skills in adults than pure cognitive tests. And anyway, the legal test for whether or not someone has capacity to make a decision doesn't rely on test scoring - this is a reasonable guide to working out whether someone has capacity to make a decision.

I think for adults without learning disabilities, cognitive testing can be useful for identifying patterns of strengths and weaknesses - both the WISC IV and the adult version provide details of strengths in particular domains - verbal reasoning/perceptual reasoning/working memory/processing speed. The research AIUI is that working memory is probably relatively fixed and not much can be done to improve it, but for some people more self awareness around the things they are better at will assist them to play to their strengths. Otherwise I generally agree re lack of usefulness of cognitive testing for most adults.

[daharyn]

I think you would find this recent blog post thought-provoking. I'm trying to take the idea of being "under impaired" around with me, keeping an eye out for where it applies in my own work, life, history. http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/2015/07/07/handicapped-being-underimpaired-teaching-equality-core

[ephemera]

*reads article with interest* - thank you for sharing the link!

[403]

In Outliers, Malcom Gladwell made a case for how social guidance of young people into opportunities and expectations creates so many of these things that our society then turns around and claims are innate. I know I've benefitted from things like that. (Especially compared to the third or so of my classmates in K-12 who were of Hispanic origin, in a school where nearly all of the teachers were white. I'm sure it wasn't intentional on their part, but such things don't have to be and often aren't.)

That said, I have taken the WAIS as part of being evaluated for learning disabilities... when I finally was in college and had sufficient income to pay for it myself. Should've been done many years earlier but my mother was afraid that if I was labeled, I'd be discriminated against. At any rate, when tested, my scores were really uneven. And so I got accommodations during college, without which I likely wouldn't have graduated despite being active, engaged, and even (gasp!) "smart".

[nicki]

I've taken a lot of IQ tests. The first was when I was abt 10 and was a qualifier for the gifted and talented group at my elementary school. I didn't know it was an IQ test at the time and nobody told me what I scored, only that I qualified for the group. When I was in grad-school, though, we were encouraged to take a selection of IQ test so that we could understand the strengths and weaknesses better (I've also done the myer's briggs a lot) and I have to say that they definitely aren't normed very well at the top range. I had something like a 20-30 point spread.

Generally speaking, I think what it does best for the upper end is to point out tendencies- ability to learn things quickly, to pattern well, to have a wide range of interests. But that also come with other things, like getting bored easily. Too much emphasis is placed on it as an indicator of "intelligence" or being "smart".

I was reading a novel recently where the heroine spends a great deal of the book thinking about how smart the hero is because of his high IQ (wow, he can do this thing because he's sooooooooo smart). I spent most of the book going, "yeah, um, no, that's not how this works."

[davidgillon]

There's one of the lesser Dan Browns, Deception Point?, where a great deal is made of the heroine's intelligence, and ISTR part of that was demonstrated when she worked out an anagram that was essential to the plot. Unfortuanately for plot credibility I'd reached the page where the anagram was first mentioned, glanced at it in passing, said 'that's {whatever it was}' and moved on. Having the heroine's genius indicated by something I didn't even have to think about to solve is a wee bit problematical .

[atreic]

Great post - thank you! Might comment later if more brain, but really wanted a DW 'like' button.

[slashmarks]

I'm aware there are differing opinions on this in the disabled community, but I just wanted to mention that some people don't agree that stupid is a slur and actually oppose people treating it like one.

Basically, stupid is a word that can mean a lot of things, ranging from 'bad at this specific task' to 'badly thought out decision-making' to 'willfully ignoring reality,' and eliminating it from your vocabulary on the basis that it's an insult to intellectually disabled people is reinforcing the association and, well, calling intellectually disabled people stupid.

This is not an area there is consensus on, though, like I said. (I'm not intellectually disabled, but I'm developmentally disabled and have had slurs like the r word thrown around at me, so I feel okay mentioning this.)

I actually was labeled gifted in school, but I was aware for a long time that there was some kind of weird difference between me and the other gifted kids -- they often seemed like... enhanced versions of the usual learning process, whereas I was really good at some things and could not do other things at all, and most of the time the things I was really good at were enough to compensate but sometimes they weren't. And then people got mad at me for being "lazy" because I was So Smart.

It was my experience growing up, and talking to others as an adult, that some of the gifted kids seemed to absorb the idea that they were superior, and some knew they weren't and figured the idea of intelligence was arbitrary/stupid/might have called it socially constructed if they had the vocabulary.

[davidgillon]

If 'stupid' is used to denigrate, then I think it counts as a slur whatever its historical use.

The campaigns on various disablist slurs, the R-word especially, but there was a huge uproar in the UK over Ricky Gervais using 'mong' a few years ago (and explicitly trying to re-popularise it IIRC) primarily focus on the terms with clearly established history of application to disabled people that have then moved into common speech, so that their entire negative meaning descends from considering disability as bad. I think it was the US (and the UK if not the US) that actually legally defined various words as relating to specific IQ ranges, so someone with IQ in the range 40-60 was legally defined as a 'cretin' (with added bonus racism) and so on. I don't recall 'stupid' as being one of the problematic terms, but the ones that are targeted derive their negative meaning solely from disability and therefore reinforce a stereotype of disability as bad. (Note that you can also have derivations that don't involve disability, for example the original derivation of retarded is from the Latin for slowed, so uses where something is engineered to be slower - e.g. a parachute-retarded bomb, which don't derive via the disability usage, are still fine).

I came across an example of problematic language use just a few minutes ago on my twitter feed 'Insane flooding at English Open' (it actually looked like a fairly typical summer downpour - must have been a slow news day). 'Insane' isn't a word we'd normally use about flooding, so why did the journalist use it? Probably because 'insane' has developed a secondary meaning of 'extreme' or 'uncontrolled', but even that secondary meaning still taps into a view of 'insanity' as a negative and subtly reinforces stereotypes of disabled people as abnormal and lesser. Salon Magazine is particularly bad for this, especially for a liberal publication, and you regularly see them titling articles as 'Liberals oppose insane racist scheme' or the like - using disablist language to condemn racism is just bizarre!

[slashmarks]

I don't think so? You can use a variety of words to denigrate someone. Teaching people to avoid specific words doesn't touch the intent. Like, I was talking about this a while ago on tumblr, and you could call someone: the r word, stupid, special, a vegetable, annoying, an idiot, eccentric, severely intellectually disabled, a person with special needs, mentally handicapped, a few crayons short of a box, disabled, or a lot of other things all with essentially the same meaning.

Some of those words are undeniably slurs. (The r word, vegetable, etc.) Some of them are words that are pretty universally rejected by the disabled community. (I've never met anyone who likes being called mentally handicapped.) But some of them are perfectly fine, or even accepted terminology, and some of them are insults that have nothing to do with disability on the surface.

If we just tell people to drop any word that gets used to insult disabled people, assuming they listen, they'll just move on to another phrase. (It's my understanding that this is what's behind a lot of the American autistic community's rejection of person with autism -- it got co-opted by the abusive professionals once it became accepted terminology.) There's no comprehension of what's actually wrong.

But what we are doing eventually is taking away words that are important, particularly for people who have problems with expressive language already. I'd argue stupid is a pretty important word to have access to.

Eta: and I'm undecided how I feel about casual use of insane and crazy like that, but I definitely don't think either word is a slur, or stupid.

[davidgillon]

I think there are two aspects at work here:

Intent, which I think we agree on - if you call someone the R-word you aren't doing it to be positive about them, and I think that's both denigration and a slur whatever word you use (I'm not sure if we're defining 'slur' slightly differently).

And Cultural Baggage, or Societal Assumptions, or whatever. I can't think of a single word that covers the full set of cultural assumptions that come with using a word like 'cretin' or the R-word, etymology doesn't entirely cover it. But essentially words come with a whole set of societal assumptions associated with them, and that baggage is loaded down onto us everytime that we, or someone else, uses the word. So for us to change the way that people look at disability, and stop them seeing it negatively, we actually have to challenge the way language shapes perception of disability with repeated negatives - 'I'd rather be dead than in a wheelchair' being perhaps the clearest example in how utterly open it is in seeing disability as a negative.

WRT Autism and 'Person With Autism', you need to bear in mind the whole neurodivergent movement is fairly heavily Social Model based and us Social Model types reject person first language as failing to represent our status as a discriminated against minority. Not to mention that PWD constructions are based on the idea of separating the person and the disability, while with neurodivergence we argue the person and the disability (if people even consider it a disability) are inseparable.

[naath]

I think that before you can ask "is this test fit for purpose" it is important to know what the purpose of it is supposed to *be*. I think one of the big problems with IQ tests is the attempt to use very similar tests for lots of different purposes.

If I want to know if you'll do well in a classroom geared towards people who like learning things out of books; then your ability to sit quietly and read in English are probably very important. If I want to assess your ability at abstract reasoning without reference to your dyslexia then a written task is clearly not really doing to help.

It's much harder to design a test that looks at, say, a person's ability to pull together information from lots of sources and make useful deductions without reference to anything they might already know.

[merrythebard]

A really good and interesting post, thank you. :-) (And, unsurprisingly, I thoroughly agree with you!)

Two anecdotal things, in slight tangent to the main part of the post but hopefully still interesting!

1. A quick summary of my own early (i.e., pre-university, or at least pre-A level) academic life would be: I was awkward. Regarded (and praised, to a point that wasn't helpful to me) as "gifted" in some respects while also being berated and mocked for the things I found hard (proprioception, spacial reasoning (including spacial imagination - rotating 3D shapes still confuses the *heck* out of me), having remotely legible handwriting, and a lot of social and other life-type skills). I also had significantly inferior maths skills relative to my other academic abilities. Looking back, I had various bits of verbal and musical aptitude and some other strong academic abilities, a great deal of sincere interest in what I was learning, coupled with probable-dyspraxia (and possible-other neurodivergencies), the early stages of ME/SEID, and the early stages of PTSD. All undiagnosed, of course. Plus I just wasn't, and still am not, more than averagely good at maths. ;-) I also kept missing school as I got more and more ill. I think my mixture of abilities and problems confounded a lot of my teachers (mine was a fairly impoverished, quite small comprehensive, and on the subjects I excelled at I was consistently top or joint-top of my year), and some of them reacted to that well and supportively, but many didn't, assuming that when I didn't succeed in an area, it meant I wasn't trying hard enough. (I'm not sure if I have a point here except, possibly, to express my hatred at the way being intelligent/not being intelligent are seen so much as being an either/or matter, when I'm sure that people like me with a very mixed skillset aren't actually particularly unusual*! Which I think was my own wake-up call for the inadequacies of IQ as a form of measurement, before I learned about the social problems with it.)


2. I should also note that this really resonated with me:

I'm the tail-end of that generation (literally the last cohort who got fully tax-funded university education in the UK!)...

I'm the same, as I think you know (though it's also interesting to note how much easier still things were for my brother (now 47) and sister (now 45). Both got full grants, and my brother's even extended to cover his *post-graduate music studies*). If my siblings and I had gone up to university with education at the point it is now... well, we just couldn't all have done it. Possibly one of us, so probably it would have been my brother.

Given that my father got to university due to a mixture of state help and a scholarship to St John's (his parents were rural working-class, both left school at 14, etc.)... I'm experiencing a disconcerting sensation these days that is actually probably quite common. That of having class and educational privileges, and still very much benefiting from them (despite my current exceedingly precarious socioeconomic situation) that are now being absolutely denied to people with a very similar background to mine, simply because of their generation. Not all the children and teenagers I know who would make good academics will go to university. It's very possible that none of my nieces and nephews will. Of course, there's always been an absolutely whopping gap between, "would do well at university" and "can afford to/gets the support and encouragement at school to enable them to go", even in the halcyon days when my siblings were undergraduates. But I do have this... weird sensation of being in a specific demographic that's being phased out.

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[1] But oh goodness would I have liked to have had just *one* conversation at Cambridge with another Cambridge undergraduate who only got a B in GCSE maths. Especially if, like me, they worked harder for that B than almost any other qualification I've ever worked for.

[ephemera]

*reads with interest*

*has insufficient brain for a sensible comment at this time*

[davidgillon]

It seems plausible that there is some natural variation in abstract reasoning ability.

Possibly related to working memory? Though it's not going to be a one-to-one linkage as, for example, people seem to think I'm reasonably smart, yet dyspraxia is supposed to give reduced working memory.

I suspect at the high end there's even more bias than in the middle towards people who just happen to be good at taking tests.

I'm one. I over-perform in tests something shocking, always have.

Ditto. I always found it much easier to score highly in exams than in coursework. And in comparison to most people I did ridiculously little revision - if I read my notes through three times I could usually recall anything I needed, and often picture the page. That worked right the way through to finals.

I don't recall what age I started reading, but I clearly picked it up quickly and like you had blown 'reading age' out of the water by 8 or 9, I remember teachers being startled that I was reading the Sunday Times, 'You're just skipping through the articles?' 'No, front to back.' (I doubt I had the context to fully understand most of the articles, but reading them wasn't an issue).

I was actually uncomfortable with the way I was treated at school, for opposite reasons between primary and secondary. At primary there was an insistence that if I was so smart then I must be able to learn to write neatly. Hello, dyspraxic? They didn't know what dyspraxia was and they made things worse by pressurising me during the act of writing, which just made me clamp down harder, and write worse. I'm slowly realising that they probably damaged me psychologically at the same time, but in more subtle ways. Overall I was almost certainly the classic 'little professor' type, but before teachers had been taught that kids like me might actually be hiding major issues behind our IQ.

In secondary school I wasn't quite placed on a pedestal, but there were two or three of us in my year (of c200) who were clearly treated differently to everyone else, I'm not sure whether other years had similar 'favourites' or whatever, but within our year it was clear. Even within the highflyers expected to go on to university or poly (I went to university in '82, so the percentage going was much lower and the systems were still separate), the two or three of us were exempted from a school-wide ruling that we all had to apply to both the university and polytechnic admissions systems. There was simply no doubt in people's minds that we didn't need the polytechnic 'backup'. Interestingly the careers system didn't seem to know how to deal with me - something I saw again when I ended up claiming benefit post-Evil Aerospace, only then compounded when I combined both DWP's inability to cope with technically skilled/executive types and their inability to cope with significantly disabled people.

The similarities in our academic process break once I get to degree level. I actually had an outrageously low offer to go to QMC, which was about the leading CompSci department at the time, but chose to go to the then unknown Lancaster instead as I didn't think I could cope psychologically with living in London (which was either surprisingly insightful of me, bloody obvious, or both), ironically it's now Lancaster that has the rep for CompSci excellence. And I think I then bailed on doing a masters or PhD because I psychologically was unable to access the support mechanisms to understand why I would have been well served by doing one, and how the system would function - I really needed the then equivalent of your 'Dear Gifted Student' essay, and better tutoring. Or any tutoring! I'm not clear if Lancaster was just generally crap at the tutor system, or I was lousy at accessing it, but I essentially had zero support from the academic staff for the whole of my time there. Of course I now recognise that I was dealing with being fairly significantly neurodiverse with at least one Specific LD and with no support network, but no one figured it out at the time. (I'm actually getting some new perspectives on my decision making at the time as I think this through with what I know now)

I could really easily have fallen into the trap of thinking that people perceived as intelligent are morally superior

It's probably as well I struggled with the daily living aspects as I could easily have fallen into that hole. Interesting IQ-related anecdote on roughly this theme: everyone has always assumed that I was the smart one in the family (and school, and to a lesser extent office), and that while I took after my civil engineer* father intellectually, my sister took after him physically and, while, like him, she could turn her hand to any sport, wasn't quite as 'bright' as me. We both went off to university, but I did CompSci, while she did Sports Science, so again the brain vs brawn thing. OTOH it was clear she didn't have the issues with daily living I did, so maybe being smarter wasn't that much of an advantage, which undoubtedly helped ground me. And then (2006?) the BBC did 'Test The Nation' a national IQ test thing, and all three of us did it, in separate houses, and all three of us (dad, me, sis) scored exactly the same (143 IIRC). And she's still better at sports and daily living than me ;)

I'm trying to cure myself of the habit of using "stupid" to mean "generically bad". I rarely call people stupid, but I'm still working on saying that an idea or situation is stupid when I really mean that it's incorrect or annoying.

That's partly because of ableism;

I can see where you're going there, though stupid itself isn't one of the terms that I and (IIRC) other campaigners have particular issues with as it isn't as heavily loaded down with disablist baggage as say 'cretin' or 'retarded'. I have pulled people up for disablist language of this kind (and had some appalling reactions in a couple of cases, both from people who identified themselves as left wing equality activists!), but it's not an area I actively campaign in.

There are so many other areas of urgent need language just slips down my priority list, even if I think the way language shapes thought is both fascinating and vital to changing perceptions. I was just tweeting about that in relation to assisted suicide earlier, talking about the cumulative impact of having heard 'I'd rather be dead than in a wheelchair' all through their life for someone who suddenly finds themselves needing one (ETA: and it probably explains, at least in part, why it took me so long to become a chair user) Brainwashing isn't an inappropriate comparison when talking about how society views disability and uses language to reinforce those views.

* I find it interesting to think about my mother and father in the context of this discussion. Both are the children of miners (though both grandfathers were a level up from basic coal hewers, one was a shot-firer, the other a salvageman, both dangerous jobs even by mining standards, so clearly not unintelligent, but likely not widely educated), my dad was the proverbial grammar school scholarship boy, but still left school at 16, did a couple of minor jobs including shifting coal at the pithead, then got an apprenticeship and worked his way up through night school to a degree equivalent and chartered engineer status (and interestingly you can't do that any more, the only route to being a chartered civil engineer is now to have a degree). Essentially he had a route out open up for him and had the confidence and support to take it. My mother is, IMO, a lot more intelligent than she thinks she is, but as a woman growing up in that environment she wasn't expected to have ambitions or expectations beyond having a family, and I think that prevented her from having the confidence in her own intelligence that's actually warranted.