Richwine: the average Nigerian is mentally retarded*

[bhikkhu]

34. IQ measurements are useless across different cultures

read http://www.ecdgroup.com/download/sa1yctii.pdf

Within the science there's plenty of argument, but still a general agreement that when you give IQ tests to people of different cultures, regardless of how careful you might have been to try to accommodate different languages and customs, you don't wind up with anything useful. Which is to say, anyone in the field knows if a Frenchman takes an IQ test and scores 100, and a Hawaiian takes an IQ test and scores 100, the two aren't equivalent. Nothing useful can be inferred from the results.

IQ tests are only relative scores among ones peers within a cultural group. Even within a cultural group, there is a significant and predictable shift over time, which would lead us to say, for instance, that our great grandparents were generally idiots. And if there had been tests in the colonial days, that our founding fathers were complete morons.

Richwine seems to misunderstand the tests themselves. I imagine his peer-review for the thesis would have been an interesting thing to see, if he has gone that far with it.