Mike,
Re: I had the fortune to have grown up both poor and disabled, a particulary crippling mix in the fast paced American society. But, fortunately I was intelligent, and have used this to leverage myself an education doing high-pay, sedentary work.
Be honest.... why don't you just twist it this way:
I had the fortune to have grown up both poor and disabled, a particulary crippling mix in the fast paced American society. But, fortunately I was white, and have used this to leverage myself an education doing high-pay, sedentary work.
You still take this IQ-BS at face value.... Personally, I don't think that these silly tests display a fair estimate of an individual's intelligence.
Besides, what's human intelligence in the first place?? Common sense would tell us that our (Western) school and academic benchmarks give us a fairly good evaluation of all the children and teenagers who pass them. But then real-life success stories will show up people such as Bill Gates, David Allen (pal of the former), Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison (founder & CEO of Oracle Corp.--2nd largest softwarehouse in the world), or Frenchman Roland Moreno ([unknown] inventor of the smart card) who are all successful businessmen IN HIGHLY SOPHISTICATED INDUSTRIAL ENVIRONMENTS (Computer and Electronics) but who would have been despised as lazy dropouts while in their 20s. Indeed, none of these worldwide renowned achievers has any degree beyond high-school (except Ellison who owns a pilot license and a skipper brevet).
So, all in all, I think we should make the distinction between gamesmanship and creativity: what IQ tests measure is an individual's skill in gamesmanship, that is the ability to use a (socially/professionally/ethnically/....) instilled set of rules to his/her advantage in what may be described as some role-play. Now, what's wrong with that? We might indeed call it a form of intelligence! After all, that's basically what life is all about: a (survival) game where an individual is required to quickly grasp a variety of different stimuli to get ahead and keep up in a somewhat hostile environment (especially the corporate one --think of sexual harassment, mobbing, etc.).
The twofold problem is that, on the one hand, the so-called game rules are ethnically and genderwise biased --however good is your gamesmanship, your score will always depend on your ethnic/gender/.... background, and, on the other hand, such a game-play benchmark can't provide an organization with creative people --ie rule-breakers. Now, you can retort that that's fine by you and your Taylorian technostructure --layers upon layers of docile, self-replicating clones.... But you know that a thriving (new) economy rests also on technological/managerial breakthroughs, and that's where your IQ-radar goes haywire: it just can't track and provide you with all these creative oddballs who flunked your sacred IQ-tests :o(
For creativity, by its very nature, can't be easily measured through imitatively-minded tests. Example: if I ask you to continue the following series, A E I O ..., in a "conformity" game-play the right answer is U, the next/missing vowel while a "creative" answer might be Y, also a vowel....
Now, assuming that creativity is something that transcends the various fields open to human genius, in other words, assuming that if one (individual, class, ethnic group, gender, whatever minority) can display some fair amount of creativity in one specific area (music, literature, politics,....), likewise one could have displayed the same grade of creativity in other spheres (nuclear physics, mathematics, biology, computer sciences,....), don't you think that the American economical fabric is grossly underrating the full potential of its workforce? In short, if African-Americans can prove to be so creative in the showbiz, if Chinese-Americans can prove to be so productive in high-tech, they should, for instance, be as creative/productive in finance/military science as well.
My 2 cents,
Gus. |
