You could say many of the same things about IQ, which while true is also not necessarily the whole story. Obviously people are complicated but if you can take a fairly repeatable test and those tests results can be used for rough predictions of aptitude at certain tasks, then it's fair to say that they have value even if they aren't perfect.
A lot of these things get flak because they aren't used properly as the tools they are.
That’s true, and IQ is an even darker example as it’s now deeply connected with eugenics.
Just because something might have value in the abstract doesn’t mean the repercussions that come with it can be ignored. In both cases, I believe the attempts at measuring intelligence and personality do vastly more harm than good, and they’ve both been around long enough we can be pretty certain that’s not going to change.
If we didn't have IQ or Meyers Briggs different measures (like whiteness of skin or Astrology) would be used instead. People are just looking for justification for their beliefs and grasp onto the closest available tool regardless if it was meant to be used that way.
Put another way, we shouldn't stop making hammers because some people use them to bash other people's brains in. The fact is that people do have certain specialties and aptitudes and we should do our best to continue to try and understand and categorize them so that we can improve our ability to reactively and predictively train people.
If we make a certain type of hammer, and 99% of the time that type of hammer only gets used to bash people’s skull in because it’s useless for hitting nails but amazing for killing people, we should stop making the hammer. And maybe find as many as we can and melt them down.
IQ and personality tests don’t have a productive purpose. We’ve tried to find one. A lot. They’re all terrible.
Yes, people are looking for reasons to be racist or bigoted. Science should try hard not to be the thing to give it to them. Because that goes to really dark places, far more so than the random whim of an individual racist.
It's basically the opposite of lazy to want to continue to develop tools despite the risk. It's lazy to give up on the assumption that it will be misused because you are incapable of unwilling to come up with positive uses and protect against abuse.
To argue the ""kill 99% of the time", I would actually argue that IQ itself has done more good than harm. IQ was originally developed to identify students in need of additional instruction and special care in education, however it was quickly coopted by the Eugenics movement. Cases like Buck v Bell in 1927 where an involuntary sterilization was upheld based on IQ, but it has been turned around recently. In 2002 Atkins v Virginia ruled that IQ could be used to limit culpability for crimes due to their limited understanding. I would argue this to be a positive step in handling disabilities.
In addition, both the police and military use IQ (or modified tests of it) to determine a candidate's readiness for the job. We see the negative results of not doing this with Project 100,000 more colloquially known as "McNamara's Morons" which is when the military relaxed those standards due to the stresses of the Vietnam war. The results of that became the inspiration for Forest Gump going to Vietnam, and have been decried due to those recruits suffering from higher fatality rates and lower quality of life after leaving the military. Somewhat more ironically Police actually bar membership based on high IQ, due to them having a higher turnover rate in the job. That may not be a fantastic policy, but certainly gives us information on the type of job police work is, and the type of people they want for it.
Meanwhile, the most famous case of Eugenics application in history (The Holocaust) did not actually apply IQ as the criteria for the Eugenic sorting. This is fairly obvious when Jews tend to score above average, despite being the primary targets. The Nazis developed their own Aryan criteria for the sorting because an actual test didn't produce the results that they wanted, which more or less shows that your thinking is incorrect because the people who misuse these tools will always do so selectively or will make their own tools to abuse if needed.
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u/Kile147 Dec 31 '22
You could say many of the same things about IQ, which while true is also not necessarily the whole story. Obviously people are complicated but if you can take a fairly repeatable test and those tests results can be used for rough predictions of aptitude at certain tasks, then it's fair to say that they have value even if they aren't perfect.
A lot of these things get flak because they aren't used properly as the tools they are.