Mismeasure of Man might be one of the best pieces of (genuinely) popular contemporary marxist political writing I've read out of the United States. Plus, I am always amused by the enthusiasm that he seems to hold in using Lukacs concept of reification as many times as humanly possible. robert wood
> I, too, am with grousy ol' Wojtek on this one. I've
> read _Mismeasure of Man_ as well, and its premise
> that this entity, "intelligence," can be reconciled
> into a unilinear, numerical measurement, to be
> compared with others', is only one of many things
> wrong with the IQ notion. (It's history ain't so
> pretty, either.)
>
> Another part that annoys me, I must admit, is having
> never met anyone online who claims their IQ is below
> 140. That would be, like, less than 1 percentile of
> the population or something, right? But I guess I'm
> meetin' 'em all! Sorry, someone's lying somewhere.
> Apparently tons of folks are casually walking into
> psychiatrists' offices and getting elaborate,
> hours-long Stanford-Binet clinical IQ tests performed
> on them, all the time! Wow, business must be booming
> -- and all for vanity purposes, too, I presume.
> Amazing.
>
> Wake up on the wrong side of the bed, get stuck in
> traffic on the way to take the test, get flustered,
> didn't have your morning coffee, stressed out about
> finances -- all that stuff affects your performance on
> that one test, that one day. IQ tests might measure
> one's specific test-taking ability at a certain time
> and while one's in a certain mood or state of mind,
> but beyond that, to extrapolate a number, and,
> further, to extrapolate everything else that's
> extrapolated from it -- it's outrageous.
>
> Just recently James Watson came out again saying
> blacks have lower IQs than whites. It just never
> stops, that sort of garbage.
>
> -B.
>
>
>
>
>
> Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>
> "And then there is the learned helplessness effect.
> Kids who are repeatedly subjected to standardized
> tests that are implicitly 'the ultimate indicator' of
> their worthiness as human being in the environment in
> which they spend most of their time - and they are not
> that good at standardized test taking -quickly learn
> that they are not good at all and act accordingly.
> Since they are not tested in their social, creative,
> artistic etc. skills.. In my book, standardized
> testing is an educational version of fascism and a
> crime against humanity."
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