—“Hypothesis: SAT has become more coachable as revisions eliminated the hardest-to-coach material (e.g., analogies). Asians invest more in practice (besides their latent cognitive advantage) than any other ethnic group. If the College Board weren’t so secretive, we could test it.”–Charles Murray @charlesmurray
Charles:
Yes, and something else we see in personality testing vs IQ testing: that life differences emerge in modeling(space, time, prediction) not knowledge and calculation. And by seeking homogeneity in IQ testing they’ve eliminated what ‘matters’ in life’s market competition.
This started with ‘classes’ then ‘girls’ then ‘minorities’ but what’s occurring is an incremental academic Harrison-Bergeron effect as this process is as self-reinforcing as was Chinese bureaucratic and Islamic intellectual calcification, stagnation, and regression.
So this effect is endemic, and illustrates ‘be careful what you measure’. By seeking to measure the invariant properties of individuals regardless of sex, race, or class, we have created a measure of exceptionalism in marginal competitive indifference – devolution.
This consequence emerges because evolutionary differences in competitiveness are due to differences in sex, race, and class. And those differences are not computational, nor calculative, but predictive beyond the limits of computation and calculation.
The evolutionary ‘edge case’ is the one that cannot be computed or calculated but only predicted by increases in intuition that have not been reducible to irregularities expressible by language, calculation, or computation.
This effect explains why post-hoc rule of law by common law, entrepreneurship, a childhood of adversarial competition, adversarial markets in all aspects of life, resulting hierarchies, produce natural distribution of abilities, rapid innovation and adaptation.
So like many civilizations before us that have failed we have disconnected the relationship between what we are testing, and the lifetime results we expect from those tested: surviving the unrelenting eternal war against man, nature, evolution and an uncaring universe.