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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 950766" data-attributes="member: 177">Well, yes and no.First, by today's standards, Gould's position may be overstated, but his essay "Jensen's Last stand was written around 1979, I think.  Mismeasure of Man was back in 1981.  His arguments stand against the concepts of IQ from 20+ years ago.  And he was fighting against decades of misunderstanding, and speaking to laymen.  All those generally lead to overstatement for the sake of clarity and focus.Mind you, the current public's conception of IQ tests is still older than Gould's arguments.  Maybe the tests have moved forwards, but education about the tests has not.  People still think in the old terms of a single test yielding a single number having a single meaning.  If this weren't the case, you wouldn't have had to state what modern tests were like.  I see no problem with using a 20 year old argument to dispell a 40+ year old misconception.In addition, as far as I've been able to discover, the tests are still only a predictor of performance on tests.  They may be more sophiticated, but you cannot actually test "intelligence" until you can define intelligence, which psychometricians have yet to do to anyone's satisfaction.  Unless you do the old, "intelligence is that which intelligence tests measure", but that is circular.And lastly - I've yet to see a person who speaks on IQ tests who isn't a propagandist.  There are few people who bother to speak on the quantification of human beings who don't have some axe to grind.</blockquote>

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