IQ, and Mental Testing More Generally

27 Aug 2011 10:37

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I think these have been dead ends, of almost no scientific value. Having written about this at inordinate length, I won't repeat myself here.

Recommended:
• Bernie Devlin, Stephen E. Fienberg, Daniel P. Resnick and Kathryn Roeder (eds.), Intelligence, Genes, and Success; Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve
• James R. Flynn, What is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect [Review: The Domestication of the Savage Mind]
• Clark Glymour, "What Went Wrong? Reflections on Science by Observation and The Bell Curve", Philosophy of Science 65 (1998): 1--32 [PDF reprint via Clark]
• Walter Lippmann, "Debunking Intelligence Experts", The New Republic 1922 [Reprinted. Basically nothing has improved.]
• Michael J. Lovaglia, Jeffrey W. Lucas, Shane R. Thye, and Barry Markovsky, "Status Processes and Mental Ability Test Scores", American Journal of Sociology 104 (1998): 195--228 [How to induce a 7 IQ point difference between randomly assigned sub-groups with about a quarter of an hour of prioming in a psych lab.]
• Ashley Montagu (ed.), Race and IQ
• Godfrey H. Thomson, The Factorial Analysis of Human Ability [Deserves separate discussion]
• Jelte M. Wicherts, Denny Borsboom and Conor V. Dolan, "Why national IQs do not support evolutionary theories of intelligence", Personality and Individual Differences 48 (2010): 91--96

OK but not great:
• James R. Flynn, Race, IQ, and Jensen
• Russell Jacoby (ed.), The Bell Curve Debate
• John C. Loehlin, Race Differences in Intelligence
• Stephen Murdoch, IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea

Dis-recommended:
• Hans J. Eysenck
• Arthur Jensen
• Richard Herrnstein [Herrnstein is however almost unique among modern advocates of IQ in the public sphere in having done value science, namely his experimental work on learning in animals, and especially the "matching law". This has, of course, no material or even methodological bearing on his writings about IQ.]
• Charles Murray
• J. Philippe Rushton

Not recommended, but not for the usual reasons:
• Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man [I do not recommend this for the simple reason that I read it in 1988, when I was fourteen. I remember it as a very good book, for whatever that's worth.]

To read:
• Gary Collier, Social Origins of Mental Ability
• Ian J. Deary, Looking Down on Human Intelligence: From Psychometrics to the Brain
• Claude S. Fischer et al., Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth
• Richard Nisbett, Intelligence and How to Get It
• Ken Richardson, The Making of Intelligence
• David Shenk, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong
• Howard Francis Taylor, The IQ Game: A Methodological Inquiry into the Heredity-Environment Controversy

To write:
• CRS, "General Factors in Correlational Psychology: Artifacts or Myths?"