Blinded by Science: IQ Is Dumb

A test designed in the 1920s sorts the philosophers from the electricians from the copilots and makes one wonder: Whither aptitude?

by Bruno Maddox

The good news, such as it is, is that I never wanted to perform hair transplants professionally, I don’t think. I have a lifelong aversion to the scalps of middle-aged men—you can ask anyone—as well as a more general but just as visceral aversion to people’s pretending to be things they aren’t. Unless the person is me, admittedly, but that’s only because artifice and affectation are all I have.

The bad news is that I couldn’t give men hair transplants even if I wanted to. Not good ones, anyway. A man with a stopwatch has just timed me transferring a pile of steel pins, using tweezers, into a wooden board riddled with little holes. Then he broke the bad news. While perhaps in some other life, some future world, I’ll know the satisfaction of a ……….. (etc.)
---------
Also know this—that you may be next. Because after a century of bogus meritocracy based on crude vertical assessments of an essentially fictional human attribute known as “intelligence,” the science of aptitude testing may be making a comeback. And having already crushed one reporter’s dream of a career in hair-loss solutions, it may be about to change everything else.

(etc., etc.)

(exerted from Page 2) Because, as Nicholas Lemann brilliantly argues in The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, the current system really can’t endure. For the better part of a century, we’ve been measuring human potential on a vertical scale, that IQ test we euphemistically call the SAT (once known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test). The goal was noble: to help smart people from all social strata get into universities. But the project has become a victim of its own success. The more meritocratic the college-entrance system became, the more demand there was to go to college, and the more universities people built. Such that now, if they want to, pretty much everyone can go to college, which is great—except that seeing as pretty much everyone now does, having a degree no longer means you get a better job. In all likelihood, in fact, you’ll end up having the same terrible job you would have had a hundred years ago, being just as miserable, only you’re four years older and a good deal deeper in debt.

Besides, how much longer are we really going to care about which college we go to? With the ever-increasing freedom we have to acquire information from beyond the bounds of our own geography, how long will it be the case that there are some things you can learn only in Cambridge, Massachusetts? On its Web site, MIT offers—for free—more than 1,500 classes through its OpenCourseWare project. A witch doctor in the Gambia can now take a semester of astrophysics from the finest professors in the discipline (in which case, I confess, he will have shown more stamina than did I, who gave up after half an hour).

If colleges don’t matter, then the SAT doesn’t matter, and freed from that behemoth’s monstrous shadow, O’Connor’s gentler, more egalitarian approach to human merit will flourish. And the public will have no choice but to accept his big and obviously true idea that people are happiest when they’re doing things that they do well, when they are expressing and exploring their innate talents rather than trying to squeeze the round peg of their self into the square hole of some job they’ll never be good at. What our nation will be like when that happens, one can only imagine. Unless, presumably, your Ideaphoria is in the low range, in which case I can only advise you to stay tuned.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/may/blinded-by-science/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=