March 17, 2004
Stupid Americans?
Visit this silly page, hosted by a British server. There is a quiz on the right consisting of 20 questions (appropriately unbiased, of course) with the stated purpose of comparing American intelligence to that of the rest of the world (somewhat insulting to both groups, I would think). Anyway, I happened to get all twenty correct on the first try and the quiz told me that the only way I got them all right was by taking the test fifty times and memorizing the answers. Of course that has to be true with such challenging questions as "who invented the motorcar" (gasp--not an American?), which country put the first man in space (USA! USA! USA! oh, nevermind), and which country is the fattest (yeah, now USA bitches!)
I'm surprised there weren't any questions like "which North American country got kicked off the UN Human Rights Commission in 2001?" or "which is the only country to drop atomic bombs on civilians?" Maybe these come in a later edition.
Update: Okay, I know this is far from balanced Continental journalism, but note the comical polls a little farther down the page. One asks whether America has given anything good to the world (results: toss-up) and compares the US to a Nazi state. Now there's a firm grasp on history.
Eeech. What a bunch of assholes.
I got 15 out of 20, myself--missed 2 I should have gotten. They say I'm suprisingly smart for an American, but have the knowledge base of a high-school student in other countries (that is, for this kind of historical trivia, I suppose.
I can attest from personal expirience this is ridiculous.
I find it especially amusing that they take pride in the fact that the inventor of TV wasn't American. I got that question wrong--I figured TV was part of the fat/McDonalds american stereotype.
Yeah, I got the "you're surprisingly intelligent for an American" score as well. Obviously, the quiz is not an intelligence test, but a knowledge test. If the author wants to argue that the American education system is worse than many others and, hence, the average American is less well educated, then I'd have to agree. However, education is not a measure of intelligence. Even so, his methodology is flawed due to the non-random nature of the sample. First off, the test will only be taken by those with Internet access, which automatically bars the poorer segments of any population from the test. Secondly, there's probably a good amount of self-selection going on among the non-American takers of the test in that those who think they might not do as well won't take the test for fear of lowering the overall score of non-Americans. Add that to the fact that the majority of American Internet users are young, white males and the quiz becomes useless in gauging the average American IQ.
Furthermore, the link from the main page that states "the US [IQ] is lower than almost all the other developed nations" is contradicted by the chart itself. America scores a 98, the same as France, Australia, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and higher than Canada, the Czech Republic, and Finland, and within one or two points of pretty much all the other European countries. In other words, almost all the developed nations score almost equally in this study, with the exception of some suspiciously high scores for some Asian nations. North Korea scores a 105, the same as Japan? Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems that a nation run by an insane dictator isn't going to have the best school systems or other infrastructures necessary for such a high average score. However, reading the study itself makes clear why North Korea scores so highly. The number is faked.
The methodology of this study is highly suspect. The IQs for each nation are taken from wildly different years as seen here. Comparing the "IQ" scores of one nation in 1952 to another in 1998 is less than useless. Even worse, the same test isn't used for every country. Some are tested by the Colored Progressive Matrix test and others by the Standard Progressive Matrix. Finally, the article's author writes here, "[w]e want to extend the analysis to the further 104 countries with populations of more than 50,000 for which we have not been able to find IQ data. For these 104 countries we have estimated the IQs." Not only have they fabricated the scores for over 100 nations, but the assumptions they used for these "estimations" are unsound.
However, even given all the enormous flaws in this study, its primary purpose was to examine the relationship between national IQ and GDP, not to compare the IQs of various nations. The conclusions the website's author draws are not valid based on the study he cites or the quiz he provides. All he's doing is promoting the very ignorance and prejudice with which he caricatures Americans.