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aziz

  • 09:20:30 pm on May 27, 2008 | # | |
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    Religious literalism and IQ - Razib discovers a correlation. What would the data look like for Islamic denominations? Speculate!

     

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  • razib 9:40 pm on May 27, 2008 | #

    two points

    1) i posted that to see how much traffic i’d get. i got A LOT (12,000 uniques so far). it caters to prejudices.

    2) i also wanted to see how eagerly people would jump on it who would generally have an aversion to the idea of IQ. it generated some schizophrenic responses on comment boards ;-)

    finally, i do think that these generalizations are stronger in the united states in terms of socioeconomic sorting than in any other society except for perhaps a place like singapore or south korea. that is because religious change here is very common, 1 out of 6 americans change their religion. and, there’s A LOT of diversity to pick from. in most of the world the situation is more like roman catholicism, where different sensibilities cohabitate. a muslim exception might be pakistan, where i have read elite families converted to shiism during the zia regime in part for property related reasons, as well as the less onerous nature of shia vs. sunni sharia (at least in perception).

    also, in indonesia i would not be surprised to see a positive correlation in IQ and literalism. that is because ‘traditional’ societies which switch to modernity are the ones which produce fundamentalism, often among the most urban and elite segments subject to the power of anomie outside of the rural culture.

  • Willow 9:51 pm on May 27, 2008 | #

    I’m curious about the way IQ is measured. (I’m not disputing it, I just don’t understand how it works.) I took an IQ test as part of the CATs as a kid, and maxed out the test. (It measured up to 147.2, I scored 147.2) But that test was almost entirely language/pattern-based. (Ie, find the next logical progression in this pattern of shapes/colors. Then take 30 seconds to try and memorize this alternate vocabulary for everyday words, and after that read this paragraph constructed with the alternate vocab and choose which answer best describes its literal meaning. Etc.) This for me was no sweat.

    But recently I took an IQ test that was almost entirely math. I scored about 120. What gives?

  • razib 9:56 pm on May 27, 2008 | #

    there a host of different “IQ” tests which correlate with each other, but not perfectly. most people are somewhat stronger in math or verbal tests, for example. but, if you are very strong on verbal tests you are usually not very weak on math tests, and inversely as well. the IQ tests for the chart above are verbal based (believe it not, verbal IQ tests are actually more strongly predictive of general intelligence than math ones).

    but, i did a follow up post using proportion with post-grad education. same line, almost the same r-squared (i added more denominations cuz i had more data).

    i also did a quick & dirty check with SAT scores by denomination. again, same pattern, with an r-square around 0.60 for the denominations i’d spot-checked.

    also, r-square just means you can predict z amount of variation of y from variation of x. so the chart above says that you can predict 88% of the variation of IQ across those denominations just from the variation in believe in literalism.

  • razib 9:58 pm on May 27, 2008 | #

    but, if you are very strong on verbal tests you are usually not very weak on math tests, and inversely as well.

    example, this is common
    95% on math
    75% on verbal

    and this
    70% on math
    98% on verbal

    not very common
    95% on math
    20% on verbal

    or
    15% on math
    79% on verbal

  • Willow 10:06 pm on May 27, 2008 | #

    I do not doubt your statistical analysis. :) I just want to know whether I’m smart or damn smart.

    That second example sounds like me.

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