So I agree with you about SAT <-> IQ, and IQ <-> SES. However...

IQ isn't the only correlate of success. I think if you look at it all, there's a large dose of conscientiousness (which standardized testing companies are now going after), and attractiveness/charisma...

... but that's on the individual side of things. There's also a whole host of societal and random stuff that is outside the control of the individual, or maybe is significant to a person, but that studies tend to treat as irrelevant.

Also, saying that the SAT is useful as a selection device doesn't mean it's the only useful selection device, or that as a selection device it's very good. Offhand I don't remember the numbers, but standardized test score probably correlates .45 or so with first-year college grades? Think about that for a second. First, that's a ton of noise. That's not very predictive at all. Second, that's first-year college grades. Change the criterion but it's still the same: your best tool really is a pretty fuzzy predictor.

So now take this very fuzzy predictor, add some other fuzzy predictors that at best get things up to like maybe .6 correlation? Still fuzzy. Now you're going to be really selective on these things? What you're going to end up with is a lot of people who would have done as well but for whom the stars didn't align right at a particular period in their life. But now we as a society have this crazy income inequality, rent-seeking monopolies of all forms, and a general winner-takes all climate, so these small meaningless differences get amplified tenfold.

The conversations about this too have this kind of all-or-nothing quality, like you're forced to choose between "standardized tests are meaningless" or "standardized tests are valid predictors for a large portion of people so we need to treat them as infallible predictors for everyone." The truth is really much greyer than these positions: yes they predict, but they predict pretty weakly, all things considered, and generally for people who fit into a certain box. This all might be fine, except now we've structured our society in part around these oversimplified assumptions, pretending it works when it doesn't really. It might be ok when there's lots of second chances, lots of opportunities for people to get back on their feet from the vagaries of life, and good opportunities in general for everyone, but when resources gets hoarded by fewer and fewer, there's more noise, that's compounded by people gaming the system, etc. etc. etc.

Just as a thought exercise: what do most human traits look like in terms of distribution? They're pretty normal, pretty Gaussian. What does income look like? Not that, not at all. The discrepancy between them should be shocking to everyone.

user:	kestreloats
created:	April 13, 2019
karma:	27