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Chinese Company Seeks US Workers With 125 IQ
CWmike writes "A Chinese IT outsourcing company that has started hiring new US computer science graduates to work in Shanghai requires prospective job candidates to demonstrate an IQ of 125 or above on a test it administers to sort out job applicants. In doing so, Bleum Inc. is following a hiring practice it applies to college recruits in China. But a new Chinese college graduate must score an IQ of 140 on the company's test. The lower IQ threshold for new US graduates reflects the fact that the pool of US talent available to the company is smaller than the pool of Chinese talent, Bleum said."
Those numbers are theoretical though, or more accurately what an ideal IQ test will deliver; there are a lot of complaints about the current IQ tests.
Usually coming from people who score low but are absolutely convinced they are smarter than the average bear.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
I live in the US, where human rights are in fact Pretty Damn Good.
I would call them pretty damn okayish myself. Certainly not in the worldly top 10.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
America has a love-hate relationship with intelligence. We admire smart people from a distance, but up close, we hate them. Classmates hate the geek for "spoiling the curve" on tests, and making everyone else look dumb. School is all about intelligence, and too easily becomes a contest. The attitude problems nearly everyone has with intelligent people don't end after high school, as shown by job hiring criteria and the constant questioning and doubting of the real value of intelligence. Seems everyone has a few stories about PhDs who did something really stupid or had some glaring failing. Many people, perhaps out of jealousy, aren't above playing dirty to make a smart person look stupid.
George W. Bush should never have been a presidential candidate, but at the time people were entertaining the idea that his less than stellar intelligence didn't matter, particularly if he has a strong team, and he had a lot of impressive names on the ticket, such as Colin Powell. Well, we found out. It does matter. Cheney couldn't rise above the irresponsibility that being able to operate somewhat undercover engenders in most people. He shamelessly manipulated Bush into making quite a few dumb moves. When he wasn't being handled, Bush made many horrendous and embarrassing gaffes, like the time he gave a speech in support of teaching Creationism in science class. The attitudes over the justifications for the "War of Choice" were telling. It became clear we'd gotten the intelligence wrong, and that the outright contempt for facts displayed by the administration was the primary cause of that. Poor Mr. Powell looked very stupid indeed for his words to the UN. They sold him down the river. Then there was the business of denying that there was Climate Change, especially in the person of an unqualified, foolish liar set above NASA's top climate scientist, James Hanson. Bush Administration officials routinely ignored scientists, or, worse, tried to paint them as perpetrators of various liberal conspiracies, or competitors in the dissemination of disinformation as if scientists were no different than they about feeding bull to the public. Quite confounding the way their extremely weak arguments and reasoning got such traction. A smarter president would not have populated his administration with such obvious fools.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
If IQ is an arbitrary then why does it correlate positively with so many desirable outcomes? I'll give you an arbitrary number: 23. I guarantee you that IQ is going to be more useful in predicting your performance than my arbitrary number is.
Arbitrary isn't random. The letter "a" is arbitrary. You could decide to write it differently, and if everyone agreed, it would be different. That's arbitrary. That's not random. IQ is defined as a normal curve centered on 100 with a standard deviation of 7.5 or 14 or whatever it is. You could define it to be a normal curve centered on 1000 or change the standard deviation or such. That will change the arbitrary number. But that's not random, and you asserted it's random.
It's also "arbitrary" in that tests used to be skewed so that white males scored higher. Turns out that the "trivia" asked was more likely to be known by a white male, and that the problems were more likely to be previously studied by white males. When they shifted the questions to ones skewed towards women, they changed the IQ of women. Arbitrary. Not meaningless, but not necessarily meaning what people thought it should mean.
"Monday" is arbitrary, but correlates well with the first day of work for that week. Remember, arbitrary has nothing to do with random.
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Weight is not arbitrary because it's real. Units representing it are arbitrary. IQ is arbitrary. If everyone agreed to change the scale to 1000 from 100, then it would change the actual IQ. If everyone agreed to change from pounds to grams (or stone or ounces or whatever) then the number would change, but the weight wouldn't. IQ is arbitrary. Weight isn't. IQ is defined by nothing other than agreement of people, thus arbitrary. Weight is a real thing that will never change no matter what people agree to, though a particular representation of it can be changed.
Your IQ isn't arbitrary because you don't get to choose it.
It is arbitrary because it can be anything, as long as the definition of IQ is changed.
Weight does not become arbitrary even if you choose a skewed weight, and once you get a real weight the number is not arbitrary either, even if your choice of unit is.
There is nothing you could decide that would change my weight. Thus my weight is not arbitrary.
This is exactly the way it is for IQ.
No, someone could redefine IQ and my IQ would change. No one could change my actual weight by decision, thus my weight is not arbitrary, even if grams, pounds, stones, ounces, etc. are all arbitrary.
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Why is it arbitrary? Because IQ is an artificial creation. IQ tests don't measure intelligence. It measures an arbitrary "intelligence quotient" invented by convention. Intelligence isn't even fully defined, so how could you measure that which you can't define? So instead, someone arbitrarily defined some IQ which IQ tests measure.
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