From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu May 18 2000 - 04:42:21 MDT
"Emlyn" <pentacle@enternet.com.au> writes:
>
> Funny thing about these "culturally neutral" tests, is that you get better
> at them the more of them you do. It gets easier to spot patterns in the way
> the questions are formulated.
>
> Also, powers of 2, pascal and fibbonacci sequences, come on. That's got to
> be heavily culturally biased. Or maybe people who don't know the powers of 2
> by sight are thickies?
At least among us nerds those sequences are not culturally neutral at
all. Which suggests that the originators of the tests were not
math/science people and did not think about the possibility that some
people regard powers of 2 as natural.
Also, I wonder if these "neutral" tests doesn't contain a strong
cultural assumption about symbolic manipulation as being somehow
natural and neutral. Which is not obvious at all when you think about
the variety of cultures on Earth.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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