We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
These death sentences are cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual … (T)he Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of death under legal systems that permit this unique penalty to be so wantonly and so freakishly imposed.
(Justice Stewart in Furman v. Georgia, 1972)Some people are peculiar in the sense that they are less interested in the advancement of knowledge than in practical matters. Massive IQ gains over time have practical relevance because they expose mistakes in measuring IQ. These mistakes are costly because they deceive us about causes and even deceive us into putting people to death who ought to be exempt. The root cause of all of these unfortunate consequences is scoring against “obsolete norms.”
Obsolete norms
An IQ score is only as valid as the test the person takes, and the test is only as valid as the standardization sample on which it is normed. When someone is assigned an IQ of 100 that means that their performance on a particular test was exactly average or at the 50th percentile. And the score is accurate only if the person is being compared to a representative sample of his or her peers, for example, a representative sample of American 14-year-olds tested at exactly the same time. The reason the test must have been normed recently is the existence of massive IQ gains over time.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
