How does one even measure that? What does it even actually mean
Well, my thought when I read
the A&H article was that they were just autistically subdividing intelligence so they could bring back the argument that joggers are actually just as smart as the huwite man, but they dumped all those stat points into street smarts instead of book smarts.
First just butter people up by telling people they're actually a genius too, and creating so many metrics that they're bound to be good at
something. Then once everyone treats the test as legitimate, "Well you know joggers are the smartest of them all. They might score high in categories you don't care about, but they score high in more of them so they're prodigies".
As for how to measure it... You could do like the SAT does and give joggers free points based on their postal code until their average score is sufficiently inflated. Or rate their vocab skills, but use street lingo instead of Latin and Greek roots. Or just be honest and look them up on the Tea Colour Chart.
The score that draws the circle is defined by what the 50th percentile is. It's not the shape that changes with the population, but the scale.
On one hand, it makes the shape make sense. On the other, it makes the chart nonsense and I hate it.
I associate that kind of graph with video games and trying to find out
my best attributes, if I'm better at A than B then my stat for A should be higher! It shouldn't look like I'm actually better at B just because everyone else is good at A but a troglodite at B.
I feel like they should have used a lot of bar graphs with little bars showing the quartiles if they really wanted to compare against the average.
And if the scores are already normalized... No shit there's going to be tiny differences between brain surgeons and rocket scientists? Assuming a standard bell curve, most people are going to be "in the middle" and in that range, a small change in raw score can translate to a large change in percentile. But if you've already left the herd behind, there's less people to compare yourself against around, it'll take a lot more raw score to move up a percentile point than before. Assuming they can even test you properly. And the smartest person is artificially capped at 99, you can't show how big the gap between first and second place are.
The test
may be reasonable, but combined with the way it seems to be being used I hate it.
