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There is no such thing as EQ (2016)

quora.com

31–40 of 129 posts

Re: There is no such thing as EQ (2016)

#31
post #22

If I was marking this as a student paper, it would go back with demerits for plagiarism, faulty logic, poorly-structured rhetoric, and, to top it all off, bad grammar. ...Dude's a professor?

I doubt people place the same amount of rigor into Quora posts and HN comments as they do into academic papers.

Re: There is no such thing as EQ (2016)

#32
post #25

I think EQ was invented to make those with low IQ to feel better.

I think pop media needed a phrase to describe someone who was obviously smart but had a lot of trouble interacting with others. I am sure we all have run into Bob or Alice the cave troll who for lack of a better word can't pick up on any of the needs of other people no matter how hard they try. Pop media isn't going to go for words with academic rigor. They just know IQ = Smart and Bob is obviously smart, but Bob is also an idiot when it comes to reading social situations so Bob is also an idiot. People realize that Bob can't both be smart and an idiot at the same time so society created a way of differentiating that Bob is both an idiot and genius at different things aspects of life.

Re: There is no such thing as EQ (2016)

#33
post #2

There is no such thing as IQ either its also a conceptual model. But agree there is no such thing as EQ.

Yeah - at the end of the day your brain is different from mine on a physiological level. Just like your muscles and bones. And your gut bacteria too, and we are probably on different drugs.

Re: There is no such thing as EQ (2016)

#34
post #18
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you actually read the answer? Nowhere did he say that those traits don't matter, or even that they are too hard to measure (although he did say they are less predictive of success than IQ). He says the concept of EQ is worthless because it just bundles together measurements of completely different character traits in a pretty much random way and creates a less-predictive mess as a result. It's like summing someon…

I read the answer, and my response is to the repeated "There is no such thing as EQ" statements which are stressed throughout it. How is anything I wrote not related to that statement? (edited my reply to be more constructive)

By saying EQ doesn't exist he's saying there is no "emotional intelligence" trait that determines how good you will be at various emotional/social aspects of life. Instead, testing EQ just looks at those various things and combines the results. There is no reason to believe that, for example, a person who is conscientious will also be agreeable. They are separate traits. A test which tests both (and other things) and combines the results and calls them "EQ" is not useful.

Contrast this with intelligence, for which they they test something very specific which you can test even in children, and we know this ability, even though on the surface unrelated to any real-world skill, strongly correlates with how they will perform at many different things later in life. It is an actual trait, not just an average of how good you are at various things.

Re: There is no such thing as EQ (2016)

#35
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware he's an authority, which is exactly the reason I caution against blind acceptance.

Hmm...you realize that he (a) explains ad nauseam and (b) cites relevant research. So how is this "blind acceptance"? Whereas you don't appear to be an authority, made a fairly broad claim ("so much wrong..."), explained nothing and cited...crickets.

If we're going to do proof by paper (always dangerous in psychology, but never mind), consider this about IQ:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/

The evidence that IQ predicts success is dubious, and certainly not settled.

I also consider him wrong about EQ, although for more anecdotal reasons:

I have known people who can read individuals and social situations with extraordinary skill, make astonishingly accurate predictions about social and personal outcomes, and manipulate both with extraordinary efficiency and effectiveness.

I've also known high-IQ individuals who were worse than average at all of the above, and who suffered poor social, political, and financial outcomes as a result.

So IMO EQ is a recognisable skill, and it's clearly not the same as agreeableness in the Big Five.

It may not have been well-defined or well-researched in psychology, and the original book definition may not be accurate either. (I haven't read Golman, so I don't know what he says about it.)

But it's nonsense to pretend it simply doesn't exist.

Re: There is no such thing as EQ (2016)

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you accept there's no EQ then why not apply the same logic to IQ? They're both based on the same false assumption that you can describe mental capacity with a number. It's not the same with BMI, which is about setting out guidelines for a healthy weight. That is something that's more appropriate to describe numerically.

IQ and BMI are strong predictors of income and disease. As the linked post describes, EQ is ill-defined, and lacks predictive power over any particular outcome.

If you know Bob is a genius coder, but is guaranteed to creep out a potential client, you're making a prediction based on your assessment of Bob's EQ.

Re: There is no such thing as EQ (2016)

#39
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, so you can enhance your mental capacity by doing this test again and again. In less than a year I will be a genius!

Sort of reminds me of how it's actually impossible to accurately value real estate. If you measure square footage, people will just fill the building with superfluous Hilbert curves. If you try to measure number of bathrooms or number of bedrooms, people will just make apartment complexes filled with dollhouses. If you try to measure profit(directly or from imputed rent), people will set up fake corporations and pay…

> it's actually impossible to accurately value real estate.

Do you mean measure it accurately based on a single metric?

Re: There is no such thing as EQ (2016)

#40
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you accept there's no EQ then why not apply the same logic to IQ? They're both based on the same false assumption that you can describe mental capacity with a number. It's not the same with BMI, which is about setting out guidelines for a healthy weight. That is something that's more appropriate to describe numerically.

> If you accept there's no EQ then why not apply the same logic to IQ? But that has been done, over and over again. By the established standard of "how to measure mental things", IQ is a very useful concept, while EQ is not. The argument Peterson (and a few others) are making is that there is no incremental validity of EQ compared to other personality traits. That just means that EQ cannot explain more variance than…

> "You can test it yourself: Read 2 random digits. Immediately repeat them. Then do that for 3, 4, and so on. There will be a number (typically between 5 and 7) when you cannot repeat the sequence without error anymore.

There you have it: A measure for mental capacity."

Not really. Almost anyone can get better at games like that without expanding their mental capacity. Here's a selection of well established tricks for enhancing memory recall:

http://lifehacker.com/top-10-tricks-to-boost-your-memory-and...

IQ isn't about skill, it's about capacity. Also, it's biased towards certain forms of intelligence. I happen to have a good memory, but that doesn't make me equally adept at all forms of human activity. EQ was an attempt to highlight this shortfall.

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