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IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

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Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#81

Post by danharaj »

JamesBarney wrote: post #66
danharaj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So was astrology at one point.

Your argument applies equally strongly to every scientific finding. I think this means that either science is poor or the argument is.

The argument is that the amount of attention paid by scholars does not make a field of inquiry more or less valid. It does apply to all science. Do you think science does not suffer from fads and community bias? When did we move past that? Even a very rigorous field like mathematics suffers from these problems. Cf. Mochizuki getting published in Nature or the controversies about the foundations of symplectic geometry.

What is your relation to science? Have you done any yourself?

Science is poor in the sense that it can be arbitrarily wrong and for arbitrarily long as humans can be. Yea, it's true. Does that trouble you?

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#82

Post by paulpauper »

Taleb's article is debunked here https://greyenlightenment.com/wealth-and-iq-part-3-continued...

Studying popular subs such as /r/wallstreetbets, /r/investing, /r/personalfinance, /r/fatfire, and /r/financialindependence is useful because we have a generally homogeneous population in which everyone tends to have similar individual preferences, that being the accumulation of wealth, so we have already controlled for that important variable. To a high degree of statistical significance, regarding the aforementioned subs, members who accumulate a lot of money at an early stage in life such as through investing and or STEM, again, tend to high high IQs. Even inheriting a lot wealth at an early age is positively correlated with IQ, because of the correlation between between family wealth and IQ.

Taleb fails to account for individual preferences as it concerns the accumulation of wealth. Obv. if you compare aspiring actors to aspiring t lawyers, IQ will not be as useful versus comparing aspiring physicists. It's not so much that IQ predicts absolute outcomes, but rather relative outcomes among a homogeneous population who have similar goals/aspirations for g-loaded activities whether it's writing, publishing, stock trading, law, math, FIRE, etc.

Aspiring lawyers who have high IQs will have high LSAT scores and GPAs and get into competitive programs, whereas low-scoring applicants may quit or find it harder to get into good programs and make as much money. On trading and investing Reddit subs , top traders almost invariably have higher IQs than traders who lose money. An extreme example of this is Renaissance Technologies, founded and staffed by some of the smartest people in the world, and by a huge margin the most successful hedge fund ever..

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#83

Post by danharaj »

catalogia wrote: post #70
danharaj wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the article. This is his point about circularity this is literally one of his examples. If IQ measures test taking acumen and there are fields that are gate kept with tests, you will see a correlation with IQ.

I doubt the skill of test taking is unrelated to aptitude in those fields, or any other field in which it's important to learn a great deal of information from books and to keep that information in mind for rapid recall during high pressure situations 'in the field.' Law or medical school is certainly harder for halfwits to get through, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong (in that respect) with that schoolin…

The MCAT is a difficult test. It is not clear that the difficulty of the MCAT is the same difficulty as practicing medicine. You can't test that question without having doctors who don't do well on the MCAT.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#84

Post by badRNG »

longtom wrote: post #78
badRNG wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The big question is whether the bottom end should starve. I think they should not starve and should have certain minimal living standards met, but they are going to be lower than the top end. You risk dividing the population trying to convince the smart to settle for less than they can get. They will simply band together and manipulate the system until they achieve it. This implies that poverty is largely a product…

Yeah the system is not very meritocratic. Not sure to which extent one can change that though and not sure how much better society would look after enforcing those changes. If you wanted to make it more meritocratic the populations with lowest IQ would actually be worse off, unless you also increase the minimal living standards.

> If you wanted to make it more meritocratic the populations with lowest IQ would actually be worse off, unless you also increase the minimal living standards.

I agree with this. I'm not sure that making economies more "meritocratic" is necessarily the only solution we have when confronting larger structures that perpetuate inequality. Even if it were, It'd be important to know who or what quantifies "merit." If it is impersonal market forces, the same unjust social systems will still eventually develop as certain families, classes, and countries entrench their economic development to solidify and secure an advantage down the line.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#85

Post by empath75 »

paulpauper wrote: post #82

Taleb's article is debunked here https://greyenlightenment.com/wealth-and-iq-part-3-continued... Studying popular subs such as /r/wallstreetbets, /r/investing, /r/personalfinance, /r/fatfire, and /r/financialindependence is useful because we have a generally homogeneous population in which everyone tends to have similar individual preferences, that being the accumulation of wealth, so we have already controlled for t…

> Studying popular subs such as /r/wallstreetbets, /r/investing, /r/personalfinance, /r/fatfire, and /r/financialindependence is useful

Promising start, lol...

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#86

Post by JamesBarney »

foolrush wrote: post #57
JamesBarney wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an article about eugenics. No one is arguing for eugenics. Eugenics was awful, but just because something was used as a tool for evil does not make it untrue. If I light someone on fire with gasoline this makes it no less useful for fueling a car.

Read it. Learn history. Learn how sociology works. Nah don’t bother. It’s HN.

I read it, and besides one paragraph (which presents a straw man) it has nothing to do with whether IQ is a psuedoscientific swindle and everything to do with whether eugenicists used IQ.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#87

Post by empath75 »

longtom wrote: post #78
badRNG wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The big question is whether the bottom end should starve. I think they should not starve and should have certain minimal living standards met, but they are going to be lower than the top end. You risk dividing the population trying to convince the smart to settle for less than they can get. They will simply band together and manipulate the system until they achieve it. This implies that poverty is largely a product…

Yeah the system is not very meritocratic. Not sure to which extent one can change that though and not sure how much better society would look after enforcing those changes. If you wanted to make it more meritocratic the populations with lowest IQ would actually be worse off, unless you also increase the minimal living standards.

> If you wanted to make it more meritocratic the populations with lowest IQ would actually be worse off, unless you also increase the minimal living standards.

If you're talking about people who have some kind of mental handicap, then this is accurate, but I'm skeptical it will be meaningfully different for people with close to average intelligence or higher, because the effect of IQ will be dwarfed by other differences like how hard they work or how much they delay gratification and save.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#88

Post by rcoveson »

scoopdewoop wrote: post #48
zug_zug wrote: post #3

I can't even bring myself to read this. After perusing and seeing it gets so emotional (bringing up eugenics, morality, etc), I have a hard time believing it's going to be objective. "There is no significant statistical association between IQ and hard measures such as wealth." So... you're saying that people with an IQ of 60 are equally wealthy as those with an IQ of 110? I understand getting frustrated about misappl…

I find it really naive to treat science like some kind of objective methodology that can output unbiased data. Its complete fantasy. "Science" is much more of a set of institutions and social regard for those institutions than an objective methodology. We often just want to throw money and scientists at an issue, and get out good "science" but thats like managers hiring 50% more programmers for 50% better/more code,…

> Everything is political! Everything.

I think what you might be saying is something like, "politics is a fundamental part of human behavior, so all things human must at least be scrutinized through a political lens". Which is probably true. But I can also point out that gut flora are part of being human, so human interaction must be at least glanced at through a gastrointestinal lens. And to some extent, that's true as well; those microbes do influence behavior in surprising ways.

Even a though the political lens has non-zero utility in practically any case, it's still not sufficient to explain the physics of our world or even all of human behavior. There's a little red in any real-world colored object, but everything is not red.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#89

Post by JamesBarney »

_0w8t wrote: post #63
JamesBarney wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110713001038/http://www.iapsyc... IQ and SAT scores are correlated.

The correlation comes from low scores. Moreover, above 70 IQ is not even well correlated with itself as variability between results for the same person is like 20%.

From wikipedia

> Psychometricians generally regard IQ tests as having high statistical reliability.[10][65] Reliability represents the measurement consistency of a test.[66] A reliable test produces similar scores upon repetition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliabil...

> The correlation comes from low scores.

Look at the pictures in this study, that is absolutely not the case, and it will take only a minute to verify.

Frey, M. C., & Detterman, D. K. (2004). Scholastic Assessment or g? Psychological Science, 15(6), 373–378. doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00687.x

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