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IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

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Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#91

Post by jcranmer »

danharaj wrote: post #72
iratewizard wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm much better at debating than you are. Maybe you're too stupid to notice? Using a simile to describe a poorly written blog post isn't the same as an ad hominem. Good try, though.

No, no, I'm not debating you. I'm genuinely asking you to examine the possibility that you aren't competent to evaluate Taleb's arguments. Do you even have a basic background in probability? Statistics is garbage in garbage out. If you misuse it you will get utter nonsense. Your flaccid appeal to another statistical correlation when we're talking about the misapplication of statistics to complex phenomena just demons…

> I'm genuinely asking you to examine the possibility that you aren't competent to evaluate Taleb's arguments.

I'll admit that I gave up reading the article (due to its invective) and skimmed the rest of it, but I don't recall there being much in the way of firm, mathematical arguments for his arguments, instead being a lot of "look, this correlates! look this correlates! clearly I'm right!" (along with mocking various groups of people).

So it's not a question of being competent to evaluate the arguments, but rather having the patience to actually find the arguments (should they exist) in the article.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#92

Post by paulpauper »

abnry wrote: post #4

Ever since Taleb blocked me on twitter for such a minor pushback I gave in the replies of one of his tweets, I've lost interest reading anything he writes. His unbridled emotion is uncouth. And it's not that I think IQ is "the most perfect psychometric ever created(TM)".

just make a new account and block him so he cannot read your tweet but his readers will still see it

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#93

Post by paulpauper »

Gustek wrote: post #28

I think the only valid interpretation of the IQ test is that you are good at solving some riddles and spotting patterns. In no way, it can be used as a generic metric of who is better or worse. I took the MENSA test last year just for fun, I did not get in :) The examiner before explained as well that the exam measures an only small part of what is considered an intelligence. In short, it is a fun exam if you like ri…

>I think the only valid interpretation of the IQ test is that you are good at solving some riddles and spotting patterns. In no way, it can be used as a generic metric of who is better or worse.

Correlations are what matter. It just so happens that success at solving such seemingly trivial riddles is correlated with important tasks such as coding and life outcomes. If IQ didn't correlate with anything there would be no reason to have IQ tests. It would be as useful as astrology.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#94

Post by pavlov »

catalogia wrote: post #79
pavlov wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ is more like lead additive in gasoline. Unnecessary to the main purpose, created with very dubious motivations, yet for decades people took it for granted that you can’t do without.

FYI most avgas is still leaded, to this day. This is because many airplane engines are designed to operate at very high compression ratios, requiring high octane fuel. The lead additive boosts the octane rating of the fuel.

That's in the spirit of the analogy. Lead additive has a special niche purpose. Similarly IQ could be useful for measuring a specific narrow combination of skills and cultural background. (The first step towards rehabilitating "IQ" should be to rename it, though.)

Lead everywhere is as toxic as assuming IQ measures some kind of general intelligence.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#95

Post by JamesBarney »

pavlov wrote: post #69
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.

IQ is more like lead additive in gasoline. Unnecessary to the main purpose, created with very dubious motivations, yet for decades people took it for granted that you can’t do without.

The first real IQ test (the Binet iq test) was created to help identify special ed kids so they could receive special tutoring.

The question about IQ is does it measure anything? Is it predictive? And can that be useful? And the answer all three of those questions is obviously yes.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#96

Post by paulpauper »

iratewizard wrote: post #2

This comes off like an angry rant by a person who scored 100 but thinks of himself as highly gifted. IQ as a concept is a useful metric and predictor. Our current "stale" IQ tests still predict criminal behavior more accurately than any sociological theories of crime. It just doesn't predict whether someone will end up in a "menial job" or as a C-level executive.

He has a greatly inflated perception of his accomplishments and intellect. Recently he has been trying to get his Mathematica PDFs published in actual journals, but good luck with that. Rendering fat tails does not make for meritorious scholarly research. Fat tail distributions long predate Taleb.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#97

Post by non-entity »

empath75 wrote: post #21

Oh man, can't wait for the conversation about this one. So much of people's identity can be wrapped up in being intelligent, which makes sense when you are still in the phase of your life where what you _can_ do is more important than what you _have_ done. If you're concerned about your IQ very much over the age of about 12 years old, that's a sign that you probably aren't focusing on the right things in your life.

Anytime IQ is brought up on HN, the comment section is gonna get interesting. I mean hell this thread is already full of snide remarks about the author, people getting emotionally charged about emotion, personal attacks from people on both sides of the argument in "clever" attempts to prove who's smarter, and occasional and questionable views.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#98

Post by paulpauper »

jcranmer wrote: post #49
longtom wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ is one of the few actually, and maybe THE most robust and measurable dimension in humans that psychology has come up with. Some people are smarter than others and they are expected to rise higher in a (necessarily imperfectly) meritocratic system. 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 l…

> IQ is one of the few actually, and maybe THE most robust and measurable dimensions in humans that psychology has come up with. IQ is the most robust psychometric (with the Big 5 personality being the only real contender), but that is largely because psychometrics in general are not robust. It's a one-eyed man in the land of the blind kind of scenario. The first big issue you run into with IQ is that... as far as we…

IQ is probably the biggest success of human psychology as a field. Personalty tests are notoriously unreliable and can be faked (hell, that is what actors do).

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#99

Post by therealdrag0 »

>> “The same people hold that IQ is heritable, that it determines success, that Asians have higher IQs than Caucasians, degrade Africans, then don’t realize that China for about a Century had one order of magnitude lower GDP than the West.”

Lol what. National gdp seems like an absurd thing to associate with with IQ. This doesn’t prove or disprove a thing. What a waste of ink.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#100

Post by JamesBarney »

danharaj wrote: post #81
JamesBarney wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you are just trying to make the argument that science has made mistakes, there is no argument, I agree. So theoretically relativity and Newtonian physics could be untrue. But it's highly unlikely.

I would argue that a combination of the simplicity of study of a phenomenon, the amount it's been studied, and the consistency of the results of that study correlate with the likelihood of it being true.

IQ is very simple to study, it's been studied exhaustively, and results of that study have been consistent. Outside of physics and some very basic biology there are few if any scientific phenomenon as likely to be true as IQ. Can you name a single phenomenon that has been as well studied in the modern era with the same consistency of results that has been untrue?

Btw you still haven't made a single argument against IQ. You've only been arguing against the totality of science and my credentials.

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