IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
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IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
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Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
#2Related: Adam ruins everything had a segment about IQ in 2017,
https://www.trutv.com/shows/adam-ruins-everything/blog/adams...
Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
#3... but g is the only thing of importance.
Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
#4IQ is undoubtedly overemphasized by some factions, especially those with an axe to grind and a dog whistle to blow, if it helps them feel less guilty about their position in the world or otherwise rationalizes injustice.
OTOH there's definitely a difference between people, people who aren't mentally defective, people that are quick on the uptake, sharp and alert, who adapt to new mental models. IQ might be an unscientific metric for identifying these people, it might leave some of them unidentified, but they definitely exist. Anyone who's worked with other people, hired other people, had to evaluate other people's capabilities, can be in no doubt about this.
It's hard to separate out Taleb's own axe-grinding from anything concrete he's trying to say about what IQ means as an independent concept. He seems more upset at short-sighted application of thought to first-order problems rather than asking higher-order questions about why the problems are problems in the first place, why the questions are being asked. When I've seen a difference between people in this degree, it's more a matter of personality than intelligence: the more detail-oriented, autistic-spectrum someone is, the more they focus only on the details, and miss out on the bigger picture. It takes a little effort to step back, but I think it can be learned. Whereas IQ (or g) doesn't seem to be improved easily with learning.
Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
#5Also the people with 180+ IQs that make random lists of “smartest people ever” if you look into it, basically have IQ test taking as a hobby and practice for it to improve their IQ (or rather, ability to take IQ tests). Or they took some test like Stanford-Binet that allows child IQs to reach ridiculous levels if the child happens to develop faster than normal (because of the formula of adjusting a child’s IQ to an adult level)
Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
#6Best parenting advice I ever got was to praise children for hard work, and avoid calling them “smart.” Intelligence becomes a stand in for some measure of goodness or social fitness that after a while it’s hard to know what we’re talking about anymore. Further, it’s seen as innate whereas hard work is something anyone can do. Being “smart” implies there’s a set of “un-smart” kids that don’t have the same fitness or goodness, and since it’s innate, they’ll always be that way in an ungifted underclass. Cue the icky connections to racism and eugenics...
Usually as a parent, seeing your kid as “smart” corresponds to noticing affinity for a kind of interest or task. You’ll help their confidence more to encourage that affinity and notice the hard won accomplishments than just saying they have some magical innate thing called “intelligence”.
Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
#7IQ is undoubtedly overemphasized by some factions, especially those with an axe to grind and a dog whistle to blow, if it helps them feel less guilty about their position in the world or otherwise rationalizes injustice. OTOH there's definitely a difference between people, people who aren't mentally defective, people that are quick on the uptake, sharp and alert, who adapt to new mental models. IQ might be an unscien…
At this point I would accept it if someone told me that 100% of what I perceive as "smarts" when interacting with someone is explained by confidence and other learned social behaviors.
Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
#8Maybe I'm dumb, but why is "performance fat-tailed"? It was kinda left as an exercise to the reader, but maybe someone has insight. The article got a bit edited, but I'm still not getting it.
Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
#9Two threads about this from last week:
Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
#10The title doesn't seem to match up with the article.
The point seems to be that IQ is good at predicting intellectual deficits at the low end but bad at predicting 'success' above that; further it indicates that IQ is mis-used in this range. This doesn't seem to indicate that IQ is 'pseudoscience', just that it's a misused statistic. Not a real shocker there, almost every statistic is misused by some group.