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IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

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Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#121

Post by tptacek »

paulpauper wrote: post #98
jcranmer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

"Actors can fake personalities" isn't a particularly rigorous argument in favor of IQ.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#122

Post by smnthermes »

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…

Autism is related to high socioeconomic status, and has common factors with high IQ. Well, it's harder to say that autism is a "pseudoscientific swindle":

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328734204_A_theory_...

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4927579/

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#123

Post by rglullis »

dennis_jeeves wrote: post #119
rglullis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IQ is just a metric from taking a standardized test. I don't know why people have a hard time understanding that. It's like being mad about people's SAT scores. Metric for what ? That is the point. The main argument as I understand is that "intelligence" is not something one-dimensional that can be measured with a number. If IQ tests were a simple pass/fail filter for detecting some kind of learning disability, sur…

>Metric for what? Metric for capability. Even though imperfect, IQ appears to reasonable good predictor of how capable a person is in learning a new task. The better way is of course to actually tech the person to find out how well he can learn it, which is time consuming. High IQ people can easily learn and do most jobs, low IQ people cannot. >How many people parrot Charles Murray to justify their racism with "scien…

Assuming you are right, the metric of capability could still work as a pass/fail filter, and if IQ tests were just that the discussions would be way less controversial.

The problem is when you have a whole lot of either naive or malicious people trying to drive this hammer into any and every thing, trying to draw crazy correlations from IQ: drug abuse, income, life expectancy, social status...

> This is different from my understood definition of racism which manifest as: "I will not hire you because you belong to race X".

Yeah, it would be crazy to hear that from a hiring manager saying that nowadays. But put the veil of science and suddenly it is easy to consistently choose the White with an IQ of 107 over the Hispanic with "only" 98, even though both of them are perfectly capable of doing the job - or to get a plant with 100 new workers and end up with a bias to White/Asian due to a test where they score "statistically higher" but that is completely irrelevant for actual job performance.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#124

Post by foolrush »

JamesBarney wrote: post #116
foolrush wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you did buddy. Sure you did. The whole idea of the SAT was an expansive control of capital when the USA grew too large for word-of-mouth recommendation systems. But you knew that too right? You also knew that it was basically designed to keep undesirables out of the capital class too, right? Guess who those people were.

Clearly this argument is spiraling away from the original premise of whether IQ pseudoscientific into what feels like a flamewar. There are a couple of HN guidelines that try to keep that from happening that I think would have helped prevent this. > Be kind. Don't be snarky. > Please don't post shallow dismissals > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article

Science is political. Get over yourself.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#125

Post by smnthermes »

api wrote: post #39
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…

IQ seems to be more predictive at the low end than the high end. Someone with an IQ of 60 is handicapped. Someone with an IQ of 100 is normal. Above 100 the differences start to vanish into noise due to loads of other confounding factors and random chance. I have taken several tests in my life. They have all shown above average but the differences have varied wildly from 120 all the way up to 160 or something. That i…

> The same is true of lots of other biological metrics. Very high cholesterol can indicate a problem. From the normal range down it's not predictive of much unless it is absurdly low. Low IQ probably indicates a neurological problem. Normal and above is... normal

Autism is caused by an excess of the same factors that increase IQ, i.e. general reduction of gene expression. Well, it's harder to say that autism is a "pseudoscientific swindle":

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328734204_A_theory_...

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4927579/

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#126

Post by longtom »

catalogia wrote: post #112
longtom wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are more important things than compassion, e.g. work/status, marriage and family. These are also easy to measure and to enforce by comparison. How do you force everyone to be nice? And is that worth it? Is the threat of being sued for "not being nice enough" an improvement for society? I doubt it. Children being treated nicely actually predicts worse, not better outcome. https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi…

> How do you force everyone to be nice? > Is the threat of being sued for "not being nice enough" an improvement for society? I never said anything about force, nor certainly anything about suing people for not being nice (which is so ridiculous it barely warrants a response...) You're reading a great deal more into what I said than what I actually said, and in a very uncharitable way. > I think there are more import…

The simplest rule is people should cohabit peacefully. AFAIK there is no evidence that this is enabled by more exposure. People assort themselves by IQ for a good reason: Most people have a natural desire to dominate and the lower IQ person would always loose which is no fun to them.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#127

Post by catalogia »

longtom wrote: post #126
catalogia wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you force everyone to be nice? > Is the threat of being sued for "not being nice enough" an improvement for society? I never said anything about force, nor certainly anything about suing people for not being nice (which is so ridiculous it barely warrants a response...) You're reading a great deal more into what I said than what I actually said, and in a very uncharitable way. > I think there are more import…

The simplest rule is people should cohabit peacefully. AFAIK there is no evidence that this is enabled by more exposure. People assort themselves by IQ for a good reason: Most people have a natural desire to dominate and the lower IQ person would always loose which is no fun to them.

> Most people have a natural desire to dominate and the lower IQ person would always loose which is no fun to them.

IQ won't help you swim faster, so no. Attitudes such as yours are what I'd hope to mitigate by encouraging children to socialize with people outside their intellectual class.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#128

Post by kuschku »

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.

I got tested at 3 psychiatrists, as part of tests for other neurological issues. Not just some shitty web test. All results were in the ballpark of 160. And yet, it doesn’t matter at all in my daily life. In fact, I only really mention those results for one reason: so others don’t reply with "you only disagree with using IQ as score because you’d lose".

IQ just tells you how fast you adapt to new challenges — and in a very roundabout way which isn’t really reliable. And that’s aside from the whole "if a metric becomes a target, it ceases being a useful metric" stuff.

But in the real world, persistence and discipline is what really matters for success — you can have a startup with the most intelligent people in this world, but they won’t be able to actually make any progress without persistence. In fact, they’ll likely be bored by any task you give them quite quickly, and spend their time on something else.

Persistence is key for success, not just in our capitalistic world, but in anything — be it in learning a new skill, completing university successfully, or doing a new startup from start to finish.

As Stephen Hawking already said: "People who boast about their I.Q. are losers"

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#129

Post by longtom »

catalogia wrote: post #127
longtom wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simplest rule is people should cohabit peacefully. AFAIK there is no evidence that this is enabled by more exposure. People assort themselves by IQ for a good reason: Most people have a natural desire to dominate and the lower IQ person would always loose which is no fun to them.

> Most people have a natural desire to dominate and the lower IQ person would always loose which is no fun to them. IQ won't help you swim faster, so no. Attitudes such as yours are what I'd hope to mitigate by encouraging children to socialize with people outside their intellectual class.

I'm not seeing much evidence for this being helpful. Inclusion attempts I've seen where largely failures and there were no pilot projects so it seems all of this was seemingly (well-intentioned) politicking.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle (2019)

#130

Post by Discombulator »

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. If you see something like science, religion, art, anything as apolitical, that probably means its just reinforcing prevailing politics.

Let's assume that everything is political. We could certainly argue that every concept and every thing created by human is in some way political.

But then what? If everything is, what does it mean for a thing to be "political"? That concept has simply become empty and useless.

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