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Do note that The Bell Curve is not considered controversial in general. The part about race and genetics is. Also genes being the sole predictor of IQ is not an accurate description of the book’s premise.
The controversial part is specifically the policy recommendations that we avoid investing resources in certain racial groups because problems in their communities can be explained by genetics.
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Another component of this theory concerning g is that it's largely genetic, and immune to "intervention" AKA stability as you mentioned. See the classic "The Bell Curve" for a full exposition. Which makes me wonder what's the point of all the intervention in the form of teaching/parenting styles and whatnot, if g factor is nature and immutable by large? What's the logic of the educators here?
Human IQ has been going up at a very fast rate for the last 100 years. Kids tested by the Army being enlisted for WW1 who had a mean score of 100(by definition) in 1917 now would have a mean score of lss than 80. Tons of interesting work on why IQ is shooting up, but it definitely is NOT genetics. This is known as the Flynn effect. Here is the wikipedia entry in case you want more details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Knowing what a trireme isn’t a sign of intelligence, it’s trivia.
Being able to figure out how to build a trireme is intelligence.
And I don’t mean looking up instructions and doing, I mean being able to reconstruct the knowledge from baser principles. This is not to say you or your son aren’t intelligent, just that knowing about triremes isn’t a sign of it.
For whatever this benchmark is worth, it's yet another metric showing Gemini 2.5 Pro is really one of the best all-around models (despite being a bit older now), and available without a subscription.
Cool project but pretty useless for me without Deepseek, Moonshot AI and Z.AI.
https://www.trackingai.org/political-test is almost the more interesting part of the website, there is a surprising uniformity of left-libertarian political views. Even assuming that companies prune out authoritarianism from their models for whatever reason, surely we'd expect at least one of them to drift over into mild economic right-wing territory. It'd be interesting to know what is causing that bias.
I'd imagine it's the same kind of "bias" against hitler that you get by reading any history book. Or that makes the overwhelming majority of scientists liberal or leftist. Just look at what happened when Musk made Grok promote the south african white genocide nonsense. It was evidently not the "make_model_liberal.parquet“ dataset he had to just turn off, but actively mucking with it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/05/elon-...
The way human IQ testing developed is that researchers noticed people who excel in one cognitive task tend to do well in others - the “positive manifold.” They then hypothesized a general factor, “g,” to explain this pattern. Early tests (e.g., Binet–Simon; later Stanford–Binet and Wechsler) sampled a wide range of tasks, and researchers used correlations and factor analysis to extract the common component, then norm…
IQ is a discovery about how intelligence occurs in humans. As you mentioned, a single factor explains most of the performance of a human on an IQ test, and that model is better than theories of multiple orthogonal intelligences. To contrast, 5 orthogonal factors are the best model we have for human personality. The first question to ask is "do LLMs also have a general factor?". How much of an LLMs performance on an I…
Yes, there is some research about it here - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
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The controversial part is specifically the policy recommendations that we avoid investing resources in certain racial groups because problems in their communities can be explained by genetics.
So were their claims falsified?
You might feel that the racism is scientifically justified, but that belief is controversial.
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And yet, in the US, the first start-ups are offering the possibility of testing embryos for their IQ. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/18/us-startup-c...
> they claimed selecting the “smartest” of 10 embryos would lead to an average IQ gain of more than six points Ethics aside this sounds like BS - how do you measure the IQ of someone against someone else who was never born?
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/silicon-valley-high-iq-children-...