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IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

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Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > Note that IQ tests correlate with SAT scores! That is (in part) Nassim Nicholas Taleb's point: we use IQ to select for success, then say IQ is correlated with success. It is circular reasoning. The more interesting measure is not jobs for which IQ is the main selection criteria to qualify for the training (your examples of MDs, JDs, and PhDs), but things where people create their own impact, lets…

Hmm... perhaps. But I'm pretty sure that the questions of e.g. the law exam are about laws, and the questions of medical school exams are about anatomy and medicinal procedures—not about the "which shape completes the pattern" puzzles from IQ tests. I'm quite certain they are not given IQ tests. The SAT, meanwhile, asks math and English questions. Is Taleb saying that IQ is a bad metric, or is he saying that these ot…

IQ tests attempt to measure g, which is some combination of processing speed, capability for abstract thought and working memory, all of those being highly correlated. The GRE and GMAT are just harder versions of the SAT, IQ tests for people who completed middle school. The LSAT is an IQ test with no math portion

> It is designed to assess reading comprehension as well as logical and verbal reasoning proficiency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_School_Admission_Test

The MCAT has one pure IQ test section out of four. However, all of these tests are highly g loaded. People who can do well on one of them can do well on the others with more or less preparation. That’s what g attempts to measure.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#162
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ is definitely not a good measure of value, contribution, quality of thought. I think it's probably correlated, and for some contributions may be a gating factor, but I've seen plenty of smart people examining the wrong things, for sure. Meta-analysis of focus doesn't seem to come free with IQ. I think it's a skill.

A guy I know—who basically spends his time around high-IQ kids, seems to be on speaking terms with several Fields Medalists, and has closely studied the lives of lots of great scientists and mathematicians—says that great achievement comes from three ingredients: (a) mental horsepower (roughly measured by IQ); (b) taste, an aesthetic sense that helps one decide to work on the right things or investigate the right hyp…

Obsessiveness only helps if you're headed in the right direction. That's why YCombinator starts up startups with so little capital - so if they're headed in the wrong direction, they find out fast.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#163
post #77

>If you want to detect how someone fares at a task, say loan sharking, tennis playing, or random matrix theory, make him/her do that task; we don’t need theoretical exams for a real world function by probability-challenged psychologists. If you want to measure skill and experience, that's good advice. When you want to measure the ability to solve problems where the individual or nobody has skill or experience yet, yo…

And anecdotely, IQ style testing has been by far the most determinant data point for successful software developer hires in my experience. I'm almost at the point where I might start to believe it is more important than domain knowledge of programming. This is likely because the type of work I typically hire for has a large amount of problem solving and troubleshooting as opposed higher level system design. Which is…

Agreed. I think the current interviewing system should be replaced with an IQ test + some more standardized domain specific knowledge tests.

The pseudoscientific programming contest style interviews used by Google and others are highly inconsistent and filled with false negatives + false positives.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#164
post #148
post #97

reading the Wikipedia article, it says that scientific consensus among surveyed psychologists and educational researchers is that IQ is a valid and accurate mesaure of the important components of intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliabil... If you're going to challenge that scientific consensus you better have something better to bring to the table than "it's being used by racists" and…

Wikipedia is not a totally reliable reference when researching non-quantitative information, especially in area with active stakeholders that likely edit wikipedia. And I would not trust "scientific consensus" in this instance given psychology's recent well documented reproducibility crisis.

This article doesn't even seem contrary to scientific consensus as far as what factual information is presented. It's just about how it's packaged in order to form his argument. It's sort of a lawyer-y manipulation of terms with some added hyperbole and even appeals to fashion sense that are misrepresenting what IQ is and what the consensus actually is.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A guy I know—who basically spends his time around high-IQ kids, seems to be on speaking terms with several Fields Medalists, and has closely studied the lives of lots of great scientists and mathematicians—says that great achievement comes from three ingredients: (a) mental horsepower (roughly measured by IQ); (b) taste, an aesthetic sense that helps one decide to work on the right things or investigate the right hyp…

Obsessiveness only helps if you're headed in the right direction. That's why YCombinator starts up startups with so little capital - so if they're headed in the wrong direction, they find out fast.

Hence item b.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#166
post #36

I have no way to navigate this, I've heard psychologists claim that IQ is the most well proven concept in the social sciences. Now this guy comes along saying the complete opposite. Anyone have any advice on how to weight this up and figure out what the truth is?

I can't get through the article.

But I used to be pretty active in the online gifted community. I was somewhat acquainted with folks involved in testing, developing new IQ tests, published authors blah blah blah. I'm not going to cite any sources. This is my understanding and it's about twenty years out of date.

First, the first test that gets cited as starting the whole IQ testing trend was never intended to measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness for children of indeterminate age.

France had a problem:

City kids typically had known ages and we're already exposed to practices like standing in line. It was easy to assimilate them into the school system.

But rural kids often had no birth certificate and their age was not known and they additionally lacked the experiences of the city kids. There were cultural differences and trying to decide when the country kids should start school was proving problematic.

So they hired a guy, I think his last name was Binet, to create a test to help them decide when children were ready to start school.

This had nothing at all to do with measuring intelligence. But thereafter he developed additional tests and this eventually becy the Stanford-Binet.

Most IQ tests have a ceiling of about 140. Trying to test IQ above that is quite challenging. If you ceiling the test, your IQ is probably something above that.

In practice, if you aren't properly assessed by about age 7, we don't have the tools to accurately determine your IQ if it is above a certain range.

IQ tests are culture specific. This means that they aren't really accurate for immigrants or people of the wrong socioeconomic class. This means foreigners, poor people and people of color routinely score poorly on them and IQ tests thus have a long and sordid history of being used to justify racist, classist bullshit as well as anti-immigrant sentiment.

Twenty years ago, they were running into a problem: The tests good for testing very high IQs were old. They this contained culturally out of date questions. They needed a new test and wee running into trouble developing such.

IQ tests are additionally merely tools that can be useful in the hands of a trained professional for assessing someone. The tests themselves do a poor job of standing on their own. So online IQ tests are about as meaningful as those online quizzes that crap like "What kind of dog are you?"

Twice Exceptional kids -- gifted and disabled in some way -- probably benefit the most from getting properly assessed because they frequently have "average" performance while being horribly frustrated. Figuring out that a kid is actually bright and intellectually starving because no one realized he was bright can be life changing.

The best use of IQ tests is to try to understand your own needs. All testing is gamable and thus of questionable value for other purposes.

Getting some assessment helped me homeschool my sons appropriately. Beyond that, it's mostly useless bullshit in my opinion. The rich kids of the "insiders" tend to score well and other people tend to score less well, so, in practice, you can't cleanly separate out wealth, culture, education, etc from some kind of theoretical raw intelligence figure.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A guy I know—who basically spends his time around high-IQ kids, seems to be on speaking terms with several Fields Medalists, and has closely studied the lives of lots of great scientists and mathematicians—says that great achievement comes from three ingredients: (a) mental horsepower (roughly measured by IQ); (b) taste, an aesthetic sense that helps one decide to work on the right things or investigate the right hyp…

Anecdotally, I would very much agree with this, with an added caveat: there are diminishing returns on mental horsepower after 2 stdevs (e.g. 130 iq). After a certain point obsessiveness separates the wheat from the chaff, by very wide margins. The long-game is underrated.

You need all three. Picking the wrong thing to work on wastes all of the time that gets spent because of obsession.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#169
post #12
post #4

IQ 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…

I'll admit I spend probably greater than average time brooding over how dumb most people are. But I don't think this is inherent in those people. I think it's mostly a result of their prior knowledge, sleep, energy level, stress/anxiety, and give-a-shit. I think most people are fundamentally capable of great intelligence.

You should ask yourself what it would it take to falsify your working hypothesis and then see if there are research results which falsify it.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of good evidence that correlates race and IQ. Even when controlling for as many factors as possible. To the best of our current scientific knowledge, this is a thing. Obviously this is an excellent source of ammo for racists and likewise those fighting racism see it as a threat. By extension, anyone who speaks of this science must also be racist and the science itself must be wrong because it is racist.…

IQ is well supported, but raceXiq is very poorly supported. Most of the HBD and 'race realism' stuff fails simply at trying to define race. Often it's 'colored people', and not any kind of grouping that even resembles human genetic diversity. This all relies on very straight-forward and well-established genetics, but they generally can't even come close to the mark here. They'll shout and scream about how "you're not…

Comically wrong. Defining ancestry is not that hard, sub-saharan africans will cluster together regardless of the diversity in Africa.

This is what the experts actually think regarding black-white differences in IQ:

"Asked: What are the sources of U.S. black-white differences in IQ?

0% of differences due to genes: (17% of our experts) 0-40% of differences due to genes: 42% of our experts [i.e., 42% = 17% said "0%" and 25% said "1% to 40%") 50% of differences due to genes: 18% of our experts 60-100% of differences due to genes: 39% of our experts [i.e., 39% = 34% said "60% to 99%" and 5% said "100%"] 100% of differences due to genes: (5% of our experts)

M=47% of differences due to genes (SD=31%)"

http://www.unz.com/isteve/taleb-iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscient...

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