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IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

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Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#211

Post by vixen99 »

jdietrich wrote: post #137
softwaredoug wrote: post #6

Best 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 g…

If you've spent any amount of time in education (or you have any faith in the data), then it is patently obvious that there is indeed a set of "un-smart" kids. We can quibble about how big that group is, but they definitely exist. It's not their fault, they just got a bad set of numbers in the polygenetic lottery or were subjected to environmental stresses that caused lasting damage. Pretending that they're smart is…

I rather hope you don't teach kids or anyone else, armed as you would likely be with a set of non-evidential assumptions about their mental development including that of drawing a spurious, simplistic and dangerous parallel between physical disability and mental 'disabilities' as you apply it to the non-clinically-referable population.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#212

Post by wolfgangK »

harry8 wrote: post #82
naniwaduni wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This would only be correct if the SAT were expressly an IQ test, and we selected people based on SAT score for that reason . To put it another way, making this point is kind of like selecting for tall players for a basketball team, then saying weight is correlated with…

Yeah totally, or like selecting for confident people where you tell people who score well on the test that they're super confident. Tall is an absolute, objective measure of a real thing that exists. IQ is NOT a measure of a thing that exists. Similar effects can be found throwing dice and ascribing the total to an IQ score, then telling parents, teachers what the poor kid's IQ is as though it were their height. It's…

> IQ is NOT a measure of a thing that exists.

I don't understand your concept of something "existing" or not. Do you believe that a "speed" exist ? That a "center of gravity" exists ? That a "temperature" exist ? People who say "IQ is what IQ tests measure" sound to me like they could say "temperature is what thermometers measure". temperature does not "exist" it is molecules movements all the way down, yet it is a meaningful/useful concept. Same goes for IQ or "g factor".

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#213

Post by zby »

waterhouse wrote: post #35
barrkel wrote: 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…

Taste is the interesting one - it is kind of self referential: a paper is important when other scientists think it is important.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#214

Post by warp_factor »

jf- wrote: post #202
iron0013 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frustrating thing from the perspective of an individual differences researcher is that Taleb is not at all correct about IQ becoming less predictive of performance at higher levels! Studies pretty consistently show that IQ is a valid predictor of performance all the way up the scale, so that, for example, someone with an IQ of 145 is likely to perform (at school, on the job, etc) better than someone with an IQ of…

IQ is one of those topics which is, unfortunately, inescapably political. If important psychometric traits, like intelligence and personality, are highly heritable, then one of the implicit assumptions of left-leaning points of view is undermined: that everyone is inherently equal, that anyone can achieve anything given the right education, environment and resources. Add to this the fact that we know that other herit…

you are being downvoted but what you are describing is unfortunately exactly what is going on.

There is that political push to pretend everyone is exactly equal. Following that doctrine, Every difference would only be to blame on your environment. Over the last couple years, this trend is going over well established scientific proofs. That ideology is getting very dangerous and I think we are getting into a dark age of science for those controversial subjects where political correctness and playing nice will be seen as more important than scientific proofs.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#215

Post by otalp »

feanaro wrote: post #171
iron0013 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The frustrating thing from the perspective of an individual differences researcher is that Taleb is not at all correct about IQ becoming less predictive of performance at higher levels! Studies pretty consistently show that IQ is a valid predictor of performance all the way up the scale, so that, for example, someone with an IQ of 145 is likely to perform (at school, on the job, etc) better than someone with an IQ of…

I'm as surprised as you and I'm glad someone took the time to write that up (I was about to when I saw your comment). I don't understand why someone would call IQ "unscientific" without addressing research showing it to be a good predictor of future performance. Note that this still doesn't invalidate the point that people can be smart in many different ways (yet have the same IQ), which seems like a reasonable posit…

Just because something is a good predictor doesn't make it scientific. There could be a third variable like wealth which needs to be controlled for, but is rarely done in those studies with few exceptions.

In those exceptions, it was generally found that wealth of parents played a much bigger role in future success than IQ.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#217

Post by warp_factor »

xupybd wrote: 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'm going with the actual consensus across scientific which is that IQ is a valid measurement.

This article is surfing on the leftist wave of pretending that everyone is completely equal in every possible way. IQ measurements are seen as bad thing as it would lessen the theory that we are all biologically equal and that only our environment would define us.

This article is more political than scientific.

It is really sad. It really reads as if the outcome of the article was decided in advance then the article written in order to build a narrative for the conclusion

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#218

Post by bryanrasmussen »

anecdote time: Once I was taking IQ tests with a group of other people, one guy in that group I knew was just really an idiot.

This guy really did seem to be stupider than me in every conceivable measure. There was just no possible human endeavor that I did not feel confident in beating him and this is a pretty rare thing to notice in people for me, I can think of 4-5 people in my life I've thought this of (discounting people suffering from obvious disabilities)

Anyway we took the IQ tests, he came back when he got his result, extremely happy and announced 'I got a 100! I had no idea it was that high!'

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#219

Post by Janeman544 »

I have a lot of respect for Taleb but I think he always overstates any conclusion. There is no doubt that IQ does not capture a hell lot of things. There is no doubt that many people will succeed in life despite flunking at IQ tests (Feynman scored mere 126 in mensa test).

The question is does IQ gives you some idea about the person's behavior in real life or not ? I think it is indisputably yes.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#220

Post by xyzzyz »

fsloth wrote: post #148
vivekd wrote: 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.

Psychometry and IQ is the single most replicated field of psychology. There is no reproducibility crisis in psychometry.
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