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IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

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Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#341

Post by xyzzyz »

repolfx wrote: post #332
ilikehurdles wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do find low IQ people in high places — they’re the low IQ people who have inherited wealth and social connections to those places.

I would be fascinated to know the IQ scores of all the US presidents, but I assume no such dataset exists. Being the president would seem to be a good example of a form of success in which IQ would not be that important relative to other personality attributes, like understanding what people want and how to (re)phrase it well, persistence, bravery, being able to spot strategic mistakes of opponents etc. It's not clea…

You can estimate that by looking at their SAT/ACT scores (which are intelligence tests to a large degree) and converting the percentile to IQ norming (mean 100, std dev 15). For Obama you get IQ 130, for George W. Bush 123.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#342

Post by slavik81 »

pps43 wrote: post #113
catskul2 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that the author of the test needs to have at least the same level of intelligence (and probably even higher) than what the test is measuring. What makes you believe that?

I gave an example above. Imagine you ask second graders to write math tests for college. They might extrapolate from their experience like this "We started working with single-digit numbers, like 2+3 or 4*2. Then we learned to work with two-digit numbers, 23+17 or 17-73. High school math should probably be three-digit numbers, college will be four-digit numbers, and math professor must be able to work with eight-digi…

Your example describes a lack of knowledge, not a lack of intelligence.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#343

Post by blablabla123 »

aptwebapps wrote: post #337
blablabla123 wrote: post #336

> Mensa members: typically high “IQ” losers in Birkenstocks. Nice article. IQ is actually the best measure yet found to see how well people can succeed in life. There used to be some craze about EQ, but that is actually pseudo-scientific stuff invented and monetized by book authors. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14940184

Yeah, I'm hope I'm not missing out, but the beginning of the article was too aggressive for me to bother with the rest.

Same, I just skimmed. Quite sad that people still do this kind of thinking and talking and that it gets rated so high here. I thought that's what people cared about last year, that people deserve equal treatment, no matter what the background is.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#344

Post by stared »

jdietrich wrote: post #56

Frankly, I'm incredibly disappointed in Taleb's recent writing. This article is one of many where the actual point being made is buried beneath unnecessary and divisive ad-hominem attacks. Does the caption "Mensa members: typically high “IQ” losers in Birkenstocks." usefully contribute to a serious, scholarly conversation on IQ? Is it reasonable or fair-minded to immediately tar opponents to your argument as racists,…

Even worse, by "When someone asks you a question in the real world, you focus first on “why is he/she asking me that?”, [...] Only suckers don’t have that instinct." he pretty much offends everyone on the autism spectrum.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#345

Post by SamReidHughes »

zbentley wrote: post #291
SamReidHughes wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozart was a genius. Ryo Fukui started playing the piano at 22 (accordion at 18), he did alright for himself. Mozart’s dad was a great student and his mother’s father was highly educated too. So my guess is, he’d be able to handle Java. It’s actually easy (in principle) to measure the programming facet of intelligence: CS programs do this with weed-out classes.

These people are outliers. The problem with outliers is that they're so far out of the normal range that it's often difficult/impossible to use outliers' experiences to answer "what causes deviations within the normal range?" Were they gifted from birth? Did they have unique developmental opportunities? Did a radioactive spider bite them just so? We can analyze their lives and experiences, but we often place far too…

Not at all. They're great tools for understanding how intelligence is multidimensional. There are also math geniuses who are very untalented at music. That tells us something.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#346

Post by jpadkins »

gaius wrote: post #327
barry-cotter wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure you did improve. Practice effects exist. They’re also limited. Just as I will get faster if I train to run the 100m or run a marathon you can get better at the GMAT, LSAT etc. But there’s a plateau you hit where you can’t get better. If you try to take someone from 50th percentile to 99th on the GMAT in the majority of cases you will fail. An increase of 0.26 standard deviations isn’t nothing but on the GMAT…

Yes and no. You can certainly practice GMAT style questions directly and get better at them that way, but the real trick is to meta up a level and see that they follow a pattern, at which point getting a very good score is easy. I think the test is really testing for that (I guess deliberately or why put the pattern in in the first place?). Or maybe it is really testing for the personality type that likes to prepare…

or it's testing for people who have the ability to 'meta up a level and see they follow a pattern' which is part of what we call IQ.

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#348

Post by coldtea »

repolfx wrote: post #329
coldtea wrote: post #318

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…

That's not really addressing the point, is it. IQ correlates well with measures of performance. Taleb's point, if we are to generously interpret his screed, is that some classes of valuable mental performance are very hard to generate metrics for or even define at all, and therefore, you would expect them to correlate with IQ less or not at all. For instance the chart that claims IQ correlates well with military perf…

>is that some classes of valuable mental performance are very hard to generate metrics for or even define at all, and therefore, you would expect them to correlate with IQ less or not at all.

I think the crux of Taleb's point is that the kind of mental performance IQ is a useful metric for is not valuable (including the associated jobs and roles that go with it).

Re: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

#350

Post by pgeorgi »

pps43 wrote: post #321
pgeorgi wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Otherwise how can you tell if the answer is correct? For example: By taking much more time and access to all literature while designing the test, which differs from the test protocol. IQ tests aren't quizzes: you don't need to be "clever" to design them, you need to know which aspect of thought process you want to measure. The value comes from their stability: there are tons of tests based on different methodologie…

I gave examples elsewhere in this thread that illustrate why more time won't help. There is a large difference between solving the same type of problem, only larger, fast, and using abstractions at a higher level. Do you really think that speed of doing long division predicts ability to solve differential equations?

> Do you really think that speed of doing long division predicts ability to solve differential equations?

I never said that.

I also fail to see how "solving differential equations" has anything to do with intelligence (with the caveat that pathologically low mathematical aptitude might limit the ability to learn it at all - one aspect here is that "unable to do division" might be a predictor for that).

But I believe that a properly designed "long division test" could be (part of) a predictor for some dimension of intelligence, and that a time component is usually helpful in test situations since it prevents tools and techniques from equalizing the outcome too much (as, given enough time and sufficient command of appropriate techniques, any problem can be solved).

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