> interestingly, scores in spatial reasoning went up
Wild guess: video games. More Americans play or used to play video games than ever. And 3D games require players to understand an environment to navigate it.
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Hmmm I wonder if an increase use of videogames paired with a decrease in the amount of time parents can spend communicating with their children might be related.
Note that over the last 30 years it's vastly transitioned from one parent staying home raising children to both parents working.
From a strict evolutionary perspective I have doubts that a high IQ is useful anymore.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/estimate...
Here is a pretty clear indication that people are just not having children.
Maybe the percentage of stay at home parents has stayed the same but the number of stay at home parents has shrunk because the number of all parents has just shrunk as well.
None of that really helps indicate why IQ in certain metrics related to communication would be in decline. Since the percentages are the same you would think outcomes would be similar then.
So are kids getting dumber or are parents just getting worse?
Or other factors in our environment are contributing to this. An increase in smart devices autocorrecting and doing 'math' for us for example.
The only things being selected for in modern humans, if anything, are going to be things like disease resistance, maybe tolerance to some chemical contaminants in food & water, air pollution. And even then only in some parts of the world.
A big part of "The Bell Curve" was arguing that no interventions could change IQ except genetics and so any money spent on low IQ people (African-Americans in the book, but the author followed up by attacking poor people more generally) was a pointless waste.
It turns out he wasn't just an asshole, he was also wrong.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/08/7-key-findi...
Nearly 50% of households in the 70s had a stay-at-home parent. So a larger number of parents today grew up with working parents than 5 decades ago.
In the absence of reasonably strong natural selection pressure to select for IQ, how could IQ not be falling over time?
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/03/new-study-didnt-really-...
For example, if the % of people who do a postgraduate degree goes doubles, it's no longer such a select group, so you'd expect the average IQ of postgraduate degree holders to go down. This doesn't mean IQ scores are going down for the population as a whole.
One more thing: why do so many papers that present charts that show how a mean or median changes over time, without also presenting charts that show how the distribution has changed over time?
IQ at best measures something that correlates with SAT. And with better education, less exposure to damaging pollutants, etc. it should always be on the rise (as demonstrated by the Flynn effect; an effect which this poor paper desperately tries to refute).
IQ research has always been about proving the superiority of one race over others, this superiority doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t stop these pseudo-scientist from trying. They bend the definition of “intelligence” and device test batteries (and in this case, interpret test battery) in skewed and bias ways to manipulate results like these. Regrettably media outlets like the Popular Mechanics and lifestyle journalists like Tim Newcomb take these researchers at their words and publish their results, despite their results pretty much being lies.
This is true but I suspect people with higher IQs tend to have more education. Probably because they are "good" at learning while someone with a lower IQ struggles more and doesn't like it because of that.
Consider a weightlifting competition where the weight-limit were 20lbs (10-kilograms). You'd be able to determine those with severe injuries or deficiencies vs a typical human, but you wouldn't be able to determine a peak-athlete from an average person.
---------
Now sure, we can increase the reps to absurd levels, like "200 reps of 20lbs", which will start to separate out the athletes from the typical humans. And that's roughly what the upper-end of the IQ test does: you need to be more-and-more accurate / fewer mistakes to reach 115, 120, 125 IQ or above. But we've have pushed the test far beyond its intended purpose.
IQ itself partially depends on a somewhat unproven concept of "general intelligence", which IIRC no one is even sure if it applies to average (or smarter) humans.
Change randomly a random line of code in any source code, and tell me how often it happens to work better than before.
Academics often stereotype “jocks” and high social status seekers as stupid. However, it often requires brains to succeed in sports and social interactions. But it is technically difficult to measure high “intuition”. I know some very very smart people that fail academically (I know they are smart because I see them achieve seemingly impossible outcomes, not because I have their skills). I strongly suspect that selecting for high non-academic skills will select for general intelligence. If one lacks skill X (e.g. the stereotypical nerd[1] with low social skills) then one usually lacks the ability to recognise people that are highly skilled in skill X (and worse often assumes the skill is useless or denigrates those with the skill or thinks they could be highly skilled if they wanted to).
There could be bubbles of selection pressure - subgroups where high IQ leads to having more kids. So long as the subgroup intermingles, then there is a population level pressure for higher intellect.
It is possible that unsmart people remove themselves from the gene pool before reproduction, or unsmart people reproduce less.
One or two outlier smart men that have thousands of children could have a massive selection pressure. Are we not all descended from Ghengis Khan?
Smartness has thousands of factors, and selection pressure on some hidden factors could easily have an outcome on general intelligence.
[1] Counterpoint “Being smart seems to make you unpopular” implies popular people are not smart: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
It is incredibly arguable if during an obesity crisis if population wide health is actually improving and if population wide health isn’t improving that could certainly contribute to lower IQ. We’re also seeing population wide declines of health in other ways like sperm count. Food is becoming less nutritious as soil depletes. Our fish stocks being about to collapse is going to be another hit against brain health as omega 3s will become rarer in the diet.
I have yet to read “the bell curve” said, but did they really use an argument that flew in the face of the abundant evidence of IQ increases unlinked to genetics as a result of better nutrition and education? Hell America gained a few IQ points nationwide from banning leaded gasoline alone so we also knew of environmental means to affect IQ levels. This was all known about and very well established at the time of authorship. Is there an excerpt?
Wow! You must have ran a battery of IQ tests to assert this with such absolute certainty.
My father used to be a gardener to make ends meet. Because of a lack of education and a language barrier, I'm sure he would appear low IQ as well. Now he works in electronics manufacturing and the efficiency by which he debugs production problems and reasons from first principles would put many of my educated peers to shame. What can be easily dismissed as a lack of ability can be more reasonably explained by a lack of opportunity and resources. But it is easier for privileged people to look down on others and believe that everyone is in a position they deserve.
Two of them were born addicted to heroin.
Currently residing in a "sober living facility" last I heard, confidently talking about launching a career in retail management. The field looks attractive because he can "just tell people what to do".
I am not rejecting this point but I have a hard time accepting it Carte Blanche. If anything if IQ is lowering for generic reasons I would suspect birth control as a cause especially since it’s a more recent phenomenon than means tested welfare.
The full set of items in SAPA can be as high as 500. They supposedly found the reverse Flynn effect by only looking at results from 35 (over a 12 year period) and another set of 60 (over a 7 years period). This should be a red flag, and raise suspicions of cherry-picking and p-hacking.
This is not to mention anything about the validity of interpreting the combination of some items from SAPA as intelligence. The SAPA authors don’t do that, neither did the researchers that originally collected the data, neither did the participants, that is only done by the researches of this particular paper. And to add another red flag, this paper was published in a pretty disgraced journal Intelligence, which has been proven to publish plenty of pseudo-scientific results where they stretch the statistics with an agenda aligned with the eugenics movement.
Yes they did, and they did a lot worse than that. And that is the reason why the scientific community was very fast to discredit this book. The science in it were bad, to say the least. It wasn’t even peer reviewed. I think the decline in IQ research is in large part thanks to the pushback this book rightfully got.
It is actually nice that this books is raised here, because the journal this study was published in Intelligence has its ties to true believers of The Bell Curve. Richard J. Haier is the editor in chief signed an editorial defending this book back in 1994. And the board included disgraced eugenicist Richard Lynn (whos discredited pseudo-scientific work cited throughout the book) was on the editorial board until 2018.
I think the point being made more generally about IQ tests testing the wrong things is very valid and I do agree with it, but it extends beyond just IQ testing, it also raises questions about standardised academic testing. What I will point out though that any rebalancing of IQ tests or standardised tests at this point is likely to become an intensely political affair because these tests are used to justify gatekeeping access to status and societal resources, and any new tests would necessarily be far worse researched than existing tests, so I wouldn't expect current IQ testing methodology to be upended any time soon.
The heritability of IQ is only well established within true believers of a pseudo-science tightly linked with the eugenics movement. Most psychologists today believe that the supposed heritability was observed because of bias within the research. And given the people who were doing these research in the 1970s and the 1980s, and their motivation for doing those, there is no question on what these biases were. Some of the researchers went so went quite far in bending the data such that it would fit their narrow—and racist—world view. They tried really hard to define intelligence such that it would make rich white people smarter, they were regrettably successful for far to long, but ultimately failed.
Your anecdotal evidence of high IQ parents (ugh!) having high IQ children is the same anecdotal evidence that sociologists have been describing for decades that high SES parents have high SES children, and is the main reason for why parents with high SAT scores are likely to have children with high SAT scores.
What IQ researchers discovered was basically the same thing that Marx described in 1867, class, however the eugenics were no communists, and instead of providing the simpler explanation, that society rewards the ruling elite, and wealth inherits, the eugenics went all conspiratorial and blamed other races for their perceived decline in society.
He worked at the American Enterprise Institute, so if you just imagine their attitude to the scientific facts of climate change, transposed onto genetics, you'll have a good idea of what they were saying. So it's not so much as not being aware of the science, but of not liking the obvious policy conclusions it leads to and so having to work really hard to counter it.
"The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in which the authors argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors."
That statement completely contradicts what your claim about the book, and now I am disinclined to trust you.. Later on another statement also completely contradicts what you are saying:
"According to Herrnstein and Murray, the high heritability of IQ within races does not necessarily mean that the cause of differences between races is genetic. On the other hand, they discuss lines of evidence that have been used to support the thesis that the black-white gap is at least partly genetic, such as Spearman's hypothesis. They also discuss possible environmental explanations of the gap, such as the observed generational increases in IQ, for which they coin the term Flynn effect"
But, me, I fully believe it is due to the war on public education by the US GOP. I wish these articles broke down these scores by school type the children go/went to.
Kids sent to high end private schools by their ultra rich parents probably have seen no such decline. It is like the US is trying to move into a caste society, ruling class and serf class.
edit: spelling
See above reply. Wikepedia completely contradicts what you are saying. I also know what you're saying about AEI is mostly garbage, too.
> A study of Norwegian military conscripts' test records found that IQ scores have been falling for generations born after the year 1975, and that the underlying cause of both initial increasing and subsequent falling trends appears to be environmental rather than genetic.
If you’re interested in the contours of this debate, I recommend Paul Gilroy’s “Postcolonial Melancholia”.
* IQ is real, measurable and heritable. The evidence for this is overwhelming.
* Nobody argues about the broad heritability of other human traits such as hair/eye color, height, athletic ability and the like.
* The argument over IQ is a consequence of terrible historical experiences with eugenics and racial discrimination. Many have adopted the quasi-religious viewpoint that IQ is not heritable to sidestep the discussion.
* As a consequence, social policy resembles the cycles and epicycles of Ptolemy's cosmology. Namely, all manner of social, economic and historical outcomes which are explained parsimoniously by understanding IQ as heritable are instead attributed to a Rube-Goldberg machine of racism, class warfare and the like.
* Accepting IQ as heritable does not, in an enlightened society, require acceptance of racism or classism, any more than people are forced to discriminate against those who, say, are genetically weaker athletes due to low relative VO2 levels.
* Social policy could be enhanced and better targeted by targeting those at the lower end of the IQ curve with subsidies such as basic income.
* Accepting IQ as real, heritable and measurable represents one of the only paths out of the present morass of corrupt political patronage programs around specific groups, just as rejection of Ptolemy's worldview enabled turning away from the demon-haunted world of religion.
> According to Herrnstein and Murray, the high heritability of IQ within races does not necessarily mean that the cause of differences between races is genetic. On the other hand, they discuss lines of evidence that have been used to support the thesis that the black-white gap is at least partly genetic, such as Spearman's hypothesis. They also discuss possible environmental explanations of the gap, such as the observed generational increases in IQ, for which they coin the term Flynn effect. At the close of this discussion, they write:
> > If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Part_III._The_N...
The part I find especially amusing is how often the Flynn effect is used to refute The Bell Curve, even though the term "Flynn effect" comes from The Bell Curve.
PS: most of the population can't read that sentence and are blind to that trick.
But if anything, time and history has shown us that even if you adopt the proposition that IQ scores measure something meaningful and some groups score less than others -- the situation is totally changeable and moveable. People become more educated, more skilled, share more culturally over time.
There is nothing intrinsic about IQ that cannot change. So to use is as if it means someone is "inferior" is just a fallacy or at best a blinded snapshot in time.
Don't use the concept this way.
It should be self-evident that you can lower IQ through environment (injury, developmental issues, malnourishment, etc.). So even if you believe there's a genetic ceiling to IQ, Flynn effect (and reverse) don't contradict that.
Increase in: 1. scores in spatial reasoning (known as 3D rotation)
"And, it should be said, there has long been debate over how accurately IQ tests are able to gauge overall intelligence and potential for success in society in the first place."
That's not what this psychologist concluded:
"Top psychologist: IQ is the No. 1 predictor of work success"
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-...
Anyway, I don't think it's bad to just admit that people intelligence is declining. The world has evolved such that you need less of it to get by.
>Your anecdotal evidence of high IQ parents (ugh!) having high IQ children is the same anecdotal evidence that sociologists have been describing for decades that high SES parents have high SES children
No, I've seen people who grew up with low SES but had parents/grandparents who were consistently A students or were employed in prestigious intellectual jobs, and lo and behold, they ended up doing better in things like school than you would expect for somebody of their SES.
>Bias, racism
I'm just going to turn this around on you. Why should I not believe you're bias and racist and simply want to disprove IQ testing so as to undermine the social position and access to societal resources certain groups have as a result of IQ testing and things like it such as standardised testing? There's plenty of profit in painting certain groups as oppressors whose success is actually just robbery, and not an accident of genetic difference, since this consequently justifies racist measures to correct this inequity. People can benefit from such notions both directly and socially through association with a popular movement.
I'm pretty sympathetic to the idea of IQ lacking validity because I can't make strongly convincing arguments that IQ predicts anything besides academic success and it's hard to then argue our measures of academic success aren't themselves arbitrary and disconnected from practical utility. It's arguably too hard and too arbitrary to distill "intelligence" down to a few standardised tests and prove those tests have cross-domain validity.
I don't have much sympathy to the idea that IQ is not heritable based on nothing but ad hominem and the idea this position is anti-racist because it's not what I read from the evidence.
Maybe these tests are declining because they are measuring skills that are decreasingly relevant? I'm not certain I believe this myself but it's an interesting thought.
Not so sure about that. Do you need more intelligence for "working the fields with basic tools" or for an average job in your country?
This might change when AI becomes economically relevant and the "value of intelligence" plummets.
("The rich outbred the poor" also seems very dubious, labor was still very manual, so you gotta have someone to do it.)
This YouTube video[1] does a fair job of summarizing the bulk of what is wrong with this book. But IMO very fact that the book is an apologia for eugenicists should be enough of a critique, you shouldn’t need any more.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
PS. Regarding the naming of the Flynn effect:
> Flynn stated that, if asked, he would have named the effect after Read D. Tuddenham who "was the first to present convincing evidence of massive gains on mental tests using a nationwide sample" in a 1948 article
Not that its wrong to question, I just think you'd need to do more work supporting the idea that language skills are less important today for some reason.
What's the trick?
As folks became better-read and educated they began to understand that IQ test questions were a sort of puzzle, not a real honest question. The answer was expected to solve the puzzle, not be right in any way.
E.g. There are no Elephants in Germany. Munich is in Germany. How many elephants are there in Munich? A) 0 B) 1 C)2
Folks back then might answer B or C, because they figure hey there's probably a zoo in Munich, bet they have an elephant or two there. And be marked wrong.
Is he right? The argument is plausible: the study measures online IQ tests. Certainly in my experience the average person online has gotten dumber in the 30 years I've been on the Internet, because Internet access has expanded and it's now the general population rather than just upper-middle-class academics. But we'd need to see comparisons vs. offline IQ tests, given to a randomly-sampled selection of the population, to be sure.
Lately been trying to get some summary, intuitive understanding of a lot of Internet content and have begun to conclude that there is something can trust (also not entirely a joke): The authors of the content want readers, and their content is something the authors want those readers to believe!!!
When I wanted something I could trust, ended up as a math major. But: Can't answer enough questions with just math. So, one resulting lesson from being a math major is, need to learn to work with content can't completely trust. E.g., in part, might keep in mind the advice "(1) Always look for the hidden agenda. (2) Follow the money."
I think the above is part of the doubt you are running into with your claim. You might be able to come up with evidence/stores that would lend credence to you conclusions about your gardener, but I do not think it would move your main point "there has got to be some correlation between IQ and education." forward.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
It's a twin study. Here's a quote: "Mean IQ scores were modestly higher among those from higher SES backgrounds, but the magnitude of genetic influences on IQ was uniformly high across the range of SES." SES means "socio-economic status".
Honestly, the evidence for heritability of IQ is very strong. Arguing against it, in my opinion, borders on arguing that vaccines don't work. I actually understand why people do it (there's a lot of very bad history in how IQ data has been used). But I just think it's more important in the long run to tell the truth and find solutions based on the truth.
Maybe raising rats in different CO2 levels over several generations. I would be interested in the results of a study like that.
There is even more to it. Language can influence (prev.: limits) your thinking and ability to categorize. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
(Removed misleading reference)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Progressive_Matrices
So what? Being able to understand expressive language and quickly context shift vocabulary is extremely valuable. If you don't have the vocabulary to identify context, being able to look up the definition of words will only get you so far. Additionally, you can't write words if you don't know that they exist.
Statistics might average that out, but I've also seen it uses often to use as a tool to decide where young kids go. It's not accurate enough.
Twin studies [1]. Different parents, socioeconomic statuses, possibly countries. Sustained significant statistical effects. That’s the genetic component of intelligence.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105 first four references
[1] Pages 16 and 17 of the Word document under "Appendix A. Supplementary data" at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
Don’t correct them, it’s honestly better this way.
Of course, it's a useful heuristic to determine if it's worth your time to examine it.
They're learning precalculus in middle/high school these days, a subject I had no exposure to until late college (and which I had to cheat my way through). I can't help them with much of their homework anymore. School is way more challenging than it used to be.
But then they go home and learn mindless consumerism, social engineering and conspiracy theory from their phones.
The kids are better-educated than myself, but they exhibit a general lack of creativity. Everything is "role playing" other people's behavior or fanfiction expanding other people's work; even their sense of humor is meme-based and monosyllabic. Where their behavior turns malicious/criminal, they're usually getting their inspiration from some counter-culture influencer encouraging it.
A test that measures ability to think outside the box is showing poor results with this generation? Color me shocked!
There are many types of argumentation that are useful for drawing practical conclusions about the world but are not, strictly speaking, valid logic. For example, "correlation doesn't equal causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively" [2]. If you know nothing about the truth or falsity of a statement, knowing who's saying it can provide some information that might tilt your opinion one way or another. But the person saying something does not make the argument true or false, otherwise I could make myself as detestable as possible to some group of people and then kill them off by giving them common-sense advice like "go to the doctor" or "eat healthy". (Come to think of it, this is exactly what happened to Republicans during COVID, where somehow wearing masks & getting vaccines became politicized.)
Bringing it back to the topic at hand - I found the digression about who Emil O Kierkegard is to be momentarily interesting, but I'd still like to know if he's right or not. The idea that this article might be due to Simpson's Paradox is plausible, and it invalidates the central conclusion of the study if it is.
The more popular video games require spatial reasoning far more than the others.
> The reasons for both the increase and the decline are sill very much up for debate.
Earth has entered the Vinge's Unthinking Depths, and we are struggling to notice it.
To use an analogy, even stopped clock can be right twice a day. Nobody expects anyone to use such a thing to tell time.
But anyone who looks at a broken clock displaying 6 o'clock and declares "it can't possibly be that time because the clock is broken" is engaging in faulty reasoning, because they're still taking information from a broken clock which contains none.
This is somewhat tongue in cheek, obviously. But to spell out my point, genetic inheritance is way more complex than most of the comments here are treating it.
If you can’t confidently explain how people with brown hair can keep having red-headed kids, it might be challenging to understand why average parents can produce smart kids (or vice versa).
This is an interesting opinion. So vaccine research has produced a number of successful trials, the research is keeps furthering more knowledge, we develop new techniques, new models, new successful predictions, and new products which yield more successful trials. I consider this a healthy field of science and engineering.
Now how does IQ research fair next to vaccine research. The first IQ test was authored in 1908, not to measure intelligence among populations, but to assess learning disability. Since then IQ researchers have been trying to prove that IQ differences exists among populations. They have created and standardized new types of IQ tests that are supposed to show this difference exists. They have spent the past 100 years doing this, using fancy statistical methods, but have so far failed to convince the other fields of science (especially other fields within psychology), nor have they convinced policy makers (though they were pretty close during the eugenics craze). They have no theory of behavior other then this hypothetical general intelligence. They have no models that predict behavior, they have no products other then their intelligence tests, the tests are constantly criticized, have no successful double blind trials to show for them selves. The techniques are the same as in the 1970s, just plain old pen and paper tests with some factor analysis to spot the correlation they were hoping to spot (some would say, preconditioned or biased to spot).
If I were to be generous I would categorize IQ research among string theory as a scientific dead end. They had a theory, it didn’t go anywhere, and now the rest of the field has moved on. However given the history of IQ research and their ties to the eugenics movement, I’m not gonna give them this benefits. I believe IQ research, with the exception of Alfred Binet him self, was always about putting people in racial categories to show that one group was superior to another, with a made up construct they call intelligence.
That’d be like if you told me a tree was 10 feet tall, then asked me how tall it was and I said “10 feet 1 inch” because I figured it had grown at least an inch in the interim. Why figure when you should already know?
Me: Summarize your understanding of this sentence:
The politicization of everything and the rise of ideologic overtake of universities, contaminated thinking accurately about the models of reality reducing every intelligence based and genuine debate to banal disputes of privileges and subjective preferences militarizing discourse with false accusations and mining the victimhood mindset.
ChatGTP: This sentence appears to express concern about a trend where everything, including universities, is becoming politicized and ideologically driven, leading to a reduction in genuine debate and an increase in banal disputes over subjective preferences and privileges. It suggests that this trend is leading to a militarization of discourse, where false accusations are made and a victimhood mindset is fostered.
PS: that style of writing uses a technique to filter attention retention on interpretation. Stretches your "interpretation stack"
In plain English: the twin studies show us how similar twins are, but they don’t tell us how true the movie Idiocracy is.
Because there's a decent chance the initial statement isn't true.
[EDIT] To clarify, it's the difference between a seasoned test-taker understanding implicitly that they're looking at a (very simple) logic puzzle, not a question about reality, and someone taking the question at face-value (and assuming the first statement's some kind of trick, or simply an error). In a sense, answering it "correctly" demands that you act dumber.
[EDIT 2] I just checked, out of curiosity, and in fact the person who answers it "wrong" is closer to correct than the person who answers it "right", in actual reality. In a not-unreasonable sense, the "moron" who gets this wrong is more-correct than the trained monkey who answers zero. There's a zoo, evidently within the borders of Munich, and they do have elephants.
Faked data is a big problem as that pretty much requires at least some trust; but the analysis part of any decent paper should be something which should be convincing even to a "hostile" reader who doesn't want to believe the author.
If you're going to build a whole chain of logic, one that attempts to solve racism somewhere in the middle and ends with the "demon-haunted world of religion", it's useful to clearly define your terms first.
"Individual differences in intelligence tend to cluster in families" [1].
There are studies which include "parents in a twin design." They found "no significant shared environmental influence [between the adoptive and non-adoptive children]: all variance could be explained by additive genetic factors and environmental factors that are not shared by children raised in the same family" with "significant genetic transmission for intelligence...found at all ages" (§ 1.3).
[1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...
in both of those cases, as in all things genetic, expanding the ceiling is a far different matter. There is no known treatment I could have been given to enable me to run a 2 hour marathon. Similarly, there is no known way to cause a 100-IQ person to reliably test at a 140 IQ.
That said, progress is being made on artificial intelligence and genetics, so that could all change.
In 2019, a group of researchers from the University of Oslo published a study that found no evidence of a decline in IQ scores over time in Norway, despite claims of such declines in other countries. The researchers argued that the methodology used in previous studies may have contributed to false conclusions about declining IQ scores.
In contrast, a group of researchers from the University of Amsterdam published a study in 2018 that reported a decline in IQ scores in the Netherlands over the past several decades. The researchers suggested that changes in educational systems, such as increased emphasis on testing and memorization, may be contributing to the decline.
In traditional psychometrics intelligence is usually operationally defined in terms of the tests them selves. These tests correlate broadly with SAT scores and we can probably agree that disabilities and environments exists which gives people obvious disadvantage when taking the SATs, and that those people should be accommodated accordingly.
Given that you accept the operationally defined term for intelligence, how should we treat group difference in IQ any differently than how we treat (or aspire to treat) group difference in SATs? In other words, why should we care about IQ at all?
* SAT tests largely amount to IQ tests and are used extensively for college admissions in the US. College degrees from top US universities remain the most sought after degrees in the world.
* Magnet schools in urban areas regularly utilize IQ tests or their equivalents to elevate students into advanced coursework. This enables students to rise above their socioeconomic status.
* European secondary schools regularly use tests that correlate with IQ tests to track students into programs leading to universities versus technical schools. These tests help coordinate society and deploy human capital where it is most needed.
* Even the US military uses IQ tests to avoid accepting recruits who don't meet a certain standard. This aids in ensuring the security of western nations.
IQ testing could be used in additional areas, such as:
* Encouraging higher IQ parents to have more children through subsidies, thereby increasing the likelihood of future technological innovations assisting all mankind.
* Assisting in identifying individuals who need more support from society.
* Better understanding the causes behind social ills like poverty, drug addiction, homelessness and the like. Understanding that an individual's IQ is a stronger determinant of economic outcome than other variables, such as race, is a step toward a society with more solidarity and less friction.
I appreciate that you have a bias against intelligence testing, and I understand its genesis (your mention of the "eugenics craze" makes that clear). I'm suggesting society aim toward an enlightened view of these things where people's IQs don't identify them as "greater" or "lesser". Wishing IQ away is unlikely to work, particularly in a world about to experience the arrival of super-intelligent AI systems.
(I find it helpful to remember that lipstick-wearing is highly heritable despite zero genetic determination, and number of toes isn't very heritable at all despite total genetic determination.)
In particular, you can't convincingly go from discussing the seemingly profound effects acknowledging IQ heritability will have on racism, in order to avoid "demon-haunted" religious arguments, to a shrug and a handwave about genotypic (and epigenetic) effects vs. environmental effects. With due respect to your good-faith attempt to establish a logical baseline to this whole situation, the demons are haunting your argument, not those of people who'd push back on it.
It's an earlier rebuttal and you can find more precise and current ones now, but Ned Block's heritability piece is a good starting point for this stuff (you can just Google for "ned block heritable", the SERP will be dozens of links to it.)
I get that you're probably trying to take this thread in a different direction from raw heritability numbers, but the parent commenter was, correctly, rebutting a flawed previous argument based solely on heritability.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35518556
If I'm reading table S11 correctly, ICAR scores were 0.016 standard deviations lower on 2018 than in 2011.
I don't know whether the researchers chose those years for some specific reason, or if those years were the only ones available. It would be interesting to know whether the intervening years show a steady decline, or something more like a random walk.
Solving a problem with one or more right answers is very different from critical thinking. Anecdotally I've seen people coming from a heavy STEM background struggle with nuance and ambiguity more than people coming from a well-rounded or heavy humanities background. I doubt the programs themselves are worse for critical thinking (good luck controlling for confounds), but it's not obvious they're better, either.
Deductive reasoning is valuable but only applicable in a small number of real world arguments, as with math it generally has to do with determining consequences of an assumption. Heuristics and just plain inductive reasoning is generally what arguments are really about most of the time.
Edit:
I read a bit of Ned Block's piece. I believe he more or less immediately dismisses my view as "Extreme geneticism". While I don't agree that different groups in a given country grow up in the same circumstances, I also don't believe this matters much, if at all. If life teaches anything, it's that it's incredibly difficult to construct a machine that absolutely prevents the success of one group or another. Life is diverse and adaptable and finds a way. There are plenty of examples of groups historically facing terrible environments who nonetheless prospered.
Block also complains about a lack of sufficient data on the question of IQ. Fine, but one must immediately ask why there is such a lack of data. And that returns us to the demon-haunted world of quasi-religious opposition to such research.
Bottom line is, if you want to argue for the Rube Goldberg machine of -isms that produce differential outcomes in groups, prove it. I believe that, just as in other areas of human endeavor such as athletics, the prior should be that genetics are the most important input.
Also, intelligence tests are but a tiny part of psychology, I would hardly call it a "whole field".
We can ask why there isn't evidence of genetic determinism in intelligence, and you can claim it's because of demonic opposition to the research, and I can claim that it's because studies into those genetic connections haven't been productive, but either way, heritability statistics don't give you an answer. It's one thing to suggest that a paucity of results should motivate more studies, but what you're doing is closer to suggesting that a paucity of results is evidence for the claim. Obviously, no.
I believe it is worth studying and debating the definition of intelligence. I believe modern IQ tests do a reasonable job of crystallizing a value which is both meaningful and useful. In general, the goal is to quantify an individual's mental potential, which might be understood as their processor speed, amount of RAM in their brain, pre-programmed learning algorithm, and so forth. As with any concept in social sciences it's difficult to define it perfectly, but I believe it's worth the effort.
As for why we should care?
1. Western societies spend incredible amounts of resources on programs to equalize opportunity for people. Large fractions of this money in most western nations are allocated based on what I view to be a misunderstanding of what enables a person to prosper financially or otherwise. Examples include universal preschool and the like. Accepting the reality of IQ would assist in eliminating ineffective programs and allocating capital more effectively.
2. The quasi-religious doctrine of universal racism is an existential risk to modern liberal democracy, and it is built fundamentally on the false premise that IQ is environmental or doesn't exist. Eliminating that premise would allow consideration of other explanations for differential outcomes between groups that don't rely on accusations of hatred and bigotry.
3. Major research institutions across America and abroad, as well as large corporations, risk decreasing the rate of technological and economic progress by implementing programs built on a quasi-religious premise that people are treated vastly unequally for reasons having nothing to do with their capability. Accepting IQ as a valid science and explanation would not only de-taboo important potential areas of research, it would eliminate costly and wasteful efforts which will never bear fruit, as they seek to address problems which don't even exist.
4. An incorrect understanding of the causes behind achievement gaps provides onramps to corrupt political participants who take advantage of the basic logical fallacy that "false statements can imply anything" to redirect funding and attention away from pressing issues. Concretely, this results in death and violence resulting from failure to properly apply the law and failure to differentiate between what is true and what is false. "Without vision, a people perish."
5. Acceptance of IQ enables creation of tiered magnet schools, trade schools and other opportunities which benefit all of society, particularly those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder but who test high. Instead, at least in America, the trend is toward the elimination of all magnet programs because they are "racist." The harms here are obvious, and they all stem from an unwillingness to even consider that IQ exists and might be genetic.
6. Refusal to discuss IQ leads to it being something that is whispered about behind closed doors, but cannot be discussed openly. This directly harms those who are often (and often wrongly) associated with groups that might be thought to have lower IQs. Bringing the reality of IQ into the open enables a real conversation about it, and it allows confronting racists on much more solid ground, since the debate is no longer undergirded with taboos and untruths.
7. Acceptance of IQ allows targeting social programs toward the truly needy, accounting for the reality that in modern human life, IQ is the variable that best correlates with material success. This would eliminate injustices like affirmative action programs going to wealthy immigrants from other nations instead of those truly in need. It levels the playing field and could serve as a basis for rational policy such as targeted universal basic income.
8. AI research will ultimately force us to accept IQ as largely genetic. Accepting IQ now will avoid some sort of schism in the coming decades over this question, and allow a more rational discourse over AI's role in our lives and how to best harness it and avoid its risks.
Is that sufficient?
> I don't understand how your logic holds together once you concede that heritability doesn't mean "genetically determined".
And you wrote:
> You literally just said that you were using "heritability" as a synonym for "genetic determination". No, you can't do that.
I'm not sure which sentence I'm supposed to take as you saying what you mean, but yes, I can say I'm using "heritability" as a synonym for "genetic determination."
And, of course there is plenty of evidence that IQ is genetic. That's most of the reason why it's become a taboo area of research. If people were sure it was a waste of time, they'd just tell researchers to go ahead and check. Instead, they taboo it because they're afraid of what it would mean for their view of society if it turned out to be true, which it surely is.
As I mentioned in another thread, your claim that it's not genetic should not be the prior here. That would be like me claiming that people's maximum height being environmental should be the prior. It's just preposterous. Of course physical traits are primarily genetic. The brain is a physical object, therefore its structure is primarily genetic.
Later
You've extensively edited your comment. In response to those edits: if you look back at my comments, I think you'll see that I haven't made a claim about genetic determinism at all, only that the evidence you've presented doesn't support it.
I understand you think your view is scientific, but it just isn't. There is plenty of data on many, many traits being genetically determined, and IQ is no different. IQ absolutely has relatively less research, which enables you to poke holes in what is there. The reason there is less research is because of a quasi-religious belief that studying such a thing is "wrong." That belief would not exist if there weren't a substantial fear that such research would show conclusively that people have predetermined genetic ceilings for IQ (as they do for many other traits such as maximum VO2, height, etc.).
I see no convincing argument here that environmental explanations should be the prior. It's just like religion. Activists have essentially outlawed IQ research, then insisted on compelling evidence to change their minds. Such situations remind me of Galileo and his telescope.
The saddest part of all of this is watching society tear itself apart, laboring under the false assumption that the culture is beset by racist boogiemen. While evil people do undoubtedly exist, the vast majority of people are well-meaning. Being honest about IQ research would enable people to see that.
You suppose IQ to be genetically determined. That's fine, but you stated previously that it was heritable, which is a claim you could marshal evidence for, unlike your current claim. It's for that reason that it's important to distinguish the two concepts. It's you who brought in the claim that the evidence for heritability is "overwhelming". By your new definition of the term, I've reduced "overwhelming" to "hand-wavy" (your new evidence seems to consist of "other things are known to be genetically determined, and research into IQ determination has been "outlawed"). Not great.
It's unsurprising that people are reluctant to talk about this stuff given the level of rigor it's approached with.
It could also be that folks that dislike nuance and ambiguity self-select to go into STEM fields because the problems and answers/solutions are more clear-cut and 'concrete'.
Also:
Sure, and NQ tests do too, because look how well graciousness correlates with cheerfulness! That can't be an accident, can it?
Less snarkily, a better analogy would be athletic ability. Suppose you take a bunch of people and measure how fast they can run, how well they can shoot free throws, and how far they can throw a football. Will the results be correlated? Of course, some people are more athletic than others. Does that mean there's a quantity called 'athleticism' that we can objectively measure with a number? No; and not because all people are equally athletic, but because you're trying to take a squishy subjective English language word and pretend it's a scalar value.
> I would hardly call it a "whole field".
The problem isn't the size of the field, it's that academics work within their field, they don't refute it. There's a very uncomfortable result about IQ tests that a generation of psychologists have tried to explain away, and I maintain that the reason they haven't succeeded is because they are institutionally incapable of saying, "Hey, maybe this is pseudoscience."
I don't think we're really having a productive discussion here, since we're talking past each other, but so I'll just reiterate a key point you're ignoring:
It is virtually impossible to research IQ in Western universities, and doing so risks a loss of tenure.
Now, you're asking for rigor in proving to you that IQ is genetic. I'm arguing that genetic determination of IQ should be the prior, thus a priori no rigor is needed. And, the environmentalists should be saddled with the necessity of disproving genetic determination, not the other way round. You offer no refutation of this argument.
But, your demand for rigor is already preposterous on its face, because researching this topic is virtually impossible! And, those who do research it are immediately slandered as white supremacists and targeted with methodological critiques that, if applied equally to all social sciences, would sink essentially all well-meaning studies in this area.
I genuinely don't understand what mental gymnastics people go through to convince themselves that, in the face of essentially every other important human trait being genetically determined (even sexual orientation!), IQ is somehow exempt. My best guess it's a consequence of wanting to "belong" in a society that has rendered my views taboo. That was a key function of Catholicism in the 1400s in Europe. Groupthink has its place.
In any event, if you reply, please specifically explain to me why I should take your demands for more research data seriously when people who argue what you're arguing have made such research unfundable.
So... it's not a fallacy. It gives you a reasonable amount of information.
Nobody said he can't possibly be right about anything. That's an exaggeration so extreme as to be ridiculous.
How can it be a fallacy and useful information?
This leaves the test author with a challenge of establishing genre as test rules-of-engagement.
> * Encouraging higher IQ parents to have more children through subsidies, thereby increasing the likelihood of future technological innovations assisting all mankind.
This is a schoolbook example of a eugenicist argument. Are you sure you want to go there?
I’m gonna assume that you meant something different than what I took from this, and you are not a eugenicists. However I do want to speak a little about why eugenicists are wrong.
The problem with trying to select for IQ is that there is no broad consensus about what constitutes a good intelligent trait. There are thousands of traits that work differently in thousands of situations. When there is no consensus, somebody must take authority. And if that authority has nefarious reasons, than we are pretty screwed. More likely no such trait, nor sets of traits exist. As Charles Darwin him self demonstrated, there is value in diversity. By not selecting for a single trait, and allowing our cognitive abilities to vary as much as possible, there is way more chances of something beneficial to our species to develop and be selected for.
Now this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t accommodate for disabilities. However it isn’t 1908 any more. We have better tests and metrics to detect disabilities, and we have better means of accommodating. IQ has run its course. We don’t need it anymore. The science has advanced, and the theory is obsolete.
And this ties to the above post, and other posts you’ve done in this tree.
You seem to think there is some scientific is pretty sound and there is some suppression going on:
> 6. Refusal to discuss IQ leads to it being something that is whispered about behind closed doors, but cannot be discussed openly. This directly harms those who are often (and often wrongly) associated with groups that might be thought to have lower IQs. Bringing the reality of IQ into the open enables a real conversation about it, and it allows confronting racists on much more solid ground, since the debate is no longer undergirded with taboos and untruths.
If you think that, you’d be wrong. Modern psychology looks for behavior, if a model predicts behavior, your pretty good. IQ does no such thing. So perhaps it is sociology, not psychology and is looking for population statistics, well... IQ is pretty bat at that too. There are number of other metrics which does that better. The simplest one being school grades. And to apply Occam’s razor, why invent an entire new construct intelligence when grades suffice.
We don’t not discuss IQ. It has been done extensively for well over a century now. and IQ has simply lost to better theories. There is no taboo, just sore loosers that keep on and on about a theory that holds no relevance any more. Just look at The Bell Curve it’s been almost 30 years and we are still talking about it, despite it being a schoolbook example of how to do bad science. We finished talking about N-rays and phrenology a long time ago, it is time we do so with IQ as well.
IQ is dead, it was never anything more than a bad theory which took way too long formally die.
Long time ago someone explained to me that the engineering of IQ tests was actually drafted from a very large pool of (regularly updated) questions, where statistical significance was extracted to form a _core symposium_ of questions to sample from. Also, the IQ score itself was normalized to be normally distributed centered at 100.
With this understanding, I was under the impression that IQ was a relative measure, at a specific point in time, of one's placement in the distribution.
Which meant to me that IQ cannot "drop" across a population, the mean will always be 100. And IQ scores cannot be compared on a time series basis, since they are only cross sectional measures.
Is that all wrong? Is there some truth to it?
When the collective hive mind of a society is organized around anti-intellectualism (the core ethos of America), then it will subsidize a combination of stupid (less talent) and mental laziness (lack of productive application of talent). This is how a society enters the dustbin of history and emerges as a brutal and backwards people.
Does it really make sense to compare raw scores from different tests? If that were the case then the normalization step would be useless, we would have an absolute measure of intelligence.
It's like the authors overheard a single sentence on the topic in a bar and decided to turn it into an entire article without looking into it any further.
Its also very different from what STEM majors do. In life there are no specific right answers just ones that aren't wrong. STEM majors dont live in a world of binary right/wrong problems any more than anyone else does.
I'll try to cover his main points...
The various intelligence tests that exist show some positive correlation. The factor "g" is this degree of correlation. The best measure of g is Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM), which is a test of visual reasoning. Intelligence tests are periodically revised and recalibrated. Flynn noticed that subjects were scoring higher on older versions. Scores on arithmetic, vocabulary, and general information showed small gains or even declines. The greatest gains were on g-loaded tests such as RPM.
Given the performance of current students in school subjects, such a rise in general intelligence doesn't seem plausible. Because of this, Flynn thinks the tests don't really measure intelligence.
Various theories have been put forward to account for the change. The gains were far too rapid to result from genetic changes. Another theory was that Americans became more familiar with test taking in general and that transferred to IQ tests, but the rise continued for decades after the spread of broader education. Also, the tests more closely related to school content were not the ones showing the rise.
Nutrition caused people to grow taller and have bigger heads, but there is very weak empirical support for a connection between nutrition and intelligence. Also, a purely biological basis for the change would indicate a rise in all aspects of intelligence, which clearly wasn't the case.
There is a well established effect of schooling on IQ, but populations of children before schooling have shown gains comparable to populations of adults after schooling. Also, groups of subjects at different levels of education showed about the same gains. Finally, schooling affects tests of content more than of reasoning, but that wasn't reflected in rising test scores.
Modern children increasingly have exposure to things explicitly designed to stimulate their intelligence, e.g. Sesame Street and preschool. Early childhood intervention programs have been shown to have no lasting effect on IQ. The most intensive environmental enrichment programs have been shown to have some lasting effect on IQ, but nowhere near comparable to the Flynn effect.
Neisser proposes that changes in the cultural environment have caused the rise. Modern industrial culture produces vastly more of complex visual media. He thinks our increasing practice in analyzing complex imagery has caused the gains in performance on visual reasoning tests.
The other comment adresses your NQ argument, but here's something I don't understand: "There's a very uncomfortable result about IQ tests that a generation of psychologists have tried to explain away"
This reeks of anti-intellectualism by the way ("can't trust the experts!"), but I am curious to know what you're referring to. It can't be the validity or reliability of IQ tests, surely? Both have been very solidly established for a long time.
Do you really view lower IQ individuals as equal if you want them to have less children (at least as a ratio of total births)? The slippery slope argument would be that you're a few steps from sterilizations.
Are we sure that "super-intelligent AI systems" wouldn't displace intelligent individuals? Seems like they'd certainly be the ones wielding a middle-ground (say, GPT-6/7/8) most effectively but if an AI reached 100% coverage of human skills (imo unlikely in our life time) we wouldn't need any theoretical physicists.
I'm referring to HBD. Respectfully, if you're not familiar with that then you have a lot of prior art to catch up on before you expound on how well-grounded psychometry is.
Completions for "humanity majors lack cr": crossword, crossword clue
No humanity majors refuting the claim that they lack critical thinking skills, maybe because that is never claimed in the first place?
Made me pretty skeptical of the FE literature.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
This assertion is rather indicative of the social attitudes that are paired with IQ-obsessed worldviews. Western societies might attempt to equalize opportunity based on the belief in the equality of outcomes now, but these sorts of programs were effected long ago on the basis of egalitarian ideals that sprang from the Enlightenment. Even if IQ revealed any such "biotruths" (which would be debated to the end of time anyway), it would not reverse centuries of Western thought which is based on equal opportunity.
In short, this view completely misunderstands how Western society actually responds to differing abilities between people. It's akin to supposing that society would tear down wheelchair ramps in order to allocate resources to those who can walk unassisted.
It's not even how many non-Western societies handle inequality among populations. China has had preferential treatment to ethnic minorities even back in imperial times:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_China
And India, even back to the days of the Raj:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India
> incorrect understanding of the causes behind achievement gaps provides onramps to corrupt political participants who take advantage of the basic logical fallacy that "false statements can imply anything" to redirect funding and attention away from pressing issues.
It's quite naive of you to suppose that any pseudoscientific evidence to the contrary wouldn't still be used to support those positions. If anything, in the hypothetical world where differences were shown to be immutable from birth, it would only strengthen the call to allocate resources to those who are less fortunate. It might normalize such a position in perpetuity, as it would then become a problem born not only of recent centuries of exploitation, but evolutionary timescales. Beware your faith in biotruths, for they can be just as easily weaponized against you.
> AI research will ultimately force us to accept IQ as largely genetic.
A non sequitur as confidently stated as it is vapid. One could say an AI wrote it, but ChatGPT is at least smart enough to hedge its bets.
Aka there’s a 1 in 500 million chance this is a winning lottery ticket is useful even if it doesn’t guarantee things one way or the other.
Meanwhile, unbiased research has shown for a long time that there is no significant variations in IQ between races when considering socioeconomic factors. We've determined this with, guess what, psychometry, and it is the overwhelming consensus in psychology. If this was your main gripe with it, rest assured that the field you so underestimate is entirely dismissive of it.
It seems to me you're just looking for ways to dismiss decades of research based on misinformation perpetuated, overwhelmingly, by non-experts. Congratulations, you are in this group.
Edit: Don’t just downvote. Explain. That’s what we are here for.
All information is imperfect.
There are plenty of metrics you can use to quantify someones atheletic capability, not least of which is your bodies ability to hold and transport oxygen.
() I don't know the technical term, but the point stands.
You're denying settled science. Trying to tie it to the Bell Curve to assassinate the basic character of the science isn't tricking anyone. Pronouns in your profile only make this bad faith move easier to identify.
The previous response did not directly say if those studies suggested high-IQ parents resulted in high-IQ children. So did it?
As noted in the study, the largest influence they tested for archery performance was height. I'd bet a large sum of money that height is also a strong positive influence on many sports (eg basketball), similar to how G is an influence on many cognitive 'sports' like occupations. We can easily measure height and most would have no trouble believing that (largely genetic) factor greatly influences athletic performance. Why is IQ so different?
That point of time is somewhere in the past. And when tests are renormalized, there is a conversion of "this score on the old test is that score on the new test". This allows for comparisons of IQ over time, across different versions of the same test. This is how the Flynn effect was first discovered.
Tests usually have solid conversions between them, you can can compare across different tests as well. Such conversions allow more verification of the Flynn effect.
If you go back far enough, you will find tests for children measuring mental age vs physical age, taking a ratio, and multiplying by 100. They fell on a distribution that was close enough to normal centered at 100 with a standard deviation of 15 or 16 that adult tests were developed to match them.
Since we don't know all the factors behind the Flynn effect in the first place, we also don't know all the factors behind why it might be reversing now.
On the individual level stupider people reproduce more so evolutionary speaking it's more efficient to be stupid. However if a small portion of the population has high IQ they can move society forward via say the discovery of electricity, mathematics, etc, etc. This propels every individual forward as a whole at the detriment of a few individuals who are to nerdy or geeky to get laid that often.
Thus from a high level perspective, there is selection pressure that works on the population of people that makes it so that our genes have the mechanisms in place to produce an occasional genius via specific combinations of traits or via simple on/off switch mutations that easily occur.
For reference this is a short and informative video on the aforementioned topic: https://youtu.be/sP2tUW0HDHA
This allows you to model the test as a hierarchical statistical model with some general intelligence factor (denoted G) at the top and then specific cognitive tasks branch off from there. You can then infer what G is just by statistical inference on the "branches" (the performance on the individual cognitive tasks); similar to how you might infer someone's height if you only had access to their leg and arm lengths, as these are highly correlated with each other and also with height.
I believe IQ scores are always population normed to have a mean of 100 but unnormalized scores are likely available to compare across time.
Engineers deal with ambiguity all the time. They do so in a logical and systematic fashion using statistics and probability. Noise is an unfortunate fact of life.
https://aassjournal.com/browse.php?a_id=897&slc_lang=en&sid=...
I didn't see any specific research related to curling, but it is definitely a fairly high peak intensity activity that demands a high level of fitness:
https://curlnoca.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Curling-Heart...
If the cause of group differences in intelligence is found to be genetic then this will be of little avail.
Even if the test doesn't predict performance in every single sport, that doesn't mean it has zero predictive power in all sports.
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Similarly, I'm not saying IQ is destiny or even the largest factor in any given endeavour, its not. But its equally wrong to say its not a factor at all. It is somewhere in the middle.
Like most metrics, it doesn't capture the entirety of the squishy concept as you say, but it does capture something about it.
I think we understand this in many other areas. Look at PE ratio or revenue growth for a stock, look at goals on target for a football striker, VO2max or running economy for a runner, mileage for a car. IQ is understandably more controversial but the concept is the same.
You suppose me to be attempting to refute an argument that IQ is genetically determined. I don't have to do that. No valid argument has been presented that it is. Your original argument supposed that the evidence for genetic determination was "overwhelming", but you believed that because you mistook the term "heritability" as a synonym for "genetic", when it is in fact a ratio "genetic/everything".
As for research funding: you also can't get a grant to prove that the Earth is flat, and that fact is persuasive to some people, who have taken to renaming the atmosphere the "atmosflat". Generally, you want your logic to be stronger than that of flat-Earthers.
That doesn't make your supposition that IQ is genetically determined wrong (I think it's wrong, but don't pretend to have demonstrated that). It just makes your logic faulty.
It of course takes side on some issues like Atheism, Religion but nothing unexpected for a site to be unapologetically rational/empirical.
It's a 2 hour video essay that covers psychometry generally as a lens to understanding a book called the Bell Curve that was a flashpoint for questions about the validity of IQ science generally (but most especially how it applies to race). It took a good chunk of my Sunday to get through it, but it was really enjoyable and gave me a ton of insight into a ton of buzzwords and studies I had heard of but couldn't really dig my teeth into.
I think with this topic, getting a briefer, less nuanced summary than something like this would be a mistake because of how much misunderstanding of these topics permeates popular culture. The video also provides a number of studies and books to keep going beyond the relatively breif 2 hours of content it provides.
It uses the famed/infamous book the Bell Curve as a case study and delves into how they were originally created, how they are updated, how the term hereditery when used in genetics means something that is sometimes counter-intuitive to the definition used in popular culture (for example whether someone wears earings has high heritability, whereas having 2 arms has effectively zero herritability) the statistical meaninfullness of factorization (G-factor) of domains of IQ into a single numerical value, how these domains came to be defined, the current state of understanding regarding the local vs enviornmental source of IQ for individuals, how the Flynn effect was observed, etc.
But to answer a bit of your earlier question. When IQ tests are created, they create a set of questions, test it on a sample group, and set the average value to 100 and higher/lower scores depending on what the distribution of correct answers is. The Flynn effect happened because researchers noticed while the average for new tests always is set at 100, people scoring 100 on a more recent test were generally scoring even higher on previous years tests. The article of the reverse Flynn effect is a little bit sensationalist because as it mentions while some areas (like Spatial Reasoning) are improving, others are apparently starting to get lower. This calls into question a bit the idea of a G-Factor which is an assumption that their is a common factor of intelligence that covaries across all IQ domains (spatial reasoning, reaction time, etc... ) which is the theoretical reasoning behind IQ being meaningfully represented as a single numerical value rather than a multi-dimensional value.
Being known for making leaps in this process and draw unwarranted conclusions is sufficient to make one suspicious and warrant extra scrutiny on other conclusions.
There are many ways to fail in scientific process, if even by pure luck. And yet more by systematic error.
Ad-hominem and appeal to authority is an annoying tactic one has to successfully defeat. Declaration of "it's a fallacy" is worthless at doing so. What you need to do is still to present your arguments in a solid way, at which the blog post failed anyway.
The ad-hominem does not apply to classification - you can make a classification mistake, but ad-hominem is not about that. It's about attacking the author's directly, and an argument that a source is unreliable because statistical claim is not of this nature as it relies on proposition to be shown true or false. Ad-hominem relies on a true but irrelevant fact. The argument above relies on a relevant proposition.
So by mentioning ad-hominem (which is quite specific) in a wrong context, you have made an argument from fallacy fallacy and additionally a pure mistake.
The one you might have wanted is Fundamental Attribution Error also known as correspondence bias, since the talk is about classes of authors and their trustworthiness based on publication medium. Even then, the claim on reliability of blog posts is to be shown or disproven, not offhand discarded.
That's the wrong way to learn STEM, and is the fault of your high school.
Sadly, I know some highly educated STEM professionals who rigorously use the scientific method to separate truth from crap in their field. Outside their field, the scientific method goes right out the window and they rely on emotional arguments and wishful thinking.
Admittedly I haven't really studied statistics, but can't you do something like measure those abilities for a population, do a PCA, and define athleticism to be the first principal component?
IQ is an example of factor analysis [0] where an unobserved "general intelligence factor" g is derived from observed items. The items are chosen so that responses correlate with each other and with g (basically, if the same person took two IQ tests with different questions then the score should be about the same). There may be some intermediate factors like verbal ability or spatial ability. The items here will be chosen so that they correlate only with items of the same factor--e.g. verbal items correlate with verbal items but do not correlate with spatial items.
A raw score on the test is not meaningful; individuals are compared against the population of test takers to determine their rank in the population. First, raw scores of the population are normalized so that the mean is 100 and the standard deviation is 15 (this is arbitrary; it's just the scale they use). Then an individual test taker can be compared with the population on this scale. The percentile rank can be obtained directly from the IQ score and vice versa.
You have some questions about the shifting mean of 100. In practice the normed distribution is computed from a norming group rather than recomputing the norm after ever test. A particular population can shift from the norming group (either over time or because it's a group with different characteristics) which is where things like the Flynn Effect come from. So a lot depends on the norming group.
I hope that answered some of your questions.
Interestingly, you could substitute "homicide rate" for "IQ" here and the statement would still be accurate. Ignorance is bliss?
>The study, published in the journal Intelligence, used an online, survey-style personality test called the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project to analyze nearly 400,000 Americans. The researchers recorded responses from 2006 and 2018, in order to examine if and how cognitive ability scores were changing over time within the country.
Presumably the testing scores collected between the 1930s and 1990s weren't online tests. I wonder if the drop is explainable by people not taking an online IQ test very seriously during the golden age of the buzzfeed quiz.
You should also be aware the Arthur Jensen is one of the scientists which Gould is criticizing, and that his reputations hasn’t gotten any better since 1980. This source of yours is hardly an impartial one.
I don't understand what is being claimed. Are you suggesting that twin studies show (or would show) that children inherit lipstick-wearing behavior from their parents, even when raised apart from them?
If this behavior is inherited, but is not genetic, what is the claimed mechanism by which it is inherited?
This article utilises feminist technoscience studies' notions of bodily 'materialisation' and 'ontological choreographies', offering a cyborg feminist account...
Modern academia outside of most STEM programs leads to things like this. I've seen a few English 101 professors that valiantly try to get their freshman past a 5th grade reading and writing level (to some success) and to actually think critically. But once you enter the hallowed halls of academia and begin to learn the language and methods of reasoning, which are lacking. I can call out one such methodology (it has a name that I've long forgotten) that allows one to make claims and assertions about the contents of a text without considering the authorial intent at all. It is essentially a codified method of casting aspersions. So-and-so becomes a gay lover, such-and-such is an allegory for communism, and so on.
I'll go ahead and blame 'process philosophy', the rejection of the absolute, the rejection of the spiritual, the obsession with a mechanistic existence, and the blind faith that -- somehow -- humanity is getting better all the time.
Where our reasoning faculties are now has been centuries in the making, even the founding fathers of the United States argued about rationalism and its rejection of the divine.
But the rationalists prevailed, and after them Marx, Lenin, Freud, and others.
And now we're here.
Out of context, a sentence like “there aren’t penguins in Texas”, could be synonymous to “penguins aren’t native to Texas”, at least to my ear.
It takes some familiarity with these kinds of questions to know that you’re meant to interpret these premises as axiomatically true and then derive a conclusion purely from the premises.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_(journal)
Seriously though, they observed a reverse Flynn effect by taking a thin slice of negative test results from a test that doesn’t even measure IQ and finding it statistically significant. This kind of reminds of when climate deniers take a tiny slice of climate records and claim the earth is actually getting cooler.
---
Unsurprisingly you’ll actually find many IQ researchers in institutions which are still trying to deny climate change. E.g. Charles Murray is now working for the American Enterprise Institute.
What one does with that reasoning is up to them (and it is often twisted in laughable ways, see the portion of an abstract I posted up-thread). Often times the brightest thinkers have been from 'soft' sciences like history or sociology. I think it is because of the abstraction required to reasonable think about these subjects.
This websites opinion aligns pretty closely with my impression: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/rationalwiki/
The overall trend is down, sure. But… year by year variance across education groups seems to be highly correlated. Like in 2011 there’s a positive bump in performance equally in Grad students and high school students. And in 2014 everyone dropped.
Like… come on. That seems like an enormous red flag to the validity of the measurement. The year by year variance (normalized against the trend) should be random across groups unless there is something specifically different about that year. Presuming people didn’t briefly all get smarter in 2011, it’s crazy that all groups tested better.
The only plausible answer is that the test was easier in 2011 right? And if that’s true, how confident can we really be that it isn’t just testing variance?
Edit: that is to say, per the central limit theorem, the sample means of each sub group per year should be normally distributed around the mean. Let’s assume our null hypothesis is the reverse Flynn decline. We should expect that for a given year that some groups will do worse than the trend prediction and some groups will do better. Since we instead see that all groups do about the same relative to the prediction, we should infer that our data is not a random sampling of scores that are described by the mean of that trend line. In fact, the scores seem to be better described by other unseen factors that are specific to each year.
There's still a significant chunk of philosophy which isn't like that at all. Sure, there's a lot of "Continental philosophy" which ends up looking largely indistinguishable from the "critical theory" cant to which you object (although, maybe, it is unfair to tar all of it with that brush). But philosophy in the analytic/Anglo-American tradition has maintained much of its immunity against that disease.
Similarly, there's still plenty of work published in fields such as history, economics, sociology, political science, etc, which (mostly or entirely) sticks to good old-fashioned factual arguments. For example, sociology of religion – try reading the late Rodney Stark's work on applying rational choice theory to the study of religions, or Eric Kaufmann's contributions to religious demography – you won't find any "cyborg feminism" in either of them.
It's cool that that's your understanding, but you're wading into territory that gets people sterilized and killed. I have a lot of trust in science, but not here. This video was informative for me: https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo
For example, here's an IQ test; let's say its given to 5,000,000 Canadians, and 3,000 Texans (1):
* What is the capital city of Canada?
* Which Canadian province is the largest by land area?
* Who is considered the "Father of Medicare" in Canada?
* Name the two official languages of Canada.
* Which Canadian team won the Stanley Cup in 2017?
* What is the national sport of Canada?
* What is the name of Canada's national anthem?
* Name the famous Canadian dish made with fries, cheese curds, and gravy.
* Who was the first Prime Minister of Canada?
* In which Canadian city is the CN Tower located?
(1) I asked ChatGPT to come up with this test.
(edit: formatting)
They don't seem to know about the g factor, which I've linked to many times today. The existence of it means one thing: smart is smart. If you're above average at "mental labor", you're also above average at learning the tools you can leverage to make your labor better faster. This would explain why the calculator didn't shatter the economic predictiveness of the g factor, and neither did the computer, and neither will ChatGPT until it becomes a true AGI. Until mental labor stops being a thing, g factor will always be a strong (though not absolute) predictor of economic success, and so will IQ tests, since they measure it.
I don't see how the comment is related to the article however. The g factor going down in general wouldn't change this correlation; it's still better to be smarter no matter what the average is.
Humanities majors are equipped with their own toolbox of concepts the same way STEM majors are equipped with theirs. For example, a philosophy major would learn important distinctions such as analytic/synthetic, extension/intension, descriptive/prescriptive, a priori/a posteriori, ontological/epistemological, type/token and so on. These are not concepts that you read once and remember and you've 'learned' them. It takes a lot of reading and writing and thinking and arguing over the course of years to grok. When done well, it can greatly illuminate a problem. Expressing the argument formally or in symbolic logic is usually a trivial exercise afterwards, the nature of philosophical inquiry puts the 'critical thinking' prior to the formal parts.
For example, consider the SEP article on Two-Dimensional Semantics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/two-dimensional-semantics...
The article is riddled with formal sections containing matrices and symbolic logic. But these are not the argument itself, and the people who came up with this framework did not arrive at this analytically through formal proofs. Rather, the formal aspects are only used to aid the intuition and remove ambiguity for readers. The bulk of the thinking requires creative and precise conceptual analysis that borrows and reinterprets a variety of well-trodden ideas in other areas of philosophy.
The more sociological and cultural departments of humanities probably have their own set of skills that are considered their versions of critical thinking. I imagine in cultural theory, one probably needs to know several interpretations of history to analyze their problems, since that fields literally deals with how historical baggage muddies the way we even define said problems to begin with. A STEM education, in a vacuum, is not going to be equipped with those tools. Why would they be? To think critically about cultural theory requires understanding facts that are embedded in its subject specific concepts. My ability to work through proofs in discrete mathematics is not going to be helpful here. But my ability to analyze history through say, systems of power is probably going to be necessary. That kind of thinking is missing from STEM, and trivially so -- it literally has nothing to do with STEM.
That is not a failure or criticism of STEM. That would be akin to criticizing English Lit departments for not engaging with math. But (and this is often the context "critical thinking" as a boon that the humanities offers is brought up) being able to recognize a politician's actions as bullshit is going to require more than just 'formal proof' -- it's going to require an ability to sort through social, historical, qualitative, ethical, and philosophical landmines. That ability is critical thinking.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Progressive_Matrices?w...
“Word embeddings utilize neural networks to create high-dimensional vector representations of words [..]”
I had to look up ontological choreography and it‘s just a concept, not unlike the weird jargon in CS. Is there at least a tiny speck of a sliver of possibility that we lack actual perspective and competency in these fields?
A lot of engineers I’ve encountered who have little social science or humanities experience seem to not be well equipped to critically evaluate works in those disciplines when they do encounter them. Which makes them vulnerable to crackpot ideology, or just latching onto the first thing they encounter that makes sense to them.
It works both ways though. Many a non-technical CEO has been talked into buying some worthless overpriced piece of enterprise software over the objections of their IT department.
Why don't we like the alleged 'relativism' of Continental philosophy? That tells us something about the culture we live in, and is worth thinking about it. Ironically, it's the concepts in Continental philosophy that allows us to talk about it the best, even if by doing so we end up disagreeing with its most notorious thinkers. Just my two cents.
Some philosophers whose works I've read and enjoyed: Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia; Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons; Peter Singer's Practical Ethics; Graham Priest's In Contradiction; Graham Oppy's Arguing about Gods; Edward Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God – that's a rather eclectic and idiosyncratic list, including books by authors which radically disagree with each other (e.g. Feser's book tries to prove God exists, Oppy's book argues all known proofs of God's existence fail) - but you definitely won't find any of that "critical theory" cant in any of them
He is not just dismissing your view as "extreme geneticism". He literally explains how fallacious it is to conflate heritability with genetic determination. Using that to make judgments about genetic determination of IQ is therefore methodologically flawed and the only intellectual honest course of action is to dismiss these types of judgments outright.
https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/230/1/19...
I should point out that I did say (with added emphasis):
> Sure, there's a lot of "Continental philosophy" which ends up looking largely indistinguishable from the "critical theory" cant to which you object (although, maybe, it is unfair to tar all of it with that brush)
In other words, a lot of it really is that bad – but not all of it.
I myself have to admit I've always been rather fascinated by Foucault, and I think a lot of what he has to say is rather interesting and of contemporary relevance–especially his viewpoint that sexual orientation is a set of contingent cultural constructs, rather than some essential reality of persons
Žižek too – I've read some of his essays, sometimes he makes some insightful points (to me at least) – although I haven't read his philosophical works, and his essays I've read, I'm not sure if they should be classified as "philosophy" per se
> Why don't we like the alleged 'relativism' of Continental philosophy?
How does it answer the classic objection that relativism is self-defeating?
I don't think "relativism" is the biggest complaint though. The biggest complaint is obscurantism–which risks dressing up the trivial as profound, and hiding falsehoods behind fancy language. And imprecision–analytic philosophy is very much about precise definitions and precise arguments, which makes it easier to judge whether an argument succeeds or fails, and to work out whether the parties to a dispute are actually arguing about the same thing or just talking past each other–Continental philosophy tends to be much more impressionistic in character, making it harder to work out what people are saying, and to judge the quality of their arguments
The term "ontological choreography" comes across to me as something like an arrangement or dance of meanings and appears to have been coined by someone whose concern was normalization of LGBTQ families via surrogate parents and possibly other technology. I could not have guessed any connection there from the actual meanings of those words and it doesn't really convey any information I know how to use.
Reading "Word embeddings utilize neural networks to create high-dimensional vector representations of words" is something precise enough that I could probably make software to create an embedding and feed it to a neural net given time and a few more details. It sounds like it's not so distant from what I did more than 20 years ago making a simple Markov chain in a few lines of Perl. The only ambiguous part is what the neural networks actually do with the Markov chain of words, because that's not stated in your quote.
The continental thinkers (starting with Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger) are asking questions like "What is one's place in the world?" or "How do forces of history affect the deepest parts of people?" or "How does our Western scientific worldview limit other kinds of knowledge?" On the surface, this is going to seem a lot more 'subjective' and is partly why it gets obscure very, very fast. Personally, I think it's still worth reading, but that's because I find those issues interesting to begin with.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
And of course you wouldn't do that for a broken clock, but you are here taking information from 'historical reliability' which is a problem because it's simply not a thing that can affect the truth or falsity of the argument made any more than the broken hands of the clock can affect the current time.
But -- and as a reply to the complaints of its obscurantism -- it's also not obvious that arguments in Continental philosophy can be re-expressed in an atomic way without losing its fundamental essence. If we could, then and only then can we accuse thinkers of being fluffy and imprecise obscurantists. However, many of these philosophies are ones that criticize reductive, logocentric discourse to begin with! In other words, that is a feature, not a bug of the philosophical tradition.
> The existence of it means one thing: smart is smart. If you're above average at "mental labor", you're also above average at learning the tools you can leverage to make your labor better faster.
But isn't this highly reductive? The very responses in this thread attempt to explain the improvement in spatial reasoning can be attributed to video games, at least three responses independently advance that hypothesis. If societal responses to the tests change over time, doesn't that mean the tests themselves are not objective across all time periods?
Funnily enough, that comment suggests that someone who grinded thousands of hours of Tetris would have higher spatial reasoning than a novice, and that's the precise category that the study in the OP reports has improved.
> Until mental labor stops being a thing
But the point is, mental labor changes over time. The measure of g measured by arithmetic tests might go down if society deemphasizes arithmetic because of technological changes. What exactly goes into g, and are those measures the only possible ways of quantifying intelligence?
> I can barely tell what point, if any, they're trying to make.
The comment is highly critical of modern psychometrics, because they argue that the tests in those field have not caught up with societal shifts that impact the results on those tests, using "working memory" as an example. Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia article on g you linked above mentions the following:
"One theory holds that g is identical or nearly identical to working memory capacity. Among other evidence for this view, some studies have found factors representing g and working memory to be perfectly correlated. However, in a meta-analysis the correlation was found to be considerably lower."
So sounds like experts disagree on the specifics.
Also, their thesis is fairly straightforward:
>> The more general critique is that "intelligence research" has ossified around Cargo Cult psychometrics. At one point, "orally administered arithmetic word problems" were a fantastic proxy for economically useful mental faculties. That is no longer true. As the set of useful capacities change, so too should psychometric evaluations. Both because treatment effects are going to make cross-generational comparisons worse than useless, and also because the thing being measured has become irrelevant.
> it's still better to be smarter no matter what the average is.
Certainly, but the devil's in the details.
This site is dense in terms and acronyms that generally will not appear in a dictionary, which does not appear to be unusual. Many interests and professions have a frightening number of terms and acronyms now.
But here's the thing. How does this critical thinking methodology fit in with the strong leftward tilt? I don't know of any successful Marxist societies (forcible or voluntary), so why do critical thinkers think they can get Marxism to work?
Here's a topical example:
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/violent-enough-to-stand-...
When the facts don't fit Marxist theory, the researcher gets cancelled.
Here's what I see is the difference between humanities critical thinking, and STEM critical thinking. In STEM, if you design an airplane, and the airplane doesn't fly, no amount of wishful thinking and rhetorical reframing is going to make it fly. The humanities have no such constraint.
For another example, Seattle recently completed a $1 Billion new terminal at Seatac to accommodate new larger planes. After it was finished, they discovered that the airplanes did not fit in the slots for them. There's just no way to spin that one into a success.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-t...
Well, Nietzsche himself insists that his "perspectivism" isn't a mere "relativism" or "subjectivism". But, exactly what the difference between the the former and the latter is, is complicated and murky and debatable, and I don't think we should exclude the possibility that counterarguments against the latter may end up succeeding against the former as well.
> But -- and as a reply to the complaints of its obscurantism -- it's also not obvious that arguments in Continental philosophy can be re-expressed in an atomic way without losing its fundamental essence.
I think it is hopeless to read Nietzsche, for example, as presenting some sort of ordered philosophical system, like Aquinas' Summa or Spinoza's Ethics. But, I think, Nietzsche is under-appreciated as a poet. And reading some of his works as poetry and fiction – you can extract some ideas from them which are very amenable to being put in a precise form. For example, eternal recurrence – he may well have not meant it so literally, but there certainly are cosmological theories in which eternal recurrence is entirely literal, and I think one could fruitfully work out the philosophical implications of such a theory using traditional analytic methods
> However, many of these philosophies are ones that criticize reductive, logocentric discourse to begin with!
For me, it really comes down to this – I've read some Nietzsche, and I enjoyed it – even when he's wrong, he's entertaining. I tried reading Derrida – and I gave up. Nietzsche convinced me he had something worthwhile to say; Derrida failed to do so before he ran out of my attention.
> I could not have guessed any connection there from the actual meanings of those words and it doesn't really convey any information I know how to use.
The word "I" is important here. I could not do anything with this either: "Let X be a compact connected Riemann surface of genus g, equipped with a holomorphic differential ω having a non-zero integral over X [..]"
I'm not saying social studies have the same level of rigor and precision, but it's another thing entirely to dismiss a whole field of study just because you couldn't reproduce it in perl.
Some topics just cannot be grasped with tweezers. You just have to try to be precise with the fuzziness and that's not easy.
Calling these twin studies as settled science is the most bad faith move here, since the chief problem of this section of The Bell Curve is that it confuses heritability with genetic determination, a mistake that informed scientists wouldn’t make. Unsurprisingly, that is why there is widespread scientific backlash against it.
Believe it or not, twin black babies separated at birth and raised with white parents are still treated as black by society.
At best, the equivalent of a broken clock is "Your link fails to provide any evidence or logic at all." And that is a properly reasoned and extremely strong condemnation, not a fallacy.
At worst, we recognize that most topics have fewer different opinions than there are times in the day, and being wrong often enough on some topic might mean you anti-correlate with the truth.
Though there are much less extreme cases where it's reasonable to warn about an author. Maybe some author makes true posts 2/3 of the time and lies 1/3 of the time. Even though such an author would probably be right in any arbitrary post, it's still worth warning a potential reader about their habit of lying.
Compare that to the following sentence taken from the field of "feminist technoscience": "Examples of masculine-coded technologies under these categories included ARPANET..." [0] Even if we can provide some kind of meaningful definition of "masculine-coded technology" such that ARPANET counts as one – is that saying anything true or useful? That seems far more open to debate than the equivalent questions for "word embeddings" and "neural networks". And that's why it isn't really fair to compare machine learning, as a discipline, to feminist technoscience – the truth and usefulness of the former is rather beyond dispute, the same things are much much more open to question for the latter.
> I'm not saying social studies have the same level of rigor and precision, but it's another thing entirely to dismiss a whole field of study just because you couldn't reproduce it in perl.
There are some approaches to social studies, which while they might not be "reproducible in Perl", seem on a much firmer footing – I mentioned before the rational choice theory of religion, advocated by the late sociologist Rodney Stark. It is far easier to derive testable hypotheses from it, for one thing. People write whole books attacking it (whether successfully or not) – like Steve Bruce's Choice and Religion – precisely because it makes claims which are firm enough to be attacked.
-General intelligence (g) is the best predictor of job performance.
-The predictive validity of g is higher than work experience.
-G facilitates the acquisition of job-related knowledge, resulting in better job performance.
-G provides predictive validity for all jobs, regardless of complexity level.
-Specific aptitude tests tailored for each job do not add predictive validity over general intelligence tests.
-These findings could impact employee selection and training practices in various industries.
If I wanted to normalize LGTBQ families with "ontological choreography" I can't get enough meaning out of that to even know where to begin to help.
> it's still worth warning a potential reader about their habit of lying.
The best way to do that will always be to point to the lie, instead of calling them a liar, because that strategy can't be copied by other liars.
That does not mean that every person in those departments is a communist. Marx simply did a lot of early table-setting for critiquing capitalism. Later thinkers did a lot to extend and refute him, so I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that critical theorists are trying to make “Marxism work”. To my knowledge, orthodox Marxists hate a lot of critical theory. Foucault, for example, is widely read in these circles, but as much as he criticized capitalism and society, he was ultimately a neoliberal. Politics is messy and critical theory is not a monolith.
The wishful thinking part cuts both ways. Leftists members of the academy would probably criticize liberals for wishful thinking that say, the capitalist status quo with some modifications could actually save us from climate catastrophe, or that the most sensitive and important parts of being human are not lost when we live under what they consider a structurally unjust system. Or the blind optimism that the “moral arc of history bends towards justice”.
Given that Marxist-Leninism has failed (although MLs would argue otherwise), I agree with the sentiment that it would be unwise to “try it again”. But an honest and charitable engagement with Marx would show that the claims he makes are rather minimal and broad. His relevance is tied to the fact that he can be reinterpreted, and it would be wrongheaded to see it as any more dogmatic than run of the mill non-leftist, folk politics. The guy simply had a lot to say about the industrial revolution.
> Their truth and usefulness is really beyond dispute;
That's what I call things that can be picked up by tweezers, concrete issues that have clear and unambigious manifestations that we all - or virtuall all - agree on.
Those are the easy things. It's very comfortable to pick them up and turn them around and analyze them. There is no ambiguity, no pesky fuzziness. I understand why certain personality types gravitate towards it and I belief myself to be such one, but I'd say be careful about proclaiming them the only things worth studying.
Sometimes things are not that clearly demarcated and even in a rigorous field such a abstract mathematics the concept of "usefulness" is not of primary concern. Also sometimes the reality of a thing itself is not obvious and needs to be studied. Sometimes it's not even clear what we are looking at - try reading anything by Heidegger. Philosophy is a field riddles with those kind of studies.
> is that saying anything true or useful? That seems far more open to debate
Throw me a bone here, but is the fact that it's not yet clear if it is true or useful, but cannot be ruled out immediately a signal that there's more to it than we currently know? Again, not saying "biomedical homological technofeministic cyborgism wrt ecosystemical unidirectionalism" (me having fun now) is equivalent to studying the properties of neural networks, but just pointing out that reality is multifaceted and that you cannot just skip entire domains of reality just because you cannot replicate it in, again, perl (or math). It's uncomfortable, it lacks precision, but we have to start somewhere and math ain't cutting it.
With that said, if you look at a page like this: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard , it's very similar to an ED page minus all the outlandish racism.
> The steepest slopes occurred for ages 18–22 and lower levels of education.
So they're blaming faulty education for people being bad at the test. Now I want to see the RCT to prove this hypothesis. (With controls for experimenter effect.)
PCA/CCA almost never tells you what the components are. ICA is a bit better at that but still not great.
The ARPANET thing is actually an interesting example, because the Department of Defense (war) is very obviously masculine-coded. It seems reasonably true to say that a lot of technology and science is masculine coded for all sorts of different reasons. Honestly, it’s trivially true to suggest that engineering is seen as a masculine profession because of particular historical circumstances, some of which probably had to do with explicitly patriarchal societies, so I don’t see what the fuss is. I can totally see why someone who spends a lot of time thinking about gender and ways of making a more egalitarian society would find this interesting and useful. It might be very niche, but so is any sufficiently advanced topic in research.
I also don’t really know who is to say one thing (machine learning) is more useful than another (feminism). You could be right, but that is a value driven claim which, ironically, is something that is going to be parsed out in philosophical debate and prose, not lines of code.
It seems to me that most complaints against the “fuzziness” of studies in the humanities are the politically bent ones, which makes me suspicious that the disdain is for particular political views or conclusions, as if to dismiss these views as spurious and non-academic. It’s certainly not scientific, but that does not mean it is not serious, and science is certainly not the final or only arbiter of what is real or worthy of intellectual consideration.
No we didn't. We started with "It's worth looking up whose blog this is before trusting any of its analysis."
And then "Adjust accordingly. I'm not telling you how to adjust, only that you're likely to want to."
And other people cited sources right up top.
Nobody made a fallacy of saying it must be wrong because he said it.
Whereas we built an airport and the plane doesn't fit is something not something anyone can argue about. Either the planes fit or they don't. Humanities academia devolves into Marxism so fast exactly because it's not pinned down by reality in that way, which is why it should just be abolished. Why should the rest of us be forced to pay for gibberish like "cyborg techno-feminism"?
Okay, but "feminist technoscience" and "feminism" are not the same thing.
"Machine learning" is a tool which can obviously be used to do useful things–although no doubt harmful things too. "Feminism" is a diverse set of values and policy preferences, which promote themselves as beneficial for women – and while we can debate the details, very few would disagree that many women have derived real-world personal benefits from at least some of those policies. My late grandmother used to complain about how – in the late 1940s – she was forced to resign from her bank job (which she loved) the week before her wedding, because the bank's policy was not to employ married women. She absolutely welcomed the law being changed to make those kinds of corporate policies illegal, and while she didn't benefit from that law change personally, her daughters-in-law (my mother included) and grand-daughters did. We can debate whether everything feminists ask for is right (they aren't all asking for the same things anyway), but (unless you are some kind of ultra-reactionary), it is rather obvious that some of their ideas have been positive developments for women, and for society in general. By contrast, what good could "feminist technoscience" do for my grandmothers, my mother, my wife, my sister, my daughter?
Vs
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/encyclopedia-dramatica/
> SATIRE
> These sources exclusively use humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues. Primarily these sources are clear that they are satire and do not attempt to deceive. See all Satire sources.
> Update: This source is no longer online.
Why not just associate intelligence with how wealthy your parents are and call it done?
A lot of scientific research is bad and you shouldn't trust it when it comes from a pre-credibility revolution field!
ie: Saying A which is true 90% of the time and B which is true 90% of the time so given A and B then C sounds reasonable until you continue with given C and D which is also X% true…. The individual probability that A, B, or D is wrong makes the chain of reasoning rapidly worthless.
Thus the error is using probabilistic statements without acknowledging they weaken an argument.
Women are famously known to not be more attracted to smarter men (by which I mean, men who the women consider more intelligent, and who are emphasizing intelligence over other things.) They're probably right; if it was evolutionarily fit, we'd already have it. But we have enough trouble with childbirth as is, and populations that are considered smarter (by people who believe IQ tests are validly constructed and administered) also often have more genetic diseases.
People who actually understand statistics like Taleb don't believe that IQ is a valid measurement or that it makes you a better person, of course, because "single number go up means better" is not how real life works.
Minimal example: if you gave a test to a living person and a corpse, only one of them would finish it, and that one would also have a higher income.
Also note the "highest intelligence" jobs don't always have the highest income, like academia, but rather involve taking lots of tests as a prerequisite.
[0] if it did, this wouldn't mean anything, because it can't be used to make predictions, because you don't know if any random person X you are trying to predict trait Y of has these "genetics".
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BARTERICMP25UPZSUSA
> lack of productive application of talent
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12027662
?
Or in other words, the reason you're not smarter is because nobody's invented a surgery to make you smarter yet. And the reason you're not less smart is that nobody's hit you over the head with a rock. If either of those scenarios happened, your ancestry wouldn't get to object much.
Causation can be determined by experiments (either "natural experiments" or intervention studies), but obviously these are both technically impossible and usually immoral to do on humans. Some fields like (…parts of) economics and medicine do experiment design properly, but many others (genetics, psychology, nutrition) just kind of ignore it and hand-wave something about P-values. This is ok if you're only using genetics to create 23AndMe ancestry charts, but it won't be once we actually have gene editing capabilities to inform.
If this is the goal, and we want to measure specific physical capabilities we know exist, why do we do it entirely by having people sit down and take tests and not by measuring their brain directly?
(It's because we don't know what the specific physical capabilities are, which is why we're pretending a descriptive statistic is causative.)
Either IQs are going up (and racial gaps closing) on a non evolutionary timescale due to environmental changes that should be studied and encouraged by government policy or IQs are not a good measure of genetic intelligence.
Their policy preferences are for the government not to intervene to improve IQ scores or close racial gaps. But they also want to make radical policy based on IQ because it's such an important measure.
I always felt that just means it's poorly defined. If you can't precisely define what exactly it is you are arguing about and what are the premises in play then we are just wasting everyone's time.
> It takes a lot of reading and writing and thinking and arguing over the course of years to grok.
But that's just learning the domain.
I'm under the impression that humanities people claim that they can think in a different way that STEM people can't.
Frankly, I feel almost everything can be processed via first order logic - I know there are some really niche things that can't.
No, but it predicts variation that is not explained by family wealth.
> Why not just associate intelligence with how wealthy your parents are and call it done?
Because they are separate factors with distinct contributions.
> A big part of "The Bell Curve" was arguing that no interventions could change IQ except genetics
So its like a "climate change denier" who says "oh I dont deny climate change, its just that I oppose every commonly accepted way to combat it and therefore am in complete policy alignment with actual climate change demiers (who all love my work despite a literal reading being that I’m saying they are wrong)."
"Can't be used to make predictions"... seriously? These factors can be used to make predictions. Now whether these things are just correlates with other more fundamental factors, or causal - I thought that was where the conflict was.
If you're not saying that then I don't understand how anything you just said is relevant to the current situation. Telling people to look up a guy's writing history is probabilistic but it isn't turning that into an unjustified boolean statement.
This is the crux of your comment and its a huge statement. Do you have evidence supporting this claim?
Indeed, but I would say the high school "system" as a whole, burdened by pressure from parents. And pressure from the state, which was rewarding and punishing schools for test scores and other metrics.
Middle class parents were just gaa-gaa over pushing their kids into STEM programs at top colleges, to the point where it was kind of overbearing. I might have been one of those parents, but my neighbor, a high school math and physics teacher, talked me out of it when my kids were younger.
At the same time, some of the non-STEM classes were pretty hard nosed, like the one were they took apart media and advertising.
Fortunately my kids learned the scientific method at home, same place they learned to read. But it was for the love of knowledge and learning, not to get ahead. That's also how I learned it.
Overall I'd recommend not taking a single article and using it as something that can refute a whole science.
Because, of course, you know you're taking a test and they expect on tests that the problem statement is symbolic, just there to pose a logic puzzle.
That's the idea we're talking about here.
For your convenience: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elephants+in+germany&t=h_&iax=imag...
I think they're liars that at the very least want you to believe the gap is mostly genetic. But they've carefully avoided ever directly stating that, because of the Nazi eugenics vibe that would give off.
So to try to avoid being accused of misrepresenting these disingenuous liars, I stated not that they believe it's 100% genetic, but rather that they believe no interventions would help.
It's their logical inconsistency, not mine.
As near as I can tell, when they say "critical thinking" they really mean "persuasive thinking". Humanities, given its lack of rigor (or ability to have rigor) compared to STEM, often falls back on persuasive arguments, and so studying them requires you to become persuasive if you want to excel. This is why they can often come into conflict with STEM "arguments" - STEM isn't about persuasion, but about proof and testing and evidence and ... math! You can't persuade the laws of the universe, they are just something that exists. That's why they consider scientists so pedantic.
Anyway, that's the theory I've developed, I hope it has persuaded you some, but if not, it is likely that I trained as an engineer and am rather tepid with my persuasive skills ;)
So, the caricature of a STEM student will make theory in his mind and then ignored pretty much all nuance in the article the theory is based on.
Another example would be bias. The history students are specifically trained to deal with bias in source material and accept that every single historical source is biased by own point of view. The amount of STEM graduates who split world into two neat categories "biased" and "non-biased" is staggering.
All of these are elements of critical thinking.
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/26/health/human-height-chang...
For bonus points: why has the heritability of height changed over time and varied by country?
Critical thinking skills are conferred to children in a much earlier age than the decision whether to pursue humanities/STEM or even go to college at all.
I've certainly met people for whom having a PhD would be like putting lipstick on a pig.
Frankly this way of talking about humanities as a whole does betray lack of critical thinking on itself. For start, back in real world and in real actual universities, critical thinking does not mean Marxism.
> When the facts don't fit Marxist theory, the researcher gets cancelled.
If you mean this as a statement about actual universities, this is a lie. I mean, so much that it seems more like talking point from TV designed to make people agree with actual legislature banning actual books.
>Despite being a rock star of scientific progress and innovation, a busy professional with a million things to do and a good understanding of the essential importance of good communication, Elon still finds time to tweet stupid shit every now and then. He apparently loves Tweeting so much, he bought 9.2% of Twitter, making him the single largest shareholder of the company.
Is that worth defending? I donno, it's not even up to date. I'm no Musk fan at all, but I think it's a pretty good example of what kind of intellectual position the authors are acting from. Maybe we have different standards for where we get our information, but I just can't read stuff like that and pretend the authors are people operating with even on iota of good faith.
Perhaps the comparison to ED is a bit harsh. In my opinion, ED is 4chan-based satire for immature and ideologically minded teenagers. RW is a series of stale reddit dunks for immature and ideologically driven teenagers.
Cognitive psychologists don’t use IQ (nor intelligence for that matter) in their models. Psychologists that do use IQ are doing so in scientific isolation (which is a red flag) and are stuck with the same models that were created in the 1970s, a sign of a dying field.
I have watched very smart physics majors struggle mightily (with success, in the end!) in a philosophy of science class because (a) they've implicitly absorbed an extremely naive epistemology, usually some Popperian but simplified thing, (b) they don't have a lot of practice reading and writing prose, and (c) their main coursework has focused on using existing models and methodologies to the near total exclusion of evaluating, analyzing, or comparing them.
Incidentally, that was in a class taught by someone with a graduate degree in STEM himself, who collaborates with working scientists on some of his work as a philosopher— this was an instructor who could very much speak the language of undergrad STEM students.
Critical thinking is also a matter of habit and temperament as much as it is being able to identify (un)sound reasoning itself. If you're not accustomed to seriously examining the structure and functioning of institutions, processes, and social practices, you ain't got it— even if you're extremely sharp with your logical and mathematical intuitions and skills.
That said, widespread innumeracy seems to me much more widely condoned socially than STEMlord parochialism, and is just as detrimental. Especially at an undergraduate level, I think we would benefit from rolling back our increasing specialization a bit. Everyone should have some experience with the work of mathematicians— writing proofs— and everyone should have some engagement with the history-of and philosophy-of some of the STEM disciplines, imo.
This is probably a good time to remind everyone that the empirical sciences are facing an extremely widespread methodological crisis right now¹. I point that out not to say that scientists are stupid or that the problems that add up to the replication crisis are easy to solve, but because critical thinking is exactly what scientists need to do and are doing when they work to address the replication crisis! It's not wrong to push for more emphasis on developing critical thinking skills and habits in science education.
--
Or 3) they're going up at the same rate, so gaps aren't closing. That's what I've always understood to be happening.
That's not the world of engineering - the "E" in STEM - though.
This isn't made any better by the two semi distinct historical roots of the modern schools of this crap bringing in either marxism by way of the frankfurt school or postmodernism (or increasingly some combination of the two). In general it becomes pretty obvious that it is a self contradicting mess that has no place in society, let alone at institutions of higher learning.
Naomi Wu is an excellent engineer and a luminary for the DIY space.
Someone who focuses on clearly explaining thoughts using small numbers of commonly understood words will be much better at forming coherent and compelling arguments than someone who instead invests the same resources in learning a vast but useless vocabulary.
> In general, the goal is to quantify an individual's mental potential
But IQ researchers have been trying to do that for over half a century, and so far have yielded pretty limited results, especially compared to models from other fields such as cognitive psychology or neuropsychology, neither of which use IQ in their models. The principle of parsimony states that: “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”. In modern psychology IQ is a useless entity.
However now you are talking about pedagogy or developmental psychology where IQ and other models of intelligence is still being used (though it is getting more and more fringe). Over there nobody cares about the heritability of IQ, only whether or not they predict certain learning disabilities and (and this is old school) which traits of intelligence predicts which learning outcomes (though I would argue behavioral psychologists that don’t use IQ nor intelligence have better luck with their models). Again, if you insist on Occam’s razor, and believe (IMO wrongly) that IQ is the preferred method then heritability should be left out of the model.
Now there is one more thing I’d like to address:
> I’d love to see such a selective demand for rigor applied to, say, studies that suggest secondary education makes a difference in outcomes.
I encourage you to read a study in developmental psychology or pedagogy. I assure you there is plenty of rigor applied. You won’t find any models that include heritability, because, like I said, scientists in the field don’t need that, so they skip it for the sake of simplicity. But what you’ll find are double blind studies, AB tests, descriptions of metrics to assess quality, descriptions of methods to assess disability, plenty of scrutiny over these methods, experiments that valuate these methods, theories which take into account seemingly successful methods, scrutiny of theories with nuanced evidence, scrutiny of methods with nuanced evidence, meta-analyses where theories are ripped apart, meta-analyses where the same theories are supported. Entering “Secondary education efficacy” actually yields over 5 million hits on Google Scholar. I call that a fairly well studied question.
Personally, I find it extremely troubling to take sexual philosophy from someone who advocated for 12 year olds to be considered "of age" to have sex with anyone, and himself molested prepubescent children in Tunisia.
No, it just means that it’s qualitative. Why would qualitative descriptions of entities mean it’s poorly defined? Take for example in philosophy of mind where qualitative descriptions of the colour red are more relevant to the discussion than quantitative descriptions of it, such as it’s frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum. In this example, having a qualitative description of the colour red, or a qualitative description of what qualia is (if it were to exist) is actually necessary in order to engage with the problem.
> Frankly, I feel almost everything can be processed via first order logic - I know there are some really niche things that can't.
What do you mean by processed?
There’s a difference between whether propositions can be expressed in first order logic vs. whether the argumentation itself is derived from first order logic. People did not sit down with a table of axioms to figure out all of aerodynamics by decree. Like many fields of inquiry, it took deduction, induction, abduction, and the scientific method. Writing things down via first order logic came after.
Your average philosophy graduate student is comfortable expressing virtually any proposition in first order logic, or even other types of symbolic logic. But I can assure you that modal arguments regarding, say, philosophy of mind, are conceived and argued in prose, with symbolic modal logic being used to aid the reader. What does that tell you about “processing via first order logic”?
First of all, it is obvious that society isn’t already leftist. If you’re citing “many quarters of society howling in disagreement”, you’ll have to show me to 1) the data and 2) this somehow changes the actual nature of our society. Do you actually think that we live in a leftist society? I certainly do not see a plurality of worker co-ops walking down the street, and last I checked, the vast majority of the means of production are still privately owned. I am not going to explain my argument again as to why this gives critical theory a leftist bent.
Your argument seems to be motivated by the fact you don’t like some of the conclusions drawn out by academics in the humanities because they don’t fit your priors. To me, it’s obvious you fall right Dunning-Kruger’s trap, having read and understood virtually nothing about the subjects in question if you’re citing “cyborg techno feminism” as an example of “Marxist devolution”. You’re really proving the point here that a lack of engagement with the humanities leads to a lack critical thinking.
In an ideal sense, Marxist theory should be capable of updating itself to match actual conditions. In a degenerated dogmatic sense, it can be used to force actual conditions to fit within a narrow and false theory.
There is no end to the different interpretations of Marxism and the arguments and debates between them, because there's only so many real world examples that could be tested and examined.
Compared to an engineering problem, Marxist theory ends up touching so many fields and variables on a global scale that the problem space ends up being orders of magnitude greater. There's too much to examine and make sense of, so interpretations end up being strategies on how to navigate through this problem space and how to achieve Marxist theories and goals, either orthodixcally or heterodoxically.
In the example of that anthropologist, it does not go into detail with what the Marxists disagreed with. However, I think a Marxist argument could be made for the wars over women in that their society is of a more primitive stage where stealing women was a part of their socioeconomics. Their system works out so that a population equilbirum is achieved.
In works like Engel's On the Origin of the Family..., there is a Marxist interpretation of how humans orient themselves accordingly to the Marxist theory that the base economics form the superstructure of the culture and society. In more advanced societies, they went through agricultural revolutions that vastly increased the population and reshaped how societies must function to keep order.
Another example of Marxist theory gone wrong could be the USSR, and you have Marxists either defending or condemning it for various reasons. It could then be said that the Chinese Marxists learned from the USSR to create their own branched off lineage to prevent similar collapse and to forge their own path towards the Marxist stages of socialism and communism. (And of course you have Marxists condemning China too. Tl;Dr: the arguments are largely either China must develop before being advanced enough for socialism or China must advance to a socialist stage or else it will gravitate back towards complete capitalist control.)
Edit: That being said, while STEM has rigorous methodologies to verify truths, the fields can also be swept up by orthodoxies and heterodoxies and different interpretations. There's always been the derisive websh*t meme for fads on Hacker News. Or there's the unsolved problems in physics with different interpretations to resolve them. The scientific process did have its roots in philosophical developments after all.
I think psychologists have spent enough ink on this non-sense and correctly moved on. It is now up to historians to talk about how damaging this theory truly was, and what the motivation was of policy makers that believed in this pseudo-science. Gould did a terrific job doing exactly that, and a more recent work of Angela Saini Superior: The Return of Race Science is another powerful account of this history, although she is not as optimistic about the state of affairs as I am.
I get that you're new to this topic, but you should at least understand which side you're on. "...there is no significant variations in IQ between races when considering socioeconomic factors" is indeed the mainstream IQ field's side, but the HBD position isn't the opposite of that, it's, "I totally agree, now explain to me again why a test of intrinsic aptitude would need to be adjusted for socioeconomic factors."
It's a mug's game, defending these tests. When IQ correlates to real-world outcomes like salary and academic achievement, they call it evidence that the test works. Then when you point out that salary and academic achievement level have group differences across race (and gender, and religion, and marital status, and height...) for reasons unrelated to intelligence, they say you need to control for those variables. But they don't actually do that! You will never hear an IQ researcher say that someone with a lower IQ is actually smarter than someone with a higher IQ when you consider the neighborhood they grew up in. They just wait long enough for you to forget the particulars, and go back to acting like IQ is an intrinsic genetic quality that's independently measurable. "Wechsler is much better than those dirty biased tests like the SAT" from one side of the mouth, and "We know it's accurate, look how well it correlates to SAT scores" from the other. A mug's game, I tell you.
And all because they can't just admit that g-factor is a statistical artifact and IQ just a test score. That was the point of the Niceness Quotient analogy: it would have the same problems, but the problems would be obvious without 100 years of thinking psychometry was scientific. If one race had higher average NQs than another, there wouldn't be a debate at all, the whole wiki page[0] would just be "Of course the results are weird, Niceness isn't measurable. We tried our best, and the results are kind of useful in some contexts, but it's not actually a trait, just a subjective concept."
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_race_and_intell...
Scrolling down to the graphs that have all sorts of breakdowns, it looks like in general it hasn't been converging. The third group, which breaks down by race/age, looks like a mixture of noisy sameness and diverging.
If you see the latter as problematic, and any research that incorporates it as flawed, then how do you provide scientific basis for the assertion that intelligence is not at all inheritable? Marx certainly isn't one.
To some extent also AANES (Rojava). Although that one is a hybrid economy where co-ops and wage labor small businesses coexist, it's roughly a 80/20 split in favor of the former, although there's no clear line there as some co-ops use wage labor as well. For the most part, this happens because the local councils actively support co-ops with loans, so organizing as one gives you an initial advantage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
How about a video essay which summarizes other critiques:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
What if you look at the numerous false predictions of IQ research:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
Or a peer reviewed summary which got published in an academic journal with over a 100 citations:
http://www.swisswuff.ch/files/richardson2002whatiqteststest.... (PDF)
Overall I’d recommend regularly reviewing the literature to assess where the scientific consensus is around a theory is. To date, the literature does not support any consensus around the theory of general intelligence nor the efficacy of IQ as a theory for intelligence.
This is a lump of mostly unrelated things, to the point where people who are likely to religiously embrace some of them would be just as likely to be horrified by the others. And don't even get me started on the "rejection of the divine" - what passes for rigor in religious apologetics can easily rival the worst of modern social studies.
Indeed, isn't it very much the opposite - that, after a period of rationalism promoted as a virtue, we have entered a period of new dogmatic spiritualism?
You're just kinda digging the hole deeper at this point, man. It's not even about time management, which is what people usually cite for this sort of epistemic learned helplessness, because you could've just saved your time by not even replying if that was what you were after.
Or if no one can define or agree on the definition those subjects should just be ignored by everyone?
In economics for instance if you try to achieve this you can often end with an oversimplified model which mostly pointless and not particularly useful unless you're writing a schoolbook for undergraduates.
In a way it might be closer to medicine than to more exact sciences (just with no way to directly test your hypothesis...). You're analyzing a very complex dynamic system with many unknown or not easily definable or measurable variables. Even if you manage to come up with a model which makes sense it might be suddenly become nearly useless when something unpredicted in that system changes.
> that they can think in a different way that STEM people can't
Maybe they can and maybe they can't, I guess that depends on the individual. But you ussually do need to think in certain ways which are likely to not be very familiar to some people whose only background is in exact sciences.
These are some of my reasons for believing that Jensen’s reputation isn’t that great, at least compared to Gould. Now why do you believe the opposite?
IQ tests in general were popular 20 years ago and have since fallen out of fashion quite significantly: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=IQ%20tes...
The lower performance may simply be due to people being less familiar/trained on the type of questions that IQ tests tend to ask.
Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis.[11][12][13][14] The scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups.[15][16][17][18][19][20]
And a quick search on Google Scholar:
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0033-295X.1...
https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/230/1/19...
And as computer people, our house is not clean either, despite the formal character of computer science. Empirical results in computer science, demos and benchmarking done in the field, and more, also matter and are often non-reproducible just a few years after publication— if source code is provided with the paper at all, which it often has not been.
Science is amazing, both for its processes and achievements. But there's lots of important work being done and yet-to-be-done on science itself. Critical thinking is essential to that work, and it goes beyond formal reasoning or puzzle-solving in the small.
Because it's useful to know if someone is wrong a lot, just like it's useful to know a clock is broken, and you don't need any fallacies for that.
For example, if someone misuses citations a lot, it's good to tell people that, even if you don't say anything about the particular subject.
I get it that you don't like this attack on the person rather than the post.
But it's not committing the fallacy of saying "it's him therefore it's wrong". The fallacy you describe about broken clocks is not happening. Saying either "it's him therefore it's weaker" or "it's him therefore it's useless" would not commit that fallacy. If a clock is sometimes broken then "weaker" is correct, and if a clock is always broken then "useless" is correct. And the impression I got was very much "it's him therefore it's weaker".
And it's not an irrelevant attack. Attacks on the way he constructs arguments are relevant to all arguments he makes.
You can't just claim it's a specific fallacy and then talk about how it's bad rhetoric in general as support of that claim.
> You're just kinda digging the hole deeper at this point, man. It's not even about time management, which is what people usually cite for this sort of epistemic learned helplessness, because you could've just saved your time by not even replying if that was what you were after.
Don't be an asshole, and I never said I was here to save time. I'm here to say that a couple accusations of specific fallacies are wrong.
See also this very nice comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35520629
Doesn't this author have a terrible reputation? And he's known for standing by disproven theories? I'm surprised you didn't find a better example.
> How about a video essay which summarizes other critiques:
Sorry, I haven't watched these 2 hours and 40 minutes, can I read the summary somewhere? Hopefully it's better than Nassim's article.
> Or a peer reviewed summary which got published in an academic journal with over a 100 citations
What is a peer reviewed summary? Is it like a meta-analysis? But honest questions: how much weight do you think this has? Are the citations supporting it or criticising it?
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
Looks like an example of bad science that was caught and exposed? Why do you think this reflects badly on the rest of the research?
> To date, the literature does not support any consensus around the theory of general intelligence nor the efficacy of IQ as a theory for intelligence.
You are asking for consensus. Do you mean an ultra majority? There's no consensus even on whether climate change is real, only 97% of scientist think so. Could you give percentages of who supports what on the science of IQ.
Sure, but this is not the claim I originally quoted. I was taking about heritability, and you're taking now about disparities between groups.
Nevertheless it seems you agree the heritability of IQ is well established, which you were denying originally.
You can indeed, which is why I judge peoples sincerity on this subject based on if they reject the social sciences entirely as pseudoscientific drivel or apply this reasoning to IQ heritability specifically because they don't like it.
If I'm being honest, deep down, I have to think "the social sciences are pseudoscientific drivel" is the more sound argument. The science is pretty bad which is why the replication crisis hit the social sciences harder than virtually anything else.
You can't figure out the time by arguing over broken clocks. And you're only interested in staying on message here, not about whether these things are even true or not.
My counterclaim is that "this proves too much, as it implies all of social science is faulty" is a shallow dismissal based on a presumption about what the article says, rather than a close reading of it. If the previous commenter would like to rebut that argument, they too could come up with any argument based on what Block actually wrote to support their original claim.
I knew nothing at all about that commenter at the start of this discussion, but what I've learned since makes me skeptical of their ability to draw sweeping conclusions from any work on this subject. It's not clear that they understand how cog. psych works, or what the implications of IQ actually are, and it is manifestly the case that they don't understand what heritability means.
In the case of IQ, we can identify the model through the exogenous quantity "relatedness." We know exactly how related monozygotic twins are (100%) and the expectation for dizygotic twin relatedness (50%), so we can use the fact that these quantities are known to figure out other model parameters.
Since we know that dizygotic twins are exactly half as related as monozygotic ones in the limit, we know the the genetic effect is going to be equal to 2(r_{MZ} - r_{DZ}) and excess resemblance cannot be attributable to genes, since dizygotic twins are not >50% related (on average).
Therefore, we can use it to directly figure out the fraction attributable to genetics, then we can see the excess relatedness as due to shared environments, and the residual as the unshared.
I don’t think we can construct a philosophical understanding on what intelligence is, as we are always bound to select an arbitrary set of traits which describes the bias of the researcher more than a useful model of behavior.
How do I provide scientific basis for the assertion that intelligence is not at all inheritable?
I don’t, but others do. If you believe you can select a set of traits which constitute an intelligent personality, which some researchers do (or rather assume for the sake of argument that it exists), then what you get is a large environmental effect on the supposed intelligence, a large cofactor of environment and inheritance, some genetical factor, but a close to 0 genetic bases for any group differences.
This is really a double tier rebuttal which states: Even if you are right (and you are not) that general intelligence exists, and that IQ is a useful measure of general intelligence (which is also false), you are still wrong that there is a genetic basis for any perceived inheritance of this supposed intelligence.
This is a pretty good high-level summary:
First of all I do not believe that IQ is a good metric for intelligence, nor that intelligence is a useful scientific construct.
Secondly, there are whole subthreads here that go into the nuances of what heritability means for measured IQ. From what I’ve gathered is that findings which assign 50-80% of the variance to inheritance neglect to account for covariance, or use very biased assumptions about G×E correlations or G×E interactions which skewes the results in favor of genetic explanations, i.e. they are biased.
The clock doesn't tell you if they're right or not. I agree here, see me agreeing! That's the part that would be a fallacy!
But knowing that the clock is broken means you know that any conclusions based on the clock contain zero information. They might be right, but only by accident. So you should completely reject the argument, without completely rejecting the result.
To make that even more explicit: An argument and the conclusion of that argument are different things. The bar for rejecting an argument is lower than the bar for rejecting its conclusion. And the bar for being extra skeptical is even lower.
The fallacy you're describing happens when you reject the conclusion. It does not happen when you reject the argument.
I didn't say it did. I said that there's something wrong with the critical thinking that goes on in the humanities department when they wind up advocating Marxism, despite Marxism having a dismal historical record of relentless failure.
STEM has had many false theories (like the sun revolves around the earth). The virtue of STEM is when the facts contradict the theories, the theories get revised, even if the old guard has to die off before the corrected theory replaces it. With Marxism, however, the facts get re-written to conform to Marxism, rather than the other way around.
One of the beauties of the scientific method is it tests the predictions a theory makes. If the predictions come true, the theory is validated. If the predictions don't pan out, the theory is false.
A famous example is Einstein's Relativity theory predicted that gravity bends light. Einstein became world famous when decades later, this bending was observed.
Marxist theory also makes predictions, but none of those predictions pan out. This never discourages the critical thinkers in the humanities, which leaves me unimpressed with the critical thinking skills of it.
Seriously though, the burden of proof shouldn’t be on the anti-IQ crowd. IQ is a new construct, that proponents have been trying to justify for over half a century. At some point, repeated failures to convince a broader field of its utility should be evidence enough that it might not be worth investigating. Yes, sometimes there are worthy theories which receive unfair treatment, like e.g. continental drift, however even Wegener’s theory took less than 50 years to be accepted, and I bet IQ research has received orders of magnitude more funding and attention than Wegener ever did.
To date, the only evidence for IQ and the g-factor comes from the tests them selves, the construct is not used in any models outside of the field of psychometrics (while psychometrics them selves is becoming more and more fringe as a science). It’s use has historically been focused around racist conjectures and eugenics.
Even though I shouldn’t I’m still gonna give one more shot at finding evidence of the increasing irrelevance of IQ in modern science. I searched for “IQ cognitive psychology” on google scholar. While I did find some attempts of researchers trying to merge psychometrics and Cognitive Psychology, however when Dennis et.al (2009) actually went ahead and looked how useful IQ was in a common neurodevelopmental model, they found it was simply in the way:
> Using IQ as a matching variable or covariate has produced overcorrected, anomalous, and counterintuitive findings about neurocognitive function.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-inter...
In my search results I also found another paper, which I couldn’t access, dating all the way to 1988, which seems to be making the same case as I that IQ is on its way to the history books: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0168863880840087...
A philosopher’s personal misdeeds don’t-in general-count as evidence against their theories. If the theories directly serve to justify their misdeeds, that might be some reason to discount them-but Foucault’s claim that sexual orientation is a historically contingent social construct has no direct bearing on the issue of sexual abuse of minors, so allegations that he engaged in that aren’t relevant to them
But honestly it raises no red flags that Jensen is the face of “modern IQ research”? His most influential work was from the 80s and the 90s, and was heavily criticized at the time (including by Gould).
Since than there has been a revolution in non-linear statistics, are you satisfied that “modern IQ research” is basically the same stuff they were doing in the 70s? I mean even General relativity has evolved significantly with since the 70s as new technology becomes available to measure old predictions. Do you honestly think it is a sign of a healthy scientific theory that after a revolution in machine learning, they are still using same old factor analysis to back up their constructs?
1) it’s contentious in Popper’s field itself on whether this criterion is right (it is generally accepted today that he is wrong) and
2) it’s contentious on whether Popper even understands Marx’s theory of history, which is where his criticism comes from, and
3) even if we decide by fiat that the predictions made by Marxism are unscientific, that does not preclude it from being a source of knowledge, or prevent Marxism from being imported as a normative political or ethical framework.
The whole “not true Marxism” thing usually comes from the mouths of people who’ve never read Marx, let alone explicitly non-Marxist thinkers who were influenced by Marx. In other words, the kinds of people who have never given this serious thought at all, but have likely watched some YouTube videos or read a couple articles. There is really no such thing as “true Marxism”. Marxism in practice has ranged from the USSR to Zapatista, which are very different from one another, but they are both no more “truly Marxist” than the other. The only person who could decide that is probably the guy himself, who is long dead.
>This never discourages the critical thinkers in the humanities, which leaves me unimpressed with the critical thinking skills of it.
If nuance and actual engagement with primary source material (as opposed to whatever it is you’re doing) does not count as “critical thinking”, then I strongly believe we cannot have any further discussion here.
> For example, Hauser (1998) and Grissmer et al (1998) documented convergence of the race difference in data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Until the current study, this finding could be explained by a differential Flynn Effect in which minority scores increased at a steeper rate. However, we found no interaction in our data; the three different race categories each showed substantial FE’s, but they also tracked closely to the same consistent increase.
So again, they accept the gap is closing, but their result suggests this is not due to a differential Flynn effect, but to something else.
Then it happily continues to use the graphs and averaged results, that Taleb showed contain almost no signal, as if nothing happened.
This is not a serious rebuttal.
The questions are in difficulty order and they’re all worth the same so because of the time limit you won’t be able to answer them all correctly. The quicker you are at solving problems, the higher the score you will get.
Your score then shows how you compare to the population percentage wise and that’s your IQ. The average score would give you an average IQ.
It might be a value driven claim, but it's also easy to imagine that societies who value machine learning and other engineering over feminism and other social justice studies are likely to outcompete the latter. At least assuming social justice issues aren't severe enough to cause a civil war to be fought or some such.
> The effect itself is strong and consistent, but we found no differential gender or race FE, nor was there much of a differential urbanization status identified. The positive finding of a differential FE in relation to maternal education (and at a smaller level, household income) at the older ages is suggestive of some of the dynamics of the process leading to the Flynn Effect. However, we do not consider our findings to be confirmatory in any sense.
It has been shown from biased studies that IQ has a large hereditary component, where these studies failed to account for genetic × environmental interaction and covariation.
By the way the wikipedia article it self goes into these nuances and caveats. Reading it, it is pretty clear that there may be a large inheritance factor to IQ, while at the same time large IQ differences between individuals have no genetic basis.
It is also easy to imagine otherwise, eg. murderous AIs killing off humanity and other AI dystopia that many people are concerned about these days. I don't think they're likely, but as far as imagination goes, it's possible. And if that actually happens, it's arguable that wasting time over "useless" concepts in the humanities is a better survival strategy for societies.
Specifics aside, I think it's quite hilarious that people in a tech discussion forum think tech is objectively more useful to society than whatever other field that they're totally unfamiliar with.
I absolutely don’t think the humanities and social sciences are useless-I think they have a lot of value.
But nowadays there seem to be two main approaches to them: (1) the modernist traditional social sciences approach, which tries to approximate the rigour of the natural sciences, to as great an extent as the subject matter will permit; (2) the postmodernist critical theory approach-which is inclined to denounce that rigour as harmful/oppressive/etc. Big fan of (1), absolutely see its value; very sceptical of (2).
"correctly conclude", huh. You're basically saying "people with similar backgrounds as mine reject the theories proposed by people with very different backgrounds, and I think they're quite right".
I probably have a similar background as you do compared with a professor in social science, so I might agree with your conclusion (that a lot of theories in humanities are flimsy), but I see nothing to indicate (except your assertion) that those engineers you know actually evaluate work in social sciences and the humanities critically. Maybe they reject them because they sound so alien and unfamiliar?
If you mean they're "critical" because they don't easily buy into those crackpot theories, perhaps consider the crackpot theories in the software engineering profession -- Agile methodology? Test driven development? Best way to interview programmers? Benefits of using $fad_framework? These are actually questions that could in theory be answered using social science methodologies. Yet what we do as a profession is simply cargo cult what the big names do. IMHO a tech CEO being sold on useless "Agile" methodologies is basically the equivalent of "a non-technical CEO has been talked into buying some worthless overpriced piece of enterprise software".
I find it sort of amazing that folks will twist themselves into pretzels to argue that IQ's genetic basis shouldn't be the prior. The majority of smart people I've talked to in life had a similar experience to me growing up. Namely, they remember very well just being "better" at school than other kids, even though their environments were similar and they didn't honestly try that hard. I specifically remember teachers lauding me in 2nd grade for how hard I worked, when honestly I was and am pretty lazy. I remember very well sitting in class in 7th grade, watching the same presentations by the teacher that all the other kids watched and then with zero studying getting 100% correct on the test while many of them struggled. And I remember going to many of their houses and seeing that their home environments were either equivalent or superior to mine.
Athletic kids have a very similar experience, by the way, when it comes down to running or jumping or other sports. They're just "better".
At base, the environmental argument boils down to something like this: "Anyone in the world could have beaten Magnus Carlsen to become world chess champion if they'd just had the proper environment." Such an argument is so obviously preposterous that the prior should absolutely be that it's false.
Another point: We already know IQ is genetic. Witness that the housecat and humans have vastly different IQs, and no cat will ever perform better on an IQ test than the median human. Again, the prior obviously should be that IQ is genetic.
And again, note that I'm simply pointing out what the PRIOR should be. Thus, it should be on YOU to provide evidence that the prior is wrong. It is insufficient to simply argue that not enough evidence exists to prove IQ is genetic, because that is the prior. The burden of proof is on YOU.
Your arguments boil down to simply gaslighting smart people that their life experience is somehow completely inaccurate, unrepresentative, or misinterpreted. If you really are making it in good faith, it leaves me wondering what in your life experience leads you to believe the genetic explanation should not be the prior. Did you do poorly in school? Did you grow up in such a privileged environment that you can't believe that people like me exist?
But here's the main point I want to make:
I find it sort of amazing that folks will twist themselves into pretzels to argue that IQ's genetic basis shouldn't be the prior. The majority of smart people I've talked to in life had a similar experience to me growing up. Namely, they remember very well just being "better" at school than other kids, even though their environments were similar and they didn't honestly try that hard. I specifically remember teachers lauding me in 2nd grade for how hard I worked, when honestly I was and am pretty lazy. I remember very well sitting in class in 7th grade, watching the same presentations by the teacher that all the other kids watched and then with zero studying getting 100% correct on the test while many of them struggled. And I remember going to many of their houses and seeing that their home environments were either equivalent or superior to mine.
Athletic kids have a very similar experience, by the way, when it comes down to running or jumping or other sports. They're just "better".
At base, the environmental argument boils down to something like this: "Anyone in the world could have beaten Magnus Carlsen to become world chess champion if they'd just had the proper environment." Such an argument is so obviously preposterous that the prior should absolutely be that it's false.
Another point: We already know IQ is genetic. Witness that the housecat and humans have vastly different IQs, and no cat will ever perform better on an IQ test than the median human. Again, the prior obviously should be that IQ is genetic.
And again, note that I'm simply pointing out what the PRIOR should be. Thus, it should be on YOU to provide evidence that the prior is wrong. It is insufficient to simply argue that not enough evidence exists to prove IQ is genetic, because that is the prior. The burden of proof is on YOU.
Your arguments boil down to simply gaslighting smart people that their life experience is somehow completely inaccurate, unrepresentative, or misinterpreted. If you really are making it in good faith, it leaves me wondering what in your life experience leads you to believe the genetic explanation should not be the prior. Did you do poorly in school? Did you grow up in such a privileged environment that you can't believe that people like me exist?
This example makes me recall a Ted Talk by James Flynn (Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents'). There's a very relevant case he discusses, which I'll copy a snippet of the transcript:
[quote]
Now let me give you a sample of some of his interviews. He talked to the head man of a person in rural Russia. They'd only had, as people had in 1900, about four years of schooling. And he asked that particular person, what do crows and fish have in common? And the fellow said, "Absolutely nothing. You know, I can eat a fish. I can't eat a crow. A crow can peck at a fish. A fish can't do anything to a crow." And Luria said, "But aren't they both animals?" And he said, "Of course not. One's a fish. The other is a bird." And he was interested, effectively, in what he could do with those concrete objects.
And then Luria went to another person, and he said to them, "There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is a city in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?" And the fellow said, "Well, if it's large enough, there ought to be camels there." And Luria said, "But what do my words imply?" And he said, "Well, maybe it's a small village, and there's no room for camels." In other words, he was unwilling to treat this as anything but a concrete problem, and he was used to camels being in villages, and he was quite unable to use the hypothetical, to ask himself what if there were no camels in Germany.
A third interview was conducted with someone about the North Pole. And Luria said, "At the North Pole, there is always snow. Wherever there is always snow, the bears are white. What color are the bears at the North Pole?" And the response was, "Such a thing is to be settled by testimony. If a wise person came from the North Pole and told me the bears were white, I might believe him, but every bear that I have seen is a brown bear." Now you see again, this person has rejected going beyond the concrete world and analyzing it through everyday experience, and it was important to that person what color bears were -- that is, they had to hunt bears. They weren't willing to engage in this. One of them said to Luria, "How can we solve things that aren't real problems? None of these problems are real. How can we address them?" Now, these three categories -- classification, using logic on abstractions, taking the hypothetical seriously -- how much difference do they make in the real world beyond the testing room? And let me give you a few illustrations.
[/quote]
---
We're educated to think that "abstract thinking" is a "good thing". But it doesn't really have to be the case. Of course I understand that for some complex real problems, the solution lies in finding and exploiting abstract connections, but I'd argue that a lot of modern society's problems lie in leaky or flawed abstractions that do more harm than good, but we still believe in those abstractions over real things. For example, we tend to cling onto "pretty" theories even when contradicted by factual data. We fight imaginary enemies all the time. We classify things into abstractions and apply generalizations, forgetting the nuances that differentiate them in the first place.
The polar bear example was particularly striking to me, because for somebody who hasn't seen a polar bear before, it probably sounds like a trick question testing whether you're gullible enough to believe there are pink little men on Mars. Yet with modern "seasoned test-takers" they'd just take whatever premise given to them without asking questions -- probably the exact opposite of what you'd actually want from a person that knows how to think critically.
So I end up working in $BigTech and making half-serious jokes about how capitalism is the cause of modern woes on Facebook...
Don't see why we can't have multiple mutually exclusive definitions, as long as they are clearly defined, then we can have different lines of argument - kind of like with geometry and the parallel postulate; and which one reality matches is a separate issue we can independently investigate.
> Maybe they can and maybe they can't, I guess that depends on the individual. But you ussually do need to think in certain ways which are likely to not be very familiar to some people whose only background is in exact sciences.
I'm curious as to exactly how the thinking is different. An example would be nice.
How is it more relevant? Is there some property of the color red that physics doesn't cover?
> Your average philosophy graduate student is comfortable expressing virtually any proposition in first order logic, or even other types of symbolic logic.
So can mathematicians and most engineers. So we are on the same level.
So what is it that students of humanities supposedly can do that STEM can't?
So what if I am? Smart people aren’t owed any special place in the theory of cognition. High IQ does not need to be at the center of anything. You shouldn’t be treated as special, because you aren’t (or more accurately, what makes you special is not your intelligence, and certainly not your IQ).
Magnus Carlsen intelligence is not what makes Magnus Carslon special, what makes him special is an extraordinary skill in a very specialized sport. He has spent decades perfecting this skill. Yes, he might have some preconditions which he inherited that makes it particularly easy for him to acquire these skills, skills like the ability to remember a large opening repertoire, to visualize a large number of available positions in a short time, to search among these positions and select which ones are more likely to lead to a favorable positions, etc.
Cognitive scientists study these preconditions, and most assume there is a level of inheritance to many if not all of them. However most (but not all) cognitive scientists don’t group all of these skills together and call it intelligence, they simply study what they see. Also if you search on google scholar you may find somebody looking for the heritability factor of a particular visualization skill, however most of the field simply doesn’t care, because it doesn’t matter in most theories of behavior.
Whatever you call intelligence is bound to be arbitrarily picked from a much larger set of cognitive skills. Now Spearman believed these all correlated in what he called general intelligence, but psychometricians have been trying to prove him right for now a hundred years. The scientific community at large remains unconvinced (although there was a period where his theory was more popular and more accepted).
I think the simpler explanation is true that if there is a correlation, it is superficial, and more likely arises because practicing one skill has implication in others, just like practicing for a 100 m dash, makes you better at long jump, not because there exists this platonic ideal of general intelligence that you are born with and makes you superior to other humans.
EDIT: I also want to prove you wrong in your believe that IQ isn’t studied because IQ research is shunned, it is studied plenty, has been for over a century, it is just that the research—like a b-plot in a bad movie—didn’t go anywhere.
Entering the search term: “IQ Cognitive Psychology” yields over 700 000 results, the top one being a study from 2019 that has been cited 60 times so far.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22113...
IQ studies still get plenty of attention, in my opinion they get too much attention. I’m sure Sabrina Hofstetter feels the same way about string theory.
This is not about you. If you really care, I was rasied by a single-mother in relative poverty. But this is not about me, either. This is about scientific methodology, society, and everyone that participates in it. So the answer to this problem is obviously not going to involve your personal life story or your inner experience of your personal intellect.
>The reason IQ isn't studied isn't because it's "not useful." It's because people who study it are systematically shunned by academia.
Using the absence of evidence as evidence of widespread conspiracy is fallacious. You've been repeating this throughout the entire comment section, but you haven't given any evidence to support the claim that research is suppressed. Searching up "IQ prediction" brings up zillions of hits on Google Scholar.
>I specifically remember teachers lauding me in 2nd grade for how hard I worked, when honestly I was and am pretty lazy. I remember very well sitting in class in 7th grade, watching the same presentations by the teacher that all the other kids watched and then with zero studying getting 100% correct on the test while many of them struggled. And I remember going to many of their houses and seeing that their home environments were either equivalent or superior to mine.
Your main point is anecdata? I certainly had the same experience you had, but the most general claim I can make is that school was a breeze for me, not that I was universally smarter than everyone else. That would be intellectually imprudent, and not very smart at all. A more intellectual prudent approach is to focus on the things that didn't come easy to you, but easy for others. I remember being subject to IQ testing, where I did extremely well. Obviously, I did extremely well in school too. But that correlation should be trivial. Before IQ measures any 'general' intelligence, it first measures test-taking ability. Through what means is most of our success in school determined? Test-taking.
>At base, the environmental argument boils down to something like this: "Anyone in the world could have beaten Magnus Carlsen to become world chess champion if they'd just had the proper environment." Such an argument is so obviously preposterous that the prior should absolutely be that it's false.
That is such a ridiculous straw man. I'm seriously questioning your apparent intelligence if you are going to be straw manning views, as oppossed to steel-manning them.
The point of contention is that between-group (i.e. racial) heritability of IQ is not explained by genetic factors, not that people are born 'tabula rasa'. The other point of contention is that heritability and genetic determination are separate concepts, and that it was a methodological error by Charles Murray to conflate the two to draw conclusions about between-group heritability of IQ.
>Another point: We already know IQ is genetic. Witness that the housecat and humans have vastly different IQs, and no cat will ever perform better on an IQ test than the median human. Again, the prior obviously should be that IQ is genetic.
So after straw-manning the arguments, you make the sweeping claim that IQ is genetic. Actually, we have mountains of evidence that show income and socioeconomic status affect IQ; the widely cited Turkheimer (2003) study showed that in impoverished families, 60% of variance in IQ was accounted for by family environment, genes contributed next to 0%, while the reverse was found in rich families. Is that surprising, that if one is struggling, that they would not be less likely to reach the 'genetic potential' of their intelligence, the same way that a malnourished child is less likely to reach the 'genetic potential' of their athleticism?
The problem with your arguments is that they are riddled with bizarre leaps of logic, and seem to be motivated by your incessant belief in predestined intellectual superiority of other people. It is obviously the case that some people, by nature or nurture, are generally brighter than others, there's no disputing that.
But what is to be done about it? If we follow the science, which almost unanimously shows that environmental and societal factors play a huge role in 'IQ gaps' -- perhaps more so than molecular genetics -- the right kind of 'solution' is one that ought to be plural, and ought to be inclusive. We are dealing with society after all, which was the point of contention in The Bell Curve. That is, if we want smarter people, and we want people to reach their innate potential, then we should make our society more egalitarian, where families struggle much less than they do today. Charles Murray reaches the opposite conclusion. Why do you think that is? There is probably a parsimonious account that explains both his choice in using flawed methodology and exclusionary policy proposal of cutting welfare. I'll let you guess at what is, and it ends in -ism.
As for your argument about IQ studies going nowhere, you're not arguing in good faith. IQ research is a third rail because it's been tied by the left to eugenics and racism. This is the same reason colleges are (at their great peril) abandoning use of the SAT.
I just want you consider one thing: Is it really “the left’s” fault that eugenics have been tied to IQ research, or should we perhaps blame the number of eugenicists which promoted this construct. I’ll let you decide on that. But also remember that known eugenicist and disgraced psychologist Richard Lynn was on the editorial board for the science journal Intelligence until 2018, they very same journal that published the paper OP posted some 30 parent posts ago about the supposed evidence for the Reverse Flynn effect. But I’m sure you can find a way to blame that on left wing politics as well.
I agree that IQ measures test-taking ability. If you agree with that and agree with it being genetic, then all that's left is seeing that IQ correlates strongly with life outcomes like income. If you want to disagree with IQ being "intelligence" then fine. Who cares what you call it. What matters is there is this genetic factor that correlates with life outcomes.
Magnus Carlsen isn't a straw man. He's a demonstration of genetic determination apart from environmental factors you're lumping in as "heritability." His abilities are genetic, not environmental. Same with someone like Kim Peek. What _is_ ridiculous is for you to argue such things aren't genetic, and that extraordinary claim requires proof.
The point about the housecat is strong. It shows that we already know that the brain is "programmed" by genetics. It's a simple point, of course, but it's one you seem not to understand or to ignore. On Turkheimer's study, yes you can lower people's IQ by various means (a simple one is lead poisoning). That doesn't mean there isn't a genetically determined IQ ceiling for each person.
But your last paragraph is where you showed your real stripes. I get it. You desperately want everyone to have the same genetic IQ so you can rev up the Rube Goldberg machine of woke machinery to argue everything is implicit bias and racism.
The truth is, on average you can't make it so families struggle less and poverty disappears, because both of those concepts exist in reference to a distribution. Compared to families in, say, 1500 Poland, NO American families struggle or live in poverty. There will always be a distribution of outcomes around a median, and a key determinant of those outcomes will always be genetic factors, among which are physical strength, speed, endurance, dexterity and, yes, IQ.
It must have been a hoot playing D&D with you as a kid. "OK I'm fine rolling for Strength, Dexterity and Constitution but if you insist on rolling for Intelligence I'm going home and putting up a poster on your house saying you're a racist!"
Thanks for illustrating the problem so neatly!
Just to be crystal clear what I mean by "prior": I'm talking about the null hypothesis. So, if you were an ancient Greek studying physics, the prior should be that gravity is a force/acceleration pointing downward, not upward. Yes, someone could argue gravity points upward, but such a claim would require evidence. Arguing it points downward imposes no such requirement, because it's obvious to any casual observer. IQ is obviously genetic, because cats have lower IQs than humans and cats have significantly different genetics than humans.
A point I'd make is this: It's obvious from what you wrote that you're left wing. I think you've admitted as much. You're now I think assuming I'm right wing, but the thing is I'm not. I'm pro-choice, voted for Biden and both Clintons, support universal health care, support repeal of the 2nd amendment, support generalized income assistance, etc. My position on IQ is actually at odds with my political compatriots. That should tell you something. Yours is not, and that's one of the reasons I know you're not arguing in good faith. It's just a religion to you.
Responding to your message below. It is the case, as you can see in this screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/q0VjGgJ
Note the lack of a reply button. You must be a real hoot in person.
That this happened here is evident from the fact that you've been reduced to arguments like "IQ is genetically determined because my cat can't play chess".
No, Richard Lynn is truly a disgrace. He has been found manipulating research data, cherry-picking, and purposefully misinterpreting results in a way to favor his political agenda. This has resulted in him being stripped of his emeritus professor title. His racist and eugenicists talking points have also landed him on a Southern Poverty Law Center list of known white nationalists. A true disgrace if there ever was one. Also note that Richard Lynn has been cited many times by supporters of IQ (including multiple times in The Bell Curve). I know this us guilt by association, but when it comes these kind of people, I for one am willing to judge associates along with main offenders.
Perhaps this is religion to me, and perhaps I’m arguing in bad faith, if that’s what it takes to argue against racist believes, than so be it. It is worth it.
But consider this. Perhaps I’m not just a dogmatic anti-racist, but also informed by a university education in psychology, and by the scientific literature in the field of psychology. Even fellow anti-racist Albert Einstein always admitted his dogma about his believes in the universe, and he was not wrong about any of it (with few exceptions; notably that quantum entanglement could be explained with localized hidden variables).
If you want a theory of intelligent to include a notion of general intelligence which can be measured, you must be able to defend which aspects of behavior falls in the category of intelligent, and which not.
Playing chess and jumping on furniture both require plenty of cognitive skills, and brain functions to work together and produce a singular outcome, both are goal driven, both takes years of practice, both have varying skill levels.
Now the cognitive functions these skills require may both be inherited, you may even find the specific genes which encodes either behavior (and name them the furniture jumping gene and the chess playing gene if you will). However when you assign chess playing as intelligent but not furniture jumping, then you’ve made an arbitrary choice, which you need to justify. (You also have the option of not defining intelligence to begin with; which what I personally would pick).
But more importantly, even if you find your justification, you’ve only found one gene of intelligence which inherits, you haven’t found a gene for general intelligence, so you haven’t shown that intelligence is determined by your genes, only the ability to play chess well.
Then when you find all the genes for all behavior you consider intelligence, you still haven’t shown that they co-inherit with each other, that is, you haven’t shown that people with the chess playing gene tend to also have the sudoku solving gene, and the IQ test taking gene, etc. For there to be a single general intelligence, and for this general intelligence to be determined by genetics, than this is what is required. Unless of course general intelligence is a real thing and there is a gene for it which allows you to play chess better than others, solve Sudoku faster than others, answer more questions on IQ tests correctly, etc. But this is a rather extraordinary claim, don’t you think?
https://www.etymonline.com/word/heritable#:~:text=%22capable....
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/heritabi...
The Cambridge definition linked just above is particularly on point:
"The ability of a disease or characteristic to be passed from a parent or grandparent to a child through the genes"
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Yes, I know it's convenient to redefine terms like gender and heritability to fit what's politically popular. I get it. But, don't gaslight me by telling me I'm redefining the words. As you can see, I could have used this word in 1300s France and been understood as speaking about traits derived from one's parents through being their offspring.
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As for my argument about a cat playing chess, I'm just trying to give you the simplest possible example so you can see that your doctrinaire position on this subject is insane.
But I don't think Walter had that degree of precision in mind when he said "Marxist". It sounded more like a generic label for anti-capitalist left to me, so I went with the broad definition to match that.
I actually appreciate your candor. I believe strongly in equality of opportunity. I do not believe accepting falsehoods as fact or drowning those seeking truth in frivolous arguments is likely to get us there.
I do actually think it is possible to have a world where we accept that IQ is genetically heritable and yet people treat each other kindly.
I am convinced that a refusal to accept IQ as a genetic trait is the cornerstone of the belief system underlying claims of systemic racism and the like. In fact, if I believed IQ were largely environmental, I would immediately join in that chorus. The problem is, IQ is genetic, and what society is actually doing is demonizing large groups of people in a fashion that resembles the Salem Witch Trials for being "racists" when in fact most situations can be explained in a far more pedestrian way by simply acknowledging that some people just aren't all that smart.
None of this is to say that zero racists exist in the world. Of course they do, and they should be vigorously combatted. But to suggest that racism is a founding principle of western culture or that it is the basic reason for differential outcomes between groups just isn't true. Not in 2023.
I agree with that reasoning! We defined intelligence the way we do because it "works." If jumping on chairs were what advanced modernity, we would test for that instead. And, that too would "work" because it would surely be a marker for people who were likely to be successful in life.
Social sciences aren't going to be able to provide specific answers to your questions in the near term. No, there is no single gene or trait that codes for "intelligence" as we define it. But, that does not mean we can't come up with intelligence tests which correlate strongly with that definition and also correlate strongly with various measures of success in life. Such measures also correlate strongly with society-wide success (measured by a group's progress along the tech tree).
Actually I’m gonna repeat a couple of paragraph from the first post you responded to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35517130
> Your [faeriechangling] anecdotal evidence of high IQ parents (ugh!) having high IQ children is the same anecdotal evidence that sociologists have been describing for decades that high SES parents have high SES children, and is the main reason for why parents with high SAT scores are likely to have children with high SAT scores.
> What IQ researchers discovered was basically the same thing that Marx described in 1867, class, however the eugenics were no communists, and instead of providing the simpler explanation, that society rewards the ruling elite, and wealth inherits, the eugenics went all conspiratorial and blamed other races for their perceived decline in society.
https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#hidden...
Of course people invested in IQ will continue to research it while there is funding available. So whomever is conspiring to silence IQ research isn’t doing a good job since IQ research keeps being funded, and IQ research keeps being published (including in the article the OP links to).
Cognitive scientists of course read some of these studies, and respond with new studies, most of them don’t use IQ and are able to predict behavior just as well, and if not better. Some of them even compare models with IQ to models without IQ, almost always does the one without IQ perform better (sources below). That is what I mean when I say cognitive psychologists don’t use IQ.
* van der Maas, H. L. J., Molenaar, D., Maris, G., Kievit, R. A., & Borsboom, D. (2011). Cognitive psychology meets psychometric theory: On the relation between process models for decision making and latent variable models for individual differences. Psychological Review 118(2):339-56 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/50393518_Cognitive_...
* van IJzendoorn, M. H., Juffer, F., & Poelhuis, C. W. K. (2005). Adoption and Cognitive Development: A Meta-Analytic Comparison of Adopted and Nonadopted Children's IQ and School Performance. Psychological Bulletin, 131(2), 301–316. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.131.2.301
* Ritchie, S. J., Bates, T. C., & Deary, I. J. (2015). Is education associated with improvements in general cognitive ability, or in specific skills? Developmental Psychology, 51(5), 573–582. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038981
* Dennis, M., Francis, D., Cirno, P., Schachar, R., Barnes, M., & Fletcher, J. (2009). Why IQ is not a covariate in cognitive studies of neurodevelopmental disorders. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 15(3), 331-343. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-inter...
(For what it's worth: research suggests that adopting low-SES children into high-SES households is associated with as much as an 18 point increase in IQ test scores.)
What is the purpose of philosophy? In its most basic sense to teach one how to live a good life. Abstract concepts like justice, fairness, ideal social structures, social values flow from this basic question.
Any precise definition of any of the above concepts is open to question, and societies and institutions to some extent embody sets of answers to them. The domain evolves over time, ideas change, pressures brought about by various outside phenomena change.
After all, we are simply a collection of organisms evolving in an environment that we don't understand, according to rules we dimly discern.
This is not to contribute to any STEM vs the humanities fight: it's fundamentally an arbitrary division of knowledge, and neither side benefits from the division. The STEM side is prone to a naive scientism and an amorality that is much to the detriment of the species. On the other hand, the humanities has unfortunately largely devolved into a sort of philosophical rag and bone yard.
Frankly, both sides should get together and have sex for a while. Something might come out of it.
I'm happy to keep going on like this, because you're surfacing a lot of pernicious "race science" myths in their absolute most easily rebutted form, which is (and here truly there is no snark intended) a sort of service to the thread.
Or they may be an idiot. That happens, too.
> As a consequence, social policy resembles the cycles and epicycles of Ptolemy's cosmology. Namely, all manner of social, economic and historical outcomes which are explained parsimoniously by understanding IQ as heritable are instead attributed to a Rube-Goldberg machine of racism, class warfare and the like.
Now I find it interesting you would say this while also believing that “High SES correlates with IQ” and “You're just measuring the same thing, going round and round in circles.”
Now a sibling post goes into why IQ and SES aren’t the same thing, but suppose for the sake of argument that it is. SES is pretty much just a function of wealth, it can be measured by things like your family income, education and occupation, all pretty straight forward. You don’t need constructs such as intelligence, g-factors, you don’t need to do factor analysis to find correlations within massive tests etc. You just take the income, education, and occupation, and you have your SES.
Now, if I were to look for epicycles within a model which predicts “success”, IQ would be a prime candidate here. Nothing predicts you income as well as your parent’s income, the same applies to education and occupation. So if these are the things you’d define as “success”. Or as you put it:
> If jumping on chairs were what advanced modernity, we would test for that instead. And, that too would "work" because it would surely be a marker for people who were likely to be successful in life.
Now ponder this for a moment. What if instead of creating a construct called intelligence and using that as the predictor for this “success” as you call it, instead we allow society to be unequal. That we grant different people different access to things like good jobs, healthcare and education. Now if said society would enforce this limited access by using something we can actually and objectively know runs in families, say money, fame, and valuable assets, that those that have less of these things get less access to the tings which grants you “success”. Wouldn’t we have a pretty good model to predict “success”.
Now leaving aside this thought experiment (and snark on my part) IQ seems like a giant epicycle of you theory of success. Instead of forming our social policies around intelligence, wouldn’t it be better to form them around something we know is a prime cause of hindrance, inequality.
Now you know my political stance here, so I’m not afraid to say: Solidarity among the working class! Eating the rich! Those are the real solutions. Not being gaslit by the wealthy elite that we are stupider then they.
I quote, from the National Cancer Institute (a scientific institution you may have heard of): "The proportion of variation in a population trait that can be attributed to inherited genetic factors."
You're just lying or misinformed. Either way, it's starting to get hard to be civil with you.
You're selectively citing research on adoption. In fact, there's plenty of research showing that gains are transitory and parental IQ is a better predictor of IQ in late teen years than is the high-SES environment. This whole "mystery" is what prompted folks to ask Jensen to start studying Head Start, as it wasn't clear it was doing any good. The problem is these interventions don't work. They don't work because IQ is genetic.
What people want to understand is the preconditions of the high SES status. Not everyone who achieves high SES has rich parents. Take Japanese people in America. They were placed in internment camps in the 1940s, yet today they have substantially higher median incomes than whites. How is this possible?
Ashkenazi Jews faced unimaginable hardship for centuries, yet they manage to have remarkable success. Jews have won 26% of all Nobel Prizes in sciences, more than 100x what would be expected by chance. Arguing that's environmental is just silly. Their environment couldn't have been worse!
Now to your overall political point, I actually disagree there too. I honestly think it's possible that this quarantining of IQ science and cancel culture are looked favorably upon by elites because they know that they preserve the status quo. In fact, policies that embrace IQ and intelligence research would be far more expensive. Rather than pretending an 80 IQ person is going to be able to become a lawyer, society would have to reckon with the hard truth that such a person is probably going to need meaningful monetary assistance his entire life. Accepting IQ would probably mean something like reparations for slavery would actually have to be paid -- not out of some guilt trip, but because many of these folks need the money to keep up in society. And, you're not going to be able to get away with a single lump sum, because they're going to need the help every year.
So, even with an anti-rich ideology, I just don't think your arguments hold water. You're falling for a head-fake. Haven't you ever wondered why so many super-wealthy people embrace liberal politics? This is why.
"That doesn't work because IQ is genetic" doesn't even make sense as a sentence. It implies that something being "genetic" means it's immutable. That's not even how genes work. But it's how people thought they worked in the 1960s, which is where your cite comes from.
I would expect that in 2023 everyone would know how to search for "literacy rate in 1900" in Google (or Bing if you will) instead of asserting your flawed expectations and wasting everyone's time.
Before I get into the bulk of my argument I want to address this first:
> Haven't you ever wondered why so many super-wealthy people embrace liberal politics? This is why.
Now I’m not super well versed in polling numbers, but I was under the impression that the ultra-rich voted overwhelmingly conservative, that is, the proportion of conservative voters are higher among the most wealthy group of the population. However, perhaps you know more about polling numbers among demographics than I.
And now to the bulk of my arguments.
So what you are describing in your above post is that there is variation in the system, as people can move across classes. In a previous system, namely feudalism (or the caste system in India), this wasn’t possible. By abolishing feudalism we allowed people to move across the SES spectrum. Although capitalism allows some movement, there is still plenty of friction. Perhaps intelligence is this friction but I need to see more evidence to believe that. Or to apply Marx’s razor: “Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by class interest.”
Your examples all have simpler alternative explanation. Not all Japanese Americans were detained in concentration camps, some—particularly the wealthier—were able to self-exclude, meaning they had a place outside the exclusion zones, and were than able to return to their wealth after executive order 9066 was rescinded. This was a huge minority of course, but it speaks volumes that it was wealth, not intelligence, which determined who could and could not self-exclude. There have also been thousands of Japanese people that have migrated since 1944, and Japanese internal policies make it so that since 1945 most Japanese migrants are of the mid- to upper classes.
Your example with Ashkenazi Jews is just acknowledging the fact that culture exists and often follows racial lines such that people from a common background seek similar education and occupations. Note that SES includes both education and occupation. Also note that critical race theory explains race as a cultural phenomena instead of biological. So this observation is not surprising in an SES model as long as some horizontal movement between classes is allowed.
Reading about Ashkenazi Jews actually lead me to this excellent summary by Vox in the matter: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/30/21042733/... In short, this can be explained with statistics as “Small average differences make big differences to outliers” so even if you believe IQ is a good metric for intelligence (and you shouldn’t), and Ashkenazi Jews do have higher IQ on average (which they might), this is still not enough to establish there is any genetic basis for the group difference, as this is exactly what you’d expect to see given the statistics. When you only look at the extremes, the expected value also becomes extreme. So your statistics about > 100x is simply wrong.
Here's a nice take-down of him that took me 3 minutes of googling to find: https://cremieux.medium.com/is-eric-turkheimer-a-scientist-e...
I remember my first university assignment when studying psychology back in 2008. It was an essay on the nature vs. nurture debate. I remember going through the sources and deeming the debate kind of stupid. Then I got to Turkheimer, particularly the legendary 2000 article of “Three Laws of Behavior Genetics and What They Mean” which begins with:
> The nature-nurture debate is over. The bottom line is that everything is heritable, an outcome that has taken all sides of the nature-nurture debate by surprise.
And concludes with:
> The gloomy prospect [non-shared environment between siblings accounting for a large part of behavioral variability] looms larger for the genome project than is generally acknowledged. The question is not whether there are correlations to be found between individual genes and complex behavior—of course there are—but instead whether there are domains of genetic causation in which the gloomy prospect does not prevail, allowing the little bits of correlational evidence to cohere into replicable and cumulative genetic models of development. My own prediction is that such domains will prove rare indeed, and that the likelihood of discovering them will be inversely related to the complexity of the behavior under study.
Later in a 2003 study he then goes on and demonstrate that almost all of the variability can be explained by environmental effects (E) and genetic and environmental interaction effects (G × E). None of the previous readings even considered interactions and always concluded with x% E + (100 - x)% G for some x. (EDIT: Catching up my reading I actually see that more recent behavioral geneticists are even using G × E² in their models, that is, the environment also interacts with it self, and that interaction also interacts with you genotype, making for much richer models).
I turned in my paper concluding that obviously there was a flaw in previous studies that don’t look at interactions. Like why is this even being debated any more? I off course got a failing grade for the essay, being of low SES (sorry IQ) my essay skills obviously lacking as I didn’t have the skill (sorry intelligence) to formulate a coherent argument. Thankfully my boy Eric Turkheimer came to the rescue by concluding that actually in a high learning environment like a university in a country which grants equal education to everybody that my skills can be improved (sorry, I mean, my intelligence is malleable), so that I could graduate 3 years later with a first grade.
No, nobody can talk bad about my boy Turkheimer.
Yea it's certainly a bit immature and yea it doesn't have the ruthless update frequency Wikipedia has but it's almost never plain wrong. I think most reasonable people would agree Elon tweets too much and it often gets him in trouble.
The interaction effect only failed to replicate in countries with less SES disparity than the USA.
> The estimated size of the interaction varies between countries, which may result from a narrower range of socioeconomic deprivation in the countries where the effect is not found (Tucker‐Drob & Bates, 2016). If the hypothesis were true, the ability to detect genetic variants associated with educational attainment would be attenuated by a limited range of socioeconomic variation, which may explain discrepant findings in different contexts.
America and western society is so taken with intellectualism that they spend their prime years for having children doing precocious amounts of studying while their brains are in a state of peak plasticity. Americans right now are like modern day Irish elk who need increasingly large antlers (degrees) to win the reproductive game but are so encumbered by this that it becomes difficult to reproduce at all. So fertility is sub-replacement and Americans have reacted by bringing in immigrants so they can spend more time working on their degrees.
What sort of immigrants do they bring in? University graduates!
Forbes found they leaned slightly right in a survey with a very low participation rate. The idea that the Democrats are bad for business is wildly overstated. Lots of businesses benefits from things like direct government spending and a highly educated workforce for their businesses to be successful. Others like virtually anybody in Oil & Gas is going to lean way right.
The democrats have been leaning wealthier and wealthier every election though, seemingly because of a partisan split between high-education and low-education voters.
Social sciences aren't criticized for being crackpot anyway, that's a strawman, it's more for the standard reasons that they produce a lot of claims but the evidential basis is weak. If social science was riven with internal debate in which these weak claims were constantly and publicly attacked, then we could compare it to the software world, but in practice we don't see that and dubious claims that come from one or two people often persist for decades before anyone decides to take a second look.
Logical thinking is the precursor to proper critical thinking.
To drive a wedge between these two concepts, he is drawing on examples like the ones put forth in Ned Block's paper, like how wearing of earrings is (or at least used to be) almost perfectly correlated with having XX chromosomes, despite the fact that being biologically female does not directly cause the wearing of earrings. Thus, according to him, your interpretation of heritability is bogus, unscientific, race science, etc.
Is this a good argument? I don't think it is. While XX chromosomes may not directly cause the wearing of earrings (or lipstick), genetics clearly are a link in the causal chain that ultimately creates the variance observed when heritability is measured. Women wear earrings because they are biologically women and we live in a culture where women wear earrings. The two factors combine to produce the effect.
The most charitable interpretation of tptacek's point is that there are other, non-genetic inputs into the directed graph of causes, that these non-genetic factors combine with the genetic factors to produce the variance, and that the non-genetic factors are morally more important. For example, clearly culture plays a role in why only women wore earrings when Block wrote his paper. This is even more clear when we see that this is no longer the case, and now it is reasonably common for men to wear earrings too.
The logical conclusion is that non-genetic factors can interact with a genetic factor to produce a difference that the genetic factor itself could not have produced. For example, you could imagine a scenario where racial prejudice and discrimination caused teachers to give up on black kids based on nothing but their race, causing them never to achieve the IQ they could have achieved if they had been given the same educational attention as a white kid. This would be a case where an IQ difference is heritable, even though the true blame lies with how people are treated based on their race.
But is that the world we live in? Given the strong heritability of IQ, and the enduring disparities that are frustratingly durable even through decades of remarkable social change, I think the onus is on the people proposing such an extra non-genetic factor to identify and measure it, in a way that can be isolated and empirically evaluated. Otherwise the argument is isomorphic to: "you're a race scientist if you think that height differences between population groups could be caused by genetics."
The extra, non-genetic factors that people would propose (socio-economic status especially) can be controlled for, and do not seem to explain the gap. Most teachers seem to value the success of racial minorities as highly, if not more highly, than other students. I think that some cultural anti-patterns in black culture could certainly play a part (like cultural pressure against being a good student), but that has been decreed to be just as verboten as the genetic hypothesis.
* Good genetics, bad environment = bad outcome
* Bad genetics, good environment = bad outcome
* Good genetics, good environment = good outcome
* Bad genetics, bad environment = bad outcome
So, it's basically an "and" gate.
I see nothing wrong with this reasoning, and it makes perfect sense to me. A couple points, however.
1. You'd still have to ask the question of which of the variables is malleable.
2. There would remain this question along the lines of, "let's say you took 1000 children from low-SES environments and put them in high-SES environments. What happens?" My recollection of the literature on this is it's somewhat sparse (because this doesn't happen that often), but that there's a strong regression to the genetic intelligence in the teenage years. BUT, even if you argue all such studies are methodologically flawed, the US government, with its $N trillion budget could easily simply run this experiment and find out what happens. Why don't people advocate to run this experiment?
Edit: Just to sidestep bad-faith responses, here's how the experiment would work. You run a program where all low-SES babies put up for adoption starting on a random day become eligible for something such that high-SES families who adopt them get some massive tax break or even subsidy while raising them. They would be required to show proof they spent $Nk per year on private schools, that they live in a high-SES neighborhood the entire time, and there would be home visits to ensure the kid is being treated appropriately by the parents. Any families where this isn't the case would be excluded.
Now just to clarify, G + E is a different model from G + E + G×E. Many twin studies in the past century were done on a pretty homogeneous demographic, across a very slim slice of SES (mostly inside high SES; as you correctly pointed out). This skewed the models such that it completely missed the G×E part, this is, if you don’t measure across different SES, you’ll miss how SES interacts with genotypes. What Turkheimer did was actually measure heritability inside low SES, and his results were that in a G + E model, the proportions were flipped. That is, instead of G=60% and E=40%, he and his team found E=60%. When your get results that flip in this way, it is a pretty clear indicator that you have interactions between your main effects (G and E), so Turkheimer fitted a model which includes the G×E interaction[1] (which all researchers with some level of statistical literacy would do) and found that almost all of the variance previously attributed to genes, would perish into the interaction effects.
You can read the study here. The methodology is not that far off from what you are proposing (just without the controlled interventions; which is bound to cause some biases anyway). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8997472_Socioeconom...
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1: Note the models are a bit more complicated than G+E. Usually they use an ACE model, with Genotype (A), shared environment (C), and non-shared environment (E; also known as gloomy prospect), and than model A + C + E. In Turkheimer, et. al. (2003) the model was s*SES + A*(a + a'*SES) + C*(c + c'*SES) + E*(e + e'*SES) where a,c,e are the main effects of A, C, E; s the main effect of SES; and a', c', e' are interactions of a,c,e with respects to SES.
Very, somewhere in the 80% range: "The estimated heritability was 0.79 (SE 0.09) for height and 0.40 (SE 0.09) for BMI, consistent with pedigree estimates." [0][1]
>For bonus points: why has the heritability of height changed over time
It hasn't.
>and varied by country?
It hasn't.
Love it when the bonus questions are easier than the main questions.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/landmark-study-resol...
Yes really.
>Using the fact that someone put pronouns in their profile is a bad faith move?
No, putting pronouns in your profile is a red flag for bad faith moves.
>Your account is literally a throwaway.
Which means you can expect unadulterated facts.
>Calling these twin studies as settled science is the most bad faith move here
No it's not, stop denying the science.
>since the chief problem of this section of The Bell Curve is that it confuses heritability with genetic determination
The Bell Curve makes no confusion between heritability and genetic determination.
>mistake that informed scientists wouldn’t make
Good thing the Bell Curve didn't make that mistake!
>Unsurprisingly, that is why there is widespread scientific backlash against it.
There wasn't much scientific backlash to it because it's fairly bulletproof. The backlash was because of contained heretical topics, and may have pointed to blasphemous conclusions.
>Believe it or not, twin black babies separated at birth and raised with white parents are still treated as black by society.
"Believe it or not, twin Asian babies separated at birth and raised with white parents are still treated as Asian by society."
You're almost there /r/selfawarewolves.