American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the 'Reverse Flynn effect'

It's worth looking up whose blog this is before trusting any of its analysis.

A summary:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard

I'd never heard of this person before finding this blog post via Google. So I trust the post as much as I trust any random blog post that seems to make a reasonable argument :)

You trust one of these random people enough to promote it. It's not unreasonable for people to point out that the author is quite infamous for his viewpoints.

Now you have. Adjust accordingly. I'm not telling you how to adjust, only that you're likely to want to.

Yup. 100% agree :)

This is an ad hominem attack. The fact that you don't like his politics doesn't imply that he's wrong.

I didn't mean to imply I didn't appreciate people telling me more about this guy. I apologise if that's how my comment came across.

It's an ad-hominem (in the original sense of the word: an ad-hominem fallacy is one where the truth or falsity of an argument is determined by the trustworthiness of its proponent rather than by the content of the argument itself).

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.

Naw!!! "trust ... analysis"??? How does it go, "trust none of what you hear and only half of what you read and still will trust twice too much??? Not entirely a joke!

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 have very low trust in RationalWiki, so here's a related Wikipedia article instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPsych

It's not a fallacy to attack someone's historical reliability in making arguments.

Bravo, I was gonna post this guy's 'bio' but someone beat me to it

I mean, it's still precisely a fallacy. Just because someone made a stupid or wrong argument 20 times in a row doesn't make it logically follow that the 21st is also wrong, without examining that argument itself.

Of course, it's a useful heuristic to determine if it's worth your time to examine it.

It very much is a fallacy to attack anything outside the argument.

That said while broken clock could happen to be correct, pointing out a clock is broken or someone is a nutter is still useful information.

It is literally a fallacy [1] in that it's invalid logical reasoning.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

[2] https://xkcd.com/552/

It's not t necessarily fallacious, but it certainly can be. A known liar stating that 2+2=4 doesn't mean that 2+2!=4.

Yes, it is. It absolutely is a fallacy to use that as your reason instead of something about the argument itself being wrong.

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.

You should distrust every analyst and trust their analysis iff the argument is sound and you reach the same conclusion by doing the same analysis process based on data you trust.

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.

This site isn’t really any above EncyclopediaDramatica in its proximity to reality. It’s a meme pit for teenagers, not really somewhere to be taken seriously.

Someone has now pointed to some data in the study that isn't stratified by education level:

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.

Just a meta note, this is why fallacies are limited. Just because something is a logical fallacy, meaning it does not lead to a disproof in a deductive reasoning sense, doesn't mean people often use arguments that could be considered fallacious to disregard arguments all the time as instead they use good heuristics.

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.

It may not be, but that's not what's being attacked here. Unless I'm missing the place where tptacek discusses the reliability of this person's arguments?

> 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

So... it's not a fallacy. It gives you a reasonable amount of information.

> can't possibly

Nobody said he can't possibly be right about anything. That's an exaggeration so extreme as to be ridiculous.

Logical fallacies undermine the argument of the person using them.

How can it be a fallacy and useful information?

Something can be a logical fallacy while still being epistemologically justified. That's because logic is not an a priori description of reality; it's just a system for making inferences that happen to often be useful models of reality. But if I change my system of logic (e.g. move from accepting to rejecting the law of the excluded middle) then one set of fallacies disappears and another appears.

You can use imperfect information. It’s the difference between heuristics and logical arguments.

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.

I don't think it's a fallacy to use imperfect information.

All information is imperfect.

Really? I've checked a range of topics and the Rational Wiki seemed spot on. Do you know of any topics it's completely wrong or unfair on?

It of course takes side on some issues like Atheism, Religion but nothing unexpected for a site to be unapologetically rational/empirical.

Science, properly done, is about convincingly explaining how your propositions might be true, usually deferring to a branch of mathematics.

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.

I don't know how to substantiate this, so I won't try. My impression of the site is that it has a particular left-wing/pro-socialist political bias that creeps into articles, particularly about individuals. It doesn't usually have false information, but the language is often quite unfair. It's not wrong to have an opinion of course, but I assume it's opinions are an emergent property of its users and not the result of unapologetic rationality.

This websites opinion aligns pretty closely with my impression: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/rationalwiki/

RationalWiki was created in opposition to Conservapedia, so it's not unsurprising that it would attract users of the opposite political persuasion to the latter site. The comparison to Encyclopedia Dramatica, a dead wiki that in its heyday was populated by edgy teenage trolls, is silly though.

I exaggerated to make the point, but taking any degree of information from it is fallacious, because it contains no information about the time.

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 we didn't start from a neutral point. We started with someone linking the article as a source of information. If someone tries to use a broken clock to tell the time, you can't use the clock to say what time it is, but you can say something about whether they're right or not. They are >99% likely to be wrong.

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.

Indeed, we started with "this guy's argument is wrong, he's a bad person" which does nothing to refute the argument because it never engages with it. I truly don't know if he's right or wrong, I just know that nobody has bothered to state an actual case about why other than telling me that he believes a lot of horrible things. Sure, I'm not going to invite him over for dinner or anything, but it does nothing to inform anyone about why he is wrong about this.

> 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.

The article's claims about Kirkegaard are all well cited, linking to his own comments.

I was just answering why I don't take it too seriously as an impartial source, I agree it's not as bad as Encyclopedia Dramatica.

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.

> Indeed, we started with "this guy's argument is wrong, he's a bad person"

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.

> Overall, we rate RationalWiki Left-Center biased based on the use of loaded language against conservatives and High for factual reporting due to pro-science reporting coupled with proper sourcing and a clean fact check record.

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.

Using probabilistic logic is perfectly reasonable as long as you track the stacking likelihood it’s wrong. However, making a probabilistic argument without tracking the internal probabilities is a Fallacy.

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.

Yes, I wasn't trying to say they're the same, just commenting on RationalWiki by itself. I suppose that wasn't clear.

RationalWiki is partly written by highly biased political activists and sometimes borders on defamation, at some point they also attacked people like Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, or Eliezer Yudkowsky. Here is what Kirkegaard has to say about the main author of this page: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/inaccuracies-in-rationalwikis-o...

See https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/inaccuracies-in-rationalwikis-o...

There wasn't even an argument about Kirkegaard's historical reliability, so it's worse than a fallacy.

What "bio"? So far I have only seen far left dominated opinion pieces, who obviously hate that he engages with taboo topics like race and IQ.

Are you saying that "You should know A is true 90% of the time." is a fallacy unless I add an explicit disclaimer about probabilistic weakening? Even if I'm not making any conclusions based on it, just suggesting people will want to use that information themselves?

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.

> Tesla Motors is a car company figure-headed by Elon Musk. It is famous for being the only company with a commercially available car floating in space. It makes electric cars, which made the news for catching fire.[133][134] As it turns out, though, while Teslas caught fire, they did so at a much lower rate than the cars relying on controlled explosions of flammable material.

>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.

Anyone who contradicts this notion that some races are better than others and ergo those other "mud" races need to be exterminated, is too far left for retards like you. Go bait someone else.

That's not the right way to think about it. It is an empirical question whether there are significant heritable IQ differences between populations with similar ancestry. If such differences exist, then this is a very important fact to know about the world. We always want to believe the truth, whatever it may be. Labelling possibly true hypotheses as racist doesn't help. Ethical questions are different from empirical ones.

The source cited for "it's worth looking up whose blog this is" is almost entirely dedicated to the proposition that he's a bad person with nothing whatsoever about his argument about the Flynn effect.

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.

Does not seem to be a reliable source. The outcome of the lawsuit emil kirkegaard filed against the main author was the author winning and Kirkegaard owing him tens of thousands in legal costs. https://www.scribd.com/document/535708866/Emil-Kirkegaard-29... Kirkegaard does not mention the lawsuit outcome on his website because he lost and was shown to be a liar in court.

> The source cited for "it's worth looking up whose blog this is" is almost entirely dedicated to the proposition that he's a bad person with nothing whatsoever about his argument about the Flynn effect.

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

does not rebut the RationalWiki page but is a poorly written smear piece. convienently, emil kirkegaard does not mention he lost the lawsuit he filed and changed his name and moved country to avoid debt collection. https://www.pdf-archive.com/2022/11/27/emil-kirkegaard-name-...

The whole point of the fallacy is that this other stuff isn't relevant to the truth of the argument, and it does nothing to inform us about the argument.

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.

If someone is trying to use a broken clock as a source, it's valuable to tell them it's broken.

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.

... writes a brand new account with zero prior comments. Surely no affiliation with Oliver Smith.

> RW is a series of stale reddit dunks for immature and ideologically driven teenagers.

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.

If someone tells you that someone is wrong and yet they can't explain how, they're a broken clock.