IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
Taleb dunking on IQ “research” at length. Technically a seriouspost I guess.
This is good:
Take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook or ask your closest Fat Tony) [Note: We can also apply here Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, which states that any of an infinite number of functions is compatible with any finite sequence. Source: Paul Bogossian]. Not only clueless, but obedient enough to want to think in a certain way.
Also this:
If, as psychologists show, MDs and academics tend to have a higher “IQ” that is slightly informative (higher, but on a noisy average), it is largely because to get into schools you need to score on a test similar to “IQ”. The mere presence of such a filter increases the visible mean and lower the visible variance. Probability and statistics confuse fools.
And:
If someone came up w/a numerical“Well Being Quotient” WBQ or “Sleep Quotient”, SQ, trying to mimic temperature or a physical quantity, you’d find it absurd. But put enough academics w/physics envy and race hatred on it and it will become an official measure.
Unlucky 10000: There is an EQ, or emotional quotient, and I was given an EQ test in high school (like age 17-18, don't remember exactly). Fortunately, it was just done for fun by a lone teacher, but I could see it becoming popular in a future school system.
Ignoring the racism behind IQ tests for a second...
IQ can't measure intelligence, because even if you're smart as hell in one topic you can be dumb as hell in another. Hell, people in MENSA prove that themselves by paying YEARLY to validate their intelligence lmao. Gives me Peggy Hill "certified genius" vibes
My dad is a smart guy so he applied to join Mensa in the 80s. Incidentally he was also an amateur soccer player at the time. Anyway he did the first test which was free and passed it. There was a second test which you did have to pay for but it wasn't that expensive so he did it and passed. But then there was a third test you also had to pay for....so he didn't join. Gave him a good story.
On the rational wiki page for Mensa it says that the founder of the organization left when it was quite young, commenting that conversations between self-validated smart people quickly devolved into "mental masturbation"....
Some of us need the validation because we can't do well in sports. Is every athlete a fool for paying to participate and compete in their sport? Mensa actually had a lot of special interest groups and it filters out people who don't want to have intelligent conversation.
I don't play sports and I'm not in MENSA and I somehow manage to have intelligent conversation. And non intelligent conversations cause I'm not a snob
Hobby groups are a thing that exist outside of MENSA... And you don't have to pay for them to talk to you 😱
Side note, I know Taleb is widely appreciated, but man this is some badly written stuff. Is all his stuff like this? I realize blog post != book, but c'mon, some pride in craftmanship is in order.
yes, way too much of it is. Taleb is extremely smart, but nobody is as smart as Taleb thinks he is.
I think the most bitter part is him taking pride in his "real life" intelligence and his condemnation of test takers as "lifeless bureaucrats who can muster sterile motivation". There is a callous hubris there, I suspect fueled by resentment of past interactions with quacks and/or holier than thou academics, the remedy isn't becoming holier than thou in turn.
Sneering is fun/cathartic, othering less so.
NOTE: As a mindless drone pencil pusher myself, prone to to investigate things that don't clearly matter immediately to the "real world"; I might be a tad defensive here ^^.
@dgerard or as insufferable. I couldn't get more than half a chapter into Black Swan because his writing style was so damned offputting.
Unfortunately he is an atrocious narcissist
Yeah, he needs an editor. But the relentless dunking on IQiots is worth the verbiage imo.
The big problem with IQ is that it's horribly misapplied. It's a predictor for how you will do in education. That is all it was designed to do and all it has ever been validated for. It does that ok, not great but well enough to be statistically significant. It has some reasonable use in identifying extreme outliers (the roughly 5% of people more than 2 standard deviations from the mean) which is useful for getting the roughly 2.5% of people more than 2 standard deviations below the mean the additional resources and care they need. There are no other valid community uses for IQ and for the vast majority of people it's a meaningless number. It unfortunately found a place in pop culture and in business and government recruitment when realistically it's use should have always been limited to research and selective clinical/educational applications (identifying people that need extra resources). Mass testing is undisputably a waste of resources because of how little useful information it generates and the high risk of misuse of basically meaningless results of the 95% that are within the normal range.
Don't forget its other use: corralling high-IQ children into Talented & Gifted programs. Gotta stigmatize them early. (It's okay, I'm allowed to joke about this; I maxed out an IQ test as a child and was shoved into T&G for grade school.)
IQ is a relatively recent construct.
My father (b. 1913) was one of the children chosen to calibrate the Stanford Binet IQ test after it moved from Europe to Stanford University.
Having a high IQ didn't make much difference for an alcoholic manic depressive attorney who could insult you in English, French, German, and Arabic.
He became an embezzler who lost everything and ended up dying in my one-year-old daughter's bedroom after his last wife threw him out.
A few days before he died, he seemed to confess to murdering his first wife.
IQ may predict other things than it was designed for.
Wtf? When has IQ been purported to be a measure of how well adjusted some is.
Smart people talk about ideas or hobbies or whatever it is they're focused on.
Dumb people talk about their IQ and how it means whatever half baked conclusions they decide to jump to.
who the heck knows their iq. don't you have to go out of your way to take that test?
I know mine. I took an IQ test in my early 20s and got a high score on it. Didn't mean a whole lot for me, I had already dropped out of highschool, then I drunked out of college and wound up fixing trash trucks for 10 years.
Comparison between attention-sensitive and attention-insensitive IQ tests are considered diagnostic for ADHD.
It was disappointing to see Veritasium not applying much critical analysis to IQ testing in his video.
He really should of downplayed it’s significance more.
I don't even want to watch that video because I know I'm going to get annoyed by it. Veritasium's video on self-driving cars was so awful, it was enough for me to just sort them into the Sketchy Pop-Sci YouTube Channels bucket for good. I've heard that their videos on electricity and that one physics bet were also pretty shaky.
@Custoslibera @pja You also have MrBeast, YouTube’s most subscribed “content creator”, giving his girlfriend an IQ test on their first date. What is it with our institutions promoting the most sociopathic amongst us?
I thought he did a good job. Most of the commentary I've seen in the last 20 years has been saying its garbage science (culturally biased, etc), but Veritasium tried to argue towards moderation. i.e., it does have its place and it does have its faults.
I'll go one further: "intelligence" as conceived by "IQ" is a mostly meaningless concept and the word, when used in everyday English, mostly just means "agrees with me"
What books(ideally books pls) would you guys recommend to anyone caught up in IQ stuff? Especially for people outside the US? Ignore if wrong place to ask this, my bad there.
Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man is always a good place to start.
Will find a copy, thank you!