7 ms·

I have no way to navigate this, I've heard psychologists claim that IQ is the most well proven concept in the social sciences. Now this guy comes along saying

by xupybd 8y ago

I have no way to navigate this, I've heard psychologists claim that IQ is the most well proven concept in the social sciences. Now this guy comes along saying the complete opposite. Anyone have any advice on how to weight this up and figure out what the truth is?

gweinberg 8y ago
There's no contradiction between "IQ is largely bullshit, especially at the high ends" and "IQ is the most well proven concept in the social sciences".
- xupybd 8y ago
  Perhaps but there is once between "IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle" and "IQ is the most well proven concept in the social sciences". Unless you are just taking a dig at the social sciences.
  - flatfilefan 8y ago
    Maybe he does and it's a right thing to do. Taleb is briefly mentioning the gaping problems of lacking reproducibility of social sciences research.
    - toasterlovin 8y ago
      There is no reproducibility crisis with IQ research.
wutbrodo 8y ago
Taleb is barely this side of being a troll: he has plenty of interesting tidbits to say and is obviously a smart guy, but read enough of his stuff and he's clearly more focused on generating heat instead of light. If you read through the article, he's not quite making the claim that one might assume from the headline: which is basically that IQ isn't much of a useful or well-defined metric.
- xupybd 8y ago
  It did seem like a lot of the article was making claims about the motives of IQ supporters. That seemed like a bit of a red flag to me, that this was more about politics than science (not that either exists without the other). Thanks
  - torstenvl 8y ago
    In both politics and science, attacking your opponents' motivations is fallacious. The merit of a position should be judged independently of the personal failings of whoever puts it forward.
Itsdijital 8y ago
There's a lot of good evidence that correlates race and IQ. Even when controlling for as many factors as possible. To the best of our current scientific knowledge, this is a thing. Obviously this is an excellent source of ammo for racists and likewise those fighting racism see it as a threat. By extension, anyone who speaks of this science must also be racist and the science itself must be wrong because it is racist. And even if it's not wrong, it must be locked in a box, hidden deep in the archives, and never spoken of again. If you're a social scientist and your results come back supporting this, should you publish them, twist them, or burn them? So it's three powerful forces (racism, equality, and truth) all converging on one extremely hot button topic. It's seems Taleb here is trying to pull out the rug from underneath this perfect quaternity of shit show.
- trextrex 8y ago
  > There's a lot of good evidence that correlates race and IQ. Even when controlling for as many factors as possible. To the best of our current scientific knowledge, this is a thing. Care to point to actual data supporting that statement?
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 8y ago
  IQ is well supported, but raceXiq is very poorly supported. Most of the HBD and 'race realism' stuff fails simply at trying to define race. Often it's 'colored people', and not any kind of grouping that even resembles human genetic diversity. This all relies on very straight-forward and well-established genetics, but they generally can't even come close to the mark here. They'll shout and scream about how "you're not allowed to study this!" despite plenty of scholarly work on human genetic diversity. It's not literally titled 'black people are human garbage', so I can see why they might have trouble finding it. There's also a lot of cherry-picking, agonizing over particular sub-populations that happen to fit their narrative and acting as though that's case closed. The reality is that most of the population diversity is in Africa and a bunch of isolated islands. Yet even in these extreme outliers we don't see much in by way of large effects (intra > inter, generally). But the race realist narrative, somehow and miraculously, comes to the conclusion that white people are super duper great, the somewhat less white people are somewhat less great, and black people are genetically .. unfortunate. Who knew?! They just got so damn lucky and happened to hate just the right people! Plenty of detailed refutation for anyone interested: https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39t4vx/gathering_some_old_refutations_of_the_typical/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39t4... https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39bx7w/welcome_to_ahs/cs2bzsr/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39bx... https://old.reddit.com/r/debatepoliticalphil/comments/7m3lex/argument_the_case_against_race_realism/ https://old.reddit.com/r/debatepoliticalphil/comments/7m3lex...
sgjohnson 8y ago
Psychology is a pseudoscience per se.
- dang 8y ago
  Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
jcranmer 8y ago
The thing to remember is that psychology is a field that has a well-worn history of being driven by heavy misinterpretation of flawed experiments, and psychometrics in particular tends to vary from the awful to the truly execrable in this regard. IQ and the Big-5 personality tests are the best of the field, but we're not talking Standard Model-level of verification--these theories are the nearsighted one-eyed kings of the land of the blind. The current consensus among psychologists is that intelligence is not driven by one single factor. Rather, there are separate kinds of intelligence (e.g., crystallized and fluid intelligence), and there may be a master throttling general intelligence factor called g. As psychology came around to this viewpoint, IQ tests have been retooled to measure g... except g can't be directly measured. So g is teased out of intelligence tests by statistical means as the primary factor of correlation, and the fact that there does exist a mildly strong correlation is taken as evidence that g exists. (And if you're saying to yourself that correlation is not causation and that this argument is circular, well, there are plenty of psychologists, if a distinct minority, who would agree with you on that point). Most psychologists, I expect, would prefer to talk about intelligence in terms of the subcategories such as crystallized and fluid intelligence, for which there is stronger evidence and more readily accessible metrics. (Most IQ tests also spit out these scores as well, but it's the IQ part that is the most widely broadcast).
- maroonblazer 8y ago
  >Most psychologists, I expect, would prefer to talk about intelligence in terms of the subcategories such as crystallized and fluid intelligence, for which there is stronger evidence and more readily accessible metrics. (Most IQ tests also spit out these scores as well, but it's the IQ part that is the most widely broadcast). When talking about IQ, i.e. 'g', this incorporates both crystalized and fluid intelligence. So to say that there's stronger evidence for these vs IQ doesn't seem to make any sense.
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  Except that IQ predicts real world performance on cognitive tasks. In fact, it is the single best predictor of job performance that exists.
amazingman 8y ago
Ignore Taleb, he’s a self-appointed expert among “charlatans” in every topic he’s ever encountered. The sheer hubris of the man is breathtaking. Every once in a while he’s correct about something important. At this point, though, it seems like those times are basically accidents.
- stuntkite 8y ago
  > Every once in a while he’s correct about something important. Lol, you just summarized the book he keeps writing. Black Swan and Anti-Fragile are alright long drive audio books. He's pretty funny once you figure out that he uses being a prick as a filter. He's like a human r/spacedicks.
zorga 8y ago
Taleb doesn't know what he's talking about, he's not remotely an expert in the field; he's just a crank trader that snatched a bit of fame with his concept of the black swan and he's very bitter he isn't more famous than he is, so he lashes out like the raging narcissist he is and continually pokes his head into fields he knows little about and calls everyone there stupid. Ignore him.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
I can't get through the article. But I used to be pretty active in the online gifted community. I was somewhat acquainted with folks involved in testing, developing new IQ tests, published authors blah blah blah. I'm not going to cite any sources. This is my understanding and it's about twenty years out of date. First, the first test that gets cited as starting the whole IQ testing trend was never intended to measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness for children of indeterminate age. France had a problem: City kids typically had known ages and we're already exposed to practices like standing in line. It was easy to assimilate them into the school system. But rural kids often had no birth certificate and their age was not known and they additionally lacked the experiences of the city kids. There were cultural differences and trying to decide when the country kids should start school was proving problematic. So they hired a guy, I think his last name was Binet, to create a test to help them decide when children were ready to start school. This had nothing at all to do with measuring intelligence. But thereafter he developed additional tests and this eventually becy the Stanford-Binet. Most IQ tests have a ceiling of about 140. Trying to test IQ above that is quite challenging. If you ceiling the test, your IQ is probably something above that. In practice, if you aren't properly assessed by about age 7, we don't have the tools to accurately determine your IQ if it is above a certain range. IQ tests are culture specific. This means that they aren't really accurate for immigrants or people of the wrong socioeconomic class. This means foreigners, poor people and people of color routinely score poorly on them and IQ tests thus have a long and sordid history of being used to justify racist, classist bullshit as well as anti-immigrant sentiment. Twenty years ago, they were running into a problem: The tests good for testing very high IQs were old. They this contained culturally out of date questions. They needed a new test and wee running into trouble developing such. IQ tests are additionally merely tools that can be useful in the hands of a trained professional for assessing someone. The tests themselves do a poor job of standing on their own. So online IQ tests are about as meaningful as those online quizzes that crap like "What kind of dog are you?" Twice Exceptional kids -- gifted and disabled in some way -- probably benefit the most from getting properly assessed because they frequently have "average" performance while being horribly frustrated. Figuring out that a kid is actually bright and intellectually starving because no one realized he was bright can be life changing. The best use of IQ tests is to try to understand your own needs. All testing is gamable and thus of questionable value for other purposes. Getting some assessment helped me homeschool my sons appropriately. Beyond that, it's mostly useless bullshit in my opinion. The rich kids of the "insiders" tend to score well and other people tend to score less well, so, in practice, you can't cleanly separate out wealth, culture, education, etc from some kind of theoretical raw intelligence figure.
warp_factor 8y ago
I'm going with the actual consensus across scientific which is that IQ is a valid measurement. This article is surfing on the leftist wave of pretending that everyone is completely equal in every possible way. IQ measurements are seen as bad thing as it would lessen the theory that we are all biologically equal and that only our environment would define us. This article is more political than scientific. It is really sad. It really reads as if the outcome of the article was decided in advance then the article written in order to build a narrative for the conclusion

by xupybd 8y ago

gweinberg 8y ago

There's no contradiction between "IQ is largely bullshit, especially at the high ends" and "IQ is the most well proven concept in the social sciences".

xupybd 8y ago
Perhaps but there is once between "IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle" and "IQ is the most well proven concept in the social sciences". Unless you are just taking a dig at the social sciences.
- flatfilefan 8y ago
  Maybe he does and it's a right thing to do. Taleb is briefly mentioning the gaping problems of lacking reproducibility of social sciences research.
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    There is no reproducibility crisis with IQ research.

wutbrodo 8y ago

Taleb is barely this side of being a troll: he has plenty of interesting tidbits to say and is obviously a smart guy, but read enough of his stuff and he's clearly more focused on generating heat instead of light. If you read through the article, he's not quite making the claim that one might assume from the headline: which is basically that IQ isn't much of a useful or well-defined metric.

xupybd 8y ago
It did seem like a lot of the article was making claims about the motives of IQ supporters. That seemed like a bit of a red flag to me, that this was more about politics than science (not that either exists without the other). Thanks
- torstenvl 8y ago
  In both politics and science, attacking your opponents' motivations is fallacious. The merit of a position should be judged independently of the personal failings of whoever puts it forward.

Itsdijital 8y ago

There's a lot of good evidence that correlates race and IQ. Even when controlling for as many factors as possible. To the best of our current scientific knowledge, this is a thing. Obviously this is an excellent source of ammo for racists and likewise those fighting racism see it as a threat. By extension, anyone who speaks of this science must also be racist and the science itself must be wrong because it is racist. And even if it's not wrong, it must be locked in a box, hidden deep in the archives, and never spoken of again. If you're a social scientist and your results come back supporting this, should you publish them, twist them, or burn them? So it's three powerful forces (racism, equality, and truth) all converging on one extremely hot button topic. It's seems Taleb here is trying to pull out the rug from underneath this perfect quaternity of shit show.

trextrex 8y ago
> There's a lot of good evidence that correlates race and IQ. Even when controlling for as many factors as possible. To the best of our current scientific knowledge, this is a thing. Care to point to actual data supporting that statement?
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 8y ago
IQ is well supported, but raceXiq is very poorly supported. Most of the HBD and 'race realism' stuff fails simply at trying to define race. Often it's 'colored people', and not any kind of grouping that even resembles human genetic diversity. This all relies on very straight-forward and well-established genetics, but they generally can't even come close to the mark here. They'll shout and scream about how "you're not allowed to study this!" despite plenty of scholarly work on human genetic diversity. It's not literally titled 'black people are human garbage', so I can see why they might have trouble finding it. There's also a lot of cherry-picking, agonizing over particular sub-populations that happen to fit their narrative and acting as though that's case closed. The reality is that most of the population diversity is in Africa and a bunch of isolated islands. Yet even in these extreme outliers we don't see much in by way of large effects (intra > inter, generally). But the race realist narrative, somehow and miraculously, comes to the conclusion that white people are super duper great, the somewhat less white people are somewhat less great, and black people are genetically .. unfortunate. Who knew?! They just got so damn lucky and happened to hate just the right people! Plenty of detailed refutation for anyone interested: https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39t4vx/gathering_some_old_refutations_of_the_typical/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39t4... https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39bx7w/welcome_to_ahs/cs2bzsr/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstHateSubreddits/comments/39bx... https://old.reddit.com/r/debatepoliticalphil/comments/7m3lex/argument_the_case_against_race_realism/ https://old.reddit.com/r/debatepoliticalphil/comments/7m3lex...

sgjohnson 8y ago

Psychology is a pseudoscience per se.

dang 8y ago
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

jcranmer 8y ago

The thing to remember is that psychology is a field that has a well-worn history of being driven by heavy misinterpretation of flawed experiments, and psychometrics in particular tends to vary from the awful to the truly execrable in this regard. IQ and the Big-5 personality tests are the best of the field, but we're not talking Standard Model-level of verification--these theories are the nearsighted one-eyed kings of the land of the blind. The current consensus among psychologists is that intelligence is not driven by one single factor. Rather, there are separate kinds of intelligence (e.g., crystallized and fluid intelligence), and there may be a master throttling general intelligence factor called g. As psychology came around to this viewpoint, IQ tests have been retooled to measure g... except g can't be directly measured. So g is teased out of intelligence tests by statistical means as the primary factor of correlation, and the fact that there does exist a mildly strong correlation is taken as evidence that g exists. (And if you're saying to yourself that correlation is not causation and that this argument is circular, well, there are plenty of psychologists, if a distinct minority, who would agree with you on that point). Most psychologists, I expect, would prefer to talk about intelligence in terms of the subcategories such as crystallized and fluid intelligence, for which there is stronger evidence and more readily accessible metrics. (Most IQ tests also spit out these scores as well, but it's the IQ part that is the most widely broadcast).

maroonblazer 8y ago
>Most psychologists, I expect, would prefer to talk about intelligence in terms of the subcategories such as crystallized and fluid intelligence, for which there is stronger evidence and more readily accessible metrics. (Most IQ tests also spit out these scores as well, but it's the IQ part that is the most widely broadcast). When talking about IQ, i.e. 'g', this incorporates both crystalized and fluid intelligence. So to say that there's stronger evidence for these vs IQ doesn't seem to make any sense.
toasterlovin 8y ago
Except that IQ predicts real world performance on cognitive tasks. In fact, it is the single best predictor of job performance that exists.

amazingman 8y ago

Ignore Taleb, he’s a self-appointed expert among “charlatans” in every topic he’s ever encountered. The sheer hubris of the man is breathtaking. Every once in a while he’s correct about something important. At this point, though, it seems like those times are basically accidents.

stuntkite 8y ago
> Every once in a while he’s correct about something important. Lol, you just summarized the book he keeps writing. Black Swan and Anti-Fragile are alright long drive audio books. He's pretty funny once you figure out that he uses being a prick as a filter. He's like a human r/spacedicks.

zorga 8y ago

Taleb doesn't know what he's talking about, he's not remotely an expert in the field; he's just a crank trader that snatched a bit of fame with his concept of the black swan and he's very bitter he isn't more famous than he is, so he lashes out like the raging narcissist he is and continually pokes his head into fields he knows little about and calls everyone there stupid. Ignore him.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

I can't get through the article. But I used to be pretty active in the online gifted community. I was somewhat acquainted with folks involved in testing, developing new IQ tests, published authors blah blah blah. I'm not going to cite any sources. This is my understanding and it's about twenty years out of date. First, the first test that gets cited as starting the whole IQ testing trend was never intended to measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness for children of indeterminate age. France had a problem: City kids typically had known ages and we're already exposed to practices like standing in line. It was easy to assimilate them into the school system. But rural kids often had no birth certificate and their age was not known and they additionally lacked the experiences of the city kids. There were cultural differences and trying to decide when the country kids should start school was proving problematic. So they hired a guy, I think his last name was Binet, to create a test to help them decide when children were ready to start school. This had nothing at all to do with measuring intelligence. But thereafter he developed additional tests and this eventually becy the Stanford-Binet. Most IQ tests have a ceiling of about 140. Trying to test IQ above that is quite challenging. If you ceiling the test, your IQ is probably something above that. In practice, if you aren't properly assessed by about age 7, we don't have the tools to accurately determine your IQ if it is above a certain range. IQ tests are culture specific. This means that they aren't really accurate for immigrants or people of the wrong socioeconomic class. This means foreigners, poor people and people of color routinely score poorly on them and IQ tests thus have a long and sordid history of being used to justify racist, classist bullshit as well as anti-immigrant sentiment. Twenty years ago, they were running into a problem: The tests good for testing very high IQs were old. They this contained culturally out of date questions. They needed a new test and wee running into trouble developing such. IQ tests are additionally merely tools that can be useful in the hands of a trained professional for assessing someone. The tests themselves do a poor job of standing on their own. So online IQ tests are about as meaningful as those online quizzes that crap like "What kind of dog are you?" Twice Exceptional kids -- gifted and disabled in some way -- probably benefit the most from getting properly assessed because they frequently have "average" performance while being horribly frustrated. Figuring out that a kid is actually bright and intellectually starving because no one realized he was bright can be life changing. The best use of IQ tests is to try to understand your own needs. All testing is gamable and thus of questionable value for other purposes. Getting some assessment helped me homeschool my sons appropriately. Beyond that, it's mostly useless bullshit in my opinion. The rich kids of the "insiders" tend to score well and other people tend to score less well, so, in practice, you can't cleanly separate out wealth, culture, education, etc from some kind of theoretical raw intelligence figure.

warp_factor 8y ago

I'm going with the actual consensus across scientific which is that IQ is a valid measurement. This article is surfing on the leftist wave of pretending that everyone is completely equal in every possible way. IQ measurements are seen as bad thing as it would lessen the theory that we are all biologically equal and that only our environment would define us. This article is more political than scientific. It is really sad. It really reads as if the outcome of the article was decided in advance then the article written in order to build a narrative for the conclusion