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IQ is probably more well studied than any other phenomenon in the social sciences or psychology. Also IQ is not science, it is something that is studied scient

IQ is probably more well studied than any other phenomenon in the social sciences or psychology. Also IQ is not science, it is something that is studied scientifically.

foolrush 7y ago
https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1270&context=law-review https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  That is an article about eugenics. No one is arguing for eugenics. Eugenics was awful, but just because something was used as a tool for evil does not make it untrue. If I light someone on fire with gasoline this makes it no less useful for fueling a car.
  - foolrush 7y ago
    Read it. Learn history. Learn how sociology works. Nah don’t bother. It’s HN.
    - afiori 7y ago
      I would say that this was not the purpose of the link. A comment said "X is something studied scientifically" with X = IQ, and the reply was the same as proposing also X = eugenics. It did not look particularly constuctive.
    - JamesBarney 7y ago
      I read it, and besides one paragraph (which presents a straw man) it has nothing to do with whether IQ is a psuedoscientific swindle and everything to do with whether eugenicists used IQ.
      - foolrush 7y ago
        Sure you did buddy. Sure you did. The whole idea of the SAT was an expansive control of capital when the USA grew too large for word-of-mouth recommendation systems. But you knew that too right? You also knew that it was basically designed to keep undesirables out of the capital class too, right? Guess who those people were.
        JamesBarney 7y ago
        Clearly this argument is spiraling away from the original premise of whether IQ pseudoscientific into what feels like a flamewar. There are a couple of HN guidelines that try to keep that from happening that I think would have helped prevent this. > Be kind. Don't be snarky. > Please don't post shallow dismissals > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article
        foolrush 7y ago
        Science is political. Get over yourself.
  - pavlov 7y ago
    IQ is more like lead additive in gasoline. Unnecessary to the main purpose, created with very dubious motivations, yet for decades people took it for granted that you can’t do without.
    - catalogia 7y ago
      FYI most avgas is still leaded, to this day. This is because many airplane engines are designed to operate at very high compression ratios, requiring high octane fuel. The lead additive boosts the octane rating of the fuel.
      - pavlov 7y ago
        That's in the spirit of the analogy. Lead additive has a special niche purpose. Similarly IQ could be useful for measuring a specific narrow combination of skills and cultural background. (The first step towards rehabilitating "IQ" should be to rename it, though.) Lead everywhere is as toxic as assuming IQ measures some kind of general intelligence.
    - JamesBarney 7y ago
      The first real IQ test (the Binet iq test) was created to help identify special ed kids so they could receive special tutoring. The question about IQ is does it measure anything? Is it predictive? And can that be useful? And the answer all three of those questions is obviously yes.
      - foolrush 7y ago
        And if you actually read Binet, you’d know that he explicitly warned against its usage beyond what he designed it for.
danharaj 7y ago
So was astrology at one point.
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  Your argument applies equally strongly to every scientific finding. I think this means that either science is poor or the argument is.
  - afiori 7y ago
    I actually think it is a very insightful point, just not for proving either sides of this argument, for this purpose it is useless. In the case of astrology, I find interesting how a few millennia of human culture, stories, and epics have been projected on celestial bodies and carried along our history through this shared medium. I would say that (if you really want to find a strong point) astrology can be seen as trying to distill human knowledge from our cultural substrata. Whether we should do it or not is another topic.
  - danharaj 7y ago
    The argument is that the amount of attention paid by scholars does not make a field of inquiry more or less valid. It does apply to all science. Do you think science does not suffer from fads and community bias? When did we move past that? Even a very rigorous field like mathematics suffers from these problems. Cf. Mochizuki getting published in Nature or the controversies about the foundations of symplectic geometry. What is your relation to science? Have you done any yourself? Science is poor in the sense that it can be arbitrarily wrong and for arbitrarily long as humans can be. Yea, it's true. Does that trouble you?
    - JamesBarney 7y ago
      If you are just trying to make the argument that science has made mistakes, there is no argument, I agree. So theoretically relativity and Newtonian physics could be untrue. But it's highly unlikely. I would argue that a combination of the simplicity of study of a phenomenon, the amount it's been studied, and the consistency of the results of that study correlate with the likelihood of it being true. IQ is very simple to study, it's been studied exhaustively, and results of that study have been consistent. Outside of physics and some very basic biology there are few if any scientific phenomenon as likely to be true as IQ. Can you name a single phenomenon that has been as well studied in the modern era with the same consistency of results that has been untrue? Btw you still haven't made a single argument against IQ. You've only been arguing against the totality of science and my credentials.

IQ is probably more well studied than any other phenomenon in the social sciences or psychology. Also IQ is not science, it is something that is studied scientifically.

foolrush 7y ago

https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1270&context=law-review https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

JamesBarney 7y ago
That is an article about eugenics. No one is arguing for eugenics. Eugenics was awful, but just because something was used as a tool for evil does not make it untrue. If I light someone on fire with gasoline this makes it no less useful for fueling a car.
- foolrush 7y ago
  Read it. Learn history. Learn how sociology works. Nah don’t bother. It’s HN.
  - afiori 7y ago
    I would say that this was not the purpose of the link. A comment said "X is something studied scientifically" with X = IQ, and the reply was the same as proposing also X = eugenics. It did not look particularly constuctive.
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    I read it, and besides one paragraph (which presents a straw man) it has nothing to do with whether IQ is a psuedoscientific swindle and everything to do with whether eugenicists used IQ.
    - foolrush 7y ago
      Sure you did buddy. Sure you did. The whole idea of the SAT was an expansive control of capital when the USA grew too large for word-of-mouth recommendation systems. But you knew that too right? You also knew that it was basically designed to keep undesirables out of the capital class too, right? Guess who those people were.
      - JamesBarney 7y ago
        Clearly this argument is spiraling away from the original premise of whether IQ pseudoscientific into what feels like a flamewar. There are a couple of HN guidelines that try to keep that from happening that I think would have helped prevent this. > Be kind. Don't be snarky. > Please don't post shallow dismissals > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article
        foolrush 7y ago
        Science is political. Get over yourself.
- pavlov 7y ago
  IQ is more like lead additive in gasoline. Unnecessary to the main purpose, created with very dubious motivations, yet for decades people took it for granted that you can’t do without.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    FYI most avgas is still leaded, to this day. This is because many airplane engines are designed to operate at very high compression ratios, requiring high octane fuel. The lead additive boosts the octane rating of the fuel.
    - pavlov 7y ago
      That's in the spirit of the analogy. Lead additive has a special niche purpose. Similarly IQ could be useful for measuring a specific narrow combination of skills and cultural background. (The first step towards rehabilitating "IQ" should be to rename it, though.) Lead everywhere is as toxic as assuming IQ measures some kind of general intelligence.
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    The first real IQ test (the Binet iq test) was created to help identify special ed kids so they could receive special tutoring. The question about IQ is does it measure anything? Is it predictive? And can that be useful? And the answer all three of those questions is obviously yes.
    - foolrush 7y ago
      And if you actually read Binet, you’d know that he explicitly warned against its usage beyond what he designed it for.

danharaj 7y ago

So was astrology at one point.

JamesBarney 7y ago
Your argument applies equally strongly to every scientific finding. I think this means that either science is poor or the argument is.
- afiori 7y ago
  I actually think it is a very insightful point, just not for proving either sides of this argument, for this purpose it is useless. In the case of astrology, I find interesting how a few millennia of human culture, stories, and epics have been projected on celestial bodies and carried along our history through this shared medium. I would say that (if you really want to find a strong point) astrology can be seen as trying to distill human knowledge from our cultural substrata. Whether we should do it or not is another topic.
- danharaj 7y ago
  The argument is that the amount of attention paid by scholars does not make a field of inquiry more or less valid. It does apply to all science. Do you think science does not suffer from fads and community bias? When did we move past that? Even a very rigorous field like mathematics suffers from these problems. Cf. Mochizuki getting published in Nature or the controversies about the foundations of symplectic geometry. What is your relation to science? Have you done any yourself? Science is poor in the sense that it can be arbitrarily wrong and for arbitrarily long as humans can be. Yea, it's true. Does that trouble you?
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    If you are just trying to make the argument that science has made mistakes, there is no argument, I agree. So theoretically relativity and Newtonian physics could be untrue. But it's highly unlikely. I would argue that a combination of the simplicity of study of a phenomenon, the amount it's been studied, and the consistency of the results of that study correlate with the likelihood of it being true. IQ is very simple to study, it's been studied exhaustively, and results of that study have been consistent. Outside of physics and some very basic biology there are few if any scientific phenomenon as likely to be true as IQ. Can you name a single phenomenon that has been as well studied in the modern era with the same consistency of results that has been untrue? Btw you still haven't made a single argument against IQ. You've only been arguing against the totality of science and my credentials.