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IQ is one of the few actually, and maybe THE most robust and measurable dimension in humans that psychology has come up with. Some people are smarter than othe

IQ is one of the few actually, and maybe THE most robust and measurable dimension in humans that psychology has come up with. Some people are smarter than others and they are expected to rise higher in a (necessarily imperfectly) meritocratic system. The big question is whether the bottom end should starve. I think they should not starve and should have certain minimal living standards met, but they are going to be lower than the top end. You risk dividing the population trying to convince the smart to settle for less than they can get. They will simply band together and manipulate the system until they achieve it.

badRNG 6y ago
> IQ is one of the few actually, and maybe THE most robust and measurable dimensions in humans that psychology has come up with. How did you come to that conclusion? That feels like a claim that would be pretty difficult to defend. I think you have far more of an uphill climb to justify that the wealthy/poor divide is largely correlated to intelligence, rather than social systems that advantage/disadvantage certain classes of people or one's access to certain privileges (prior wealth, access to education, etc.)
- longtom 6y ago
  I'm not saying it is largely determined by it and not claiming there are no injustices, but I'm saying it is not a negligible factor.
  - badRNG 6y ago
    >The big question is whether the bottom end should starve. I think they should not starve and should have certain minimal living standards met, but they are going to be lower than the top end. You risk dividing the population trying to convince the smart to settle for less than they can get. They will simply band together and manipulate the system until they achieve it. This implies that poverty is largely a product of being on the wrong end of the intelligence scale, which ignores the substantial impact that social and economic structures play in determining one's economic success. When looking at factors that perpetuate poverty, IQ isn't even on the map.
    - longtom 6y ago
      Yeah the system is not very meritocratic. Not sure to which extent one can change that though and not sure how much better society would look after enforcing those changes. If you wanted to make it more meritocratic the populations with lowest IQ would actually be worse off, unless you also increase the minimal living standards.
      - badRNG 6y ago
        > If you wanted to make it more meritocratic the populations with lowest IQ would actually be worse off, unless you also increase the minimal living standards. I agree with this. I'm not sure that making economies more "meritocratic" is necessarily the only solution we have when confronting larger structures that perpetuate inequality. Even if it were, It'd be important to know who or what quantifies "merit." If it is impersonal market forces, the same unjust social systems will still eventually develop as certain families, classes, and countries entrench their economic development to solidify and secure an advantage down the line.
      - empath75 6y ago
        > If you wanted to make it more meritocratic the populations with lowest IQ would actually be worse off, unless you also increase the minimal living standards. If you're talking about people who have some kind of mental handicap, then this is accurate, but I'm skeptical it will be meaningfully different for people with close to average intelligence or higher, because the effect of IQ will be dwarfed by other differences like how hard they work or how much they delay gratification and save.
jcranmer 6y ago
> IQ is one of the few actually, and maybe THE most robust and measurable dimensions in humans that psychology has come up with. IQ is the most robust psychometric (with the Big 5 personality being the only real contender), but that is largely because psychometrics in general are not robust. It's a one-eyed man in the land of the blind kind of scenario. The first big issue you run into with IQ is that... as far as we understand intelligence in psychology, there isn't a single number that can be reflected as IQ. The closest we come is a "g factor" that influences all other types of intelligence, and is somewhat circularly defined as the correlation between all of the different intelligence metrics.
- longtom 6y ago
  > in general are not robust Sure, but they are robust enough to be relevant to everyday life. > circularly defined g is circularly defined, which is the nature of how a latent factor is defined. But g also does correlate with school and work performance (around r = .5), so it IS related to everyday life. Though you can only make extreme decisions based on single tests. E.g. you can say they are "likely not gifted" when they score low or "likely not an imbecile" when they score high.
- paulpauper 6y ago
  IQ is probably the biggest success of human psychology as a field. Personalty tests are notoriously unreliable and can be faked (hell, that is what actors do).
  - tptacek 6y ago
    "Actors can fake personalities" isn't a particularly rigorous argument in favor of IQ.
catalogia 6y ago
The solution to this is to teach clever kids from a young age to be compassionate towards the less clever. Right now our society does a terrible job of this; hating and mocking people for being stupid is far too common. Much of it may feel justified under reasoning like "Stupid people [bullied me|voted wrong|didn't follow instructions|did something wrong and broke things] and for that reason my negative feelings towards them are valid." But clever kids should be reminded that hating their peers for being stupid won't make them any less stupid. Compassion is constructive but disdain is not.
- longtom 6y ago
  Not saying the education system is perfect, but even though IQ is partly determined by education, science indicates there is not much one can achieve this way.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    I don't propose that compassion towards the less clever will raise their IQ. When I say that compassion is constructive, I mean that compassion paves the road towards mutual understanding and social harmony.
    - longtom 6y ago
      I think there are more important things than compassion, e.g. work/status, marriage and family. These are also easy to measure and to enforce by comparison. How do you force everyone to be nice? And is that worth it? Is the threat of being sued for "not being nice enough" an improvement for society? I doubt it. Children being treated nicely actually predicts worse, not better outcome. https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/full/10.1027/2512-8442/a000011 https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/full/10.1027/2512-8442/a000...
      - catalogia 6y ago
        > How do you force everyone to be nice? > Is the threat of being sued for "not being nice enough" an improvement for society? I never said anything about force, nor certainly anything about suing people for not being nice (which is so ridiculous it barely warrants a response...) You're reading a great deal more into what I said than what I actually said, and in a very uncharitable way. > I think there are more important things than compassion, e.g. work/status, marriage and family Smart people will be more likely to support social policies that help people in those regards if they are taught to be compassionate from a young age. I'm earnestly surprised to receive pushback on what I'm suggesting, and it's probably because you don't understand what I'm suggesting. Maybe providing a concrete example of what I propose will help you understand what I mean: one possibility is to encourage clever kids to participate in intellectually inclusive extramural activities where they can form social bonds with people less clever than themselves. Track and field or the swim team are two good options, contrasted with science olympiad (which is generally inaccessible to dull children.)

badRNG 6y ago

> IQ is one of the few actually, and maybe THE most robust and measurable dimensions in humans that psychology has come up with. How did you come to that conclusion? That feels like a claim that would be pretty difficult to defend. I think you have far more of an uphill climb to justify that the wealthy/poor divide is largely correlated to intelligence, rather than social systems that advantage/disadvantage certain classes of people or one's access to certain privileges (prior wealth, access to education, etc.)

longtom 6y ago
I'm not saying it is largely determined by it and not claiming there are no injustices, but I'm saying it is not a negligible factor.
- badRNG 6y ago
  >The big question is whether the bottom end should starve. I think they should not starve and should have certain minimal living standards met, but they are going to be lower than the top end. You risk dividing the population trying to convince the smart to settle for less than they can get. They will simply band together and manipulate the system until they achieve it. This implies that poverty is largely a product of being on the wrong end of the intelligence scale, which ignores the substantial impact that social and economic structures play in determining one's economic success. When looking at factors that perpetuate poverty, IQ isn't even on the map.
  - longtom 6y ago
    Yeah the system is not very meritocratic. Not sure to which extent one can change that though and not sure how much better society would look after enforcing those changes. If you wanted to make it more meritocratic the populations with lowest IQ would actually be worse off, unless you also increase the minimal living standards.
    - badRNG 6y ago
      > If you wanted to make it more meritocratic the populations with lowest IQ would actually be worse off, unless you also increase the minimal living standards. I agree with this. I'm not sure that making economies more "meritocratic" is necessarily the only solution we have when confronting larger structures that perpetuate inequality. Even if it were, It'd be important to know who or what quantifies "merit." If it is impersonal market forces, the same unjust social systems will still eventually develop as certain families, classes, and countries entrench their economic development to solidify and secure an advantage down the line.
    - empath75 6y ago
      > If you wanted to make it more meritocratic the populations with lowest IQ would actually be worse off, unless you also increase the minimal living standards. If you're talking about people who have some kind of mental handicap, then this is accurate, but I'm skeptical it will be meaningfully different for people with close to average intelligence or higher, because the effect of IQ will be dwarfed by other differences like how hard they work or how much they delay gratification and save.

jcranmer 6y ago

> IQ is one of the few actually, and maybe THE most robust and measurable dimensions in humans that psychology has come up with. IQ is the most robust psychometric (with the Big 5 personality being the only real contender), but that is largely because psychometrics in general are not robust. It's a one-eyed man in the land of the blind kind of scenario. The first big issue you run into with IQ is that... as far as we understand intelligence in psychology, there isn't a single number that can be reflected as IQ. The closest we come is a "g factor" that influences all other types of intelligence, and is somewhat circularly defined as the correlation between all of the different intelligence metrics.

longtom 6y ago
> in general are not robust Sure, but they are robust enough to be relevant to everyday life. > circularly defined g is circularly defined, which is the nature of how a latent factor is defined. But g also does correlate with school and work performance (around r = .5), so it IS related to everyday life. Though you can only make extreme decisions based on single tests. E.g. you can say they are "likely not gifted" when they score low or "likely not an imbecile" when they score high.
paulpauper 6y ago
IQ is probably the biggest success of human psychology as a field. Personalty tests are notoriously unreliable and can be faked (hell, that is what actors do).
- tptacek 6y ago
  "Actors can fake personalities" isn't a particularly rigorous argument in favor of IQ.

catalogia 6y ago

The solution to this is to teach clever kids from a young age to be compassionate towards the less clever. Right now our society does a terrible job of this; hating and mocking people for being stupid is far too common. Much of it may feel justified under reasoning like "Stupid people [bullied me|voted wrong|didn't follow instructions|did something wrong and broke things] and for that reason my negative feelings towards them are valid." But clever kids should be reminded that hating their peers for being stupid won't make them any less stupid. Compassion is constructive but disdain is not.

longtom 6y ago
Not saying the education system is perfect, but even though IQ is partly determined by education, science indicates there is not much one can achieve this way.
- catalogia 6y ago
  I don't propose that compassion towards the less clever will raise their IQ. When I say that compassion is constructive, I mean that compassion paves the road towards mutual understanding and social harmony.
  - longtom 6y ago
    I think there are more important things than compassion, e.g. work/status, marriage and family. These are also easy to measure and to enforce by comparison. How do you force everyone to be nice? And is that worth it? Is the threat of being sued for "not being nice enough" an improvement for society? I doubt it. Children being treated nicely actually predicts worse, not better outcome. https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/full/10.1027/2512-8442/a000011 https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/full/10.1027/2512-8442/a000...
    - catalogia 6y ago
      > How do you force everyone to be nice? > Is the threat of being sued for "not being nice enough" an improvement for society? I never said anything about force, nor certainly anything about suing people for not being nice (which is so ridiculous it barely warrants a response...) You're reading a great deal more into what I said than what I actually said, and in a very uncharitable way. > I think there are more important things than compassion, e.g. work/status, marriage and family Smart people will be more likely to support social policies that help people in those regards if they are taught to be compassionate from a young age. I'm earnestly surprised to receive pushback on what I'm suggesting, and it's probably because you don't understand what I'm suggesting. Maybe providing a concrete example of what I propose will help you understand what I mean: one possibility is to encourage clever kids to participate in intellectually inclusive extramural activities where they can form social bonds with people less clever than themselves. Track and field or the swim team are two good options, contrasted with science olympiad (which is generally inaccessible to dull children.)