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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 sc

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 6y 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.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  It is my understanding that all of the evidence we have for IQ is statistical in nature: it's a robust correlate. I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that it is strong correlation with an innate, biological, causative metric that closely corresponds to a general, popular notion of "intelligence"--which is of course the use that pop psychology immediately attaches to it. IMHO, the most biting criticism of IQ is that we (that is the psychology community at large) expect such a thing to exist, and so we treat anything that looks like it might fit that glove, no matter how poorly, as evidence of its existence. Our scientific methods aren't really capable of forcibly rebutting such a theory--see the existence of parapsychology, where psi is statistically known to exist (unless you're a skeptic). See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o... for a discussion of this phenomenon.
  - JamesBarney 6y ago
    I'm not sure what non statistical evidence of IQ would be? Would you mind elaborating on this. > I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that it is strong correlation with an innate, biological, causative metric that closely corresponds to a general, popular notion of "intelligence"--which is of course the use that pop psychology immediately attaches to it. I don't think you need to correlate IQ with anything physical for it to exist. But it's been correlated with genes, amount of white matter, size of different regions in the brain etc... Maybe we have a different idea of what IQ means. I would say the IQ "theory" could be broken down into a couple of distinct hypotheses. 1. Problem solving is a skill/ability - People who are good at solving some types of problems, will be better than average as solving other types of problems. 2. We can test this ability - We can write down problems and ask them to solve them. Because of 1 this tells us how good they will be at solving other problems. 3. This ability helps with some real world tasks - The real world has lots of problems that benefit from problem solving ability. When we put together this means we can predict a portion of someone's ability at a real world task we care about (like physics or software development) by estimating their problem solving ability through a test. Based on the evidence we currently have I don't know how this couldn't be true.

JamesBarney 6y 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.

jcranmer 6y ago
It is my understanding that all of the evidence we have for IQ is statistical in nature: it's a robust correlate. I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that it is strong correlation with an innate, biological, causative metric that closely corresponds to a general, popular notion of "intelligence"--which is of course the use that pop psychology immediately attaches to it. IMHO, the most biting criticism of IQ is that we (that is the psychology community at large) expect such a thing to exist, and so we treat anything that looks like it might fit that glove, no matter how poorly, as evidence of its existence. Our scientific methods aren't really capable of forcibly rebutting such a theory--see the existence of parapsychology, where psi is statistically known to exist (unless you're a skeptic). See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o... for a discussion of this phenomenon.
- JamesBarney 6y ago
  I'm not sure what non statistical evidence of IQ would be? Would you mind elaborating on this. > I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that it is strong correlation with an innate, biological, causative metric that closely corresponds to a general, popular notion of "intelligence"--which is of course the use that pop psychology immediately attaches to it. I don't think you need to correlate IQ with anything physical for it to exist. But it's been correlated with genes, amount of white matter, size of different regions in the brain etc... Maybe we have a different idea of what IQ means. I would say the IQ "theory" could be broken down into a couple of distinct hypotheses. 1. Problem solving is a skill/ability - People who are good at solving some types of problems, will be better than average as solving other types of problems. 2. We can test this ability - We can write down problems and ask them to solve them. Because of 1 this tells us how good they will be at solving other problems. 3. This ability helps with some real world tasks - The real world has lots of problems that benefit from problem solving ability. When we put together this means we can predict a portion of someone's ability at a real world task we care about (like physics or software development) by estimating their problem solving ability through a test. Based on the evidence we currently have I don't know how this couldn't be true.