11 ms·

Is there a general factor of intelligence?

55 points by luu 5y ago

michaelt 5y ago
> Things are correlated. No one seems to seriously dispute this. So why all the debates? I know many very outstanding programmers - but very few are also outstanding at writing poetry, or learning foreign languages, or engaging in impactful political action. I've no doubt that 'general science' performance is correlated with 'assembling objects' performance. But I wouldn't expect Bobby Fischer to have great insights into world politics just because he was a chess grandmaster.
- bgroat 5y ago
  They wouldn't be outstanding - they don't have specialized training. But how do your outstanding programmers compare at writing poetry... when compared to your not-outstanding programmers who also have no specialized training?
- bitwize 5y ago
  If they applied themselves to those things the way they did to programming, there's a good chance they'll be outstanding or at least remarkably good in those as well. Intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for competence at intellectual tasks.
- tristor 5y ago
  I think this is more because of how people choose to spend their time. I know several outstanding programmers that are also great at learning foreign languages and writing poetry, and in fact, it seems that learning human languages and computer languages have some strong correlations in research about linguistics learning. But, no matter how good you may be at any one of these things, to become good at the others you must spend time focused on learning and doing them. Most of the great programmers I know prefer to spend their time in pursuing other things that they become good at instead, primarily stuff to do with physical engineering. (Aside, I've always thought the propensity for using physical engineering as a non-work hobby is guided by frustrations from the intangible nature of programming/software.) But, I do in fact know several that travel and learn foreign languages, or that write poetry and short stories as a form of outlet.
vfistri2 5y ago
article is quite misleading, I can't believe author wasted 5 mins of my life explaining data science and visualisation while all I cared for are answers.
tristor 5y ago
Another way to look at this would be to look at the correlation between scores of different standardized mental tests. ASVAB, IQ, and SAT scores are strongly correlated to one another, even though they use slightly different testing methodologies and focus in some ways on different things. All of the evidence we've gathered over decades seems to indicate that there is a general factor for intelligence. But as he points out in his conclusion, this is /descriptive/, meaning we can arguably accurately determine someone's intelligence via testing and that single general factor accurately describes their intelligence in relation to others. It does not in any way imply we understand the causative factors that lead that score to go up or down in any meaningful way. For reasons I don't fully understand, there's a lot of folks in the social sciences these day that seem to be waging war on the very concept that you can describe intelligence generally (and IQ tests specifically). The mere fact that the results of these types of tests on large population groups tend to follow a normal distribution is alone good evidence that they're indicative, as in most things diverse large population groups tend to fall on a normal distribution.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  It's because they don't want to deal with the implications and the massive unfairness of the fact that some people are just born smarter than others. Easier to just pretend it's not true.
- mgh2 5y ago
  In general, I have seen a tendency from liberal, humanity disciplines that are trying to get rid of empirical studies to justify their political ideologies: "equality for all vs. equality of outcomes", "truth is relative", etc.
  - NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
    I have also observed this, sadly. I think it's basically coming down to a battle of the mathematically literate vs. not, and unfortunately the non-literate have a lot of stickiness in academia because they can generate ideas people want to believe with no empirical "where the rubber meets the road".
photochemsyn 5y ago
Interesting article but it neglects a very important factor in its comparison of physical test results and mental test results, namely the extent to which physical and mental capabilities are trainable. It's a simple exercise to, just take the lower half of the cohort in each categorty (mental/physical) in a given study and give them intensive one-on-one training in all areas for a year, then compare their performance on said mental and physical tasks after that training. Doing this for different age groups might be particularly interesting. There's often a bias towards assuming that physical skills are trainable while mental skills are not, because many people have been raised to assume that the latter are due to mainly to genetic factors. This 'genetic superiority' is typically then used to justify current class structures, racial makeup of the wealthiest 1% etc. Such views have little if any supporting scientific evidence - mental skills are just as trainable as physical skills (yes there's a genetic component in both cases, which might place an upper bound on one's performance, but such genetic factors are not correlated with race/gender/etc.).
- Spinnaker_ 5y ago
  Perhaps the best physical test for innate athletic ability is the standing vertical jump. There isn't an awful lot you can do to improve it. You can lose weight and train explosiveness, but someone with a 10" vertical will never be even average. Compare that to deadlifts, where any individual can triple their max through training. I'm guessing there is an equivalent with mental capabilities. Somethings you can train, some are innate.
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    But is it that you can't train it, or that nobody does because there's no carrot? Something like the SAT is a game that people learn to win.
    - WillPostForFood 5y ago
      Something like the SAT is a game that people learn to win. This is oft claimed, but data doesn't back it up. SAT is marginally affected by coaching and training. "Coached students are only slightly more likely to have large score gains than uncoached students. In addition, about 1/3 of students experience no score gain or score loss following coaching. The typical gain associated with coaching is 8 points for verbal and 18 points for math" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/09/can-coaching-truly-boost-sat-scores-for-years-the-college-board-said-no-now-it-says-yes/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/...
sobriquet9 5y ago
The problem with this approach is that the correlations only work for average and below average cases. If someone is illiterate, chances are he's not going to be great at physics or medicine either. If someone is overweight, chances are he's not very good at running or ice skating. Correlations stop working as we move above average, though. Paul Morphy was good at chess, but not so good as a lawyer. Michael Jordan is great at basketball, but not at golf.
- runarberg 5y ago
  Indeed. And that what these tests were all originally designed to do before they were coopted by the eugenics movement. IQ tests are really good at detecting if someone needs more help. They are not good at detecting if someone is smarter then another.
- tomrod 5y ago
  I'm not sure that's anything more than an encoding issue. The apparent bifurcation at "above average" is probably reducible to "above average in at least one technical domain" with an additional encoding for "above average in more than one technical domain". Your concern is resolved by the first, with information loss of polyglots captured by the second.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  There are 450 NBA players and 250 golfers on the PGA tour. So if you take this out of a sample of just men in the USA (massive underestimate), then to be a NBA player is about 3 / million and pro golfer is about 2 / million. So that means if there was no correlation, to be both would be 6 / trillion. So if they were correlated such that the combination is 100x more likely than average, the odds would be 0.6 / billion, or 2 men on Earth. But, this doesn't take into account the tradeoff in training time between the 2 sports. Realistically, that would be zero people. So one would expect even with a strong correlation, nobody would be able to be a pro athlete in multiple sports. But wait, some people have! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deion_Sanders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deion_Sanders, and your example of Michael Jordan was able to play in the minor leagues of MLB, something that most people could never come close to if they trained for it their whole life. So, yes, there is absolutely a general athleticism. edit: so would be higher numbers because would have to take into account number of people who have been pro athletes at some point in their life, not just right now. But not enough higher that the point doesn't stand.
pacbard 5y ago
The argument seems to rely on measurement data. That is, all the intelligence measures we have are correlated, therefore there is a single intelligence factor. What this argument misses is the fact that not observing something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. For example, we weren’t able to observe atoms for a long time time but they were there all along. Gardener tried to make this argument in the 70s regarding multiple intelligences but I don’t know about the measurement evidence backing that theory up.
wswope 5y ago
On one hand, g is such a flamebait topic that’s been covered to death. As mentioned in the piece, there’s a hard scientific consensus, even if people don’t bother to look into it before spouting their hot takes. But that being said, the visualization on this are top notch, and the effort put into them shows - fantastic article in terms of presentation, and hats off to the author for putting it together.
quanto 5y ago
The cigar analogy with rotation symmetry lost me. As each axis measures something different, there is some sense of unit dependency (e.g. measuring height in one axis (cm) and measuring weight in another axis (kg)). It is silly to say one number in one axis with a different unit is comparable to another one in another axis. A different way to say it is that each axis can be (should be) normalized before any kind of factor analysis. The cigar shape is as much a function of per-axis normalization than whatever the underlying pattern is.
- wswope 5y ago
  Check the “Mental tests aren’t not cigars” section again - it addresses that.
BenoitEssiambre 5y ago
One problem is that g is not very well defined. It's just some vague factor. I think it would make sense to define it as something like: the extent someone has well calibrated Bayesian reasoning that exploits information to its maximum to do accurate predictions. It's hard to test though because there is a dearth of synthetic benchmarks or algorithms to compare to. Humans seem to still be better at performing these types of Bayesian "common sense" tasks than any synthetic procedure, so we can only compare using tests that we subjectively agree other "smart" humans seem to be good at.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > the extent someone has well calibrated Bayesian reasoning that exploits information to its maximum to do accurate predictions. The concept of g actually completely rules this interpretation out based on nothing. If g was a matter of learning reasoning skills and applying them, you'd be able to teach it. It wouldn't be some magical race/sex/class number.
  - BenoitEssiambre 5y ago
    Using calibrated Bayesian reasoning can certainly be an innate trait. Some people seem good at making good predictions and assessing uncertainty of the data and knowledge they have whether they've been thought or not and it seems like an unusually difficult thing to teach. Will you make that much better predictions even if you read all of the lesswrong.com cannon?
    - jhanschoo 5y ago
      I dont think your definition is accurate though. IQ tests like progressive matrices dont test only if you have good probabilistic models but how well you can identify the pattern in the matrices. If the patterns follow a minimum entropy distribution, there is only so much that falls to technique, and the technique is intuitive (prefer simple over complex); there is still the problem of raw computation that is guessing and rejecting.
hi5eyes 5y ago
The only measure of intelligence is being able to get exactly what you want, in exactly the way you want it everything else is a useless metric to sell yourself
- burrows 5y ago
  This ability that you are describing, do you have a recommendation for how we (as scientists) can measure it in people?
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Almost all versions of "intelligence" rely heavily on memory, in one form or another.
jmmcd 5y ago
> Suppose you’re hiring someone for a job that requires a few different mental tasks. (Arithmetic, sequential memory, whatever.) If you knew someone’s g, you could guess how well they’d do at each task. But it would only be a guess! To really know, you still need to test the skills individually. I think this part in the conclusion somewhat contradicts a lot of the analysis. In fact, the results have shown that if you knew someone's g, your guess at their performance on each task would be a good guess.
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
  Yeah, it seems like political correctness to me. The author obviously understands your point, and what the author writes isn't exactly false--but it is misleading enough to keep some likely screamers off his/her back.
yk 5y ago
> This question is a trap. If you try to answer it, you’ll find yourself beset by semantic questions. What’s intelligence? What’s a factor? And if you get past those, you’ll then find a bleak valley of statistical arcana. Thing is, building the ontology is the most important part of the scientific process. Otherwise you're just praying to a blind idiot god and listen into the void for answers. Or as the author puts it, "statistical arcana." To be concrete, I'm pretty confident I overtook half of humanity in that fitness test in the last year. Not because I was bitten by a radioactive spider, but because I started to work out. Now to claim the analogy to intelligence, that would need an answer to what the analogy of working out is in intelligence. Or to look at it on the level of people who compete in a sport, I'm quite confident that Tom Brady is not very fit by NFL player standards. Similar for Xavi in soccer, but Christiano Ronaldo is probably near the top, and I don't have a good intuition in case of Messi, because he is a quite small player and that will have an effect. The preceding criticism is enabled, by having a good intuition of what the fitness test is, I have a pretty good intuition about the mechanics of a push up. That is not there for intelligence, and I strongly suspect that this whishi-washiness is whats actually holding up all arguments about iq, since it prevents concrete criticism.
- runarberg 5y ago
  I think that might be on purpose. Proponents of general IQ really want IQ to be immutable (i.e. mostly hereditary) and really don’t want it to be diverse and nuanced (hence general intelligence). I.e. they don’t want IQ test to resemble fitness tests. So they try their best to design their tests in a way that it stays consistent across time and exercise does not affect test scores that much. A test that actually measures a specific thing and increases with exercise (e.g. the SAT) is discounted as a factor. In fact the foundations of IQ tests lies heavily on the eugenics movement which wanted to prove the superiority of able bodied white men. They actually started by assuming brain size correlates with intelligence (it doesn’t) and then set out and proved that on average white men had the biggest brain of them all (which is also false). The nuances of fitness does not help in this goals as one can easily just pick a type of intelligence/fitness which white men perform poorly at in general so their claim was that there exists a general intelligence to remove this nuance. Their current IQ tests are all set up to assume this is true, and hence you can see it in the results. If you can’t then you are not really measuring intelligence.
tyronehed 5y ago
Yes there is, and coincidentally it’s called G and it stands for general intelligence.
pgcj_poster 5y ago
It seems like most of the skills measured in the studies referenced relate to spacial skills or memory/recall. That's not surprising, since those are fairly easy to measure. However, I bet if you could measure artistic, musical, social, and emotional skills, the data would look less cigarre-shaped.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Something I've tried to look up and never got anywhere with is why IQ is normalised by age? The article mentioned testing physical strength of 20 and 80 year olds that reminded me of this. Which age does best on raw test scores? Seems surprisingly hard to Google this info but I assume it's out there? edit: a renewed effort to google suggests the things IQ tests test peak in late teens. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956797614567339 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/095679761456733...
kkfx 5y ago
IMVHO that's a classic fallacy of a managerial-driven thinking: numbers are not the essence of anything, they can be used in many things to summarize to the extreme something but not everywhere for everything. It's like to say "how many degree of temperature and humidity there are in this room"? Most just look at nearest thermo-hygrometer and say out load a number, let's say 19℃ considering that number "the truth" at maximum with the relative precision error of the meter. Actually that's a "somewhat realistic approximation", a room is not a well insulated calorimeter, so I can say that's 32℃ just because behind the windows with direct sunlight that's the temperature locally measured with 30% humidity, but also on the other extreme of the room, one of an old masonry house placed direct on ground soil, where I measure 14℃ and 60% humidity. For intelligence it's not much different, only even harder to measure. We can say someone is very skilled in math so "he/she is intelligent" and craft some kind of test (like uni admissions tests common in various faculties around the world) but can also be absolutely not much skilled in math but very smart in talking and comprehend peoples so we can craft a "social ability skill" intelligence scale etc and finally combine all those test in a giant one and establish a scale, but again that scale is a kind of generic approximation of something we try to "standardize" after a long process of observation on many peoples abilities. It's not a real measure out of something tangible and really meaningless, for instance if you need a developer how it's intelligence score matter? Someone might have a high score but still being far less able to sole certain kind of programming tasks than someone else. Long story short: there is no real and meaningful measure for intelligence, we just try to pretend there is something to craft studies on that produced like an industrial product because in a managerial-driven society anything must be like that, it's not possible to think about immeasurable, not programmable Gantt diagrams style things.
breadbreadbread 5y ago
Oh Easy Question: No.

55 points by luu 5y ago

> Things are correlated. No one seems to seriously dispute this. So why all the debates? I know many very outstanding programmers - but very few are also outstanding at writing poetry, or learning foreign languages, or engaging in impactful political action. I've no doubt that 'general science' performance is correlated with 'assembling objects' performance. But I wouldn't expect Bobby Fischer to have great insights into world politics just because he was a chess grandmaster.

bgroat 5y ago
They wouldn't be outstanding - they don't have specialized training. But how do your outstanding programmers compare at writing poetry... when compared to your not-outstanding programmers who also have no specialized training?
bitwize 5y ago
If they applied themselves to those things the way they did to programming, there's a good chance they'll be outstanding or at least remarkably good in those as well. Intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for competence at intellectual tasks.
tristor 5y ago
I think this is more because of how people choose to spend their time. I know several outstanding programmers that are also great at learning foreign languages and writing poetry, and in fact, it seems that learning human languages and computer languages have some strong correlations in research about linguistics learning. But, no matter how good you may be at any one of these things, to become good at the others you must spend time focused on learning and doing them. Most of the great programmers I know prefer to spend their time in pursuing other things that they become good at instead, primarily stuff to do with physical engineering. (Aside, I've always thought the propensity for using physical engineering as a non-work hobby is guided by frustrations from the intangible nature of programming/software.) But, I do in fact know several that travel and learn foreign languages, or that write poetry and short stories as a form of outlet.

vfistri2 5y ago

article is quite misleading, I can't believe author wasted 5 mins of my life explaining data science and visualisation while all I cared for are answers.

tristor 5y ago

Another way to look at this would be to look at the correlation between scores of different standardized mental tests. ASVAB, IQ, and SAT scores are strongly correlated to one another, even though they use slightly different testing methodologies and focus in some ways on different things. All of the evidence we've gathered over decades seems to indicate that there is a general factor for intelligence. But as he points out in his conclusion, this is /descriptive/, meaning we can arguably accurately determine someone's intelligence via testing and that single general factor accurately describes their intelligence in relation to others. It does not in any way imply we understand the causative factors that lead that score to go up or down in any meaningful way. For reasons I don't fully understand, there's a lot of folks in the social sciences these day that seem to be waging war on the very concept that you can describe intelligence generally (and IQ tests specifically). The mere fact that the results of these types of tests on large population groups tend to follow a normal distribution is alone good evidence that they're indicative, as in most things diverse large population groups tend to fall on a normal distribution.

fallingknife 5y ago
It's because they don't want to deal with the implications and the massive unfairness of the fact that some people are just born smarter than others. Easier to just pretend it's not true.
mgh2 5y ago
In general, I have seen a tendency from liberal, humanity disciplines that are trying to get rid of empirical studies to justify their political ideologies: "equality for all vs. equality of outcomes", "truth is relative", etc.
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
  I have also observed this, sadly. I think it's basically coming down to a battle of the mathematically literate vs. not, and unfortunately the non-literate have a lot of stickiness in academia because they can generate ideas people want to believe with no empirical "where the rubber meets the road".

photochemsyn 5y ago

Interesting article but it neglects a very important factor in its comparison of physical test results and mental test results, namely the extent to which physical and mental capabilities are trainable. It's a simple exercise to, just take the lower half of the cohort in each categorty (mental/physical) in a given study and give them intensive one-on-one training in all areas for a year, then compare their performance on said mental and physical tasks after that training. Doing this for different age groups might be particularly interesting. There's often a bias towards assuming that physical skills are trainable while mental skills are not, because many people have been raised to assume that the latter are due to mainly to genetic factors. This 'genetic superiority' is typically then used to justify current class structures, racial makeup of the wealthiest 1% etc. Such views have little if any supporting scientific evidence - mental skills are just as trainable as physical skills (yes there's a genetic component in both cases, which might place an upper bound on one's performance, but such genetic factors are not correlated with race/gender/etc.).

Spinnaker_ 5y ago
Perhaps the best physical test for innate athletic ability is the standing vertical jump. There isn't an awful lot you can do to improve it. You can lose weight and train explosiveness, but someone with a 10" vertical will never be even average. Compare that to deadlifts, where any individual can triple their max through training. I'm guessing there is an equivalent with mental capabilities. Somethings you can train, some are innate.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  But is it that you can't train it, or that nobody does because there's no carrot? Something like the SAT is a game that people learn to win.
  - WillPostForFood 5y ago
    Something like the SAT is a game that people learn to win. This is oft claimed, but data doesn't back it up. SAT is marginally affected by coaching and training. "Coached students are only slightly more likely to have large score gains than uncoached students. In addition, about 1/3 of students experience no score gain or score loss following coaching. The typical gain associated with coaching is 8 points for verbal and 18 points for math" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/09/can-coaching-truly-boost-sat-scores-for-years-the-college-board-said-no-now-it-says-yes/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/...

sobriquet9 5y ago

The problem with this approach is that the correlations only work for average and below average cases. If someone is illiterate, chances are he's not going to be great at physics or medicine either. If someone is overweight, chances are he's not very good at running or ice skating. Correlations stop working as we move above average, though. Paul Morphy was good at chess, but not so good as a lawyer. Michael Jordan is great at basketball, but not at golf.

runarberg 5y ago
Indeed. And that what these tests were all originally designed to do before they were coopted by the eugenics movement. IQ tests are really good at detecting if someone needs more help. They are not good at detecting if someone is smarter then another.
tomrod 5y ago
I'm not sure that's anything more than an encoding issue. The apparent bifurcation at "above average" is probably reducible to "above average in at least one technical domain" with an additional encoding for "above average in more than one technical domain". Your concern is resolved by the first, with information loss of polyglots captured by the second.
fallingknife 5y ago
There are 450 NBA players and 250 golfers on the PGA tour. So if you take this out of a sample of just men in the USA (massive underestimate), then to be a NBA player is about 3 / million and pro golfer is about 2 / million. So that means if there was no correlation, to be both would be 6 / trillion. So if they were correlated such that the combination is 100x more likely than average, the odds would be 0.6 / billion, or 2 men on Earth. But, this doesn't take into account the tradeoff in training time between the 2 sports. Realistically, that would be zero people. So one would expect even with a strong correlation, nobody would be able to be a pro athlete in multiple sports. But wait, some people have! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deion_Sanders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deion_Sanders, and your example of Michael Jordan was able to play in the minor leagues of MLB, something that most people could never come close to if they trained for it their whole life. So, yes, there is absolutely a general athleticism. edit: so would be higher numbers because would have to take into account number of people who have been pro athletes at some point in their life, not just right now. But not enough higher that the point doesn't stand.

pacbard 5y ago

The argument seems to rely on measurement data. That is, all the intelligence measures we have are correlated, therefore there is a single intelligence factor. What this argument misses is the fact that not observing something doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. For example, we weren’t able to observe atoms for a long time time but they were there all along. Gardener tried to make this argument in the 70s regarding multiple intelligences but I don’t know about the measurement evidence backing that theory up.

wswope 5y ago

On one hand, g is such a flamebait topic that’s been covered to death. As mentioned in the piece, there’s a hard scientific consensus, even if people don’t bother to look into it before spouting their hot takes. But that being said, the visualization on this are top notch, and the effort put into them shows - fantastic article in terms of presentation, and hats off to the author for putting it together.

quanto 5y ago

The cigar analogy with rotation symmetry lost me. As each axis measures something different, there is some sense of unit dependency (e.g. measuring height in one axis (cm) and measuring weight in another axis (kg)). It is silly to say one number in one axis with a different unit is comparable to another one in another axis. A different way to say it is that each axis can be (should be) normalized before any kind of factor analysis. The cigar shape is as much a function of per-axis normalization than whatever the underlying pattern is.

wswope 5y ago
Check the “Mental tests aren’t not cigars” section again - it addresses that.

BenoitEssiambre 5y ago

One problem is that g is not very well defined. It's just some vague factor. I think it would make sense to define it as something like: the extent someone has well calibrated Bayesian reasoning that exploits information to its maximum to do accurate predictions. It's hard to test though because there is a dearth of synthetic benchmarks or algorithms to compare to. Humans seem to still be better at performing these types of Bayesian "common sense" tasks than any synthetic procedure, so we can only compare using tests that we subjectively agree other "smart" humans seem to be good at.

pessimizer 5y ago
> the extent someone has well calibrated Bayesian reasoning that exploits information to its maximum to do accurate predictions. The concept of g actually completely rules this interpretation out based on nothing. If g was a matter of learning reasoning skills and applying them, you'd be able to teach it. It wouldn't be some magical race/sex/class number.
- BenoitEssiambre 5y ago
  Using calibrated Bayesian reasoning can certainly be an innate trait. Some people seem good at making good predictions and assessing uncertainty of the data and knowledge they have whether they've been thought or not and it seems like an unusually difficult thing to teach. Will you make that much better predictions even if you read all of the lesswrong.com cannon?
  - jhanschoo 5y ago
    I dont think your definition is accurate though. IQ tests like progressive matrices dont test only if you have good probabilistic models but how well you can identify the pattern in the matrices. If the patterns follow a minimum entropy distribution, there is only so much that falls to technique, and the technique is intuitive (prefer simple over complex); there is still the problem of raw computation that is guessing and rejecting.

hi5eyes 5y ago

The only measure of intelligence is being able to get exactly what you want, in exactly the way you want it everything else is a useless metric to sell yourself

burrows 5y ago
This ability that you are describing, do you have a recommendation for how we (as scientists) can measure it in people?

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

Almost all versions of "intelligence" rely heavily on memory, in one form or another.

jmmcd 5y ago

> Suppose you’re hiring someone for a job that requires a few different mental tasks. (Arithmetic, sequential memory, whatever.) If you knew someone’s g, you could guess how well they’d do at each task. But it would only be a guess! To really know, you still need to test the skills individually. I think this part in the conclusion somewhat contradicts a lot of the analysis. In fact, the results have shown that if you knew someone's g, your guess at their performance on each task would be a good guess.

NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
Yeah, it seems like political correctness to me. The author obviously understands your point, and what the author writes isn't exactly false--but it is misleading enough to keep some likely screamers off his/her back.

yk 5y ago

> This question is a trap. If you try to answer it, you’ll find yourself beset by semantic questions. What’s intelligence? What’s a factor? And if you get past those, you’ll then find a bleak valley of statistical arcana. Thing is, building the ontology is the most important part of the scientific process. Otherwise you're just praying to a blind idiot god and listen into the void for answers. Or as the author puts it, "statistical arcana." To be concrete, I'm pretty confident I overtook half of humanity in that fitness test in the last year. Not because I was bitten by a radioactive spider, but because I started to work out. Now to claim the analogy to intelligence, that would need an answer to what the analogy of working out is in intelligence. Or to look at it on the level of people who compete in a sport, I'm quite confident that Tom Brady is not very fit by NFL player standards. Similar for Xavi in soccer, but Christiano Ronaldo is probably near the top, and I don't have a good intuition in case of Messi, because he is a quite small player and that will have an effect. The preceding criticism is enabled, by having a good intuition of what the fitness test is, I have a pretty good intuition about the mechanics of a push up. That is not there for intelligence, and I strongly suspect that this whishi-washiness is whats actually holding up all arguments about iq, since it prevents concrete criticism.

runarberg 5y ago
I think that might be on purpose. Proponents of general IQ really want IQ to be immutable (i.e. mostly hereditary) and really don’t want it to be diverse and nuanced (hence general intelligence). I.e. they don’t want IQ test to resemble fitness tests. So they try their best to design their tests in a way that it stays consistent across time and exercise does not affect test scores that much. A test that actually measures a specific thing and increases with exercise (e.g. the SAT) is discounted as a factor. In fact the foundations of IQ tests lies heavily on the eugenics movement which wanted to prove the superiority of able bodied white men. They actually started by assuming brain size correlates with intelligence (it doesn’t) and then set out and proved that on average white men had the biggest brain of them all (which is also false). The nuances of fitness does not help in this goals as one can easily just pick a type of intelligence/fitness which white men perform poorly at in general so their claim was that there exists a general intelligence to remove this nuance. Their current IQ tests are all set up to assume this is true, and hence you can see it in the results. If you can’t then you are not really measuring intelligence.

tyronehed 5y ago

Yes there is, and coincidentally it’s called G and it stands for general intelligence.

pgcj_poster 5y ago

It seems like most of the skills measured in the studies referenced relate to spacial skills or memory/recall. That's not surprising, since those are fairly easy to measure. However, I bet if you could measure artistic, musical, social, and emotional skills, the data would look less cigarre-shaped.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

Something I've tried to look up and never got anywhere with is why IQ is normalised by age? The article mentioned testing physical strength of 20 and 80 year olds that reminded me of this. Which age does best on raw test scores? Seems surprisingly hard to Google this info but I assume it's out there? edit: a renewed effort to google suggests the things IQ tests test peak in late teens. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956797614567339 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/095679761456733...

kkfx 5y ago

IMVHO that's a classic fallacy of a managerial-driven thinking: numbers are not the essence of anything, they can be used in many things to summarize to the extreme something but not everywhere for everything. It's like to say "how many degree of temperature and humidity there are in this room"? Most just look at nearest thermo-hygrometer and say out load a number, let's say 19℃ considering that number "the truth" at maximum with the relative precision error of the meter. Actually that's a "somewhat realistic approximation", a room is not a well insulated calorimeter, so I can say that's 32℃ just because behind the windows with direct sunlight that's the temperature locally measured with 30% humidity, but also on the other extreme of the room, one of an old masonry house placed direct on ground soil, where I measure 14℃ and 60% humidity. For intelligence it's not much different, only even harder to measure. We can say someone is very skilled in math so "he/she is intelligent" and craft some kind of test (like uni admissions tests common in various faculties around the world) but can also be absolutely not much skilled in math but very smart in talking and comprehend peoples so we can craft a "social ability skill" intelligence scale etc and finally combine all those test in a giant one and establish a scale, but again that scale is a kind of generic approximation of something we try to "standardize" after a long process of observation on many peoples abilities. It's not a real measure out of something tangible and really meaningless, for instance if you need a developer how it's intelligence score matter? Someone might have a high score but still being far less able to sole certain kind of programming tasks than someone else. Long story short: there is no real and meaningful measure for intelligence, we just try to pretend there is something to craft studies on that produced like an industrial product because in a managerial-driven society anything must be like that, it's not possible to think about immeasurable, not programmable Gantt diagrams style things.

breadbreadbread 5y ago

Oh Easy Question: No.