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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 c

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".
seneca 5y ago
Agreed on all counts. > 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 unfortunate reality is that social sciences are largely corrupted by political activism. Their activities are often prescriptive social engineering that attempt to use their perceived scientific authority rather than actual descriptive science. Put simply, they are saying what they want to be so, rather than what is so.
- daenz 5y ago
  I've heard the argument that even if there is a reliable measure of IQ and there is a measurable difference between groups of people, that knowledge only harms people and doesn't do any good, so we shouldn't pursue it anyways. So I think to get everyone on the same page, you have to address that concern in some form, or there will be some people who are always against the idea of measurable intelligence.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    I'm not sure that's the same argument. If a chemical engineer wants to explain why she won't research chemical weapon agents, she's not going to say "chemical weapons don't exist" or "everything's made of chemicals so chemical weapons aren't a coherent category". She'll say chemical weapons are a clear, coherent, and real idea, but the risks of understanding them better outweigh any potential benefits. It's a reasonable argument, and one I personally tend to lean towards, but you can't meaningfully debate it if you don't have a shared understanding that a general factor does indeed exist.
- delecti 5y ago
  "Corrupted by political activism" is probably going too far. It's not controversial to acknowledge that lots of historical attempts to measure intelligence have been pretty biased in favor of English speaking white men. Many of those attempts were biased just because of unexamined biases (the kind everyone has). Unfortunately some were also very deliberate spins (one notable example being the book The Bell Curve). I think it's reasonable to conclude that measuring intelligence isn't valuable enough for all of the negative externalities attached to it given how the world currently is. But then from there it's easy to make the easy jump to saying it's impossible to measure intelligence without those negative externalities, which is probably not true. But if you can't measure intelligence without significant bias, you aren't really measuring it at all, you're just measuring your biases.
runarberg 5y ago
It is because we have a more nuanced take on what intelligence is. We don’t think that intelligence is something that you can measure with a pen and paper test. Being smart also includes stuff like “reading the room”, being empathetic, knowing when to quit, etc. If there is a general intelligence—which I very much doubt—our current tests don’t even come close to measuring it.
- moonchrome 5y ago
  >our current tests don’t even come to measuring it. Then why do they correlate with outcomes so well ?
  - runarberg 5y ago
    Maybe because they are designed to and because of selection bias. These tests are expected to correlate, if they don’t they are considered a bad test and is thrown into obscurity (but more likely fixed until it does).
    - moonchrome 5y ago
      But if they didn't even come close to measuring it then there would be no correlation ? It's not like these tests are applied retroactively to explain past performances - they offer actual predictive value. Selection bias can account for some of it but there are ways to test if this and from what I've seen it still holds up.
      - runarberg 5y ago
        I’m not disputing that these tests measure something, they obviously do. However what they are measuring is not what most people consider a satisfactory definition of intelligence. In fact most psychometricians simply give up and define intelligence based on what these tests measure (i.e. operation definition). Without justification that is very poor science.
      - plorkyeran 5y ago
yxwvut 5y ago
The existence of 'general intelligence' is a pretty different question from "can we measure 'general intelligence'"? The analysis demonstrated does not account for the possibility of confounding by some external factor unrelated to intelligence (income, tutoring, etc), which is what many will argue. At best you can claim a notion of 'general test-taking ability' with no ambiguity. Once you recognize the problem-solving patterns in these tests, doing well becomes significantly easier, which is an almost inescapable measurement problem. And re: normal distribution implying some fundamental truth, the same can be said of an iterated guessing game (eg: take the sum of your correct guesses over 100 coin-flips - the population's scores on that game will be normally distributed).
- runarberg 5y ago
  Also regarding the normal distribution. As pointed out by Stephen J. Gould, intelligence is not normally distributed. The IQ test results are. But IQ test results are standardized to be normally distributed. It is an assumption that intelligence is normally distributed, and evidence suggests it is not. More likely—if it exists at all—it is log-normally distributed. Psychometricians believe that there is some fundimental truth in the normal distributions, and then standardize their test scores so that it follows this distribution in order to gain validity. It is a pseudo-scientific self fulfilling prophesy.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
    This viewpoint is generally acknowledged as wrong by the scientific community, and Gould is generally acknowledged as a hack who sold out by telling people what they wanted to hear in exchange for book sales.
    - runarberg 5y ago
      > Gould is generally acknowledged as a hack who sold out by telling people what they wanted to hear in exchange for book sales. It’s funny you should say that. Because I generally regard the authors Gould is addressing in his book Mismeasure of Man, including S.G. Morton, C. Murray, A. Jensen, etc. as hacks that used questionable scientific means to tell people what they wanted to hear—namely the superiority of white men—in exchange for book sales.
CJefferson 5y ago
Looking just at SATs, it is very common for people to take a practice test early on, then do lots of work/ revision, then eventually recieve a much higher score. If SAT score were measuring some immutable value, then it wouldn't be so easy to improve one's score with revision, and tutors.
- maldusiecle 5y ago
  The degree to which the SAT is coachable is a subject of debate. The biggest studies have suggested that even private tutoring has an effect of less than 40 points.
  - usgroup 5y ago
    Kasparov had a nice line about this in "How life imitates chess". I'm paraphrasing but it was something along the lines of "there are lots of things that cannot be tought to you which you can nontheless teach yourself". I think that thinking processes is very much in that category, and I think that the investment in time is considerable. I think its typical to expect gradual improvement -- a constant response to training. Anecdotally, it doesn't work like that.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  I'm not really sure anyone above has implied that intelligence is immutable - just that you can describe it generally. Consider the physical fitness correlations in the article - I don't think anyone would argue that your level of physical fitness is immutable. But just because the value is mutable is no reason to disregard the current value - it can still be a meaningful and useful indicator.
- mercutio2 5y ago
  It is not very common to increase your score on the SATs by a significant amount. The actual gains are very marginal, in the aggregate. Most money spent on test prep is just wasted.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  That's part of why the r for SAT-IQ is somewhere between 0.5-0.8[0] rather than higher. Also the average SAT score increase by retaking seems to be 40[1] points which doesn't skew things that much. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient 1. https://www.manhattanreview.com/sat-retaking/#:~:text=The%20average%20score%20improvement%20for,of%20100%20points%20or%20more https://www.manhattanreview.com/sat-retaking/#:~:text=The%20....
usgroup 5y ago
IQ doesn't behave like you think it might in fairly uncontroversial situations is part of the problem. For example, have a read about the "Rationality Quotient" and the surprising conclusion that rationality is poorly correlated with IQ. I'd certainly expect smarter people to be more rational, but it is not so. I think that the treatment of things like time factors and tool use is also somewhat trivialised. Those that play chess will note that excellent Rapid or standard players can be terrible Bullet or Blitz players. Roger Penrose -- nobel prize winning mathematical physicist -- was held back a year on count of his arithmetic being that bad. Yet he is a shockingly good mathematician mostly qua geometrical intuition to which he can convert other things. Who cares, Penrose can just use a calculator. Similarly, I'd say that many IQ tests are just symbolic regression. What if I was brilliant at stating symbolic regression problems, but poor at solving them? Then me + solver would make all the difference, unlike if I was poor at stating them ... And so on.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  >Roger Penrose.. Showing outliers just proves there are outliers not that the averages are uselesss. >Those that play chess will note that excellent Rapid or standard players can be terrible Bullet or Blitz players. I play chess and those are definitely highly correlated, I suspect at least r of 0.7 especially for those who have put decent time into the different controls.
  - usgroup 5y ago
    I didn't mention Penrose because he is an outlier. I mention him as an example where tool use disproportionally effects resultant performance, or conversely as an example of where a specific link in a reasoning chain effects the outcome. I think that is more close to normal than not. I.e. you can often patch people, and they become better at something. Regarding chess, research suggests you're wrong: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1469029219300901 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14690... https://hvandermaas.socsci.uva.nl/Homepage_Han_van_der_Maas/Publications_files/papers/chesspaperfinal3.pdf https://hvandermaas.socsci.uva.nl/Homepage_Han_van_der_Maas/...
deeg 5y ago
> 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). I think part of the issue is that it's very hard to measure intelligence accurately (whatever that means) across cultural divides. If you gave an American IQ test (e.g. an SAT) to Europeans, Asians, and Africans you'll likely get different results, not (necessarily) because of innate differences but because of educational/cultural backgrounds. Poverty levels can also change scores. This makes it tricky to know what to do with these scores and we need to acknowledge that. This leads some to conclude that we should get rid of the notion of a measurable IQ altogether. That goes too far in my opinion but I understand their concern.
- blululu 5y ago
  Unclear if it is hard to measure intelligence or if we just don’t like the results. Of course poverty and education can change the results. This is only a problem with the tests if we know for a fact intelligence is independent of material circumstances. Nobody would be surprised that good nutrition and regular exercise make it possible for someone to run faster or lift heavier weights. Of course we as a society are also failing to provide the basics to large segments of the population, but getting rid of testing is a motivated effort to hide failures rather than try to improve. “Can’t get a fever if you don’t check temperatures…”
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
  Some of the difference in scores will be driven by differences in g, some by differences in motivation, some by education, etc. There are tests that, controlling for motivation, do a pretty good job of getting around this (like Raven's progressive matrices, etc.) They don't even require language. I think you're on the right track, though. But the key sticking point is this: many people are very uncomfortable with the idea that there are differences in intelligence among people, both within and between populations. Unfortunately, that is undeniably true. And so we get this ridiculous, unproductive dance. Also, just as an aside, the latest evidence around the "poverty actually makes you literally stupider" claim is that it's not supported--studies aren't replicating. Which makes sense because the claim is prima facie crazy, but I digress...
deltarholamda 5y ago
>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 reason is that general intelligence tests show differences between racial and ethnic groups. Which isn't shocking, as intelligence is certainly driven by genetics and compounded by culture. But because it is, it upsets people. IQ testing is a pretty valuable filtering mechanism. Smart people are really important to advancing society. Replacing it with some other, more subjective metric just moves the filter into the realm of political control. Which seems like a bad idea to me, but what do I know? I'm not a genderqueer left-handed ginger aboriginal, so I'm not very smart.
- seneca 5y ago
  Your point would be better delivered without the last paragraph.
  - deltarholamda 5y ago
    Like I said, it upsets people, and since we value not upsetting people, that's the metric we optimize for. This has costs and consequences, like anything else. It's the social sciences version of technical debt.
    - runarberg 5y ago
      > I'm not a genderqueer left-handed ginger aboriginal, so I'm not very smart. > we value not upsetting people, that's the metric we optimize for. From the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): > Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. I’m a prime target for this flamebate, and you’ve managed to upset me quite a bit. I’m actually surprised I didn’t bite already. Indeed I’ll actually just leave it at that and pat my self on the back for resisting.
    - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
      It intentionally upsets people without actually adding to your argument. That sounds like trolling to me, which is not what we are going for here.
Kranar 5y ago
>The mere fact that the results of these types of tests on large population groups tend to follow a normal distribution. The results do not follow a normal distribution though. IQ is forced into a normal distribution with a standard deviation of 15 by definition, it is constructed in such a way that it's forced into that distribution. The actual measurements, ie. raw test scores, are not normally distributed.
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
  I think you're conflating IQ and all the other things parent talks about. Almost by definition with these sorts of processes we'll see Gaussian curves.
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  The raw test scores are normally distributed. This much is pretty much forced by the central limit theorem. Now, of course, the raw score distribution does not have mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15, but that’s just a norming issue, to make it useful to compare across the tests.
Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago
The fact that various test scores are correlated to each other only means, could mean that the tests themselves are correlated or that test-taking abilities are correlated. The resulting normal distribution also suggest tests are indicative of test-taking abilities. But... how do you show that test-taking ability correlates to intelligence?
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  The test taking ability is highly correlated to real world ability on practical tasks. See, for example, Hunter and Schmidt, “The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings.” (1998), which summarizes a mountain of research over almost a century, and in fact finds that test taking ability is strongly predictive of real world performance.
shalmanese 5y ago
> 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. It's also possible that single cultural factors could be so pervasive that they overwhelmingly swamp any signal by forcing a correlation just on its own. eg: Before the 1960s or so, you could look at every society that had ever existed and make the observation that, except for a countable list of exceptions, men received more education that women. This might lead you to a natural conclusion that men have some natural innate advantage in receiving education that women lack. Except that's not the truth at all, the truth is that patriarchy was such a universal of the human condition that it affected every single corner of the planet to such an extent that there was no control group until very, very recently. So much so that even the slightest letting off of patriarchy shows women are so much more innately suited to education that colleges have had to quietly implement affirmative action programs for men simply to keep their gender balances even remotely in check. Many people would argue that classism and racism so thoroughly pervades our understanding of intelligence that we will simply never get our control group until some future date when they recede enough for us to truly see their effects.
mgh2 5y ago
I think you are referring to the notion of consilience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience
dTal 5y ago
>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 The fallout from eugenics gave social science a complex. Innate difference and especially innate superiority of one person over another is taboo. The field is poisoned by motivated reasoning. >At the height of the controversy, during the 1970s to 1980s, the debate was highly ideologised. In Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature (1984), Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin criticise "genetic determinism" from a Marxist framework, arguing that "Science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology ... If biological determinism is a weapon in the struggle between classes, then the universities are weapons factories, and their teaching and research faculties are the engineers, designers, and production workers." The debate thus shifted away from whether heritable traits exist to whether it was politically or ethically permissible to admit their existence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture#Determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture#Determin...

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".

seneca 5y ago

Agreed on all counts. > 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 unfortunate reality is that social sciences are largely corrupted by political activism. Their activities are often prescriptive social engineering that attempt to use their perceived scientific authority rather than actual descriptive science. Put simply, they are saying what they want to be so, rather than what is so.

daenz 5y ago
I've heard the argument that even if there is a reliable measure of IQ and there is a measurable difference between groups of people, that knowledge only harms people and doesn't do any good, so we shouldn't pursue it anyways. So I think to get everyone on the same page, you have to address that concern in some form, or there will be some people who are always against the idea of measurable intelligence.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  I'm not sure that's the same argument. If a chemical engineer wants to explain why she won't research chemical weapon agents, she's not going to say "chemical weapons don't exist" or "everything's made of chemicals so chemical weapons aren't a coherent category". She'll say chemical weapons are a clear, coherent, and real idea, but the risks of understanding them better outweigh any potential benefits. It's a reasonable argument, and one I personally tend to lean towards, but you can't meaningfully debate it if you don't have a shared understanding that a general factor does indeed exist.
delecti 5y ago
"Corrupted by political activism" is probably going too far. It's not controversial to acknowledge that lots of historical attempts to measure intelligence have been pretty biased in favor of English speaking white men. Many of those attempts were biased just because of unexamined biases (the kind everyone has). Unfortunately some were also very deliberate spins (one notable example being the book The Bell Curve). I think it's reasonable to conclude that measuring intelligence isn't valuable enough for all of the negative externalities attached to it given how the world currently is. But then from there it's easy to make the easy jump to saying it's impossible to measure intelligence without those negative externalities, which is probably not true. But if you can't measure intelligence without significant bias, you aren't really measuring it at all, you're just measuring your biases.

runarberg 5y ago

It is because we have a more nuanced take on what intelligence is. We don’t think that intelligence is something that you can measure with a pen and paper test. Being smart also includes stuff like “reading the room”, being empathetic, knowing when to quit, etc. If there is a general intelligence—which I very much doubt—our current tests don’t even come close to measuring it.

moonchrome 5y ago
>our current tests don’t even come to measuring it. Then why do they correlate with outcomes so well ?
- runarberg 5y ago
  Maybe because they are designed to and because of selection bias. These tests are expected to correlate, if they don’t they are considered a bad test and is thrown into obscurity (but more likely fixed until it does).
  - moonchrome 5y ago
    But if they didn't even come close to measuring it then there would be no correlation ? It's not like these tests are applied retroactively to explain past performances - they offer actual predictive value. Selection bias can account for some of it but there are ways to test if this and from what I've seen it still holds up.
    - runarberg 5y ago
      I’m not disputing that these tests measure something, they obviously do. However what they are measuring is not what most people consider a satisfactory definition of intelligence. In fact most psychometricians simply give up and define intelligence based on what these tests measure (i.e. operation definition). Without justification that is very poor science.
    - plorkyeran 5y ago

yxwvut 5y ago

The existence of 'general intelligence' is a pretty different question from "can we measure 'general intelligence'"? The analysis demonstrated does not account for the possibility of confounding by some external factor unrelated to intelligence (income, tutoring, etc), which is what many will argue. At best you can claim a notion of 'general test-taking ability' with no ambiguity. Once you recognize the problem-solving patterns in these tests, doing well becomes significantly easier, which is an almost inescapable measurement problem. And re: normal distribution implying some fundamental truth, the same can be said of an iterated guessing game (eg: take the sum of your correct guesses over 100 coin-flips - the population's scores on that game will be normally distributed).

runarberg 5y ago
Also regarding the normal distribution. As pointed out by Stephen J. Gould, intelligence is not normally distributed. The IQ test results are. But IQ test results are standardized to be normally distributed. It is an assumption that intelligence is normally distributed, and evidence suggests it is not. More likely—if it exists at all—it is log-normally distributed. Psychometricians believe that there is some fundimental truth in the normal distributions, and then standardize their test scores so that it follows this distribution in order to gain validity. It is a pseudo-scientific self fulfilling prophesy.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
  This viewpoint is generally acknowledged as wrong by the scientific community, and Gould is generally acknowledged as a hack who sold out by telling people what they wanted to hear in exchange for book sales.
  - runarberg 5y ago
    > Gould is generally acknowledged as a hack who sold out by telling people what they wanted to hear in exchange for book sales. It’s funny you should say that. Because I generally regard the authors Gould is addressing in his book Mismeasure of Man, including S.G. Morton, C. Murray, A. Jensen, etc. as hacks that used questionable scientific means to tell people what they wanted to hear—namely the superiority of white men—in exchange for book sales.

CJefferson 5y ago

Looking just at SATs, it is very common for people to take a practice test early on, then do lots of work/ revision, then eventually recieve a much higher score. If SAT score were measuring some immutable value, then it wouldn't be so easy to improve one's score with revision, and tutors.

maldusiecle 5y ago
The degree to which the SAT is coachable is a subject of debate. The biggest studies have suggested that even private tutoring has an effect of less than 40 points.
- usgroup 5y ago
  Kasparov had a nice line about this in "How life imitates chess". I'm paraphrasing but it was something along the lines of "there are lots of things that cannot be tought to you which you can nontheless teach yourself". I think that thinking processes is very much in that category, and I think that the investment in time is considerable. I think its typical to expect gradual improvement -- a constant response to training. Anecdotally, it doesn't work like that.
horsawlarway 5y ago
I'm not really sure anyone above has implied that intelligence is immutable - just that you can describe it generally. Consider the physical fitness correlations in the article - I don't think anyone would argue that your level of physical fitness is immutable. But just because the value is mutable is no reason to disregard the current value - it can still be a meaningful and useful indicator.
mercutio2 5y ago
It is not very common to increase your score on the SATs by a significant amount. The actual gains are very marginal, in the aggregate. Most money spent on test prep is just wasted.
Tenoke 5y ago
That's part of why the r for SAT-IQ is somewhere between 0.5-0.8[0] rather than higher. Also the average SAT score increase by retaking seems to be 40[1] points which doesn't skew things that much. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient 1. https://www.manhattanreview.com/sat-retaking/#:~:text=The%20average%20score%20improvement%20for,of%20100%20points%20or%20more https://www.manhattanreview.com/sat-retaking/#:~:text=The%20....

usgroup 5y ago

IQ doesn't behave like you think it might in fairly uncontroversial situations is part of the problem. For example, have a read about the "Rationality Quotient" and the surprising conclusion that rationality is poorly correlated with IQ. I'd certainly expect smarter people to be more rational, but it is not so. I think that the treatment of things like time factors and tool use is also somewhat trivialised. Those that play chess will note that excellent Rapid or standard players can be terrible Bullet or Blitz players. Roger Penrose -- nobel prize winning mathematical physicist -- was held back a year on count of his arithmetic being that bad. Yet he is a shockingly good mathematician mostly qua geometrical intuition to which he can convert other things. Who cares, Penrose can just use a calculator. Similarly, I'd say that many IQ tests are just symbolic regression. What if I was brilliant at stating symbolic regression problems, but poor at solving them? Then me + solver would make all the difference, unlike if I was poor at stating them ... And so on.

Tenoke 5y ago
>Roger Penrose.. Showing outliers just proves there are outliers not that the averages are uselesss. >Those that play chess will note that excellent Rapid or standard players can be terrible Bullet or Blitz players. I play chess and those are definitely highly correlated, I suspect at least r of 0.7 especially for those who have put decent time into the different controls.
- usgroup 5y ago
  I didn't mention Penrose because he is an outlier. I mention him as an example where tool use disproportionally effects resultant performance, or conversely as an example of where a specific link in a reasoning chain effects the outcome. I think that is more close to normal than not. I.e. you can often patch people, and they become better at something. Regarding chess, research suggests you're wrong: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1469029219300901 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14690... https://hvandermaas.socsci.uva.nl/Homepage_Han_van_der_Maas/Publications_files/papers/chesspaperfinal3.pdf https://hvandermaas.socsci.uva.nl/Homepage_Han_van_der_Maas/...

deeg 5y ago

> 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). I think part of the issue is that it's very hard to measure intelligence accurately (whatever that means) across cultural divides. If you gave an American IQ test (e.g. an SAT) to Europeans, Asians, and Africans you'll likely get different results, not (necessarily) because of innate differences but because of educational/cultural backgrounds. Poverty levels can also change scores. This makes it tricky to know what to do with these scores and we need to acknowledge that. This leads some to conclude that we should get rid of the notion of a measurable IQ altogether. That goes too far in my opinion but I understand their concern.

blululu 5y ago
Unclear if it is hard to measure intelligence or if we just don’t like the results. Of course poverty and education can change the results. This is only a problem with the tests if we know for a fact intelligence is independent of material circumstances. Nobody would be surprised that good nutrition and regular exercise make it possible for someone to run faster or lift heavier weights. Of course we as a society are also failing to provide the basics to large segments of the population, but getting rid of testing is a motivated effort to hide failures rather than try to improve. “Can’t get a fever if you don’t check temperatures…”
NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
Some of the difference in scores will be driven by differences in g, some by differences in motivation, some by education, etc. There are tests that, controlling for motivation, do a pretty good job of getting around this (like Raven's progressive matrices, etc.) They don't even require language. I think you're on the right track, though. But the key sticking point is this: many people are very uncomfortable with the idea that there are differences in intelligence among people, both within and between populations. Unfortunately, that is undeniably true. And so we get this ridiculous, unproductive dance. Also, just as an aside, the latest evidence around the "poverty actually makes you literally stupider" claim is that it's not supported--studies aren't replicating. Which makes sense because the claim is prima facie crazy, but I digress...

deltarholamda 5y ago

>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 reason is that general intelligence tests show differences between racial and ethnic groups. Which isn't shocking, as intelligence is certainly driven by genetics and compounded by culture. But because it is, it upsets people. IQ testing is a pretty valuable filtering mechanism. Smart people are really important to advancing society. Replacing it with some other, more subjective metric just moves the filter into the realm of political control. Which seems like a bad idea to me, but what do I know? I'm not a genderqueer left-handed ginger aboriginal, so I'm not very smart.

seneca 5y ago
Your point would be better delivered without the last paragraph.
- deltarholamda 5y ago
  Like I said, it upsets people, and since we value not upsetting people, that's the metric we optimize for. This has costs and consequences, like anything else. It's the social sciences version of technical debt.
  - runarberg 5y ago
    > I'm not a genderqueer left-handed ginger aboriginal, so I'm not very smart. > we value not upsetting people, that's the metric we optimize for. From the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): > Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. I’m a prime target for this flamebate, and you’ve managed to upset me quite a bit. I’m actually surprised I didn’t bite already. Indeed I’ll actually just leave it at that and pat my self on the back for resisting.
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    It intentionally upsets people without actually adding to your argument. That sounds like trolling to me, which is not what we are going for here.

Kranar 5y ago

>The mere fact that the results of these types of tests on large population groups tend to follow a normal distribution. The results do not follow a normal distribution though. IQ is forced into a normal distribution with a standard deviation of 15 by definition, it is constructed in such a way that it's forced into that distribution. The actual measurements, ie. raw test scores, are not normally distributed.

NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
I think you're conflating IQ and all the other things parent talks about. Almost by definition with these sorts of processes we'll see Gaussian curves.
xyzzyz 5y ago
The raw test scores are normally distributed. This much is pretty much forced by the central limit theorem. Now, of course, the raw score distribution does not have mean of 100 and standard deviation of 15, but that’s just a norming issue, to make it useful to compare across the tests.

Eddy_Viscosity2 5y ago

The fact that various test scores are correlated to each other only means, could mean that the tests themselves are correlated or that test-taking abilities are correlated. The resulting normal distribution also suggest tests are indicative of test-taking abilities. But... how do you show that test-taking ability correlates to intelligence?

xyzzyz 5y ago
The test taking ability is highly correlated to real world ability on practical tasks. See, for example, Hunter and Schmidt, “The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings.” (1998), which summarizes a mountain of research over almost a century, and in fact finds that test taking ability is strongly predictive of real world performance.

shalmanese 5y ago

> 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. It's also possible that single cultural factors could be so pervasive that they overwhelmingly swamp any signal by forcing a correlation just on its own. eg: Before the 1960s or so, you could look at every society that had ever existed and make the observation that, except for a countable list of exceptions, men received more education that women. This might lead you to a natural conclusion that men have some natural innate advantage in receiving education that women lack. Except that's not the truth at all, the truth is that patriarchy was such a universal of the human condition that it affected every single corner of the planet to such an extent that there was no control group until very, very recently. So much so that even the slightest letting off of patriarchy shows women are so much more innately suited to education that colleges have had to quietly implement affirmative action programs for men simply to keep their gender balances even remotely in check. Many people would argue that classism and racism so thoroughly pervades our understanding of intelligence that we will simply never get our control group until some future date when they recede enough for us to truly see their effects.

mgh2 5y ago

I think you are referring to the notion of consilience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consilience

dTal 5y ago

>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 The fallout from eugenics gave social science a complex. Innate difference and especially innate superiority of one person over another is taboo. The field is poisoned by motivated reasoning. >At the height of the controversy, during the 1970s to 1980s, the debate was highly ideologised. In Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature (1984), Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin criticise "genetic determinism" from a Marxist framework, arguing that "Science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology ... If biological determinism is a weapon in the struggle between classes, then the universities are weapons factories, and their teaching and research faculties are the engineers, designers, and production workers." The debate thus shifted away from whether heritable traits exist to whether it was politically or ethically permissible to admit their existence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture#Determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture#Determin...