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>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 descr

>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.
usgroup 5y ago
I think that the "whole story" matters, even if the bits you highlight are a large part of it. A bit like the relationship between epigenetics and the rest of genetics -- it rather changes how you interpret what you already know. Given that we cannot say what intelligence is better than "its what intelligent people do", I'd say we were far from the "whole story". I think pretending that there is no "whole story" and using IQ to make policy decisions about populations is political. I don't think anyone cared that a bunch of researchers were tinkering with some psychometrics. They cared that a whole racial group could be shut out of certain jobs on the basis of a half baked abstract reasoning test.
- deltarholamda 5y ago
  >Given that we cannot say what intelligence is better than "its what intelligent people do", I'd say we were far from the "whole story". I'm not opposed to this, and I doubt most people would be either. Take college admissions as an example. A low-SAT, low-GPA student in a one-on-one interview with an admissions officer could dazzle the interviewer to such a level that admission with a scholarship could be guaranteed. We don't do that often for a variety of reasons, but one would certainly be because of the quasi-legal requirement to tick certain boxes to avoid trouble. Okay, but that has costs. We've been able to paper over a lot of this with economic good times, but that's unlikely to last forever. Hard reality always wins in the end.

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.

usgroup 5y ago

I think that the "whole story" matters, even if the bits you highlight are a large part of it. A bit like the relationship between epigenetics and the rest of genetics -- it rather changes how you interpret what you already know. Given that we cannot say what intelligence is better than "its what intelligent people do", I'd say we were far from the "whole story". I think pretending that there is no "whole story" and using IQ to make policy decisions about populations is political. I don't think anyone cared that a bunch of researchers were tinkering with some psychometrics. They cared that a whole racial group could be shut out of certain jobs on the basis of a half baked abstract reasoning test.

deltarholamda 5y ago
>Given that we cannot say what intelligence is better than "its what intelligent people do", I'd say we were far from the "whole story". I'm not opposed to this, and I doubt most people would be either. Take college admissions as an example. A low-SAT, low-GPA student in a one-on-one interview with an admissions officer could dazzle the interviewer to such a level that admission with a scholarship could be guaranteed. We don't do that often for a variety of reasons, but one would certainly be because of the quasi-legal requirement to tick certain boxes to avoid trouble. Okay, but that has costs. We've been able to paper over a lot of this with economic good times, but that's unlikely to last forever. Hard reality always wins in the end.