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> 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
by 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 agoI 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.
- polski-g 5y agoBrain size is actually correlated r=0.41 with IQ
- ryan93 5y agoYeah some racists thought black people are stupid because of brain size. Has less than nothing to do with modern IQ tests. I’m not following your argument that the racist behavior of people in the general study of intelligence invalidate all study of it forever.
- runarberg 5y agoI drew the parallels because we know the brain size studies were pseudo science with an agenda to prove a ludicrous statement. IQs are still up for debate, but we do know that modern IQ tests have their foundations in the eugenics movement. And they certainly had the same agenda as the brain size hacks, so I don’t think the parallels are unfair. There has been a high profile literature as early as the 1990s (The Bell Curve) which tries to use the IQ to prove this nonsense. So even if the brain size hacks are all gone, and the eugenics movement died with WW2, there are still people with an agenda where a nuanced free immutable “intelligence” is their goal.
- ryan93 5y agoSaying the “foundations” isn’t an argument. Many geneticists used to be hard core eugenicists doesn’t invalidate the whole field or it’s developments. The validity of modern iq exams has been studied by hundreds or thousands of modern non racist psychologists and the evidence is public info
- runarberg 5y agoThe evidence is still disputed, and the validity is encoded in the tests. Modern IQ tests are adjusted to be robust across multiple trials, that doesn’t prove that intelligence is immutable by a long shot, it is merely a self fulfilling prophecy. Books such as The Bell Curve are not in and of them self racist. This book in particular makes zero racist claims. However it relies on deeply racist studies as its premise, so if you want to conclude anything from it, that conclusion is racist. I don’t think every proponent of IQ is racist, however there is a lot of racism embedded in the research, sometimes directly, but most often by association.