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There’s no replication crisis in psychometry. It’s the highest quality area of psychological research, at least with respect to reproducibility. While there’s r

by User23 4y ago

There’s no replication crisis in psychometry. It’s the highest quality area of psychological research, at least with respect to reproducibility. While there’s room for debate as to what exactly it is that’s being measured, there is none for whether something meaningful at all is being measured. IQ measurements have strong predictive power too for various outcomes, such as educational attainment. A civilization reduction of IQ by nearly 1/3 sigma is absolutely cause for concern.

mjburgess 4y ago
Unfortunately little of what you've said is true. IQ only has predictive power at very low scores; above 100 it randomly correlates with, eg., wealth and various other extrinsic objective measures. The only cases where "success" is measured by the profession are circluar, ie., its often claimed Drs/lawyers etc have high IQs, but necessarily so, since they're all filtered based on IQ tests. Psychometry has nothing to replicate, because there are no psychometric theories. It is simply a field which finds patterns in exams it makes up, based on no testable theories, and asserts that these patterns have "some meaning". There isnt anything here to replicate.
- morsch 4y ago
  If you're saying that lawyers and PhDs all have to score high on what's literally an IQ test, then I don't think that is true. You can become both without ever doing an IQ test, and as such there can be no filtering -- are those even routinely administered? However, to succeed at higher education (and to get into it), especially written tests, you need to be good at some stuff that also means you'll be decent at an IQ test. That means they have some value, though I tend to agree that it means very little overall.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    All law and medical schools i'm aware of require IQ tests for admission, they're often called "aptitude" or "admissions" tests
    - morsch 4y ago
      Yeah, that's not a thing here.
      - User23 4y ago
        The Abitur isn't a thing anymore?
        morsch 4y ago
        Of course it is, but it's not "literally an IQ test" in that the result is not an IQ. Universities don't require an IQ above 105 to apply, they require good grades. Apparently in other places, doctors and lawyers literally take an IQ test, which is bizarre. Or maybe the original poster has an unusually broad understanding of what's an IQ test, in that pretty much any (written?) examination qualifies. Which would transform his thesis from "IQs are a sham" to "any evaluation of specific aptitude and knowledge is a sham".
        User23 4y ago
        Yes, I believe that's essentially his thesis, at least with respect to aptitude, based on my discussion with him in a sister thread. He's apparently referring to the MCAT and LSAT, which serve as entrance examinations for medical and law schools respectively. Similarly the SAT, which is the undergraduate entrance examination used by many schools, is a very good predictor for score on an actual IQ test. So much so that one can conflate the two without really being very wrong.
- User23 4y ago
  For some reason some people just really hate the idea that intelligence is something that can be measured with some accuracy. You're just repeating their discredited arguments that have been reliably debunked for decades now. In reality, intelligence is the single most selected for human trait and it correlates with, to a greater or lesser extent, being better at basically everything. In other words, it has many phenotypic consequences. That includes some pretty surprising things, like semen quality[1] and height[2]. And then there's the obvious stuff like higher IQ correlating with better performance in school and work[3]. It also correlates with higher income and lower criminality, but those effect sizes are smaller. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222683944_Intelligence_and_Semen_Quality_are_Positively_Correlated https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222683944_Intellige... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3617178/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3617178/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_correlations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_c...
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    The IQ test is a test, people good at taking tests are good at taking tests. This doesnt rise to the level of a theory of intelligence, nor evidence that IQ measures it. A vast amount of "mere statistical" research is pseudoscience; entire fields. It requires a lot of experience in hard scientific methodology, and an actual education in statistics. A lot of experimental sciences attract people interested in the experiments who just plug data into models and report the results. The vast majority of such "research" is pseudoscience, and it's one massive house of cards. Most "heritability" research, population genetics research, psychometrics, psychology, nutrition, etc. is pseudoscience. The whole type of statistics that has basically been invented by the social sciences is the basis for massive amounts of pseudoscience. Factor analysis, propensity scores, correlation coefs, etc. -- it's just an analysis of correlation. Such is the poverty of thinking in these "social sciecnes" that they arent trained enough to realise that a model of correlations in effects isnt a model of their causes, not even nearly so. And this is esp. sevre in the case of complex systems like humans and animals. All of the methods of IQ research are simple models of correlations in quiz answers. They do not rise to the level of a theory of anything, and their use is routinely circular and unethical.

by User23 4y ago

mjburgess 4y ago

Unfortunately little of what you've said is true. IQ only has predictive power at very low scores; above 100 it randomly correlates with, eg., wealth and various other extrinsic objective measures. The only cases where "success" is measured by the profession are circluar, ie., its often claimed Drs/lawyers etc have high IQs, but necessarily so, since they're all filtered based on IQ tests. Psychometry has nothing to replicate, because there are no psychometric theories. It is simply a field which finds patterns in exams it makes up, based on no testable theories, and asserts that these patterns have "some meaning". There isnt anything here to replicate.

morsch 4y ago
If you're saying that lawyers and PhDs all have to score high on what's literally an IQ test, then I don't think that is true. You can become both without ever doing an IQ test, and as such there can be no filtering -- are those even routinely administered? However, to succeed at higher education (and to get into it), especially written tests, you need to be good at some stuff that also means you'll be decent at an IQ test. That means they have some value, though I tend to agree that it means very little overall.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  All law and medical schools i'm aware of require IQ tests for admission, they're often called "aptitude" or "admissions" tests
  - morsch 4y ago
    Yeah, that's not a thing here.
    - User23 4y ago
      The Abitur isn't a thing anymore?
      - morsch 4y ago
        Of course it is, but it's not "literally an IQ test" in that the result is not an IQ. Universities don't require an IQ above 105 to apply, they require good grades. Apparently in other places, doctors and lawyers literally take an IQ test, which is bizarre. Or maybe the original poster has an unusually broad understanding of what's an IQ test, in that pretty much any (written?) examination qualifies. Which would transform his thesis from "IQs are a sham" to "any evaluation of specific aptitude and knowledge is a sham".
        User23 4y ago
        Yes, I believe that's essentially his thesis, at least with respect to aptitude, based on my discussion with him in a sister thread. He's apparently referring to the MCAT and LSAT, which serve as entrance examinations for medical and law schools respectively. Similarly the SAT, which is the undergraduate entrance examination used by many schools, is a very good predictor for score on an actual IQ test. So much so that one can conflate the two without really being very wrong.
User23 4y ago
For some reason some people just really hate the idea that intelligence is something that can be measured with some accuracy. You're just repeating their discredited arguments that have been reliably debunked for decades now. In reality, intelligence is the single most selected for human trait and it correlates with, to a greater or lesser extent, being better at basically everything. In other words, it has many phenotypic consequences. That includes some pretty surprising things, like semen quality[1] and height[2]. And then there's the obvious stuff like higher IQ correlating with better performance in school and work[3]. It also correlates with higher income and lower criminality, but those effect sizes are smaller. [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222683944_Intelligence_and_Semen_Quality_are_Positively_Correlated https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222683944_Intellige... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3617178/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3617178/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_correlations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Social_c...
- mjburgess 4y ago
  The IQ test is a test, people good at taking tests are good at taking tests. This doesnt rise to the level of a theory of intelligence, nor evidence that IQ measures it. A vast amount of "mere statistical" research is pseudoscience; entire fields. It requires a lot of experience in hard scientific methodology, and an actual education in statistics. A lot of experimental sciences attract people interested in the experiments who just plug data into models and report the results. The vast majority of such "research" is pseudoscience, and it's one massive house of cards. Most "heritability" research, population genetics research, psychometrics, psychology, nutrition, etc. is pseudoscience. The whole type of statistics that has basically been invented by the social sciences is the basis for massive amounts of pseudoscience. Factor analysis, propensity scores, correlation coefs, etc. -- it's just an analysis of correlation. Such is the poverty of thinking in these "social sciecnes" that they arent trained enough to realise that a model of correlations in effects isnt a model of their causes, not even nearly so. And this is esp. sevre in the case of complex systems like humans and animals. All of the methods of IQ research are simple models of correlations in quiz answers. They do not rise to the level of a theory of anything, and their use is routinely circular and unethical.