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The article doesn't appear to suggest a viable substitute for IQ. It concludes that we should "[measure] what an intellect can accomplish in a lifetime," but th

The article doesn't appear to suggest a viable substitute for IQ. It concludes that we should "[measure] what an intellect can accomplish in a lifetime," but this isn't really practical. IQ is not a perfect measure of intelligence, but I think it's better than no measure of intelligence.

mjburgess 4y ago
I'd disagree. The use of bogus psychometrics is not socially neutral. It's used to filter applications to university courses, jobs, and so on. They make a systematically, imv disasterous, effect on the lives of everyone they come into contact with. IQ tests are only a clincally valid test of extreme mental deficits. They do not correlate with objective measures of above-average performance, and have created a "metrical culture" with severe unethical concequences.
- poszlem 4y ago
  "IQ is part of a large “nexus” of positively correlated societal outcomes. IQ correlates positively with family income, socioeconomic status, school and occupational performance, military training assignments, law-abidingness, healthful habits, illness, and morality. In contrast, IQ is negatively correlated with welfare, psychopathology, crime, inattentiveness, boredom, delinquency, and poverty."
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    Indeed, all basically false. Fit a straight line, find a straight line. Where IQ scores correlate, it's at the very-low-score end. It doesnt correlate with independent objective performance measures at average-and-above. The people writing those papers are psychologists, not statisticians, and often the most poorly trained. Most of it is either circular pseudoscience or unreporducible. Indeed, for much of the IQ literature to be "unreporducible" would be a great credit, since it would mean it had a testable thesis -- which, largely, it never does. The beginning and end of IQ research is, largely, just that straight-line rulers can draw straight lines in any dataset you put them against.
VHRanger 4y ago
Nobel winner James Heckman did a lot of work on this [1]. The takeaway is that IQ doesn't matter as much as other attributes (character, learned skills, etc.) in life outcomes. HN style crows way overvalue IQ style skills when intelligence has multiple dimensions, many of which matter more than IQ. IQ is effectively just a measure of test-taking skills. That's useful in some areas, but you could see someone like Gengis Khan or Nikola Tesla be incredibly intelligent and a poor test taker. [1] https://heckmanequation.org/resource/i-q-isnt-everything/ https://heckmanequation.org/resource/i-q-isnt-everything/
- tgv 4y ago
  IQ is a fair predictor of achievement in life, though. But there are other predictors too, such as parents' socio-economic status, or geographical location. We wouldn't claim these things measure intelligence, though. IQ is a proxy for intelligence, but one with great shortcomings. Unfortunately, there's no agreed upon definition of intelligence, let alone an operalization, and a way of measuring it. So IQ keeps being used.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    > Unfortunately, there's no agreed upon definition of intelligence, let alone an operalization, and a way of measuring it. So IQ keeps being used. Uhuh.... so this line it's crazy, right? It's really strange you concede that we have no theory and hence no way of verifying whether an IQ score is a valid and reliable measure of the thing we have no theory of... and yet, you say it is a "proxy for intelligence" The entire edifice of research which makes these claims is a product of a pseudoscientific use of statistics by amateur statisticians. The vast majority of the results you think exist in the literature are frauds, and often egregious ones at that. A human being is one of the most complex systems known to exist in nature, and the frauds in psychometrics are very far away from being up to the task of studying them. The greatest minds in applied sciences, matehmatics and statistics would largely throw up their hands at the job of measuring "intelligence" --- that some fools havent, is no good thing.
    - tgv 4y ago
amusedcyclist 4y ago
Changing culture to stop seeing intelligence as some unchangeable fixed thing is probably better than having a bad measure of "intelligence".
- Kye 4y ago
  Even IQ itself was meant as a way to identify what supports people need to keep up and negate the difference.
mkoubaa 4y ago
To me this is like saying that if you were lost in Boston and someone gave you a map of Chicago that it's better than nothing.
- poszlem 4y ago
  It's more like saying "it's better if someone gave you a hand-drawn map of Boston, instead of no map at all".
- DemocracyFTW2 4y ago
  Well we do know that [all North American cities] look the same so to that extent you can use a map from a different city to find your way. [all North American cities](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/ym6ms5/a_map_of_every_american_city/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/ym6ms5/a_map_of_ev...)
pdntspa 4y ago
Why do we really need a measure of intelligence? What does this grant us aside from giving people yet another cudgel with which to lord over others, and another way for unfortunate people to feel bad about themselves? When/how is IQ ever used for good? Everyone I have ever talked to about it who talks about others' IQ intends to use those people for their own selfish purposes. And people I've talked to who talk about their own IQ only ever use it to brag, boast, or otherwise elevate themselves. Neither of these are behaviors that should be encouraged.
- candiodari 4y ago
  Well that's easy: to change education for people based on their abilities. Any specific class can only be educated to the lowest level everyone in the class will support. So you split up classes by IQ, you don't even give more opportunities to the "high-IQ" class. You just split them up. Nothing more. Generally this is not based on actual IQ test results, but on teachers impressions. And they keep "secret" which is the high IQ class. And if a kid is really motivated to be in the better class, change the kid to the other class (and vice-versa) if at all possible. Of course this worked better with 15 kids-per-class than with the current 40 kids-per-class education system. This is doing a lot of good, and has been for decades. Essentially it results in a smarter and more capable society, because people can be educated much closer to the limit of their abilities.
wesleywt 4y ago
No, it is worst than no measure of intelligence. It gives a false impression of the truth that can hurt the person or people involved. IQ is often used in racist terms, since certain populations in the world do not have the cultural background to pass this arbitary test
- Auracle 4y ago
  There are many different types of IQ tests, with different types of questions. Some just use shapes/patterns.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Aren't IQ tests supposed to be made culturally/language independent tho ? What would be "cultural" thing on IQ test ? The ones I saw never really had anything aside base-10 numbers. Do you have any examples ?
  - wesleywt 4y ago
    The most famous example was of black kids who never seen a ruby in their lives in the 50s. But Ruby the name was quite popular. So they got that question wrong. But it is normally used to denigrate Africans who have even less exposure to European norms than African Americans. Despite the genetic diversity of Africans being a lot higher than Europeans, they are often thrown into the same batch of "IQ deficient" groups. None of this is actually scientifically sound.
ilyt 4y ago
Right, but aside from academics, what is the use for the number. Like, sure, it will maybe tell you that person A is better than person B at solving what essentially are logic puzzles, but that's at best tangentially related to most things, even in "intellectual" jobs it's a mix of knowledge, creativity and ability to see correlation plus almost always some social skills too.

mjburgess 4y ago

I'd disagree. The use of bogus psychometrics is not socially neutral. It's used to filter applications to university courses, jobs, and so on. They make a systematically, imv disasterous, effect on the lives of everyone they come into contact with. IQ tests are only a clincally valid test of extreme mental deficits. They do not correlate with objective measures of above-average performance, and have created a "metrical culture" with severe unethical concequences.

poszlem 4y ago
"IQ is part of a large “nexus” of positively correlated societal outcomes. IQ correlates positively with family income, socioeconomic status, school and occupational performance, military training assignments, law-abidingness, healthful habits, illness, and morality. In contrast, IQ is negatively correlated with welfare, psychopathology, crime, inattentiveness, boredom, delinquency, and poverty."
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Indeed, all basically false. Fit a straight line, find a straight line. Where IQ scores correlate, it's at the very-low-score end. It doesnt correlate with independent objective performance measures at average-and-above. The people writing those papers are psychologists, not statisticians, and often the most poorly trained. Most of it is either circular pseudoscience or unreporducible. Indeed, for much of the IQ literature to be "unreporducible" would be a great credit, since it would mean it had a testable thesis -- which, largely, it never does. The beginning and end of IQ research is, largely, just that straight-line rulers can draw straight lines in any dataset you put them against.

VHRanger 4y ago

Nobel winner James Heckman did a lot of work on this [1]. The takeaway is that IQ doesn't matter as much as other attributes (character, learned skills, etc.) in life outcomes. HN style crows way overvalue IQ style skills when intelligence has multiple dimensions, many of which matter more than IQ. IQ is effectively just a measure of test-taking skills. That's useful in some areas, but you could see someone like Gengis Khan or Nikola Tesla be incredibly intelligent and a poor test taker. [1] https://heckmanequation.org/resource/i-q-isnt-everything/ https://heckmanequation.org/resource/i-q-isnt-everything/

tgv 4y ago
IQ is a fair predictor of achievement in life, though. But there are other predictors too, such as parents' socio-economic status, or geographical location. We wouldn't claim these things measure intelligence, though. IQ is a proxy for intelligence, but one with great shortcomings. Unfortunately, there's no agreed upon definition of intelligence, let alone an operalization, and a way of measuring it. So IQ keeps being used.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  > Unfortunately, there's no agreed upon definition of intelligence, let alone an operalization, and a way of measuring it. So IQ keeps being used. Uhuh.... so this line it's crazy, right? It's really strange you concede that we have no theory and hence no way of verifying whether an IQ score is a valid and reliable measure of the thing we have no theory of... and yet, you say it is a "proxy for intelligence" The entire edifice of research which makes these claims is a product of a pseudoscientific use of statistics by amateur statisticians. The vast majority of the results you think exist in the literature are frauds, and often egregious ones at that. A human being is one of the most complex systems known to exist in nature, and the frauds in psychometrics are very far away from being up to the task of studying them. The greatest minds in applied sciences, matehmatics and statistics would largely throw up their hands at the job of measuring "intelligence" --- that some fools havent, is no good thing.
  - tgv 4y ago

amusedcyclist 4y ago

Changing culture to stop seeing intelligence as some unchangeable fixed thing is probably better than having a bad measure of "intelligence".

Kye 4y ago
Even IQ itself was meant as a way to identify what supports people need to keep up and negate the difference.

mkoubaa 4y ago

To me this is like saying that if you were lost in Boston and someone gave you a map of Chicago that it's better than nothing.

poszlem 4y ago
It's more like saying "it's better if someone gave you a hand-drawn map of Boston, instead of no map at all".
DemocracyFTW2 4y ago
Well we do know that [all North American cities] look the same so to that extent you can use a map from a different city to find your way. [all North American cities](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/ym6ms5/a_map_of_every_american_city/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/ym6ms5/a_map_of_ev...)

pdntspa 4y ago

Why do we really need a measure of intelligence? What does this grant us aside from giving people yet another cudgel with which to lord over others, and another way for unfortunate people to feel bad about themselves? When/how is IQ ever used for good? Everyone I have ever talked to about it who talks about others' IQ intends to use those people for their own selfish purposes. And people I've talked to who talk about their own IQ only ever use it to brag, boast, or otherwise elevate themselves. Neither of these are behaviors that should be encouraged.

candiodari 4y ago
Well that's easy: to change education for people based on their abilities. Any specific class can only be educated to the lowest level everyone in the class will support. So you split up classes by IQ, you don't even give more opportunities to the "high-IQ" class. You just split them up. Nothing more. Generally this is not based on actual IQ test results, but on teachers impressions. And they keep "secret" which is the high IQ class. And if a kid is really motivated to be in the better class, change the kid to the other class (and vice-versa) if at all possible. Of course this worked better with 15 kids-per-class than with the current 40 kids-per-class education system. This is doing a lot of good, and has been for decades. Essentially it results in a smarter and more capable society, because people can be educated much closer to the limit of their abilities.

wesleywt 4y ago

No, it is worst than no measure of intelligence. It gives a false impression of the truth that can hurt the person or people involved. IQ is often used in racist terms, since certain populations in the world do not have the cultural background to pass this arbitary test

Auracle 4y ago
There are many different types of IQ tests, with different types of questions. Some just use shapes/patterns.
ilyt 4y ago
Aren't IQ tests supposed to be made culturally/language independent tho ? What would be "cultural" thing on IQ test ? The ones I saw never really had anything aside base-10 numbers. Do you have any examples ?
- wesleywt 4y ago
  The most famous example was of black kids who never seen a ruby in their lives in the 50s. But Ruby the name was quite popular. So they got that question wrong. But it is normally used to denigrate Africans who have even less exposure to European norms than African Americans. Despite the genetic diversity of Africans being a lot higher than Europeans, they are often thrown into the same batch of "IQ deficient" groups. None of this is actually scientifically sound.

ilyt 4y ago

Right, but aside from academics, what is the use for the number. Like, sure, it will maybe tell you that person A is better than person B at solving what essentially are logic puzzles, but that's at best tangentially related to most things, even in "intellectual" jobs it's a mix of knowledge, creativity and ability to see correlation plus almost always some social skills too.