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https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-... IQ is largely

https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39 https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-... IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

stale2002 3y ago
IQ scores are highly correlated with actual success, undeniably so. Maybe IQ doesn't exactly track "intelligence", or whatever that is, but it is certainly tracking something that is correlated to success.
- spamizbad 3y ago
  Sure, but is that causal? For example, maybe there's some other factor (like SES) that's driving both. And switching to IQ tests doesn't really solve the problem, as your avenues for cheating on that are identical to LC. You could probably screen candidates based on the question "Did any of your parents go to college? And if so, did they study or work in a STEM field?" and be roughly as predictable. (This is terrible and you shouldn't do this)
  - throw9away6 3y ago
    Yeah but hiring companies don’t care. Same as these interviews that they do have some correlation to success maybe no better than iq
  - peterfirefly 3y ago
    We know for a fact that it is IQ that is driving SES and not the other way around.
    - mrguyorama 3y ago
      What evidence do you have for this claim? You are suggesting SES is a meritocracy around IQ.
      - _dain_ 3y ago
        identical twins reared together vs apart, their IQs correlate more with their twin's than with the SES of the adoptive family. high quality studies have found that the additive heritability of IQ is somewhere around 0.8-0.9, that's just totally incompatible with parental SES as the primary upstream cause. it's simply not debatable. and it wasn't debatable ten or twenty or fifty years ago either; it is one of the most well-established facts in human quantitative genetics. ironically one of the things having a high IQ is bad for is having accurate beliefs about IQ; ask anyone who didn't go to college and odds are they'll correctly tell you that smartness runs in families.
SkyBelow 3y ago
IQ is imperfect and has many issues that haven't been accounted for, nor should it be extended to represent all of intelligence, and many tests claiming to test IQ are completely pseudoscience, if even that, but the general concept isn't pseudoscience. A standardized IQ test has correlation with a number of other indicators of intelligence. It isn't a prefect test and popular culture has greatly oversold its importance, but our society misusing the science, and even scientists historically misusing the science, isn't reason enough to call it pseudoscience.

stale2002 3y ago

IQ scores are highly correlated with actual success, undeniably so. Maybe IQ doesn't exactly track "intelligence", or whatever that is, but it is certainly tracking something that is correlated to success.

spamizbad 3y ago
Sure, but is that causal? For example, maybe there's some other factor (like SES) that's driving both. And switching to IQ tests doesn't really solve the problem, as your avenues for cheating on that are identical to LC. You could probably screen candidates based on the question "Did any of your parents go to college? And if so, did they study or work in a STEM field?" and be roughly as predictable. (This is terrible and you shouldn't do this)
- throw9away6 3y ago
  Yeah but hiring companies don’t care. Same as these interviews that they do have some correlation to success maybe no better than iq
- peterfirefly 3y ago
  We know for a fact that it is IQ that is driving SES and not the other way around.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    What evidence do you have for this claim? You are suggesting SES is a meritocracy around IQ.
    - _dain_ 3y ago
      identical twins reared together vs apart, their IQs correlate more with their twin's than with the SES of the adoptive family. high quality studies have found that the additive heritability of IQ is somewhere around 0.8-0.9, that's just totally incompatible with parental SES as the primary upstream cause. it's simply not debatable. and it wasn't debatable ten or twenty or fifty years ago either; it is one of the most well-established facts in human quantitative genetics. ironically one of the things having a high IQ is bad for is having accurate beliefs about IQ; ask anyone who didn't go to college and odds are they'll correctly tell you that smartness runs in families.

SkyBelow 3y ago

IQ is imperfect and has many issues that haven't been accounted for, nor should it be extended to represent all of intelligence, and many tests claiming to test IQ are completely pseudoscience, if even that, but the general concept isn't pseudoscience. A standardized IQ test has correlation with a number of other indicators of intelligence. It isn't a prefect test and popular culture has greatly oversold its importance, but our society misusing the science, and even scientists historically misusing the science, isn't reason enough to call it pseudoscience.