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Physical attractiveness correlates with many good things like fertility and genetic health. Not to mention beautiful people benefit from the halo effect. The ca
by User23 3y ago
Physical attractiveness correlates with many good things like fertility and genetic health. Not to mention beautiful people benefit from the halo effect. The causality there though is likely that the relative superiority of attractive persons causes the halo effect to exist. There’s a pretty obvious set of mechanisms that offer causal reasons why attractiveness leads to better outcomes.
As for the presidential fitness exam, well that’s true but quite facile. Much like how people who have taken the Wonderlic test are considerably more likely than the general populace to be or have been in the NFL.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if taking aptitude tests at all regardless of score predicts above average outcomes because of a selection effect.
- tptacek 3y agoThe point is that you can drag a lot of unrelated things together and get an increasingly predictive metric, despite the underlying factors being unrelated, which simply means that "being predictive" is not by itself dispositive of some underlying mechanism. It doesn't mean prediction isn't real! The problem is people going from "prediction" to "inferred ground truth" --- which is exactly what happens in the "g" discussions.
- User23 3y ago> which simply means that "being predictive" is not by itself dispositive of some underlying mechanism. Right. I don’t see how any statistical analysis can tell you if a mechanism exists or what it is. Quite the opposite. The better you understand the mechanism of the process that generates your data points the higher quality your statistical analysis will be. And in the case of intelligence we know there must be an actual real underlying factor because some people are observably smarter than others.
- tptacek 3y agoI don't think anybody is arguing that people aren't observably smarter than other people; the question is about the metrics we're using, which, I mean, an equally vivid (and equally non-rigorous) argument would be: if you really buy into the IQ/g story, go hang out with a bunch of Mensa people and see how long you hold onto that belief.
- User23 3y agoI’m willing to bet that a Y combinator founder’s event’s attendees have as high if not higher average IQs than persons at a Mensa meeting. Mensa appears to select for high aptitude and low achievement, which is a really unfortunate combination.