5 ms·

IQ(rather g-score) is the most well understood measurement in all of pyschology..

by gmadsen 3y ago

epgui 3y ago
And yet it means very little and is a horrible proxy for what we consider “intelligence”.
- justrealist 3y ago
  It's an incredibly good predictor of life outcomes.
  - pillefitz 3y ago
    So is skin color
    - badpun 3y ago
      That changes from society to society, whereas intelligence as a positive predictor of success is universal.
      - epgui 3y ago
        You could just replace “skin colour” with “ethnic privilege” or whatever (which is more the point). I don’t know of any societies that don’t have that sort of problem.
    - ralfd 3y ago
      Also in ethnically homogenous countries?
      - pillefitz 3y ago
        I guess so, looking at South Africa or other African countries where ethnicities with Western features historically got preferential treatment.
      - eesmith 3y ago
        Which country are you thinking of? Statistics of course can't work if there is no deviation, but I can't think of a country which is ethnically homogeneous. Countries with a high degree of homogeneity, like South Korea and Japan, still have their own forms of racism. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_South_Korea says many students "have difficulties maintaining relationships with students who do not share the same nationality background ... because of their classmates' different skin colors".
        febusravenga 3y ago
        > which is ethnically homogeneous Like Poland after world war two?
        eesmith 3y ago
        Was post-war Poland more homogeneous than current-day Japan or South Korea? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Poland doesn't tell me numbers, saying only of that era: > Ukrainians resp. Rusyns, the largest minority group, are scattered in various northern districts. Lesser numbers of Belarusians and Lithuanians live in areas adjoining Belarus and Lithuania. The Jewish community, almost entirely Polonized, has been greatly reduced. In Silesia a significant segment of the population, of mixed Polish and German ancestry, tends to declare itself as Polish or German according to political circumstances. Minorities of Germans remain in Pomerania, Silesia, East Prussia, and Lubus. > Small populations of Polish Tatars still exist. That's not 100% ethnically homogeneous, which means in principle there could have been ethnic discrimination.
      - epgui 3y ago
        There are no such countries AFAIK. Societies seem to find ways to divide into “tribes” one way or another.
  - eesmith 3y ago
    "Both grades and achievement tests are substantially better predictors of important life outcomes than IQ." - https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1601135113 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1601135113 "Table 2 shows the extent to which IQ, standardized achievement tests, and grades explain the variance of outcomes at age 35 in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 (NLSY79) data. ... Achievement tests and grades are more predictive than IQ." - https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18121/w18121.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18121/w181...
    - ralfd 3y ago
      Even then Borghans concedes that "Grades, scores on achievement tests, and IQ are strongly positively correlated", just not perfectly so. But also compare the meta study of Strenze (2007): http://web.archive.org/web/20200616015146/https://esferaarmilar.pt/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Intelligence-and-socioeconomic-success-A-meta-analytic-review-of-longitudinal-research.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20200616015146/https://esferaarmi... Page 415: > Meta-analysis demonstrated that parental SES and academic performance are indeed positively related to career success but the predictive power of these variables is not stronger than that of intelligence (see Table 1). In fact, intelligence exhibited several correlations with the measures of success that were larger than the respective correlations for other predictors suggesting that intelligence is, after all, a better predictor of success.
      - eesmith 3y ago
        Please bear in mind that what little I know about the topic is based on my limited, non-expert (I'm a programmer) readings over the years, eg, dipping into Google Scholar when this topic comes up on HN. > Even then Borghans concedes that "Grades, scores on achievement tests, and IQ are strongly positively correlated", just not perfectly so. Sure. There are also strongly positively correlations between how rich your parents are and grades, scores on achievement tests, IQ, and career success. Before making my earlier HN comment I had found the 2007 paper you cited, and noticed the comment "but there is little evidence of any historical trend in the relationship." Thing is, I had also found "Investigating Core Assumptions of the “American Dream”: Historical Changes in How Adolescents’ Socioeconomic Status, IQ, and GPA Are Related to Key Life Outcomes in Adulthood" from 2019, at https://web.s.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=08a09f36-8525-4bb4-af60-35558895553f%40redis https://web.s.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&... , which did find a difference - IQ was becoming a less relevant predictor: ] In a nutshell, the U.S. has faced dramatic socioeconomic changes during the last decades. The present findings suggest that for two birth cohorts—born in the early 1960s and in the early 1980s inequalities in educational, occupational, and health-related outcomes, which can be assumed to increase in later adulthood and old age, can be predicted by individual differences in adolescents’ IQ, GPA, and parental SES. The patterns of associations between life-outcomes and parental SES did not vary much, and that of IQ remained largely the same or varied inconsistently between cohorts. However, the observed increased predictive utility of GPA suggests that combined effects of social, economic, and labor-market changes may have increased stratification processes due to individual differences in GPA for adolescents belonging to the 1980s cohort. This is for the US. They argue that the transition to a service/post-industrial economy combined with the increasing need for a college degree, increases the measure of GPA as a predictive value over intelligence. It also comments the earlier "studies could not answer questions about whether predictive relations could generalize across cohorts who grew up in different socioeconomic environments." FWIW, this study was pre-registered, at https://osf.io/hm5pt/ https://osf.io/hm5pt/ , so there's less chance of p-hacking. Because of that 2019 paper, I restricted my search to only include papers published in the last few years.
  - chownie 3y ago
    How well does it stand up to the other great life outcome predictor, post code?
  - pseudocomposer 3y ago
    Not as good as parental income.
    - justrealist 3y ago
      When you separate out the results of intelligence on income (they are highly correlated traits), it's actually more impactful. ie, 1 SD of intelligence dropped on a random person will give them better life outcomes than 1 SD of parental income.
- shard972 3y ago
  [dead]

IQ(rather g-score) is the most well understood measurement in all of pyschology..

epgui 3y ago

And yet it means very little and is a horrible proxy for what we consider “intelligence”.

justrealist 3y ago
It's an incredibly good predictor of life outcomes.
- pillefitz 3y ago
  So is skin color
  - badpun 3y ago
    That changes from society to society, whereas intelligence as a positive predictor of success is universal.
    - epgui 3y ago
      You could just replace “skin colour” with “ethnic privilege” or whatever (which is more the point). I don’t know of any societies that don’t have that sort of problem.
  - ralfd 3y ago
    Also in ethnically homogenous countries?
    - pillefitz 3y ago
      I guess so, looking at South Africa or other African countries where ethnicities with Western features historically got preferential treatment.
    - eesmith 3y ago
      Which country are you thinking of? Statistics of course can't work if there is no deviation, but I can't think of a country which is ethnically homogeneous. Countries with a high degree of homogeneity, like South Korea and Japan, still have their own forms of racism. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_South_Korea says many students "have difficulties maintaining relationships with students who do not share the same nationality background ... because of their classmates' different skin colors".
      - febusravenga 3y ago
        > which is ethnically homogeneous Like Poland after world war two?
        eesmith 3y ago
        Was post-war Poland more homogeneous than current-day Japan or South Korea? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Poland doesn't tell me numbers, saying only of that era: > Ukrainians resp. Rusyns, the largest minority group, are scattered in various northern districts. Lesser numbers of Belarusians and Lithuanians live in areas adjoining Belarus and Lithuania. The Jewish community, almost entirely Polonized, has been greatly reduced. In Silesia a significant segment of the population, of mixed Polish and German ancestry, tends to declare itself as Polish or German according to political circumstances. Minorities of Germans remain in Pomerania, Silesia, East Prussia, and Lubus. > Small populations of Polish Tatars still exist. That's not 100% ethnically homogeneous, which means in principle there could have been ethnic discrimination.
    - epgui 3y ago
      There are no such countries AFAIK. Societies seem to find ways to divide into “tribes” one way or another.
- eesmith 3y ago
  "Both grades and achievement tests are substantially better predictors of important life outcomes than IQ." - https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1601135113 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1601135113 "Table 2 shows the extent to which IQ, standardized achievement tests, and grades explain the variance of outcomes at age 35 in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 (NLSY79) data. ... Achievement tests and grades are more predictive than IQ." - https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18121/w18121.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18121/w181...
  - ralfd 3y ago
    Even then Borghans concedes that "Grades, scores on achievement tests, and IQ are strongly positively correlated", just not perfectly so. But also compare the meta study of Strenze (2007): http://web.archive.org/web/20200616015146/https://esferaarmilar.pt/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Intelligence-and-socioeconomic-success-A-meta-analytic-review-of-longitudinal-research.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20200616015146/https://esferaarmi... Page 415: > Meta-analysis demonstrated that parental SES and academic performance are indeed positively related to career success but the predictive power of these variables is not stronger than that of intelligence (see Table 1). In fact, intelligence exhibited several correlations with the measures of success that were larger than the respective correlations for other predictors suggesting that intelligence is, after all, a better predictor of success.
    - eesmith 3y ago
      Please bear in mind that what little I know about the topic is based on my limited, non-expert (I'm a programmer) readings over the years, eg, dipping into Google Scholar when this topic comes up on HN. > Even then Borghans concedes that "Grades, scores on achievement tests, and IQ are strongly positively correlated", just not perfectly so. Sure. There are also strongly positively correlations between how rich your parents are and grades, scores on achievement tests, IQ, and career success. Before making my earlier HN comment I had found the 2007 paper you cited, and noticed the comment "but there is little evidence of any historical trend in the relationship." Thing is, I had also found "Investigating Core Assumptions of the “American Dream”: Historical Changes in How Adolescents’ Socioeconomic Status, IQ, and GPA Are Related to Key Life Outcomes in Adulthood" from 2019, at https://web.s.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=08a09f36-8525-4bb4-af60-35558895553f%40redis https://web.s.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&... , which did find a difference - IQ was becoming a less relevant predictor: ] In a nutshell, the U.S. has faced dramatic socioeconomic changes during the last decades. The present findings suggest that for two birth cohorts—born in the early 1960s and in the early 1980s inequalities in educational, occupational, and health-related outcomes, which can be assumed to increase in later adulthood and old age, can be predicted by individual differences in adolescents’ IQ, GPA, and parental SES. The patterns of associations between life-outcomes and parental SES did not vary much, and that of IQ remained largely the same or varied inconsistently between cohorts. However, the observed increased predictive utility of GPA suggests that combined effects of social, economic, and labor-market changes may have increased stratification processes due to individual differences in GPA for adolescents belonging to the 1980s cohort. This is for the US. They argue that the transition to a service/post-industrial economy combined with the increasing need for a college degree, increases the measure of GPA as a predictive value over intelligence. It also comments the earlier "studies could not answer questions about whether predictive relations could generalize across cohorts who grew up in different socioeconomic environments." FWIW, this study was pre-registered, at https://osf.io/hm5pt/ https://osf.io/hm5pt/ , so there's less chance of p-hacking. Because of that 2019 paper, I restricted my search to only include papers published in the last few years.
- chownie 3y ago
  How well does it stand up to the other great life outcome predictor, post code?
- pseudocomposer 3y ago
  Not as good as parental income.
  - justrealist 3y ago
    When you separate out the results of intelligence on income (they are highly correlated traits), it's actually more impactful. ie, 1 SD of intelligence dropped on a random person will give them better life outcomes than 1 SD of parental income.
shard972 3y ago
[dead]