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Sorry, is your criticism that IQ proponents conflate point estimates with unknown population parameters? Is that what other IQ critics see as the core of the di

• astrange 3y ago
  Well I don't want to speak for anyone else. It's more of a secondary criticism though, that people aren't very careful about reading research papers. And of course that in many fields the researchers aren't careful either (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credibility_revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credibility_revolution). The primary criticism is that people want there to be something called IQ (or g, or intelligence) that is 1. a real physical variable that causes things 2. an unchangeable attribute of a person that 3. makes you better and more virtuous than people with less of it. This recently causes 4. the belief that if we invented an AI it'd have a lot more of it than us and would take over the world[0]. Whereas I think that: 1. the best reason to know it is to find working interventions to improve it, which they can't find because it isn't real, so they should find some real physical processes. 2. the other reason to know it is to predict someone's ability on a task, and in any such situation there is better evidence you could use for that. Although this one's kinda illegal anyway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.). 3. a superintelligent computer would not take over the world. [0] The Lesswrong guy, the main advocate of this one, didn't graduate high school but would like to be seen as intelligent, which means it's convenient to believe that intelligence is so inherent you don't have to prove it by performing well at school.