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Well, the rational thing is obviously to be scared of what ideas sound like. > Rather than judging an individual on their actual intelligence Actual intellige

Well, the rational thing is obviously to be scared of what ideas sound like. > Rather than judging an individual on their actual intelligence Actual intelligence is hard to know! However, lots of factors allow you to make a rapid initial estimate of their actual intelligence, which you can then refine as required. (When the factors include apparent genetic heritage, this is called "racism" and society doesn't like it. But that doesn't mean it doesn't work, just that you can get fired and banned for doing it.) ((This is of course why we must allow IQ tests for hiring; then there's no need to pay attention to skin color, so liberals should be all for it.))

const_cast 1y ago
> Well, the rational thing is obviously to be scared of what ideas sound like. Yes, actually. If an idea sounds like it can be used to commit crimes against humanity, you should pause. You should reassess said idea multiple times. You should be skeptical. You shouldn't ignore that feeling. What a lot of people are missing is intent - the human element. Why were these studies conducted? Who conducted them? If someone insane conducts a study then yes - that is absolutely grounds to be skeptical of said study. It's perfectly rationale. If extremely racist people produce studies which just so happen to be racist, we should take a step back and go "hmm". Being right or being correct is one thing, but it's not absolutely valuable. The end-result and how "bad" it is also matters, and often times it matters more. And, elephant in the room, nobody actually knows if they're right. Making logical conclusions isn't so, because you are forced to make thousands of assumptions. You might be right, you might not be. Let's all have some humility.
stonogo 1y ago
The assertion that "actual intelligence is hard to know" followed almost immediately by "apparent genetic heritage" is what's wrong with your opinion. And no, it doesn't work -- at least it doesn't work for identifying intelligence. It just works for selecting people who appeal to your bias. IQ tests are not actual measurements of anything; this is both because nobody has a rigorous working definition of intelligence and because nobody's figured out a universal method of measuring achievement of what insufficient definitions we have. Their proponents are more interested in pigeonholing people than actually measuring anything anyway. And as a hiring manager, I'd hire an idiot who is good at the job over a genius who isn't.
- FeepingCreature 1y ago
  Actual intelligence is hard to know precisely/accurately/confidently, is what I meant, my bad. It's not hard to place a guess, and there's nothing wrong with it either so long as you're open for refinement. Your brain does it automatically in the first few seconds of seeing somebody, you can't even prevent it, and skin color is by no means the largest factor in it. IQ as a metric is correlated with almost every life outcome. It's one of the most reliable metrics in psychology. As a hiring manager, if you think an idiot can be good at the job, you either hire for an undemanding job or I'm not sure if you're good at yours.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    SES, personality, and education are also correlated with life outcomes. Craniometry used to be one of the most reliable metrics in psychology.
    - FeepingCreature 1y ago
      Sure, I'm not saying IQ is everything. Do you have articles on craniometry actually being validated by studies? That sounds interesting.
      - tptacek 1y ago
        SES, education, and personality are intimately interrelated with "IQ". Once you control for those, what's the leftover signal, and how do you know?
        FeepingCreature 1y ago
        I mean, if IQ is real then SES and education are plausibly strongly caused by it. In that case, controlling for SES and education and then saying "there's not much signal left, thus IQ is bunk" just means that you've basically renamed IQ into "the implicit thing that determines SES and education, which I will not calculate directly." With such related properties it becomes hard to determine causation in general. The obvious test would be to improve education and see if IQ shifts. I don't have a study for this on hand, but I expect (just to register my prediction, not to make an argument) that if I look I'll find that the signal is weak that direction.
wizzwizz4 1y ago
Your treatment of IQ is ridiculous. Give me access to a child for seven months, and I can increase their IQ score by 20 (and probably make myself an enemy in the process: IQ test drills are one of the dullest activities, since you can't even switch your brain off while doing them). Intelligence is not a single axis thing. IQ test results are significantly influenced by socioeconomic factors. "Actual intelligence is hard to know" because it doesn't exist. I have never yet known scientific racism to produce true results. I have known a lot of people to say the sorts of things you're saying: evidence-free claims that racism is fine so long as you're doing the Good Racism that Actually Works™, I Promise, This Time It's Not Prejudice Because It's Justified®. No candidate genetic correlate of the g factor has ever replicated. That should be a massive flashing warning sign that – rather than having identified an elusive fact about reality that just so happens to not appear in any rigorous study – maybe you're falling afoul of the same in-group/out-group bias as nearly every group of humans since records begin. Since I have no reason to believe your heuristic is accurate, we can stop there. However, to further underline that you're not thinking rationally: even if blue people were (on average) 2× as capable at spacial rotation-based office jobs than green people, it still wouldn't be a good idea to start with the skin colour prior and update from there, because that would lead to the creation of caste systems, which hinder social mobility. Even if scientific racism worked (which it hasn't to date!), the rational approach would still be to judge people on their own merits. If you find it hard to assess the competence of your subordinates, to the point where you're resorting to population-level stereotypes to make hiring decisions, you're an incompetent manager and should find another job.
- FeepingCreature 1y ago
  > Your treatment of IQ is ridiculous. Give me access to a child for seven months, and I can increase their IQ score by 20 That would be remarkable! Do you have a write-up/preprint on your protocol?
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    There's nothing remarkable about it: • Drill. • Goto step 1. Does this make the child "more intelligent"? Not in any meaningful way! But they get better at IQ tests. It's a fairly common protocol. I can hardly be said to have invented it: I was put through it. (Sure, I came up with a few tricks for solving IQ-type problems that weren't in the instruction books, but those tricks too can be taught.) I really don't understand why people think IQ test results are meaningful. They're among the most obvious cases of Goodhart's law that I know. Make up a sport that most kids won't have practised before, measure performance, and probably that's about as correlated with the (fictitious) "g factor" as IQ tests are.
tptacek 1y ago
We do allow IQ tests for hiring. That we don't is a super-pernicious online myth. Some of the largest companies in America, with extremely deep pockets for employment law plaintiffs attorneys to come after, do in fact use IQ tests. Most companies don't, though, because they don't work.
- FeepingCreature 1y ago
  Huh. Interesting, thank you, I didn't know that!
  - tptacek 1y ago
    (The "they don't work" thing is my editorial gloss; the rest of it though is I think objectively verifiable.)
    - FeepingCreature 1y ago
      Um, I asked Grok and aren't IQ tests soft-outlawed under disparate impact? As opposed to skill qualifications, it's hard to prove that, say, you need to be "intelligent" to work at a certain job. You would end up having to argue that intelligence even exists in court, which I can see why companies would try to avoid- ie. disparate impact creates a reversed weight of evidence. If your test has disparate impact, you now have to prove that it's necessary, creating a chicken-and-egg problem.
      - tptacek 1y ago
        Nope. It's trivially easy to pull up (a small minority of) Fortune 500 companies that use IQ tests in their hiring processes. The companies that offer these tests brag about the companies that use them. Whatever Grok thinks about this doesn't really much matter in the face of that evidence.
        FeepingCreature 1y ago
        I think they use "aptitude tests" or "personality tests" that are at least packaged up to look relevant to the job, not direct naked IQ tests? I can't offhand find companies using actual IQ tests in hiring. And if you're saying "well those are just repackaged IQ tests, so doesn't it count", then 1. it sure seems like IQ tests are illegal then, but 2. it also seems like they're so useful that companies are trying to smuggle them in anyway?

const_cast 1y ago

> Well, the rational thing is obviously to be scared of what ideas sound like. Yes, actually. If an idea sounds like it can be used to commit crimes against humanity, you should pause. You should reassess said idea multiple times. You should be skeptical. You shouldn't ignore that feeling. What a lot of people are missing is intent - the human element. Why were these studies conducted? Who conducted them? If someone insane conducts a study then yes - that is absolutely grounds to be skeptical of said study. It's perfectly rationale. If extremely racist people produce studies which just so happen to be racist, we should take a step back and go "hmm". Being right or being correct is one thing, but it's not absolutely valuable. The end-result and how "bad" it is also matters, and often times it matters more. And, elephant in the room, nobody actually knows if they're right. Making logical conclusions isn't so, because you are forced to make thousands of assumptions. You might be right, you might not be. Let's all have some humility.

stonogo 1y ago

The assertion that "actual intelligence is hard to know" followed almost immediately by "apparent genetic heritage" is what's wrong with your opinion. And no, it doesn't work -- at least it doesn't work for identifying intelligence. It just works for selecting people who appeal to your bias. IQ tests are not actual measurements of anything; this is both because nobody has a rigorous working definition of intelligence and because nobody's figured out a universal method of measuring achievement of what insufficient definitions we have. Their proponents are more interested in pigeonholing people than actually measuring anything anyway. And as a hiring manager, I'd hire an idiot who is good at the job over a genius who isn't.

FeepingCreature 1y ago
Actual intelligence is hard to know precisely/accurately/confidently, is what I meant, my bad. It's not hard to place a guess, and there's nothing wrong with it either so long as you're open for refinement. Your brain does it automatically in the first few seconds of seeing somebody, you can't even prevent it, and skin color is by no means the largest factor in it. IQ as a metric is correlated with almost every life outcome. It's one of the most reliable metrics in psychology. As a hiring manager, if you think an idiot can be good at the job, you either hire for an undemanding job or I'm not sure if you're good at yours.
- tptacek 1y ago
  SES, personality, and education are also correlated with life outcomes. Craniometry used to be one of the most reliable metrics in psychology.
  - FeepingCreature 1y ago
    Sure, I'm not saying IQ is everything. Do you have articles on craniometry actually being validated by studies? That sounds interesting.
    - tptacek 1y ago
      SES, education, and personality are intimately interrelated with "IQ". Once you control for those, what's the leftover signal, and how do you know?
      - FeepingCreature 1y ago
        I mean, if IQ is real then SES and education are plausibly strongly caused by it. In that case, controlling for SES and education and then saying "there's not much signal left, thus IQ is bunk" just means that you've basically renamed IQ into "the implicit thing that determines SES and education, which I will not calculate directly." With such related properties it becomes hard to determine causation in general. The obvious test would be to improve education and see if IQ shifts. I don't have a study for this on hand, but I expect (just to register my prediction, not to make an argument) that if I look I'll find that the signal is weak that direction.

wizzwizz4 1y ago

Your treatment of IQ is ridiculous. Give me access to a child for seven months, and I can increase their IQ score by 20 (and probably make myself an enemy in the process: IQ test drills are one of the dullest activities, since you can't even switch your brain off while doing them). Intelligence is not a single axis thing. IQ test results are significantly influenced by socioeconomic factors. "Actual intelligence is hard to know" because it doesn't exist. I have never yet known scientific racism to produce true results. I have known a lot of people to say the sorts of things you're saying: evidence-free claims that racism is fine so long as you're doing the Good Racism that Actually Works™, I Promise, This Time It's Not Prejudice Because It's Justified®. No candidate genetic correlate of the g factor has ever replicated. That should be a massive flashing warning sign that – rather than having identified an elusive fact about reality that just so happens to not appear in any rigorous study – maybe you're falling afoul of the same in-group/out-group bias as nearly every group of humans since records begin. Since I have no reason to believe your heuristic is accurate, we can stop there. However, to further underline that you're not thinking rationally: even if blue people were (on average) 2× as capable at spacial rotation-based office jobs than green people, it still wouldn't be a good idea to start with the skin colour prior and update from there, because that would lead to the creation of caste systems, which hinder social mobility. Even if scientific racism worked (which it hasn't to date!), the rational approach would still be to judge people on their own merits. If you find it hard to assess the competence of your subordinates, to the point where you're resorting to population-level stereotypes to make hiring decisions, you're an incompetent manager and should find another job.

FeepingCreature 1y ago
> Your treatment of IQ is ridiculous. Give me access to a child for seven months, and I can increase their IQ score by 20 That would be remarkable! Do you have a write-up/preprint on your protocol?
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  There's nothing remarkable about it: • Drill. • Goto step 1. Does this make the child "more intelligent"? Not in any meaningful way! But they get better at IQ tests. It's a fairly common protocol. I can hardly be said to have invented it: I was put through it. (Sure, I came up with a few tricks for solving IQ-type problems that weren't in the instruction books, but those tricks too can be taught.) I really don't understand why people think IQ test results are meaningful. They're among the most obvious cases of Goodhart's law that I know. Make up a sport that most kids won't have practised before, measure performance, and probably that's about as correlated with the (fictitious) "g factor" as IQ tests are.

tptacek 1y ago

We do allow IQ tests for hiring. That we don't is a super-pernicious online myth. Some of the largest companies in America, with extremely deep pockets for employment law plaintiffs attorneys to come after, do in fact use IQ tests. Most companies don't, though, because they don't work.

FeepingCreature 1y ago
Huh. Interesting, thank you, I didn't know that!
- tptacek 1y ago
  (The "they don't work" thing is my editorial gloss; the rest of it though is I think objectively verifiable.)
  - FeepingCreature 1y ago
    Um, I asked Grok and aren't IQ tests soft-outlawed under disparate impact? As opposed to skill qualifications, it's hard to prove that, say, you need to be "intelligent" to work at a certain job. You would end up having to argue that intelligence even exists in court, which I can see why companies would try to avoid- ie. disparate impact creates a reversed weight of evidence. If your test has disparate impact, you now have to prove that it's necessary, creating a chicken-and-egg problem.
    - tptacek 1y ago
      Nope. It's trivially easy to pull up (a small minority of) Fortune 500 companies that use IQ tests in their hiring processes. The companies that offer these tests brag about the companies that use them. Whatever Grok thinks about this doesn't really much matter in the face of that evidence.
      - FeepingCreature 1y ago
        I think they use "aptitude tests" or "personality tests" that are at least packaged up to look relevant to the job, not direct naked IQ tests? I can't offhand find companies using actual IQ tests in hiring. And if you're saying "well those are just repackaged IQ tests, so doesn't it count", then 1. it sure seems like IQ tests are illegal then, but 2. it also seems like they're so useful that companies are trying to smuggle them in anyway?