Taleb dunking on IQ “research” at length. Technically a seriouspost I guess.
This is good:
Take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook or ask your closest Fat Tony) [Note: We can also apply here Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, which states that any of an infinite number of functions is compatible with any finite sequence. Source: Paul Bogossian]. Not only clueless, but obedient enough to want to think in a certain way.
Also this:
If, as psychologists show, MDs and academics tend to have a higher “IQ” that is slightly informative (higher, but on a noisy average), it is largely because to get into schools you need to score on a test similar to “IQ”. The mere presence of such a filter increases the visible mean and lower the visible variance. Probability and statistics confuse fools.
And:
If someone came up w/a numerical“Well Being Quotient” WBQ or “Sleep Quotient”, SQ, trying to mimic temperature or a physical quantity, you’d find it absurd. But put enough academics w/physics envy and race hatred on it and it will become an official measure.
Unlucky 10000: There is an EQ, or emotional quotient, and I was given an EQ test in high school (like age 17-18, don't remember exactly). Fortunately, it was just done for fun by a lone teacher, but I could see it becoming popular in a future school system.
Testing EQ would probably be opposed as "woke" by conservative parents in the school district.
Nah, they're okay with it because it reinforces their belief that a person is either high-empathy or low-empathy, with higher EQ being better. In general, conservatives love standardized tests and grades, because it grants the appearance of merit, which is essential for meritocracy.
This shit is just as bad, frankly. The quest to quantify and then rank All The Things is inherently dangerous.
For anyone who hasn't watched it this video is an excellent breakdown of the racist history of both The Bell Curve and of IQ tests.
Hi, could you perhaps elaborate a bit on the racist history of the bell curve? I'm well aware of the racist history of IQ, but I don't even have an inkling of what that's referring to in the context of the bell curve. It's just the graph of a normal distribution, is this referring to some weird application of it to some racist shit?
PS: I know you've attached a video with info on it and me asking might be kinda dumb. However, I saw it's 2+hrs and I don't have the time to watch it right now but I'm still interested.
I feel that my comment was a little ambiguous.
The Bell Curve mentioned isn't the graph distribution, but rather the book by the same name that uses misrepresented data from IQ tests to push the idea that there is a genetic factor that makes black people inherently less intelligent than anyone else.
Sorry for any misunderstandings.
also, the video you linked is very good and well worth the time investment. for anyone who can’t watch the video, RW has a good article along the same lines
Here's two studies that tested for heritability of IQ.
IQ test predict performance with the same self-identified racial groups, so what explains that?
No source here so I can only assume where you got this data. The most commonly cited source for this is the one used in The Bell Curve which compared test scores of black children in America immediately post segregation and apartheid South Africa against white American children. So, like, obviously the segregated underclass in two deeply racist countries is gonna have a lower quality of education.
It's gonna take me a bit to figure out how to use the website for NLSY79 so bear with me on that.
The youngest of the cohort in 1979 was 14, since segregation was only officially ended in 1965, it once again seems more likely the legacy of segregation and America's continued racist culture had a larger impact on outcomes than IQ test scores to me.
But, I'm a biologist not a sociologist, so not really my field of expertise.
Edit: the National Longitudinal Study of Youth doesn't even test for IQ, this has been a waste of time.
sorry you had to deal with this lying racist shithead. let me know if hexbear deals with them in a satisfactory way — it’s always good to know how other instances deal with “polite” racist shitheads who try to slip their bullshit in under a thin veneer of misapplied science
Yes it does, it's one of the most widely cited studies for IQ research. My uni had the class do a research project based on this study, you might just be looking at the wrong page.
It doesn't, see attached screenshot of tests carried out on the cohort.
Show
Still sifting through the data myself to have a look, but this study seems to suggest it doesn't (at least with educational outcomes).
It does show that g is a poor predictor for educational outcomes.
And this study shows that g doesn't correlate well with wealth.
So, what "life outcomes" is IQ supposed to be so much better at predicting that we can safely ignore its racist baggage?
There are fields of biology that were largely discarded due to its racist foundations, (does eugenics ring any bells to you?).
IQ is a predictor of outcome only once you have discarded every other variable, I don't see why such a weak predictor is being so stringently defended by you.
Also when I talk about racist baggage, I don't mean that some racists use IQ as an excuse for racism. I mean IQ testing was popularised by eugenicists looking for excuses to do eugenics.
Did I ever argue for the tossing out of psychometrics?
IQ in its current state has not been extracted from its racist origins. If the sole basis of modern genetics was fascists and their hangers-on trying to find a new way to root out removed your arguement may have a point, but it has moved on from the eugenicists of old. Whereas the basis of IQ testing is largely unchanged from its origins and the consequences of that remain largely unexamined by the people that argue in its favour.
The theories of Arthur Jensen, a (now deceased) proponent of eugenics via IQ testing have been used argue against the establishment of welfare programs and affirmative action.
Charles Murray, the surviving author of The Bell Curve is still rattling around pushing for segregated education in order to form a "cognitive elite".
Former prime minister of the UK Boris Johnson is a proud proponent of IQ based eugenics.
As were the people that informed his policies.
You can't claim this stuff is in the past when it's still being used by neoliberals to inform policy.
The framework behind IQ has not changed since its racist beginnings, until those can be addressed any not racist benefits are merely a byproduct of an attempt to maintain a tool used legitimise racialised hierarchies.
Genetics on the other hand has discarded the racist theories that spawned it.
If so, how is someone being racially discriminated against by IQ tests continuing to be used?
See again, my example of the 2020 grading controversy, where students were marked below their expected grades based on an algorithm that used average demographic SAT scores. 36% of GCSE students were graded significantly lower than they should've been. You wanna guess the racial make-up of schools hit harshest by this?
what has genetics discarded that IQ tests haven't?
Well for starters eugenics has been rejected in the mainstream consensus of geneticists. Their crackpot theories are rejected and their racism is unsupported by their academic peers. James Watson publicly expressing his bigoted views on race and IQ resulted in a barrage of complaints by his peers in the field of genetics.
On the other hand in psychometrics:
Charles Murray, (to name but one prominent eugenicist psychometrician) continues to publish his works tying IQ to race on a number of journals, is broadcasted on a variety of publications, and his works (despite not holding up to much scientific scrutiny) continue to be cited in studies into IQ.
Richard Lynn and J Philippe Rushton, are two prominent professors of psychology who are very outspoken about IQ being connected primarily to race. They are in charge of the pioneer fund, a eugenics institute. Rushton has argued in favour of phrenology.
The American Psychological Association was still publishing pro-eugenics articles as recently as 2005.
That's the difference. Genetics has discarded its eugenicists, psychometrics has kept them.
what elements remains in psychometry that causes harm where IQ tests are still used?
The main changes on how IQ is measured have been to account for the Flynn effect. There has been no attempt to correct the fundamental flaw in how IQ tests work, ie their conception of intelligence revolves around the pet theories of some 1920's eugenicists.
Side note, I know Taleb is widely appreciated, but man this is some badly written stuff. Is all his stuff like this? I realize blog post != book, but c'mon, some pride in craftmanship is in order.
yes, way too much of it is. Taleb is extremely smart, but nobody is as smart as Taleb thinks he is.
I think the most bitter part is him taking pride in his "real life" intelligence and his condemnation of test takers as "lifeless bureaucrats who can muster sterile motivation". There is a callous hubris there, I suspect fueled by resentment of past interactions with quacks and/or holier than thou academics, the remedy isn't becoming holier than thou in turn.
Sneering is fun/cathartic, othering less so.
NOTE: As a mindless drone pencil pusher myself, prone to to investigate things that don't clearly matter immediately to the "real world"; I might be a tad defensive here ^^.
High-end stats is kind of Taleb’s thing, so he gets to be as insufferable as he likes dunking on IQiots imo.
Yeah, he needs an editor. But the relentless dunking on IQiots is worth the verbiage imo.
QUIZ
You administer IQ tests to 10K individuals, then give them a "performance test" for anything, any task.
2000 of them are dead. Dead people score 0 on IQ and 0 on performance. The rest have the IQ uncorrelated to the performance.
What is the spurious correlation IQ/performance?
SOLUTION
37.5%
EUGENICISTS DESTROYED with FACTS and LOGIC
I'll go one further: "intelligence" as conceived by "IQ" is a mostly meaningless concept and the word, when used in everyday English, mostly just means "agrees with me"
What books(ideally books pls) would you guys recommend to anyone caught up in IQ stuff? Especially for people outside the US? Ignore if wrong place to ask this, my bad there.
Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man is always a good place to start.
You have just demonstrated that you don’t understand Taleb’s critique. Admittedly, his basic critique is buried in tons of verbiage, but your response here is an irrelevance.
IQ measurements are next to useless on an individual level because a) IQ measurement is terrible & non-repeatable with very large variance between successive tests for any given individual & b) IQ doesn’t measure the thing you actually want, which is task-specific performance: it has terrible correlation with any given task-specific measure, barely rising above “vaguely related”.
At the population-level, IQ suffers from terrible statistical issues, including circularity affecting outcomes (SAT tests in the US are a particular problem), and inter-population differences that make comparisons extremely noisy. The field is also historically full of charlatans who literally made up data out of thin air, even before you start in with the problems with the actual data they drew upon & the stats they applied to it.
Ultimately, It doesn’t matter that you can measure some “factor” and show that there’s a weak correlation with lifetime wealth, or prison likelihood or whatever if that measurement is an otherwise useless one: Using IQ as a measure of an individual is wildly inappropriate. Using it as a population measure is next to useless because of widespread issues with both the input data & the statistical analysis done to torture some kind of correlation out of said data & call the job done.
Finally, when you’ve done all these population level stats on your so-called “g-factor” and squeezed some kind of vague relationship between various groups & your “g-factor” out of the data, what are you doing that /for/? What good do you expect to do in the world with that information? Because the only real-world use seems to be advocating for blocking the immigration or education of specific groups of people, despite the fact that, as has already been pointed out, you cannot use IQ on an individual level because it has extremely poor predictive value at the individual level. Sounds ... kind of racist don’t you think?
