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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31661 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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My favorite fake fact is that people with <100 IQ can't understand hypotheticals. I've worked minimum wage jobs and I've met some real fucking dummies - yes, they can understand hypotheticals.

Every time I've run into this, it has not been presented as a fact, and the number was far lower than 100 - I think 85 or 80 maybe? Where here have you seen someone claim that it's a known fact that people of 49th percentile intelligence or lower can't understand hypotheticals?

I saw someone on the SSC subreddit who had supposedly done IQ studies claim this. It was a very lengthy post with a lot of upvotes.

I remember that too, but thought it was <85 IQ. Camas search hasn’t found anything, though.

There was some discussion by ZorbaTHut and Naraburns here that I found interesting.

I remain confused, at best, on this topic. I've brought up the sort of incapability revealed by Gwern's review of McNamara's Folly (including with Gwern), and if you work with seriously developmentally disabled adults at all it comes across as, if anything, an understatement. But there are alternate explanations (eg, people don't take tests seriously, the lizardman's constant being high, etc), and some of the conclusions regarding how wide-spread these problems are don't seem present in the real world, even ones with far less political relevance (IQ is supposed to strongly correlate with reflexes). There are more complex explanations that might make it all work out, but I don't know how many of them are serious rather than best-fit.

Shameless link to the blog, but the Project 100,000 recruits likely had IQs between 80-90, which is average-to-below average, not developmentally disabled at all. https://greyenlightenment.com/2021/07/30/project-100000-an-analysis/

What happened was due to troop shortages, a greater quantity of low-quality soldiers was recruited than typical, but this was not unprecedented at the time. It was practiced during WW2.

Looks like the US is poised to repeat the experiment. US Navy now enlisting recruits with ASVAB score of 10. ASVAB scores are set with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10, so people scoring 3-4 standard deviations below the mean test taker.

ASVAB scores are set with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10, so people scoring 3-4 standard deviations below the mean test taker.

Literally every Google hit I can find agrees with you about this, but your linked story has the subheader:

A new policy will allow for more recruits who score between the 10th and 30th percentile of the Armed Forces Qualification Test.

And (double-checking in octave...) normcdf([-3 -4]) is [1.35e-3 3.17e-5], not [.3 .1]. The group 3-4 standard deviations down shouldn't be the 10th-30th percentile, it should be around the 0.1th percentile, barely one in a thousand people scoring that low. Why even bother administering tests at that point, unless it's deliberately an experiment and you want your results section to include a good covariance matrix for the disaster?

AFQT is different . Different scoring system. Maximum score is 99, which is 99% percentile. Lowest score is 1-percentile.

Thank you!

My fault for stopping as soon as I was confused by the subheader; they explain the distinction quite clearly a few paragraphs into the article...

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