In Paul Fussell’s book on class (I think), he says that people are really worried about differentiating themselves from the class immediately below them, but largely ignorant of the customs and sometimes even existence of the classes above them. When I found SSC, and then The Motte, and stuff like TLP, I was astonished to find a tier of the internet I had had no idea even existed. The quality of discourse here is . . . usually . . . of the kind that “high brow” (by internet standards) websites THINK they are having, but when you see the best stuff here you realize that those clowns are just flattering themselves. My question is, who is rightly saying the same thing about us? Of what intellectual internet class am I ignorant now? Or does onlineness impose some kind of ceiling on things, and the real galaxy brains are at the equivalent of Davos somewhere?
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Why not respond to the whole thing? Surely if you are adamant that what you say is true, shouldn't you be able to explain these things with your own independent thinking rather than through relying on the surrounding hive mind? And if it is a popular sentiment, shouldn't it be easy for you to articulate the validity of IQ or HBD such that anyone could understand it, given you've talked about these things enough times already?
When I asked you about the futility of discussing things like IQ I meant you and the forum specifically rather than society as a whole, since you seem to have put a lot of thought into something that seemingly has no direct effect on you. But I will still read what you wrote because I truly am interested in why you think IQ is so important.
I think that while your heart is in the right place, you're effectively making up a problem that doesn't exist. We already have a working definition of smartness - if your work is great, everyone sooner or later will agree that you're smart. Nobody is frantically searching for a way to quantify smartness or even define it because it is and always has been self-evident. There's probably environmental factors that predispose people for even greater smartness but I doubt they would diverge much from the very same recommendations that have persisted since the very beginning of recorded history: ample exercise, excellent nutrition, peer bonding and carefully considered, intellectually stimulating leisure. Perhaps you can try desperately to have children with someone who has also demonstrated their abnormal intelligence, but I think that this would be a very silly and likely vain effort.
Could you elaborate on this? And if you don't mind me asking, how has your personal model of the world been made better by your knowledge of IQ and specifically HBD?
I was being a little disingenuous here since I really meant to put successful people. I haven't met any successful people who think about IQ or are aware of something like HBD. While I'll concede that this was inappropriate, wouldn't you agree that subjectivity is important when discussing this? I think that you're missing the bigger picture when you refrain from discussing the sentimental aspects of this or how it effects people on an individual basis rather than through what you consider an objective perspective.
Evidently some things are unlikely. What I meant to say is that if you're willing to let the initial unlikelihood of your success deter you from obtaining success, you are probably never going to do anything worthwhile anyways because you lack the courage to put in the work and take risks.
If Muggsy Bogues took what you're saying to heart he would've never joined the NBA to become a 5'3" champion because he would've considered his stature a disability. And if someone with an IQ of 85 told me about his theoretical physics dreams I would tell him he's a liar - if he really liked it that much then he would have a higher IQ, just because he would have spent his childhood doing complicated arithmetic to work towards his vision (early specialization) and his youthful mind would've risen to meet the occasion. But what good would it do either of us if I put him down without knowing his potential? If he really likes what he does more than everyone else, why shouldn't he succeed? Keeping this in mind, I'd instead wish him good luck on his endeavors and I'd pray for his imminent success.
Even if the odds of me succeeding were near impossible I would still do what I do and die trying. I can't possibly be bogged down by the esoteric, probabilistic nonsense that burdens people day in and day out - the only direction I can possibly go in is up. So I don't mean to be rude, but I think that what you call sober pragmatism is really just your attempt to rationalize your own feelings.
I very much want what you say about IQ and HBD to be true. I want to believe that I'm special because of a test, and I want to believe that I'm smarter than other people because of my race. These fantasies sound fun to entertain, but I'm not going to go believing something unless I'm shown proof.
writing coherent responses is somewhat difficult and takes some amount of time. There are enough politics forums in existence I could spend 16 hours a day researching and writing posts on various topics. Even that understates it, I could spend 16 hours a day writing just about race and IQ across dozens of different internet forums and still not be able to respond to everyone interested. One might, ofc, want to do other things in life in addition to discussing race and Iq. If your last paragraph warrants 5 paragraphs in response, each other paragraph would ... and then you'd respond with 5 paragraphs each, and it blows up.
why do physics and math professors consistently score 140+ on iq tests?
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Sure. But I'm not really one to keep papers or sources on hand. I arrived at my conclusions over years of reading various books, articles and posts and updating my conclusion over and over again until they reached a settling point.
I suggest you read the Wikipedia page on IQ to get a rough understanding of what it is exactly.
Else this article by Scott is a good primer. Its an introduction to just how useful IQ is as a metric.
Because it's a metric that can predict a lot of things. Such as social mobility, education attainment, wealth, crime rate, etc. And it predicts those things for groups and individuals.
IQ score is a better predictor of Job performance than Education level, College grades, and Interview scores by a mile. It's not even close.
IQ is correlated with so many things consistently in the same direction that the summed correlation is extremely strong. This is the telltale sign of a signal in the noise.
Of course, it exists.
We don't know how to make people smarter. We really don't. Millions of dollars were spent on improving educational outcomes for certain groups to no avail. Refer to Arthur Jensens most infamous paper.
Everything you suggested helps one reach their natural limit, they do little to go past that limit.
Sure.
IQ has a r of 0.82 with National GDP/capita. That information is immensely useful for me. I can spot nations that are doing better or worse than their expected outcome and analyze further better than anyone who isn't aware of this, because.. I know where to look!
Seriously, I challenge you to find me something that explains this much variance that isn't an economic metric or just another proxy for IQ.
I don't care at all. The Motte is a place for adults to discuss adult things. And I will speak the truth even if it really really hurts because that's just my value system. I value the truth more than not offending people with it.
Exceptions don't disprove the rule.
That's on you, has nothing to do with the truth value of IQ as a metric. I reiterate, It's not a value judgment or a prescription, its a description.
Profound misunderstanding of the central HBD claim.
Group differences give you little information on the individual. Imagine you have two normal distributions
Na(100,15)andNb(85,15). Na refers to the White IQ probability distribution, Nb refers to the black. There will be a lot of black people who score higher on an IQ test than a lot of white people and vice versa. BUT on average, white people score higher.Also the fact that there is a race based IQ score gap is... not controvertial. The reason for that gap and what to do about it is. Just look it up.
I mean I am interested in how you think IQ measures smartness but not interested enough to do so much reading. As I'm sure you know I find reading distasteful, and I was considered illiterate until not long ago. But even after taking a glance at these links none of them really say anything about how IQ measures smartness, intelligence or whatever you'd like to call it. In fact, none of them refute what I said about IQ really only making sure that students think a particular way suited to the needs of an institution.
I looked at the first article you provided and I really never knew about this before. I definitely see how IQ would be important when you want to measure the things Kaufman discusses - but I still fail to see how IQ would be important to an actual person going about his day. I also fail to see how this refutes what I said about IQ tests determine a manner of thought rather than the supposed smartness of an individual. Kaufman himself states that IQ should be considered a summary score that emerges from a host of related cognitive mechanisms. It seems more appropriate as an analytical tool for psychologists like Kaufman for gauging the effectiveness of public policy or the downstream effects of economic changes. On the other hand, the latter two links you provided were inaccessible and shoddy at best. The first of the two was locked behind a paywall, and the second led to a Reddit comment which then led to several unavailable research papers and an obscure blog post.
You only took the first part of what I said and went on a tangent. I said that we already know what smartness is, not that the problem of not knowing how to increase this abstract smartness doesn't exist. Even if you're making an actual point this is still off the mark - assuming you're talking about the west, the efficacy of the educational system isn't really dictated by whether or not we know how to make people smarter.
What do you mean by natural limit? Theoretically, there's no upper limit to an IQ score.
This is pretty interesting, but it's still not very worthwhile or remarkable. I don't really see this being used anywhere else, and it just seems like you're trying to rationalize spending years reading into IQ.
I commend your maturity and honesty. But I think that your evident lack of real world experience is preventing you from seeing that even if IQ is monumentally important, whatever it insinuates in the eyes of most students under any practical application would do far greater harm than good.
Clearly, but I never said that they didn't. Note that what I originally said was that phenomenal people wouldn't let something like a standardized test determine the probability of their success in a field they truly care about. I'm only criticizing your own personal value system through which you argued for the practical use of IQ tests in a way that would have share the sober pragmatism of determining the likelihood of NBA eligibility based on height.
What did I misunderstand so profoundly, assuming IQ tests do what you say they do? If this is not what you're saying, then what do you mean to say? It's fine to bring these normal distributions up but you're disregarding the nuanced cultural, economic and historical differences between each race that would complicate these findings (see previous responses), and by failing to take these things into account you're painting an entirely different picture.
The idea behind it is simple. When you track various different abilities such as mathematical test scores, language abilities, musical abilities, memory recall under stress, and many more. All those results tend to correlate. Meaning people who are good at one test are also likely to be good at another test. Keeping in mind care is taken to make sure people can't learn or study for these tests, they are trying to test of inherent ability.
This suggests the existence of there being some kind of latent variable/factor that is a feature of all the above functions. This latent factor is called the 'g factor'. Or the general intelligence factor. Which is the working definition of "intelligence" or more colloquially "smartness" according to most psychologists and especially psychometricians.
You will need to understand factor analysis for the "light bulb moment". IQ tests are the best metric we have as trying to proxy the g factor. Because of their strong 'statistical reliability' (Explanation on Wikipedia/IQ).
Those links assume that you know that IQ is tracking the g factor. So look at them in retrospect now.
Here are the mechanisms.
IQ tracks g.
g cannot be increased and is hereditary (probably genetic).
g correlates with many success metrics.
I can't do the thinking for you. But if you spend some time reflecting on those 3 facts. It will be evident why IQ is so useful as a metric.
Not at all. Psychometricians are well aware of those weak points and take great care to account for those. The strongest studies showing IQ's heredity (studies that track identical twins across their lifetimes) show that IQ is strongly hereditary.
These discrepancies also hold in different regions, different times, and different places. There really isn't any other explanation but to accept the signal that some groups of people score differently.
This doesn't make very much sense. Students who spend all their time making songs and poetry aren't going to do well on math tests. Conversely, students who spend all their time doing arithmetic aren't going to make very good songs. And a correlation between these things isn't necessarily enough to demonstrate the presence of inherent ability - more contextualization is needed, otherwise you're just disseminating bad science. When you make sweeping conjectures you need to cite reputable studies and you need to explain yourself.
Psychometry is a pseudoscience. For a forum that supposedly intends to move past shady thinking this is a surprisingly shady thing to bring up. No respectable academic even remotely corroborates the things you've mentioned, and you've veered off from showing that IQ measures intelligence into discussing the existence of an elusive G factor. You've also refrained from correcting my profound misunderstanding of HBD or even further discussing HBD in its entirety, while also refraining from responding to any of the straightforward questions I had about IQ from prior responses.
You need to prove the things you're saying with studies and explanations. When you make these far fetched claims you can't simply tell the people you're trying to convince to do the thinking themselves, otherwise you ironically come off as someone incapable of thinking for themselves. People who really understand what they do are usually really good at explaining what it is they do to an uninformed audience. So far you've provided studies and explanations likely propagated by this forum and other similar echo chambers comprised of people who think similarly - nothing you've said yet tells me that you've arrived at these conclusions on your own volition or free thought.
Again, psychometry isn't taken seriously by academia and is regarded as a pseudoscience - I implore you to cite and explain the studies that led you to the conclusions you're making about heritability and the G factor. Also, you should provide additional context for the twin studies you bring up. Did the researchers assume that the twins continuously lived in the same environment? Did they ensure that the twins were genetically identical? These factors are among the things that make twin studies difficult to get right, and they're also why twin studies are no longer taken seriously as a means of analyzing heritability.
The ideas you discuss are not real things discussed in either the genomics or psychiatric community, but the manner in which you articulate them feigns professional authority and understanding to a sufficient enough extent that any uninformed person perusing through this discussion would believe what you're saying and become indoctrinated with the perspectives propagated by the echo chamber. What you said about this forum being a branch off of HBD conjecture on another adjacent forum makes sense in hindsight - the people here have already decided that they believe in what you're talking about, and they're just finding things to reaffirm what they think. The relative mediocrity of this discourse is ironic given it's taking place under a post that remarks on how intellectually stimulating this forum is compared to the rest of the internet and its communities of unenlightened denizens.
You are not going to waste my time by ignoring everything I said, then claim you were illiterate months ago and refuse to read anything I provide, then ask for "reputable studies" in the next breath. Why should I provide them to you if you self-professed won't read them? Then claim I don't have free thought?
And then you go on to bash the supposed good faith and intelligence of the very forum that isn't banning an obvious troll like you and is attempting to answer your questions in good faith even though you are not making that job easy for anyone?
I'm done here.
You never did before I claimed this - you only started citing psychometry as a legitimate source in your prior response. Anything real you did provide didn't say IQ measured smartness, and you neither proved nor explained what you mean when you say HBD.
I don't know why you're being so angry with me, I really am interested in what you think. I don't know what I can do to show you I'm not trolling. Does asking questions warrant such a combative response?
On a similar note though I found that people with a high IQ tend to be better at regulating their emotions.
If you think this is a high-IQ way to call someone stupid, it's not.
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