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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I don't see how IQ tests can test your smartness when they are relatively easy to do well on, and even if you don't do well on them initially you can basically get a perfect score by reviewing the patterns/ concepts that people are unfamiliar with. It's unseemly when you try to condense the beauty and potential of the human spirit down to a test metric.
I think that he meant that you were confiding in the people on this forum to test your ideas.
Not sure if you know this but IQ and its validity has a very deep history as a widely held belief in this very forum we are on. Im not being sarcastic. In fact one can make an argument that the discussions of IQ and its intersections with HBD being a very contentious CW topic is what partially led to the creation of The Motte.
Anyways. IQ is ultimately a metric. But its the best metric of among all others as a proxy for g, the thing we are really trying to measure. Im not gonna reiterate the literature.
But, in a discussion about intelligence it would be rather obtuse to not mention the best proxy of it would it not? Its not a value judgement.
I had no idea. What does HBD mean though? Is this another kind of IQ test?
In my opinion I still don't think that an IQ test or any proxy of it would be a good idea. To me it seems like all an IQ test does is check if a student is thinking about things in a certain way - if they can quickly recognize patterns, and if they can really break apart a problem - in short, are they thinking in a particular way that would be useful to the needs of the institution? Are they thinking like an engineer or a mathematician? If a student does badly on an IQ test I don't think that it means they're stupid. Rather, I think that what this really means is a student has spent their time doing other things which don't necessitate the kind of thinking an IQ test checks for. They may consequently lack development in certain subsets of their minds relegated to do these very specific kinds of thinking, because our minds are constantly changing and adapting to the stressors we place on them like any other part of our bodies. This student may have spent their time cooking, painting landscapes, or just doing stupid kid things.
Of course, there's probably going to be outliers who are predisposed to this kind of thinking at an early age, maybe as a result of their upbringing, and/or the predisposition of their parents. But what if these outliers don't even want to pursue the avenues they'd do well in according to an IQ test? Wouldn't this test just give them and their parents a flawed conception of who they really are? On the other hand, wouldn't the effect be much worse on those students who do really badly on an IQ test? They'll go through their whole lives believing that they're stupid, and that there's something terribly insufficient in them which prevents them from doing what they want to do with their lives. I'd argue that we already instilled this sense of inferiority in kids with standardized tests. I've seen too many students who think that they're innately stupid or incompetent because they can't readily understand arithmetic, memorize historical trivia or whatever else the curriculum throws at them.
Somebody else will hopefully respond with a more detailed breakdown of the actual studies but IQ:
Is very predictive of success in things people care about
Cannot be trained
Is a very well studied and consistent measure
Varies a lot person to person and has at least a large genetic component
To the degree that some tests meant to measure IQ can be studied for is a flaw in those tests but the ones we have are pretty good at not being gamed.
HBD stands for "Human Bio Diversity" and is the recognition that populations of people vary genetically. Uncontroversially in situations like the Dutch being taller on average than the Spanish. Incredibly controversially in situations like American Jews having a higher IQ on average to American Natives. People here disagree wildly on whether it is true and what it would imply if it were. But we do allow its discussion which brings quite a bit of heat from the sort of people who find the idea dangerous. We originally started out as a weekly thread on slatestarcodex.com run by Scott who now blogs on astralcodexten.substack.com, but he was harassed by people who didn't like the discussion so he asked us to got to his subreddit, then our own subreddit and finally this shiny new offsite. Although it's not just HBD that got us targeted, it's the willingness to entertain dangerous ideas with HBD being the most usually cited example.
Could you cite the studies that corroborate the things you're saying about IQ tests and HBD? I'd have a difficult time believing that you can't do better on IQ tests just because the questions on them are neither infallible nor interesting enough to even come close to doing what they mean to do. I especially don't see how the ones we have right now are good at not being gamed when one glance at any IQ test reveals a bunch of problems that become trivial once you make someone understand a specific pattern or concept. After all they're only made by people, so wouldn't they be susceptible to the issues arising from their inherent biases and ways of thinking?
How could you say that certain races of people are dumber than other races of people when there are innumerable cultural, geographical and economic differences between each race which would complicate any relevant study?
Assuming that IQ does what this forum says it does for instance, at what period did you get these races of people to take their IQ tests? Were economic differences between Jews and Natives accounted for? Wouldn't it be irrational to compare the IQ of a Native raised in poverty on a reservation to an affluent Jew from the suburbs? And even if you did somehow account for this difference and only selected Jews and Natives from identical socioeconomic backgrounds how would you take into account their cultural differences? How the average Native is raised compared to the average Jew? What Natives eat throughout their childhood compared to whatever Jewish children eat? I'm sure that there's a lot more things that I haven't thought of that would make this entire thing far fetched.
Also, wouldn't saying this also present an evolutionary inconsistency? While I see how differences in geography and climate could select for traits like increased height or lighter pigmentation in certain races compared to others, what evolutionary advantage would present itself in the relative diminishing of cognition in a race? I'd assume that intelligence is some consistently increasing factor across the evolutionary context in every race driven by technological advancements, with few exceptions and outliers.
Lastly, don't you think that it's futile to discuss things like this to such an extent because you can't really do anything with what you learn? I hardly ever see interesting people think about things like whether or not their IQ exceeds 130 or how intelligent their race is. In my experience these people almost always focus only on doing whatever they like to do, and they wouldn't let something like a standardized test determine the probability of their success in a field they truly care about. If you would let a piece of paper tell you you're not good enough to become an engineer - would you ever have done anything interesting in the first place?
You kind of give the impression that you're playing at ignorance, but to address the "but IQ test must be easily learnable", I'll point you towards various standardized tests (SATs, GREs, MCAT, LSAT). They are incredibly important for getting into various schools, and people fight very hard to get to those schools. While training courses exist, they generally don't do much, and if it were as easy as you seem to think, everyone would have 100% anyway.
Seriously, have you ever taken a standardized test? Did you ace it? If not, do you think it's only because you couldn't be bothered?
These are not IQ tests. Note that I said like standardized tests. Although irrelevant to the discussion, the tests you specifically mention are things you need to study for. The top performers on these tests are people from supportive family structures who apply themselves rigorously and consistently.
They're correlated, this doesn't necessarily mean they're the same thing. These tests do not and have never claimed to measure IQ. Many of the questions on these tests require specific knowledge, analytical skills and ways of thinking that can be obtained from a textbook.
What you're saying is not corroborated by anything and is merely anecdotal. It's actually quite the opposite, as differences in standardized test scores across different rungs on the socioeconomic ladder have always been attributed to the accessibility of quality test material and the tremendous opportunity cost of studying, particularly in the US. Assessments like the SAT are made to require studying some amount of trivia, and students from poor neighborhoods just aren't going to have the time, resources or support structure to put into this. Most of these students aren't even going to be thinking about school in the first place because of cultural issues. I'm glad that you're the exception, but there are lot of people that grew up like you did who were not as fortunate.
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