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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Notes -
Apologies for the delayed response, I'm not sure why but I'm not getting notifications on your posts, and I swear I've rechecked this thread since the post date on this so not sure what's going on there. Although having read your responses to others doesn't seem to bode well for a discussion.
Anyways I'm a glutton for pain so troll or not lets roll in the mud, I enjoy it.
I'm not totally sure what you mean by this. IQ distribution gaps between the races are not scientifically controversial. Pretty much any study on it finds around one standard deviation between white and black American IQ. Here's one but feel free do a basic google search
I'm not really sure what interesting has to do with anything. Rulers are quite bland objects but are able to measure length very accurately. As for their accuracy I think the measure you're interested in is the test-retest reliability which checks how well a test resists things like training or other factors. IQ tests do quite well on this. Although this is not of the utmost importance when it comes to the HBD angle because much like BMI being a measure of population not really being meaningfully thrown off by bodybuilders to get a population obesity the vast majority of these cross race studies are not giving people multiple tests to study on and very few people are studying recreationally for IQ tests.
I'm afraid I'll need you to be more specific. Shape rotation and the like is still cognitively taxing to people irrespective of any "trick", and even if it were a well designed tests either teaches the test taker the "trick" or is designed in such a way to avoid this kind of thing.
It's a rigorously studied field that is very concerned with making sure their metrics align with outcome data. This is a very general type of criticism, I'd be happy to address something more specific but I'm just not really sure how recognizing patterns in repeating numbers is supposed to be influenced by biases.
I very specifically did not say this. We are talking about population scale averages.
The tests simply don't include culturally relevant data.
Continuously since the 50s iirc.
That's a bit of a strange question, part of how IQ test are anchored to the real world is giving them to similarly situated people and seeing how well it predicts things we care about like educational attainment. Thus the validity of the measure does do things like attempt to hold economic birth status constant, so comparing all the poor natives given the same test and seeing how the scores predict how they do versus eachother. The test is very predictive in this way with the higher scores being correlated with reduced all cause mortality, twitch reflexes, lifetime income, educational attainment, ect. So in the design of the tests these things are held constant. And the effects remain when these things are not held constant within group, a high IQ but poor native compensates for the advantage of a lower IQ but richer native. But as the tests are obviously correlated with economic differences it is kind of nonsensical to account for it when comparing groups, the raw number is what you actually want.
There is positive pressure for intelligence for sure and studies have shown IQ is rising generation by generation(referred to as the Flynn effect). Speculation into why this is happening is somewhat out of scope here but worth investigating in its own right. As for whether it's somehow inconsistent evolutionarily it isn't for the same reason we haven't also evolved giant muscles and other minor adaptions that seem useful, evolution just isn't that fast and intelligence trades off against things like calorie consumption and birth canal size so there is at least some theoretical downward pressure.
I can only speak for myself although I think I'm not alone in being generally not that interested in HBD in itself so much as in how it can be used to answer certain questions that without HBD tend to flare out into the conspiracy realm. When asked why Jews are so overrepresented in highly competitive institutions of power instead of appealing to Jewish conspiracy I can note that a small advantage in the center of a normal distribution can yield disproportionately large amounts on the wings. Likewise I don't need to reach for systemic racism to explain why costly educational interventions meant to close the black-white educational attainment gap have failed with every attempt.
I was convinced that I had aphantasia in the past, so I didn't even bother to try actually "shape rotating" on these sorts of tasks; I tried to somehow determine "logically" if shape could be rotated some way around.
Now I sorta can do it by visualizing*, but I'm not sure if performance is any better. Definitely cognitively taxing. I hate these tests.
* there's still no actual qualia, I think. But I could will myself to imagine e.g. "an apple", and then examine details. Ofc they're probably generated the moment I look for them, and certainly unstable. Also works for moving visuals - e.g. I could 'see' gameplay of a game I played for hundreds of hours (years ago).
On one LSD trip, I couldn't really think verbally at some point. Possibly that's when I learned this; I'm not sure through.
But I almost never think like this spontaneously. I wonder if it's useful and/or trainable.
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again incredibly minor nitpick: IQ is rank-ordered to be normal, and e.g. if multiplicative instead of additive effects are important at the tails IQ might be fatter. So absent evidence that it's normal at the tails, assuming that subpopulations have normally distributed IQ isn't exactly justified. iirc a study measured it somehow and found it was fatter than normal but cant find it
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For introduction into HBDIQ science, this could be useful starter.
In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths About Human Intelligence.
Author's blog here
Book summarizing the scientific evidence, showing how ironclad it is and debunking the usual anti HBDIQ talking points.
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