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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   31094 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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Would be awkward for everyone if IQ positively correlates with other positive traits not immediately connected to taking tests.

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/study-links-childrens-eye-hand-coordination-with-their-academic-performance.html

Brain do work gooder faster, affect many thing.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA525579.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Alpha

I feel like all of these tests and correlations are just trying to grasp at a specific quality some form of capacity of abstract thought not directly linked to the here and now, lets call it "plasticity". The capability to approach a novel problem without first being specifically coached on the particulars. If we could quantify just exactly what's different in brains with vastly dis-similar IQs then we could start gunning for the problem, attempt to artificially "uplift" those incapable.

None of this will happen, because of the knee-jerk anti-eugenics stance of the mainstream left/right.

Most positive traits correlate somewhat. So do most negative ones.

The problem with intelligence is that it makes you retarded. Smart people can convince themselves of anything, and thus lose connection with reality in proportion to how smart they are.

Take Scott's most recent post on child rearing for an obvious example. He's the smartest person I've ever met personally, and he's a tard.

The problem with intelligence is that it makes you retarded.

No. Being deep enough on the autism spectrum makes you retarded about some things. People keep (often intentionally) conflating that with intelligence.

Scott is much more an example of someone on the autism spectrum than he is an example of the modal intelligent person.

Boy, I don't know how much time you spend around not smart people, but I promise you it's all worse on average.

I think you have to take a wildly uncharitable interpretation of what Scott wrote to think he's therefore bad at child rearing.

Would I personally indulge my toddler quite so much? No, but it sure was funny to read about. My little girl isn't quite so ridiculous, yet.

I think there are certain brain worms that target a certain level of intelligence, but it's not like it gets worse as you get to super geniuses relative to say 115.

Bertrand Russell was a pacifist and Albert Einstein endorsed socialism explicitly. These are views I consider immensely retarded due to overwhelming theoretical and empirical evidence against them. Motivated reasoning effects everyone, and smart people perhaps find more territory to get lost in than a more average person.

But overall there's basically no known tradeoffs with higher intelligence. There are not a set number of character points. Life isn't fair.

The empirical evidence against socialism during Einstein's day wasn't quite there. Animal Farm was a speculative novel at the time, not known as prescient.

Einstein wrote his famous essay in 1949.

Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom in 1944. He identified the knowledge problem, which devastates any ideas about central planning, in 1936.

Samuelson wrote Foundations of Economic Analysis in 1946 and Economics in 1948.

Mises wrote Socialism in 1922.

Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776.

In the essay, Einstein reveals he does not understand basic economic principles and simply tries to discredit the entire field as insufficiently scientific. He also talks about human nature, and goes on to reveal he doesn't understand it very well. He was, to his credit, not a fan of the Soviets.

I'm being a wee bit uncharitable, because the most influential living economist of the time was probably Samuelson, and he used a bunch of math to justify some version of socialism. (He was still defending the growth of the Soviet economy in 1989...) But Einstein didn't even try to justify his delusions with the math of blackboard economics.

Actually, by total coincidence I just found a quote from Samuelson shitting on Einstein being as delusional about economics as Chomsky.

And the communists had equally impressive-sounding arguments for why Marxism would work. And the Soviets were doing everything humanly possible to hide their failures. And 1949 was before the Great Leap Forward. And...

It obviously wasn't impossible to realize by then communism would fail; Hayek and Mises did. But castigating Einstein for not realizing it, when economics was not even his field... seems a bit harsh? Humans don't have ten years to consider each bit of evidence. Scott has admitted that he would have probably been a communist if he had been alive at the turn of the century (I can't find the exact tumblr post, but this one gestures at the same general direction), and I would have probably been one too if I had not come of age in the 21st century with all the evidence available to beat me over head.

From Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, chapter 108:

It is only by harsh experience that we learn which principles take priority over which other principles; as mere words they all sound equally persuasive.

(But as for the people who have access that evidence and still choose to be socialists, there is no hope.)

As the Samuelson quote I cited in another comment makes clear, Einstein had a pie-in-the-sky moronic view of how economies worked.

He was already anti-Soviet, so he knew that wasn't going well.

Further, Einstein took an explicitly anti-intellectual approach to the question. He was dumbing things down even though he obviously could have grasped the theory and math had he chosen to.

The fact that economics was not even his field is a pretty fucking good argument that he shouldn't have lent his prestige to such a moronic pursuit via that essay.

Well, super duper extra embarrassing given my user name. But was Animal Farm not an allegorical criticism of Stalin? Like the badness was known?

Again, sorry if I misremember, I've used this handle on various parts of the internet for literally longer than I can remember.

It was written before the badness was widely known- and intended as an intra-socialist critique based on the behavior of Stalinists who fought alongside Orwell(in a different socialist faction) in the Spanish civil war.

So not speculative from Orwells perspective, who already recognized the hazards and badness of at least Stalinism. But not yet recognized as a prescient critique of repeated failures of general socialism.

I don't think that's contradictory to what I recall. Maybe it's time for a re-read anyway.

He actually couldn't get it published originally- the critique of communism was considered verboten by progressive publishing houses, but he was too left wing for rightist publishers.

I've spent most of my life associating with the lower half of the IQ distribution. I'm well aware of the failure modes and ridiculous behavior of the dummies. Stupidity, however, is its own limiting factor.

The failure modes of intellect have basically no upper bound.

That's a good way to put it.

More degrees of freedom to really get into complex ways to fuck things up.

Indeed, one can see here for an example that Steve Hsu wrote about.

As Hsu remarked: “No evidence of diminishing returns in the far tail of the cognitive ability distribution.”

Even when range-restricted to the top 1% of 13-year-old test-takers on the SAT math, the four quartiles among The One Percent follow a rank-order with respect to any doctorate, STEM publications, STEM doctorates, patents, whether-95th-percentile-income eventually attained.

Note Hsu’s blog post and the linked underlying Nature article are coming up on 10 years old in a few months, yet things remain unchanged with regard to blank slatism and hopium as to the diminishing-to-zero returns of IQ.

ven when range-restricted to the top 1% of 13-year-old test-takers on the SAT math, the four quartiles among The One Percent follow a rank-order with respect to any doctorate, STEM publications, STEM doctorates, patents, whether-95th-percentile-income eventually attained.

Yes, IQ and its proxies predict academic success. That's what I said. Our economy is set up to award higher incomes to those with higher education, thus the income. But this is just circular logic. High paying jobs are mostly gated behind advanced degrees, which require at least an average IQ to fudge and a high one to excel at. Give out jobs based on who is the best basketball player, and height would predict income just fine.

That's what I said. Our economy is set up to award higher incomes to those with higher education, thus the income. But this is just circular logic.

One would need to find a similar explanation for patents. In any case, your head canon is at odds with the evidence.

Using AFQT scores as a decent but imperfect proxy for IQ: In a regression with net worth, education, and eight other factors as covariates, IQ was still a very significant predictor of income. Even controlling for net worth, education, and eight other factors, each additional IQ point was found to provide $346 to $616 worth of income across four regressions. That is, someone who has an IQ of 125 would be predicted to make about $5,190 to $9,240 more a year than someone with an IQ of 110, when the two have the same net worth and education. Mean income was about $43,700 in this dataset, so that's a solid chunk of change.

Across these the four regressions with the same specification (they differed in their estimation methods), both IQ and net worth were significant at the 0.01 level in all four. In contrast, education was only significant at the 0.01 level in three of them and not significant at the lower bar of 0.10 in the fourth. This would at least suggest circumstantially that education was the weakest strongman at the circus here. Plus, in any case, this is "over"-controlling and understating the effect of IQ, since IQ allows one to attain higher education levels. IQ also allows for better wealth preservation, holding income constant.

With the endogeneity problem of IQ and education in mind (the over-controlling), this article wanted to take a further look. It appears the author may have used the same data source as the first one, given its relative availability, but his was limited to those with children and he made slightly different design choices here or there (such as taking log income for regression analyses). Nonetheless, the author similarly found an association between IQ (AFQT score) and income that persisted after adding the controls of "marital status and presence of a live-in partner, education, number of children, employment status, employment history, hours worked, and age. Measures of race/ethnicity and sex are also included."

The author then moved onto to evaluate the IQ (net of education) -> Income vs. IQ -> Education -> Income pathways. The first is the direct or "partial" effect of IQ ("extent to which it affects income, net of differences in educational attainment"), the second the "indirect" effect of IQ ("the extent to which AFQT increases income by increasing education"). He calculated a value of 0.505 for the standardized regression coefficient of AFQT on income (a one standard deviation increase in IQ increasing income by 0.505 standard deviations). He found that if you split this 0.505 between the direct effect and the indirect effect, the first would get slightly more than half of 0.505 and the second slightly less than half of the 0.505. That is, not only is the indirect IQ -> Education -> Income pathway unable to fully account for the IQ/income relationship, this indirect pathway actually gets edged out by the direct pathway of IQ (net of education) -> Income.

Even in a severely range restricted dataset (the Terman set of individuals who identified as children to have estimated IQs of at least 140), IQ was still found to directly contribute to lifetime earnings, independently of the indirect effect through education. Like the previous article, this one that uses the Terman study found that for men, more of the impact of IQ upon income was direct rather than indirect through education. Additionally, among men with a BA or less, a standard deviation of IQ was worth about $160K of lifetime earnings. Among those with an MA or more, a standard deviation of IQ was... also worth about $160K of lifetime earnings.

All in all, the evidence points toward a robust IQ effect upon income that exists independently of the indirect effect of IQ upon education (and in turn upon income). Not only that—if anything, the independent, direct effect of IQ upon income exceeds the indirect effect of IQ through education upon income.

You could probably see if there's signal by controlling for education level and seeing if the income outcomes still hold. I'm not sure if anyone's done that (or if there's enough data -- almost every recent study of this sort I've seen uses the SMPY cohorts, because there aren't too many other choices)

That post deserves a top level post. I mean, yes, toddlers are often trying(and often deliberately trying), but he's not reacting as the received wisdom of parents passed through generations would recommend.

I trust Scott to wrangle the outcomes of his own genetics more than I do any onlookers with partial information.

His little boy is a hell of a character, but there's nothing in those anecdotes he shared that strike me as an actual problem. Keep in mind Scott does baby duty at set times, and for much of the day he has outside assistance. He can afford to be a bit indulging without losing his mind for the time he has the watch.

Can I ask how you met Scott?

Went to a meetup at his house back when he lived in my state.

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