This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Einstein. The gentleman responsible for Special Relativity, General Relativity, the photoelectric effect (which actually got him the Nobel), Brownian motion as proof of atoms, mass-energy equivalence, and Bose-Einstein statistics. "Very smart, but not in a reality-shattering way."
I'm going to need a minute to process that. Possibly three. Fortunately my psychiatry experience prepares me well; I can usually recover from being utterly flabbergasted in 5 seconds or bust.
If two complete overhauls of how humanity understands space, time, gravity, and matter doesn't clear your bar for "reality-shattering," I'd genuinely love to know what does. Should he have collapsed the lightcone via propagating false vacuum decay? Manually torn the curvature tensor out of the universe and presented it to Bohr in a jar? What are you on about? What are you smoking?
As for “Einstein was probably about 140”: probably according to what? A preserved Wechsler protocol from 1905? A Stanford-Binet administered by divine revelation? Some conversion table from “invented general relativity” to “moderately gifted but not too spooky”? I am genuinely curious how you got to “Einstein probably had IQ 140”. I presume you've heard of something called a ceiling effect?
"Focused on his craft, like all successful smart people" really makes me wonder which Einstein you mean. The one who played violin semi-seriously, wrote political and philosophical essays by the bushel, corresponded with Freud about the psychology of war, lobbied Roosevelt about the bomb, and turned down the presidency of Israel? Monomaniacal indeed. The phrase "successful smart people" is also wonderfully convenient as a construction, since any polymath counter-example presumably just gets retroactively reclassified as unsuccessful.
With whatever respect you're due, and without further comment on the magnitude of that debt: British psychiatrists are held to higher standards than that. I'm held to higher standards than that, mostly by myself. I know the difference between Cohen's d and Hedges' g. My interest in entering a d-measuring contest with you is, by consensus values, small. It is roughly equivalent to my interest in arguing with you about the psychometric validity of the other form of g.
Don't believe me? Here's the MRCPsych Paper B critical appraisal syllabus.
I gave it last week. The headache is still bad enough that I'm not going to dig through my own post history to surface the times I've gone several layers deep into statistics arguments on this site. You're welcome to spend your time doing so, I value mine.
Lumping me in with the median doctor who thinks p<0.05 gud? Nice try though.
You appear to attribute all outward intellectual achievement to latent g. But the correlation between g and such achievement isn't 1. A really high estimate of that correlation would be 0.70, so was Einstein a 4 SD physicist of his day, his expected g would be 2.8 SDs, which is 142. 142 is extremely intelligent and a focused person at that level can achieve great things. It's been found that the correlation between intelligence and chess is as low as 0.24.
He lived a long time and did physics as a profession, but yes he also had hobbies. This is typical of people in the 140s IQ.
I'm glad you pay more attention to statistics than most psychiatrists. Maybe one day you can help replace the DSM with a quantitative approach. Have you read Eysenck on general psychoticism? It's in his book on genius.
My tips for you on intuiting why you probably over-identify people being over 150 IQ:
high IQ is exponentially-increasingly rare because the bell curve is thin-tailed. Shrinkage is optimal; you would have less error if you shrink everyone's intelligence towards the median by 10% or so.
Flashy outcomes are a result of intelligence as well as other factors like work ethic and fortune. Many people think a famous businessman, scientist, or writer has an outrageously high IQ, because they think their preferred intellectual status markers correlate at >= 1 with intelligence. They don't.
The CEF (conditional expectation function) of g on outcomes might not be linear. The IQ wealth CEF is probably concave for instance. Nonetheless, lots of people believe that Elon Musk must be a genius, but his real intelligence is probably top 1% or 2%. He's exogenously fortunate and an outlier in other ways, like commitment to business, and these explain his wealth jointly with his intelligence.
Wasn't it a big thing though in statistics that often a phenomenon is nicely described by the normal distribution in the fat part, but has much more outliers than the exponential shrinkage of the bell curve tail predicts, and so there are all sorts of modified distributions with wider tails. Is it well known that intelligence isn't one of those?
More options
Context Copy link
If we define g factor as smartness then I can understand @dailydogma argument. His point basically seems to be, whatever causes Einstein's success in physics was not his g factor. There are lot of people who are very talented in a skill such that the second place in the world doesn't come close to the first place in ability. For them g factor may not explain the variance in ability but some other (maybe inborn and genetic) trait may explain that variance better, a trait which does not generalize well to other domains.
Nigel Richards is incredibly dominant in his field, he is the french scrabble champion. He is better than any computer at the game and he doesn't understand french at all. He only learned it for the game in just nine weeks. This is not an ability any other competitor shows. [https://youtube.com/watch?v=T-8NrvVqbT4] If you try to explain his success with g you would end up with a very simple question
"If his ability is so much greater than his opponents and this is primarily explained by his g then his g must also be far far greater than his opponents, why is he is not an equally prominent physicist or the like. G factor generalizes, he should be better at everything." A explanation for this can be he has some trait which doesn't generalize well but helps with his specific domain, so he doesn't have very high IQ (or g or intelligence) but he is still very good in his field.
This can also lead to a very smart but not an world shattering level smart Einstien who nonetheless can make the discoveries he did. Just look at latest models from OpenAI and how jagged they are, they can do Erdos problems but we are not at AGI are we?
Maybe Von Neumann was consistently a genius in may different fields and hence was smarter than Einstien.
If at the very top something other than g factors starts explaining most of the variance then you can easily have 135 IQ Feynman.
Edit: Math is very g loaded but once you filter for people with high IQ (120+ or 130+) the correlation would drop, and you would probably end up with very jagged talent rather than a generalized talent which is used in g. After filtering at 145 IQ threshold different cognitive abilities merely have 0.1 correlation https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2017.07.004
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I heard you can do that in just 5 seconds if you just run really really fast. Like, really fast.
And shrink when viewed by an external observer? I'm a grower, not a shower.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link