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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   24642 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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?

  1. Appearances can be deceptive. I do not think that g is some kind of stamp that gets impressed on your forehead and then dictates the rest of your life without further environmental modification. If you wish to argue that certain factors/metrics only explain a limited fraction of the observed variance in outcomes, you should have lead with being more charitable and assuming that I know what I'm talking about. Doctors are not known, as a class, to be particularly stupid. Your assumption was and does remain incorrect.
  2. I appreciate the more substantial attempt at engaging with my arguments, and while I have genuine disagreements, I wasn't kidding about the headache. That strikes me as a remarkable approach to estimating Einstein's IQ, going from what it might have been, in theory, to what it might have been on a hypothetical IQ test he never gave. I recall that there are plenty of confounders for the chess and IQ stuff, probably Berkson's paradox, but I do not have the time to check. The rest of your arguments are tangential to any point I came in with the intention of litigating. I told you so. Now, if you had lead with these points, any semblance of rigor, or at least charity, I would engage more productively. Right now, I simply can't even if I want to.

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