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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2574 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 2, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I just had this experience in a discussion with someone, and I saw a pattern or script of responses I’m sure some of you have seen before. Intelligence came up, and I was met with “everyone is unique, with their own unique set of abilities, there is no such thing as intelligence.” [Mention IQ] “Oh, wasn’t that debunked by some studies recently?” [Disagrees] “Well IQ tests are just biased towards rich people that know about regattas.” [Deny the regatta myth] “Well all they are measuring is ability to take IQ tests” etc etc etc

I’m not really expecting to persuade somebody to change their mind, but the feeling of going up against this was so daunting. I just felt like I was going up against a castle built by decades of anti-intelligence messaging, and in a Bayesian sense their priors against the very concept of intelligence were so strong that just nothing I could say would even budge them. How do you respond to this? Probably the answer is just walk away. I’m not even sure what I am looking for since I know persuasion really isn’t on the table, but just how do you respond when this comes up in conversation? The person I was speaking with was extraordinarily civil, and not at all upset by my statements fwiw

I usually mention that IQ is good at making predictions and correlates to lots of interesting things, and people typically accept that. Usually it's not necessary to press the intelligence/IQ thing too hard, but I guess it depends on what exactly the point you were hoping to make was.

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