<story><title>IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle</title><url>https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dqpb</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ll admit I spend probably greater than average time brooding over how dumb most people are. But I don&amp;#x27;t think this is inherent in those people. I think it&amp;#x27;s mostly a result of their prior knowledge, sleep, energy level, stress&amp;#x2F;anxiety, and give-a-shit. I think most people are fundamentally capable of great intelligence.</text></item><item><author>barrkel</author><text>IQ is undoubtedly overemphasized by some factions, especially those with an axe to grind and a dog whistle to blow, if it helps them feel less guilty about their position in the world or otherwise rationalizes injustice.&lt;p&gt;OTOH there&amp;#x27;s definitely a difference between people, people who aren&amp;#x27;t mentally defective, people that are quick on the uptake, sharp and alert, who adapt to new mental models. IQ might be an unscientific metric for identifying these people, it might leave some of them unidentified, but they definitely exist. Anyone who&amp;#x27;s worked with other people, hired other people, had to evaluate other people&amp;#x27;s capabilities, can be in no doubt about this.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to separate out Taleb&amp;#x27;s own axe-grinding from anything concrete he&amp;#x27;s trying to say about what IQ means as an independent concept. He seems more upset at short-sighted application of thought to first-order problems rather than asking higher-order questions about why the problems are problems in the first place, why the questions are being asked. When I&amp;#x27;ve seen a difference between people in this degree, it&amp;#x27;s more a matter of personality than intelligence: the more detail-oriented, autistic-spectrum someone is, the more they focus only on the details, and miss out on the bigger picture. It takes a little effort to step back, but I think it can be learned. Whereas IQ (or g) doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to be improved easily with learning.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toasterlovin</author><text>You should ask yourself what it would it take to falsify your working hypothesis and then see if there are research results which falsify it.</text></comment>
<story><title>IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle</title><url>https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dqpb</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ll admit I spend probably greater than average time brooding over how dumb most people are. But I don&amp;#x27;t think this is inherent in those people. I think it&amp;#x27;s mostly a result of their prior knowledge, sleep, energy level, stress&amp;#x2F;anxiety, and give-a-shit. I think most people are fundamentally capable of great intelligence.</text></item><item><author>barrkel</author><text>IQ is undoubtedly overemphasized by some factions, especially those with an axe to grind and a dog whistle to blow, if it helps them feel less guilty about their position in the world or otherwise rationalizes injustice.&lt;p&gt;OTOH there&amp;#x27;s definitely a difference between people, people who aren&amp;#x27;t mentally defective, people that are quick on the uptake, sharp and alert, who adapt to new mental models. IQ might be an unscientific metric for identifying these people, it might leave some of them unidentified, but they definitely exist. Anyone who&amp;#x27;s worked with other people, hired other people, had to evaluate other people&amp;#x27;s capabilities, can be in no doubt about this.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to separate out Taleb&amp;#x27;s own axe-grinding from anything concrete he&amp;#x27;s trying to say about what IQ means as an independent concept. He seems more upset at short-sighted application of thought to first-order problems rather than asking higher-order questions about why the problems are problems in the first place, why the questions are being asked. When I&amp;#x27;ve seen a difference between people in this degree, it&amp;#x27;s more a matter of personality than intelligence: the more detail-oriented, autistic-spectrum someone is, the more they focus only on the details, and miss out on the bigger picture. It takes a little effort to step back, but I think it can be learned. Whereas IQ (or g) doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to be improved easily with learning.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yourapostasy</author><text>&amp;gt; I think most people are fundamentally capable of great intelligence.&lt;p&gt;If the real world distribution of IQ closely approximates the Gaussian distribution IQ tests are meant to model, then in the US alone there are about 44 million people in the range from about 70-85. World wide, about 1 billion people in that cohort of 1-2 standard deviations. Even if actual real world results are half of what the models predict, we&amp;#x27;re still talking really large numbers of people.&lt;p&gt;Finding ways to bring them up to &amp;quot;just&amp;quot; average intelligence would be astounding for the species, and I&amp;#x27;d aim for that first instead of setting ourselves up for failure by defining a goal of &amp;quot;great intelligence&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Right now, the best we can prescribe with even a semblance of consistent results is intensive educational intervention and family assistance from early childhood onward. Actually doing that in our current economic model would be on the order of ditching the MIC and somehow transferring the spending to those activities. That&amp;#x27;s a pipe dream with current established stakeholders.</text></comment>