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IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
(medium.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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SneerClub
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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.
AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)
This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.
[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]
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IQ is a relatively recent construct.
My father (b. 1913) was one of the children chosen to calibrate the Stanford Binet IQ test after it moved from Europe to Stanford University.
Having a high IQ didn't make much difference for an alcoholic manic depressive attorney who could insult you in English, French, German, and Arabic.
He became an embezzler who lost everything and ended up dying in my one-year-old daughter's bedroom after his last wife threw him out.
A few days before he died, he seemed to confess to murdering his first wife.
IQ may predict other things than it was designed for.
Wtf? When has IQ been purported to be a measure of how well adjusted some is.
it hasn't but it has been promoted as a predictor of success in education, work and life. The Bell Curve famously claimed that higher IQ people were more likely to finish education, stay in work, stay out of prison and stay married.
Fair enough.
Importantly, even where a very spare analysis which gets to pick and choose its terms and data (i.e. any analysis which begins by frontloading (1) measured - actually etimated - IQ and the traditional and (2) unanalysed markers by which success is judged) finds that there is a crude regularity whereby IQ and success are correlated, in practical terms nobody will ever - and I mean EVER - use this data to support conclusions which follow from the discovery of a crude regularity. This is partly a human cognition thing and mostly an ideology thing, but the human cognition thing is an important cause. It’s very difficult, practically impossible, for people not to move from a continuous result (the crude regularity) to a categorical conclusion (one which parses between individuals) - and fortunately, for the bigot, this already plays into the bigoted attitude.