IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

 (medium.com)

6 points | by wslh7 hours ago

6 comments

  • zeroonetwothree7 hours ago
    It doesn’t pass the smell test. I think it’s clear from personal experience that some people I meet are just “smarter” than others. They do better at a wide range of intellectual activities. I don’t know if “IQ” is the best measurement of that but it’s clearly true that some concept of general intelligence is real.

    A lot of the arguments here are silly. For example IQ has only a moderate correlation with income. Well yes, there are many other important skills for being successful and intelligence is just one of them. It doesn’t mean all else being equal I wouldn’t rather have a higher IQ.

  • fuzzfactor3 hours ago
    Anybody who knows a little about testing and IQ eventually figures out this is not a perfect rating.

    Sometimes there is an outlier that makes the whole thing seem suspect in some way or another.

    If a truly intelligent person were to achieve only a mediocre score on a test like this, the article could very well be a "measured" response to that discrepancy alone. "Extensively" measured really, this is quite technical and not a short blog post.

    To the degree that it can be measured of course . . .

  • giardini7 hours ago
    A good article critical of Taleb's arguments is

    "Nassim Taleb on IQ" January 8, 2019

    https://archive.ph/PCvgk

  • riskyingo6 hours ago
    The fact that most people can score really high with enough practice and preparation is just a good sign to disregard it entirely.
  • paulpauper7 hours ago
    Psychometrics peddlers looking for suckers (military, large corporations) buying the “this is the best measure in psychology” argument when it is not even technically a measure — it explains at best between 2 and 13% of the performance in some tasks (those tasks that are similar to the test itself)[see interpretation of .5 correlation further down], minus the data massaging and statistical cherrypicking by psychologists; it doesn’t satisfy the monotonicity and transitivity required to have a measure (at best it is a concave measure). No measure that fails 80–95% of the time should be part of “science” (nor should psychology — owing to its sinister track record — be part of science (rather scientism), but that’s another discussion).

    IQ testing incurs legal risk and yet companies use proxies like the wonderlic, because there is some correlation between IQ and competence, that is not possible to predict otherwise.

  • SubiculumCode4 hours ago
    Ridiculous insulting article.