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Post a Comment On: Steve Sailer: iSteve

"Does IQ testing work or not work?"

22 Comments -

1 – 22 of 22
Anonymous Socially Extinct said...

IQ naysayers dwell on cultural differences between groups, but I think they are best devoting their time to citing the differences between eras.

A typical modern Flynn-Fantastic adulator who boasts of Millennial cerebral acuity is just as guilty of the same short-sighted thinking that the evo-relativists are in claiming that IQ tests are culturally biased (with the implication that groups in question are the same generation). If you enlarge the sample enough, any outstanding individual contribution is just that much less meaningful. Sorta the bread-and-butter of the modern corporacracy.

I wonder how anyone can claim we are "smarter" now than we were 40 years ago. This is such such utter, obvious garbage. The only thing that has changed in 40 years are our cultural expectations and parental meddling. Hmmm!

7/8/13, 1:29 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Liberal arguments against g testing:

1) Stephen J. Gould

2) Dats raciss!!!!

3) STEPHEN J. GOULD!!

4) I heard some anecdote about there was this guy whose IQ varied 30 points

5) STEPHEN J.GOULD godammit!!!!!!

6) Some racist 115 years ago did it wrong

7) IQ don't measure nothing, but your stoopid

8) STEPHEN J. GOULDDDDD!!!!!!!!

and so on

7/8/13, 1:42 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...


A few years ago, the SAT added a third score, Writing, but many colleges aren't sure how useful it is, and there's some sentiment for dropping the Writing test as not worth the extra time or cost. In other words, there are diminishing marginal returns to more detail.


Writing was added to allow women to double count their verbal scores which are comparable to men's. It narrows the "gap" among the top scorers so to speak. More women than men take the test but the absolute number of men who get an 800 math score is about double the number of that of women.

7/8/13, 1:49 PM

Blogger Bruce Charlton said...

@Steve

"A. If Adam and Zach take an IQ test and Adam outscores Zach by 15 points, it's far from impossible that Zach actually has the higher "true" IQ.... Maybe if they took the test dozen times, Zach just might average higher than Adam."

I would suggest that peak performance is the correct measure of IQ, not the average. A person might be ill on many occasions of test taking, and it is how they perform at their best that measures their underlying g.

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/how-should-we-measure-general.html

*

"conscientiousness, like many virtues, is positively correlated with IQ, so IQ tests work surprisingly well."

I don't think this is correct - at least not necessarily, and not as a generalization. Between ethnic groups there does seem to be a correlation between IQ and C - probably due to natural selection in complex agricultural societies, as described by Greg Clark - but this breaks down within ethnicities - indeed several studies by Adrian Furnham (of University College London) in college students found an inverse relationship between IQ and C.

It also breaks down between men and women - on average, men are higher in IQ and women in C -

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/do-elite-us-colleges-choose-personality.html

7/8/13, 2:39 PM

Anonymous Scharlach said...

Dialogue requires two interlocutors to come to some kind of consensus, which is usually a synthesis of two positions, but a synthesis in which some interlocutors need to concede more than others.

No one's too interested in doing that sort of thing right now. Moral outrage and social justice do-goodery are more satisfying.

7/8/13, 2:47 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/corzine_off_the_crook_t3VpDFmfEsx9Qd7VdtCLvM?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=Business


And the GOP Sucks up to the superrich.

7/8/13, 4:05 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Writing was added to allow women to double count their verbal scores which are comparable to men's. It narrows the "gap" among the top scorers so to speak. More women than men take the test but the absolute number of men who get an 800 math score is about double the number of that of women."

Interesting. Yet, it seems that men still write most of the "important" books. "My favorite book of 2011 was Homesickness: An American History by Susan J. Matt." How often does Steve refer to a book by a woman? Are times changing? Are women hitting their stride? Or do women still defer to men, like the Bronte sisters to their undistinguished brother?

7/8/13, 4:14 PM

Anonymous Piper said...

Writing was also added to give scorers a chance to add points for race and/or leftism. Check out some actual SAT writing prompts. Note how they beg the writer to step on an ideological banana peel, while also admitting first-person signalling of favored backgrfounds.

7/8/13, 5:04 PM

Blogger sunbeam said...

"One of the very few positive traits not correlated with IQ is musical rhythm—which is a reason high IQ rock stars like Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend, and David Bowie tell Drummer Jokes. "

What are the others? Reading the HBD stuff is depressing to me. I read the entirety of what you just posted, but it is very hard sometimes to stomach a lot of the implications of this material.

I mean reading this, it's like you meet the average guy on the street and have to think "You will never be good at anything, ever."

It's be nice to see a list of positive things that aren't correlated to higher IQ.

7/8/13, 5:06 PM

Anonymous John D said...

Steve, I have long appreciated your FAQs on Race and IQ. Have borrowed heavily from them when debating the topics on various forums. Your FAQ on race has been particularly useful in refuting foolish "Race is a social construct." blather, so thanks for those.

7/8/13, 6:05 PM

Anonymous Education Realist said...

"I mean reading this, it's like you meet the average guy on the street and have to think "You will never be good at anything, ever.""

Anecdata: I offer up my father, age 78: IQ of 95, excellent mechanic, encyclopedic knowledge of aircraft, fantastic improvisational cook and musician, conversationally fluent in any language you can think of after 3 days among the natives. No abstract capability at all. (I wrote about him earlier, here, just to show I didn't invent him: http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/acquiring-content-knowledge-without-hirschs-help/ (second paragraph only))

We'd just heard about the Asiana flight and I was reading the first witness account, saying that the tail had fallen off and then the plane had crashed.

"Naw," said dad, "It's SFO. The pilot came in too low, hit the sea wall, knocked off the tail. Check the debris when the photos come out--you'll see it strewn all over the tarmac. Betcha anything he tried to abort."

This was an hour after the crash, within the next few hours a number of aviation experts showed up in comments sections and quotes saying the same thing.

And, for that matter, he had two kids with IQs over 125 (mine over 145), another two with IQs north of 100. That's an outlier situation, but it happens.


The problem, of course, is that we are wiping out the gainful employment for people like my father. We're spending tons of time in school trying to educate them using abstractions and forcing critical thinking and literature analysis down their throats, rather than teach them interesting content and give them meaningful jobs after high school.

7/8/13, 6:24 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

" Piper said.."
And Piper said it brilliantly. I took the SAT way before the written component. The prompts he linked to are so obviously steering the student toward the "right" answer, and the right kind of student will catch the cue. The students who had the right kind of teachers have such a big advantage, having been inculcated with The Narrative.

7/8/13, 6:52 PM

Blogger Aaron Gross said...

Re Usenet: This isn't a FAQ in the Usenet sense; it's a dialogue. These so-called FAQs seem to have arisen with the death of Usenet.

You seem inconsistent on the "IQ measures intelligence" thing. You acknowledge that maybe "some of the predictive power of IQ comes not from intelligence itself" (e.g. conscientiousness), but then you say that IQ "sort of" describes someone's intelligence. But if the only way to tell if a particular measurement describes a property is through prediction ("external validation"), then IQ tests also "describe" conscientiousness.

Some critics have said that they have nothing against IQ tests, as long as you don't call them intelligence tests. I think there's something to that. The tests measure some vaguely defined property called "intelligence," along with other vaguely defined or undefined things. I think research on biological correlates of g might be a way out of that, but it's nowhere near that stage yet.

Some minor points. "That's what you call a decent sample size." Sample size is rarely an issue with these studies. The question is how representative the sample is.

Typo: I think you meant that rhythm is negatively correlated with IQ, not uncorrelated. Otherwise, no Drummer Jokes, right?

7/8/13, 9:15 PM

Blogger Aaron Gross said...

[T]he truth is that I found learning enough about psychometrics in the 1990s to be able to write non-stupidly on the subject to be hard work. I noticed early in my writing career that writing X number of words on IQ was more mentally exhausting than writing X number of words on almost any other subject.

Seems to me the real IQ test is writing correctly about heritability. Rule of thumb: If you think you understand heritability, you don't.

7/8/13, 9:30 PM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

Right, writing accurately and readably about the heritability of IQ is very hard.

7/8/13, 9:32 PM

Blogger Aaron Gross said...

Or heritability of anything. It's no harder to understand/describe heritability of IQ than heritability of height. Both are very hard if not impossible to understand. People who should know better, like Razib Khan and (if he was quoted correctly) Charles Murray have said outrageously wrong things about heritability.

The philosopher Ned Block put it best: "Heritability is a lousy scientific concept." But it's not meaningless, and it's the best concept we've got for now.

7/8/13, 11:11 PM

Anonymous Maximo Macaroni said...

If IQ predicts nothing, why are people still worried about the effects of lead on the IQ of children?

7/9/13, 5:37 AM

Blogger Eric Rasmusen said...

Perhaps you or one of your readers should start "FAQipedia", to parallel Wikipedia. I'm serious. They'd both be good, each in their own way. Wikipedia's organizational style could be exactly imitated. Or, more simply, Wikipedia could add a FAQ section to each article.

One thing about the FAQ format that is good is that it makes addressing myths and misconceptions easier. In a Wikipedia or other article, it's awkward to insert a one-sentence paragraph saying, "Contrary to what many believe, poisonous mushrooms do not tarnish a silver spoon."


7/9/13, 7:37 AM

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

Eric Rasmusen writes:

"One thing about the FAQ format that is good is that it makes addressing myths and misconceptions easier. In a Wikipedia or other article, it's awkward to insert a one-sentence paragraph saying, "Contrary to what many believe, poisonous mushrooms do not tarnish a silver spoon."

Right. It makes the writing style choppy and it may well be that readers miss the point of many of these random interpolations. With an FAQ, readers can skip over what strike them as stupid questions or say, "Yeah, I was always kind of wondering that ..."

7/9/13, 10:27 AM

Anonymous Cail Corishev said...

Perhaps you or one of your readers should start "FAQipedia"

Faqs.org. Doesn't have the inter-linkage that put WikiPedia on the map, though.

7/9/13, 1:40 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Somehow the lack of efficacy of IQ tests just doesn't penetrate high stakes measurement of persons such as that basic to efficacious placements in the military and in national security positions. Beria, reportedly, used the Raven
Advanced Progressive Matrices, to assess applicants for his KGB operation, even if use of such tests was illegal for anyone other than the chief honcho of the police state! The use of IQ testing by the American military has been highly regarded all over the world in placement challenges in military situations, in industry, and so forth. Leftist
verbal engineers from cafe society are recurrently disvoering that intelligence is a fraud.

7/9/13, 9:58 PM

Anonymous cthulhu said...

Favorite drummer joke:
Q: How does the roadie tell that the drum riser is level?
A: The drool comes out of both sides of the drummer's mouth.

7/10/13, 10:01 PM

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