IQ (moved subtopic)
^^Hey Luciom, can you remind me again how smart JD Vance is? Above, same, or below the average MAGA chode?
I have no problem with schools using affirmative action to help people like Vance with humble backgrounds.... but maybe not in law school where these idiots start becoming dangerous. And they got to find smarter people then Vance or the whole thing just looks ridiculous and all you're doing is de-valuing your own department.
Testing for something implies that you are gauging it directly, not that it's an incidental inference you might be able to draw given the results if you so desire. IQ tests don't "test for" delayed gratification any more than they test for ability to play chess, those are just other things that happen to be correlated with IQ (assuming the delayed gratification correlation as given, I have no idea if it's true or not).
Bummer. Do you think it'd be worth it to try to explain it again using other terms and examples, or should I just let it ride?
My knowledge of both stats and poker theory is pretty poor, but I think if I re-read it 2 or 3 times, I could probably ask a handful of questions and understand the whole thing start to finish. But I'm too lazy to, so let it ride. If I'm feeling frisky I'll go back and re-read it and PM you with the parts I'm missing.
My knowledge of both stats and poker theory is pretty poor, but I think if I re-read it 2 or 3 times, I could probably ask a handful of questions and understand the whole thing start to finish. But I'm too lazy to, so let it ride. If I'm feeling frisky I'll go back and re-read it and PM you with the parts I'm missing.
If it helps, you can think of the difference between earning money from being an investment banker (where a small number of astronomically profitable investments makes up for a large number of losing investments) versus investing in an index fund (where you make a small amount of money from very reliable stocks). You can normalize both these distributions and turn them into a bell curve, but comparing outcomes on different parts of the curve are going to be way out of whack.
This is the less important concept to understand for the purposes of this conversation because it’s not exactly like there’s one black guy out there hogging all of the intelligence or whatever.
For the college admission example, you can instead imagine that there’s a test with 1000 questions. The median amount of questions people get correct is 500 out or 1000, (ie: 50% get below 500), 10% of the takers get between 500-549 correct and 30% of the population gets between 550-555.
Let’s say a study is run that demonstrates that drinking caffeine before a test improves your performance on the test by an average of 6 questions. That’s a very small difference out of 1000. I mean, the difference between getting almost FIFTY more questions correct (500 vs 549) is only a difference of 4 “IQ” points (100 vs 104) so clearly a difference of getting 6 more questions correct is practically nothing. A rounding error, a headline might say just looking at the data one certain way.
But the difference between getting 549 vs 555 questions correct makes for a difference in IQ of 16 points (120 vs 104).
This is obviously an extreme example, but the point is that the way that IQ is weighted can actually make it LESS useful for determining “how much smarter is someone than someone else” than just looking at the results. Putting different weights or controls on the data might make it MORE useful than the raw scores. It takes an actual understanding of statistics that…well *I I* certainly don’t have, to say nothing of your typical twitter troll bandying about IQ stats.
big if!
you talk like testing for IQ = testing for income and time preferences, but no receipts to back it up.
even with income/wealth there's no great correlation. IQ explains less than 15% of variations in income. most all of that is found in the sub-80 IQ bracket for obvious reasons. if you exclude that cohort it'd likely fall to <5%, just eyeballing the distribution. but it's not the obvious 1:1 linear phenomenon you're constantly alluding to in this thread.
[quote=d2_e4]Why not, if they got better at whatever metric you are using to gauge their intelligence in the intervening period? You seem to want intelligence to be this mythical unadulterated measure, pure as the driven snow, chiseled in stone the day we are born and remaining untouched until the day we die. I would posit that such a measure does not exist, no matter how you attempt to define it. So, assuming we agree on that, the only thing we disagree on is what to call the thing we're actually measuring, and possibly how best to measure it.[/quote]
you previously defined intelligence as roughly "proficiency in analytical reasoning and critical thinking, the faculty for recognising common logical fallacies, and the ability and desire to arrive at conclusions through logic rather than emotion or superstition."
IQ tests are toy problems that (as trolly mentioned) can be studied/practiced to improve your score. after studying these, have you improved your ability to apply logic over emotion/superstition generally and avoid logical fallacies across most facets of life, or have you merely improved in the toy domain? if it's more the latter, it limits the info value of IQ scores. some people are predisposed to perform very well on these tests, namely those steeped in academia or doing math olympiad in their free time
one story that comes to mind is a professor asking students whether they'd take a bet on a true 50/50 coin flip (coin is genuine, you can flip it and observe the result) for $10 that pays out $25 heads / $0 tails. something like 80% of the class said they would not. does this indicate low intelligence in your view?
Risk aversion and patience correlate with high IQ (at the population level)
Correlation of income and IQ is 0.4 from a recent swedish study.
And yes it's monotone
According to this most recent paper it stops only at around 130-135 of IQ
Tried to edit my post to add a clarifying point about using percentiles instead of quotient because numbers range from misleading to outright wrong, but the central point stands (or would arguably be even clearer if I had the requisite expertise to precisely explain the difference in outcomes).
you previously defined intelligence as roughly "proficiency in analytical reasoning and critical thinking, the faculty for recognising common logical fallacies, and the ability and desire to arrive at conclusions through logic rather than emotion or superstition."
IQ tests are toy problems that (as trolly mentioned) can be studied/practiced to improve your score. after studying these, have you improved your ability to apply logic over emotion/superstition generally and avoid logical fallacies ac
Improving a skill necessarily means improving it in general. If your claim is that you can improve your IQ test score by not really improving these skills, but just "faking it" by learning how to solve the very narrow range of the types of problems that the test, I accept that could be a problem. I'm sure it's a problem that the people who designed the test have considered and attempted to mitigate by structuring the questions in a certain way, but I really don't know. I don't even know what types of questions are asked on a real IQ test, I'm just assuming they're similar to the questions I've seen on the online ones.
I'd ask though, is this really problem that exists in real life, or one that has been invented to discredit the methodology? What's the benefit to someone of taking the test multiple times and/or studying for it? Beyond bragging rights, is your IQ score actually used by anyone anywhere in any situation that matters? And if we're saying that it's a problem when comparing scores between different groups, then why? Isn't it a problem that affects all groups uniformly?
one story that comes to mind is a professor asking students whether they'd take a bet on a true 50/50 coin flip (coin is genuine, you can flip it and observe the result) for $10 that pays out $25 heads / $0 tails. something like 80% of the class said they would not. does this indicate low intelligence in your view?
Depends. If you divorce the question from whether the student would personally do it (there might be any number of reasons why they personally might not want to gamble, or bet above a certain amount, or take on a certain amount of variance), and just ask them if this is a good bet in a vacuum, and they still say no, then yes, I'd probably say this is an indicator of poor analytical skills.
Examples of reasons that don't indicate low(er) intelligence:
- I don't have $10
- I don't want to risk $10
- I don't gamble
Examples of reasons that indicate low(er) intelligence:
- Tails is more lucky for me
- I want to choose before each flip
- The house always wins
- Any reason related to gambler's fallacy, e.g. if it comes in heads for the guy before me then I'm a dog on my flip etc.
- Not being able to intuitively see that it's a +EV bet, even without explicitly having been taught what EV is or how to calculate it (which is what I suspect you were driving at)
"Is IQ ever useful", militaries in the most advanced countries in the world use it to filter people
Correlation of income and IQ is 0.4 from a recent swedish study.
And yes it's monotone
According to this most recent paper it stops only at around 130-135 of IQ
the correlation to wealth of parents is .99 though
I don't think it's 0.99 lol.
But anyway wealth is correlated to income which is correlated with IQ, IE on average if you inherit money you are more intelligent than average because your parents were.
Money passing through the generations just amplify existing genetical gaps, it's not random.
It's Lamarckian though, not Darwinian, so it works much faster.
Yeah but they aren't reported in the IQ test results when we talk about IQ tests, are they?
The 2023 paper above uses the cognitive ability test taken by swedish military conscripts (in the past, they abolished conscription by now), and it lists basically all the relevant literature on the topic (including IQ vs other more comprehensive tests and so on) in the very long part of the paper before the actual discussion of their results.
I don't think it's 0.99 lol.
But anyway wealth is correlated to income which is correlated with IQ, IE on average if you inherit money you are more intelligent than average because your parents were.
Money passing through the generations just amplify existing genetical gaps, it's not random.
It's Lamarckian though, not Darwinian, so it works much faster.
yeah i was obviously speaking rhetorically but there's been a lot of studies things like where they track income of graduates of Ohio State who were accepted into an Ivy and instead chose Ohio State for weird reasons etc, height, race, gender, etc
all that stuff has been studied, and the one thing that trumps everything is the income of the parents
yes there's a lot of stuff where you can argue that it's not simply a caste society - that wealthier families are more likely to stress education, be able to support their children financially (so they can take the unpaid internship or pursue an advanced degree or get a loan to start a company), and that smart and ambitious people have smart and ambitious children
but even accounting for all of that - wealth is by far the greatest common denominator - you find me a billionaire and i'll show you his parents are millionaires and his grandfather was a high income engineer/doctor etc
the instances of the child of a farm hand or mechanic growing up to become somebody is a myth perpetuated by lies, exaggerations, and massive over reporting of outliers
even some famously self made men are not self made in the slightest but came from very priviledged backgrounds
common examples of self made people such as gates, zuck, musk, buffet, bezos, etc may not have grown up children of billionaires but did grow up the children of millionaires
There's probably a correlation, since people with strong analytical reasoning skills will be better at everything that uses those skills, but if your goal was to test for how well someone does in the areas above, I'm sure you could design a much more reliable test for that.
Nah. Biological systems in general are extremely noisy. You really cant do much better than IQ to create a marker for aptitude in a wide range of cognitive tasks for **** sapiens. Like I said, there has actually been A LOT of study on this topic, and the results consistently indicate this to be the case.
However, for political reasons common people such as you and I are intentionally gaslighted into thinking this isn't the case, because our elite class is uncomfortable talking about IQ.
+1
from luciom's paper
Family background may also impact occupational success net of education (Torche, 2011, 2018; Falcon and Bataille, 2018; Oh and Kim, 2020). Laurison and Friedman (2016) and Friedman and Laurison (2020) show that individuals with a higher class background obtain higher wages than those from a lower class background, keeping their educational level constant. Bernardi and Gil-Hernández (2021) find that this direct effect of social origin is stronger among those with higher levels of education. One mechanism through which socio-economic background may impact occupational success net of education is the cultural capital that individuals gain from home (Bourdieu, 1984). Those from privileged backgrounds are thought to be more likely to occupy privileged positions themselves because their cultural backgrounds provide a leg up in the educational system and subsequently the labour market (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1979; Lareau, 2011). The acquisition of high-status positions would require mastering the right tastes, behaviours, and customs. Such subtle and elaborate displays of sophistication are naturally taught during upbringing in some families. Cultural capital might thus push children from higher social classes into steeper career trajectories (Lamont, 1994). Cultural tastes may also indirectly affect careers through the ability to build more extensive networks to important others (Lizardo, 2006).
can you think of a more convoluted, inaccurate way of saying "rich kids get good gigs because their parents are rich with rich networks"?
Correlation of income and IQ is 0.4 from a recent swedish study.
And yes it's monotone
According to this most recent paper it stops only at around 130-135 of IQ
a study of swedish military men taking something other than an IQ test. bravo
also from the paper:
Discussion
Precisely in the part of the wage distribution where cognitive ability can make the biggest difference, its right tail, cognitive ability ceases to play any role. Cognitive ability plateaus around €60,000 at under a standard deviation above the mean. In terms of occupational prestige, it plateaus at a similar level above a job prestige of 70: The differences in the prestige between accountants, doctors, lawyers, professors, judges, and members of parliament are unrelated to their cognitive abilities.
#monotonicity
also they're using spearmans rank and even then p=0.4 implies only ~15% of variance in wage ranks is explained by ability ranks, where "ability" here <> IQ
Well this is just an epistemic question then. If we find that IQ scores are highly correlated with the proposed g-factor, to the point of almost being a 1:1 correlation, you would basically be denying science and would have to come up with some alternative explanation as to why IQ has reproducibly, over time, been correlated with extreme skills in the fields that I listed before, and why low scores are so highly correlated with lack of intelligence to the point of lacking certain things like bei
late to the party but what is this
"if we find that IQ scores are highly correlated with the proposed g-factor..."
what do you propose g-factor is based on if not IQ-like tests?
i feel like i'm being punked when someone's gotcha is "well if you don't like IQ tests, how do you explain G FACTOR and the close correlation between the two?!"
thread seems ripe for horseshoe bell curve IQ memes with ardent IQ defenders in the middle
