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.
d2_e4 - Then I humbly suggest that everyone in this thread is talking past each other.
Someone's level of intelligence is very important in life. IQ is at best a crude measure determined by imperfect tests. If you want to say it's close enough, then fine. But the tests don't come close to measuring everything that goes into being "smart".
The test is bad at capturing outliers (low IQ person with other exceptional talents say perfect hear, or viceversa) but for groups that effect very rapidly disappears.
If 1000 people have a median IQ of 115 and other 1000 people have 99 (say employees of two different companies) , you can be approx as certain as the fact the sun will rise tomorrow, that one company objectively has smarter employees than the other under any semantical sense of the word intelligence
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And going with correlates , you will be able to make predictions about group outcomes of the two groups without knowing literally anything else about them. Marriage rates, life expectancy and so on, with very high probability
Someone's level of intelligence is very important in life. IQ is at best a crude measure determined by imperfect tests. If you want to say it's close enough, then fine. But the tests don't come close to measuring everything that goes into being "smart".
Nobody said it measured everything. We are saying it doesn't measure nothing.
I think that's being rather generous. I humbly suggest that a number of posters ITT are being rather circumspect about their real objections to IQ testing, therefore their arguments are coming across as a vague and malformed semantic objection to calling what IQ tests measure "intelligence".
I guess I would.... Anecdotally, I just don't know of people getting tested or testing their kids for it.
The summer after elementary school, I took the SAT to qualify for a summer program. I was 12 and hadn’t yet taken pre-algebra. I’d never taken a test like it before and I had no preparation. When my score came back significantly higher than the state average for 12th graders who also took the test, my parents took me for IQ testing. I took the Wechsler scale, and it was grueling. After that they skipped me several grades and I took college courses over the summers.
Many if not most of the other kids in those places had similar experiences. Parents go nuts pretty often when they think their kid might be “gifted”.
They also tested us regularly at the institutions for… I don’t even know what. Surveys and questionnaires with odd questions.
Some of these kids went on to do amazing things. Some of them didn’t. When everything comes easy to you at an early age, you don’t develop a good work ethic or much discipline unless it’s specifically reinforced in you by adults who don’t allow you to skate by. Complacency is more commonplace than one might think in “high iq” places.
As far as the SAT went in highschool, I just took it every time it was offered until I graduated bc each time score would go up. Never understood why everyone didn’t do this. It was like $50 to take the test. Best prep ever.
Never got the perfect score. Knew many who did though.
Can you take the PSAT if you already take the SAT as a Freshman? People take the PSAT as juniors to maximize their chances of being National Merit. I never thought about taking the SAT before that.
Can you take the PSAT if you already take the SAT as a Freshman? People take the PSAT as juniors to maximize their chances of being National Merit. I never thought about taking the SAT before that.
Yes. I took the SAT several times before the PSAT, and was a national merit scholar. Not sure if it’s changed since 20 years ago.
I think that's being rather generous. I humbly suggest that a number of posters ITT are being rather circumspect about their real objections to IQ testing, therefore their arguments are coming across as a vague and malformed semantic objection to calling what IQ tests measure "intelligence".
You could also credibly accuse the IQ fanboys of not being upfront about their motivations.
How are we measuring intelligence then, guys? If you don't like IQ, presumably you have a different measure? Or are we just not measuring it at all, because it's unfair that some people are smarter than others?
IQ tests are the best measure we have for measuring general intelligence (assuming the general intelligence theory is valid in the first place). They have a lot of uses and are least prone to error in cases where causality isn't at question, the more apples-to-apples the comparisons are, etc.
Whether that measure is good enough for all purposes in all contexts to make direct comparisons between all people and populations is an entirely other question. It would be a fatal leap in both logic and faith to assume the answer is yes.
At a macro level, scores can depend on things like whether the test takers natively speak the language it's administered in; at an individual level, scores vary depending on whether you had a good breakfast or have gone through a recent trauma. Obviously IQ tests are tests so it's impossible to avoid the fact that it's measuring people's test-taking abilities as much as anything else. Not all of these are inherent problems: so having your dad die or eating too much sweets on an empty stomach temporarily makes you dumber, that's not an inherent contradiction or anything. But it's VERY EASY to imagine how it would lead to misleading conclusions in a lot of cases, especially the further removed you get from the psychometric context.
The basic statistical methods used in scoring and analyzing IQ (normalizing the distribution, re-curving it every x number of years, curving it based on age, etc) are subject to any number of assumptions and irregularities that psychometricians would argue make sense for their purposes but would be the entirely wrong way to analyze the data in any other number of contexts.
Speaking of context, this thread is plucked out of from some other thread so I'm not entirely sure what the context is or what IQ tests are being used to prove, but based on the graphs on the first page, I'm sensing they're being used to make a whole host of apples-to-oranges comparisons which beg a great deal of questions about causality, etc.
IQ tests are the best measure we have for measuring general intelligence (assuming the general intelligence theory is valid in the first place). They have a lot of uses and are least prone to error in cases where causality isn't at question, the more apples-to-apples the comparisons are, etc.
Whether that measure is good enough for all purposes in all contexts to make direct comparisons between all people and populations is an entirely other question. It would be a fatal leap in both logic and fa
Sure, I agree with all of this. Good post. The limitations of IQ testing are articulated better in this post than elsewhere in the thread, IMO.
FYI, topic started because I called Vance dumb (mostly just trolling, I have never actually heard him speak), Luciom pointed out that he did law or whatever at Yale so he must be smart, and we went from there.
As far as this discussion goes, I guess I am one of the "IQ fanboys" and I assure you I have no ulterior motives for my position, and I venture that neither does eda.
I have a main reason to discuss group IQ.
That is group outcomes. Everytime someone claims a group is worse off AND THEN uses that as proof some sort of violence is operating against that group and that is the reason for the worse outcome, if we have a measurable trait that explains the outcome gap, it helps denying the argument that systemic violence is happening against that group
You could also credibly accuse the IQ fanboys of not being upfront about their motivations.
There is nothing unusual about the phenomenon that is playing out in this thread.
At a very general level, people who do well on things like IQ tests, the SAT, the LSAT, etc., tend to place more value on the sort of intelligence that facilitates strong performance on those sorts of tests. (My son does very well on standardized tests but is an indifferent student. As between test scores and grades, guess which metric he thinks is more predictive of future success?) Creative types tend to place more value on creative intelligence. Incredibly hard workers tend to place more value on hard work. I am not describing an iron rule, of course, and these categories overlap significantly, but I think this is directionally correct.
Ego is a real thing.
LOL. It sounds like you participated in what was known in the 1980s as the Duke Talent Search. I did the same thing. It was certainly eye opening to realize how poorly the general population performed on the SAT.
There is nothing unusual about the phenomenon that is playing out in this thread.
At a very general level, people who do well on things like IQ tests, the SAT, the LSAT, etc., tend to place more value on the sort of intelligence that facilitates strong performance on those sorts of tests. (My son does very well on standardized tests but is an indifferent student. As between test scores and grades, guess which metric he thinks is more predictive of future success?) Creative types tend to plac
Tbh, I don't even know if I place that much value on it. I got roped in because some people were literally saying "LOL IQ" and "IQ is not a quantifiable metric" like it's not a real thing, which I thought was ridiculous.
@Rococo, Yeah, I had no idea what was happening. I already knew I didn’t want to do what the adults had planned for me; I wanted to do music and art. What was the point in it all…
If 1000 people have a median IQ of 115 and other 1000 people have 99 (say employees of two different companies) , you can be approx as certain as the fact the sun will rise tomorrow, that one company objectively has smarter employees than the other under any semantical sense of the word intelligence
What if one company was full of software coders and the other was an agricultural company that mainly employed first-generation Americans that had no cultural background that helped with the first test? Or maybe they were people that new everything there was about building a house in South Dakota but had dropped out of school after 6th grade to go work for their father?
What if one company was full of software coders and the other was an agricultural company that mainly employed first-generation Americans that had no cultural background that helped with the first test? Or maybe they were people that new everything there was about building a house in South Dakota but had dropped out of school after 6th grade to go work for their father?
Language barriers aside, people who do manual labour generally have lower analytical reasoning skills than people who write software, not least because it is a skill that is required for writing software but not for doing manual labour. Is this controversial?
I suspect if you administered a test of physical strength or manual dexterity to both of your groups, the results would be as one would expect. What is this intended to demonstrate?
Tbh, I don't even know if I place that much value on it. I got roped in because some people were literally saying "LOL IQ" and "IQ is not a quantifiable metric" like it's not a real thing, which I thought was ridiculous.
I only remember a couple of people saying LOL IQ. Most people were simply questioning the accuracy of IQ tests as a measure of innate general intelligence. Like the SAT, the MCAT, and a lot of other standardized tests, IQ tests obviously measure something that we can call a type of intelligence (or an ability related to intelligence).
I only remember a couple of people saying LOL IQ. Most people were simply questioning the accuracy of IQ tests as a measure of innate general intelligence. Like the SAT, the MCAT, and a lot of other standardized tests, IQ tests obviously measure something that we can call a type of intelligence (or an ability related to intelligence).
That came after. I got roped in before those more nuanced views came in, during the "LOL IQ" epoch. And, you know the story, now, every time I try and get out, they pull me back in.
@Rococo, Yeah, I had no idea what was happening. I already knew I didn’t want to do what the adults had planned for me; I wanted to do music and art. What was the point in it all…
It is incredibly seductive for parents to believe that Little Lord ****pants (or Little Lady ****pants) is a genius. But most of us just turn out to be regular ole smart people.
In my entire life, I have never met anyone who I would feel comfortable calling a genius. Admittedly, I set the bar for genius quite high, so that may be part of the explanation.
