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by rsaarelm 5862 days ago
As far as I understood, Stanovich's thesis is that rational thinking skills are more important than raw intelligence, and high-IQ people can have poor rational thinking skills, and a RQ test for rational thinking skills should be used instead.

This is good so far, but the problem is that rational thinking skills are quite teachable, while there still doesn't seem to be much any success in raising IQ with teaching. So it seems that you'd probably still be better off hiring people with high IQ scores, and training them to improve their RQ if necessary rather than just hiring high RQ score people.

Does Stanovich discuss whether IQ scores correlate with how well people learn rationality skills?

1 comments

Not "instead". Stanovich is pretty clear that IQ tests measure something real and useful - no debate about that. The trap he's talking about is that in most occasions people live on auto-pilot, and fail to engage their higher cognitive skills. The frequency with which they do this is largely independent of the IQ.

Unfortunately I don't think there is much study into teaching rationality skills systematically. Scientists tend to be rather methodical about such things, and they'll probably want a working RQ test before attempting to do serious teaching. And as Stanovich says, a good RQ test is doable right now - given enough time and money.