[jlawson]

You don't need to "define" it in some philosophical sense to use it.

Compare "mass". What is mass? Can you really define it? You can say what it does, but what "is" it? Well, nobody can define it, except in terms of the things that it does. Because those are all we see of it. We can measure it, we see those measurements let us predict other outcomes. So we can use our knowledge of mass in practical, predictive ways to build things and accomplish things. Physicists still don't know what it "is" and they don't have to.

Now intelligence. You can measure it. The measurements stay stable on a given person over time and between tests. The measurements predict a wide variety of outcomes - both of a large life scale (income, longevity, criminality, etc) and on an individual task scale (this person can learn X in Y time). It's the most solid, repeatable, predictive result in all of psychometrics - more than personality traits or anything else we can measure about the mind. but what "is" it? It's the thing that predicts all those outcomes. No practical use for it requires that it be anything else.

The whole "what is intelligence anyway" thing is a giant red herring; it's a specific case of a general-purpose counterargument that can be used to attack literally any statement about anything by demanding endlessly more rigorous definitions of the terms involved.

[teilo]

I never claimed that intelligence is nothing. I said that the IQ measurement is itself not worth much except as a general guide in fairly broad ranges.

Intelligence is certainly something. It is relevant. But it is not precise, and is useful, as I said, only in the broadest strokes. And like all psychometrics, the manner in which it is measured is itself not stable.

But comparing intelligence to mass or any other physical measurement is a non sequitur. Mass is precisely measurable with perfectly repeatable results, and has perfectly repeatable interactions.

[jlawson]

I think it's worth separating out different tasks in terms of how g-loaded they are (that is to say how much they require intelligence).

General life success is g-loaded but not to an extreme degree. As many have noted, it's certainly possible to have success without great intelligence by working around one's limitations and finding other strengths.

But consider other tasks like "invent a new theorem in particle physics and get it published in a top journal" or "improve a mature database/load-balancing system to save a million dollars a year for a large computing company". These are extremely g-loaded tasks. Intelligence, as measured by IQ, is an absolute requirement to be able to do these things at all in my opinion. My sense is I don't think anyone could ever do such things without scoring 120+ IQ at absolute minimum and probably much more, though I'd be happy to hear counterexamples.

That's an example I'd say where intelligence as a concept and measure is useful in narrow strokes: When you need such a task to be done and done well, you can use intelligence measures to filter who does it (the same way you'd use stature to filter who you put on your basketball team).

In any case, however useful intelligence is, it's the most useful of all psychometric measures. Everything else is worse. That makes it not a great tool necessarily, but the most generally important among the tools we have.

[teilo]

I can agree with that.

[toasterlovin]

> I said that the IQ measurement is itself not worth much except as a general guide in fairly broad ranges.

IQ predicts about 30% of a whole host of life outcomes (mostly related to job performance, educational attainment, earnings, etc.). That might not seem like a whole lot, but it's the best single predictor of life outcomes that exists, aside from looking at a person's parents and siblings.

[pessimizer]

But IQ itself is predicted by parental earnings and parental educational attainment (and, IIRC, mostly by the sheer volume of reading for pleasure during childhood.)

There's a chicken/egg thing here that I think is a cart/horse thing.

[colemannugent]

Education doesn't have as much effect as you might think. It seems that nutrition has a very significant effect on IQ: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886990...

[toasterlovin]

It has roughly 30% predictive power after controlling for the most obvious confounding factors (like the ones you mention).

[lellotope]

As someone who does research in this area, broadly defined, I think you're on to something, but I also think there are some misleading things about this article (which I nevertheless think is interesting) and caveats to what you're saying.

Lots of thoughts:

1. Intelligence is a broad construct. It is by definition, and it is not the only cognitive construct. It does have a lot of utility for certain purposes though, such as in identifying pervasive neurological disease.

As others are noting, this is relevant to the article in that we tend to focus on extremes when making these kinds of comparisons, when the full spectrum is really what's important sometimes. We tend to fixate on whether someone went to some prestigious university or less prestigious university, or whether our incomes are in the upper middle class or upper class, but in the sense of outcomes, compared to all outcomes, these can be relatively minor distinctions and hard to predict.

2. There are other variables that are relevant, like conscientiousness, ruthlessness, and so forth. This is certainly true.

3. There are still other variables that have nothing to do with the individuals involved though. The elephant in the room are societal and other random factors that prevent any individual attribute from mattering as much as they could. The article starts out by dismissing prediction among females out of hand because of societal limitations, which is reasonable. But there are lots of other variables involved, random and nonrandom societal and environmental forces at play. The hidden story is that there are limits to predicting outcomes at all from the individual at hand, meaning that other variables in the environment are working.

4. Measurement of intelligence is fuzzy and imperfect as you're alluding to. It's stochastically imprecise, in the sense that giving the same test twice, or two different tests, will give you somewhat different answers. But it's also imperfect in that the thing it's measuring isn't really what we probably want to measure in an ideal case. Even if the tests were giving the same answer all the time, it wouldn't really be intelligence in the way we want to talk about intelligence.

5. I'm not sure that we really want cognitive functioning measures to be perfectly stable, because I don't think cognitive functioning is actually perfectly stable. It probably varies across the day, for example.

6. Physical measurements are certainly more precise. But the objects systemically are much less complex. It's easier to talk about measuring the mass of a cubic meter of oxygen than it is to talk about measuring climatological variables; something analogous is in play with things like intelligence.

Also, even physical measurements at a certain level become fuzzy and highly interdependent. Measuring mass "precisely" depends on your scale and other variables.

[philipkglass]

You can quantify mass identically for humans, for other animals, and for inanimate objects. Intelligence-as-measured-by-IQ-tests apparently only works for humans. I would like to see intelligence measurement procedures that work alike for corvids, humans, and digital computing systems. I don't know if they exist. It appears that ordinary IQ tests cannot be applied that way.

My main grievance with IQ as "general" intelligence is its human parochialism. It does not generalize much at all. "The most solid, repeatable, predictive result in all of psychometrics" sounds like very faint praise to someone with a background in the natural sciences.

[2918273756663]

> I would like to see intelligence measurement procedures that work alike for corvids, humans, and digital computing systems. I don't know if they exist.

Of course these objective psychometrics exist, but it's usually only referenced in fields like information sciences, xenology, or speculative futures studies. The obvious reason is because IQ or g factor is only relevant as a barrier to entry in human societies for eliminating potential revolutionary competition against the higher incumbent echelons, pseudoscientific justification of persecution and political subsidy gerrymandering by fracturing demographics into enclaves of special interests to play off each other, or simply as a cultural shibboleth to identify peers for collusion and enemies for swindling.

To start with, there's metrics like the encephalization quotient which are still empirically based (read: gimmicks to support a pre-defined conclusion) curve fitting of anthropocentric expectations of how a genre of organisms should be judged relative to how humans perceive themselves in ability. Yes it's an improvement from IQ or g because it simplifies what was a constantly changing, completely opaque, and wholly arbitrary metric into something that at least measures one physically real property, namely brain volume. But I guess you could say the same about things like phrenology or any other quackery.

There's further refinements to metrics like the sentience quotient based on the density of computational matter or surface area of the I/O boundary of an organism against its environment. Even metrics like this still have incredible assumptions on the nature of intelligence as if we should prioritize the bandwidth or latency of interconnect, I/O, or memory among many other considerations such as algorithmic efficiency -- a whole other can of worms because that means you now need to define the relevant sources and sinks of information and that mapping essentially implies the "purpose of life" which is still a tricky thing to classify. Maybe it's the ability to minimize the time required to maximize the diffusion of an energy gradient? It's unclear.

And that's pretty much the crux of all this that has been stated before on this site[0]: "Metrics, even if not quantified, are always goal-oriented in providing an explanation or use."

Sometimes that use could be nepotism, mental masturbation to relieve some angst brought on by realizing a life wasted in pursuing nonsense like psychiatry, or maybe it's just to survive when the only source of funding demands you to tailor a patch of woven bullshit to mend the emperor's increasingly tattered clothes.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18017451

[dang]

Would you please stop creating accounts for every comment or two you post? This is in the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it, for reasons explained at length here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[kiliantics]

You're not measuring; "intelligence". You're measuring someone's ability to perform well in a very contrived test. A test that no one could even take without a very specific education experience.

So in that context, I'm sure the results are robust. But I don't think that means much

[adwn]

> You're not measuring; "intelligence". You're measuring someone's ability to perform well in a very contrived test. A test that no one could even take without a very specific education experience.

You're not measuring; "mass". You're measuring an object's ability to attract other objects in a very contrived test. A test that no object would even undergo outside a very specific physics experiment.

[kiliantics]

The difference being that an object's "mass" has very broad implications for all the theories that incorporate the notion of an object's "mass", all of which have been tested to high precision. (In tests that range from being contrived to not at all.) You can't say this for "intelligence" in anywhere close to the same way.

But it seems more HNers are dead set on believing that there is a genetic factor that can make certain people more "superior" than others, to justify existing social hierarchy.

[adwn]

Does it also bother you that tall people are statistically more successful basketball players? Or that wiry people are statistically better marathon runners? If no, then why does it bother you that intelligent people are statistically more successful in positions that require complex mental work?

The intelligence trait is real, not imaginary. Sure, it's a lot more complex than a simple, well-defined concept like mass. But then again, that applies to everything related to the human mind.

> [...] to justify existing social hierarchy.

What a weird attitude... Would you prefer that someone's position in the social hierarchy is even more strongly determined by their parents position or money? As was the case in medieval Europe?