[runarberg]

> IQ is the most replicated and reliable measure in all of psychometrics

This is not a high barrier to pass. Psychometrics is a field notorious for employing biased and non-existing constructs.

Just because it is well studied, doesn’t make it real. N-rays were at one point one of the most studied rays in physics. It didn’t make measurements using n-rays more reliable. If everyone is repeating the same mistake, it doesn’t erase the mistake.

You know the history of IQ and how countless studies in the past are biased in horrendous ways. It might be well replicated and "reliable", it is still wrong.

[nshepperd]

If it's not such a high barrier to pass then maybe you can make your arguments without appealing to the most easily knocked down nonsense (social priming).

If you want to argue that IQ is "wrong" you need to explain https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8162884 and every other result that has been published relating to it, not just make vague insinuations that IQ is just like social priming (it's not).

[runarberg]

Again (this has been stated several times in this thread). Intelligence tests are useful to detect and diagnose mental disabilities. What we (and Taleb) are questioning is the usefulness of above average IQs.

I don’t know why you are all of a sudden talking about social priming (I’ve never seen it pop up before in this thread), especially since priming is a concept from physio-psychology and computation psychology (that has apparently been borrowed by social psychologists) not psychometrics. I’m not even sure what you mean by social priming (I did a quick browse on wikipedia without success) so you have to inform me.

If you are saying that my claim—that psychometrics is a field filled with pseudoscience—is unsubstantiated, you are right. I did (implicitly) claim that, and I didn’t provide any substantial evidence for my claim. I probably should have, but that is out of the scope of this thread, so I’ll just leave it unsubstantiated. Call me lazy, and you would be correct.

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Edit: To clarify. Priming did come up in a grandparent’s comment. Priming (as my layman understanding goes) is believed to be a neurological effect that increases the efficiency of a search response for similar stimuli presented at short intervals. That is finding a particular pattern gets easier with subsequent trials. Priming effects have been demonstrated in numerous studies in the past two decades. However (as is usually the case in many scientific fields) a hype has arisen around the concept and many scientist are claiming that priming can explain several unrelated psychological constructs. Many of these studies have poor methodology and have never been replicated. Perhaps my parent comment was talking about one of these studies when they mentioned “social priming”.

[nshepperd]

Low level chronic lead exposure doesn't cause a "mental disability". What it does is cause permanent brain damage which subtracts a few IQ points, harming individuals with above average IQ scores just as it harms those with average and below average IQs.

Yes, social priming studies are what cljs-js-eval was referring to originally when they mentioned "priming". Priming itself is generally solid science (eg. the Stroop effect).