[lkjhdcba]

Nassim Taleb wrote a thorough rebuttal of IQ as a concept, if you can trudge through the math:

https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...

It's also worth noting that no one in the field of neuroscience (or genetics, for that matter) takes IQ seriously. It's solely an abstract toy for some psychologists to play with.

[badestrand]

Real thorough math right there (quotations from your article):

> "[IQ] ends up selecting for exam-takers, paper shufflers, obedient IYIs (intellectuals yet idiots), ill adapted for “real life”."

> "It is at the bottom an immoral measure"

> "If you want to detect how someone fares at a task, say loan sharking, tennis playing, or random matrix theory, make him/her do that task; we don’t need theoretical exams for a real world function by probability-challenged psychologists"

> "Only suckers don’t have that instinct."

This is just a trash article by a bitter science denier. IQ-deniers are for me not much different from anti-vaxxers. Yes, you are free to criticize aspects of the test but there is no denying that people have different thinking speeds, as "immoral" as that fact might be.

[fxtentacle]

I think the article is quite correct with its statement that pure IQ is meaningless.

If you use your intelligence to learn something useful, that is, well, useful.

But if you just have intelligence and don't utilize it towards a purpose, it is useless, like an unused full battery.

[lkjhdcba]

"there is no denying that people have different thinking speeds" -> "IQ is a real, relevant and construct-valid metric"

What is the IQ needed to draw this implication?

[beautifulfreak]

Why did he write it up so badly? He could make his arguments so much clearer if he just stated them fully. Maybe this piece was meant for math PhDs, not a general audience. To me, it comes across as an attempt to impress the reader with the semblance of authority and knowledge, not to guide the reader through the reasoning. This style of writing is often used to hide bad reasoning, to gloss over weak arguments or deliberately deceive. He could have done a better job.

[Viliam1234]

He wrote it badly, because his goal is to write something controversial, which will remind people of his existence and hopefully increase the books sales. The target audience are people who are already his fans, and will accept uncritically anything he writes.

It is possible to have a reasonable debate about whether intelligence is real, what exactly it means, and what outcomes it correlates with. This is obviously not the way to do it. This is pure clickbait, pretending to be smart math, because pictures with dots and number, plus textbook screenshots.

Some of the things he says make sense. But he exaggerates their importance, and completely strawmans his opposition. "If you want to detect how someone fares at [X], make him/her do that task; we don’t need theoretical exams" - thank you, Captain Obvious!

[lkjhdcba]

I believe it was a twitter thread that he unrolled and mashed up into a medium post. On twitter he's often abrasive and kind of a dick as a character, and the tone carried into this post. He's doubled down about it because his rant seemed to have angered a lot of people among his demographic following, so if you follow him you'll probably find more explanation.

>this piece was meant for math PhDs

Lol it is absolutely not meant for math PhDs. I think anyone with a bachelor degree could follow the math (probably, I don't know much about the university system works in the US).

[vcavallo]

“no one”? are you sure that absolutely nobody in neuroscience or genetics thinks IQ measures anything at all? maybe you should also clarify what you mean by “takes seriously”.

if nothing else, it measures your ability to take IQ tests, and IQ score has some correlation to “success” in western culture (note i’m not saying “intelligence” anywhere here).

[lkjhdcba]

Genetics happens to be my field and...yeah. IQ is just too far removed from an actual mechanistic explanation ("gene X does this which interacts which gene Y whose coding protein triggers a cascade onto receptor Z of the brain which...") and for a geneticist if you haven't got a mechanism you've got nothing. There are far more interesting, solid and construct-valid traits to study.

As for neurosci I'll admit it's second-hand knowledge from my social circle and colleagues, though it could be that I live in a bubble and neuroscientists are secretly terrorized to share their mindbreaking findings on the first component of a PCA.

>if nothing else, it measures your ability to take IQ tests, and IQ score has some correlation to “success” in western culture (note i’m not saying “intelligence” anywhere here).

This is circular, since many of the required tests to be "successful" are similar to IQ tests or "g-loaded" as people like to say. Even then, the correlation is weak beyond very low IQs.