The article tries to discredit IQ hard without saying things that are outright false, but for that reason had to admit IQ's reliability and validity.
> Correlation is 80% between test and retest, meaning you being you explains less than 64% of your test results.
As if that's bad? 80% is a very good reliability.
> If you renamed IQ, from "Intelligent Quotient" to FQ "Functionary Quotient" or SQ "Salaryperson Quotient", then some of the stuff will be true. It measures best the ability to be a good slave confined to linear tasks. "IQ" is good for @davidgraeber's "BS jobs".
I get it, you have negative valence towards IQ. Still, even if IQ measures "the ability to be a good slave" (it doesn't, but let's assume it does), that's an outcome we care about, proving IQ's validity. It dismisses IQ's correlation with academic success as "just another test", but no, it doesn't work that way. IQ also correlates with research success and research is not test.
> IQ also correlates with research success and research is not test.
We should define research success and test. Research is definitely a fitness function that is intertwined with lots of dependent and independent variables no?
Most of the Taleb argument is that you can't compress a high dimensional space down to one dimension is it not?
Yes, but dimensionality reduction is a thing. IQ is just PCA. Intelligence is multidimensional, but it happens to have one large principal component. It could have been otherwise, but it is just not so, here on Earth with Homo sapiens.
Dimensionality reduction isn't reversible function. Video and one channel of audio is at least 10 dimensions, arguably IQ is more, you are going to project that to a single scalar?
The sample size, the experimental design and control are all out of whack in these papers, I was trying to PCA Taleb's argument.
I don't think you are measuring what you think you are measuring.
There was a now deleted insightful comment, by another author which I will paste below and then reply to.
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No. That would be a pat objection. He is saying the value of IQ as a measure of intelligence-explained performance for anything that isn’t isomorphic to an IQ test is low. The reason IQ looks like a good measure or produces any correlation with anything outside of itself is because it is predictive on the low-side of the distribution. When you include the low-side data you get correlations on the high-side because of the correlation on the low-side. However, its predictive power on the high-side is mostly noise (a stick in the mud gets its support from the mud, not the wind). He demonstrates this by clipping the low-side data and comparing to salary (which he argues is a ‘real-world’ set not isomorphic to an IQ test).
In other words, a low IQ (very low) suggests lack of intelligence but, above some fuzzy point, a higher IQ does not suggest more intelligence (and could even be anti-correlated).
He is not saying some people aren’t smarter than other people or that dimension reduction is always bogus. He is saying that IQ is a bogus way to measure intelligence because intelligence is supposed to explain performance and when the clip the low tail it simply does not.
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reply inline since I am out of post karma.
Thanks for that explanation.
Let me paraphrase from down here, to put it bluntly, the supposedly predictive value of this continuous variable (IQ) should really be replaced with a high, medium and low or a binary value. That the predictive power of IQ is much more coarse grained, and it doesn't do what it is commonly used for.
Slight defense, I wasn't trying to say dimensionality reduction was bogus either, nor was I advocating for pat objection. I was trying to reduce the argument down to something manageable so it could be pulled back into a discussion.
I do think we should always focus on the predictive power of any theory, value or mathematics. It is easy for one to intentionally or unintentionally go off into the weeds. How quickly does the measure become the goal? :)
Even if you agree with Taleb's arguments in that article, he still admits that low IQ is correlated with low wealth, low income and other such social measures of low success. So the hypothesis that IQ may be declining should still be concerning, since more and more people will be in that low IQ range predictive of low success.
I don't see the relevancy. Hassim Talim (author of black swan, statistician, finance) argues all of psychology is unscientific.
In your link he even states IQ is a weak measure for some tasks. That the trend is reversing - people are now getting worse at "test taking" - is notable and interesting.
Whether IQ should be used as a proxy for expected real world success doesn't seem relevant to this study.
Damn I like Taleb, don't always agree with his results or means.
> Note the online magazine Quillette seems to be a cover for a sinister eugenics program (with tendencies I’ve called “neo-Nazi” under the cover of “free thought”.)
I'd love to see Taleb and Zizek spar, or riff, either one.
> Correlation is 80% between test and retest, meaning you being you explains less than 64% of your test results.
As if that's bad? 80% is a very good reliability.
> If you renamed IQ, from "Intelligent Quotient" to FQ "Functionary Quotient" or SQ "Salaryperson Quotient", then some of the stuff will be true. It measures best the ability to be a good slave confined to linear tasks. "IQ" is good for @davidgraeber's "BS jobs".
I get it, you have negative valence towards IQ. Still, even if IQ measures "the ability to be a good slave" (it doesn't, but let's assume it does), that's an outcome we care about, proving IQ's validity. It dismisses IQ's correlation with academic success as "just another test", but no, it doesn't work that way. IQ also correlates with research success and research is not test.