[astrange]

You have to read the study to find out what it meant by IQ. People freely confuse IQ (a score on a test that's calling itself an IQ test) with IQ (a platonic ideal statistic people assume exists for the purpose of publishing research about it). This could be either.

[cltby]

Sorry, is your criticism that IQ proponents conflate point estimates with unknown population parameters? Is that what other IQ critics see as the core of the disagreement in this debate?

[astrange]

Well I don't want to speak for anyone else.

It's more of a secondary criticism though, that people aren't very careful about reading research papers. And of course that in many fields the researchers aren't careful either (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credibility_revolution).

The primary criticism is that people want there to be something called IQ (or g, or intelligence) that is 1. a real physical variable that causes things 2. an unchangeable attribute of a person that 3. makes you better and more virtuous than people with less of it. This recently causes 4. the belief that if we invented an AI it'd have a lot more of it than us and would take over the world[0].

Whereas I think that:

1. the best reason to know it is to find working interventions to improve it, which they can't find because it isn't real, so they should find some real physical processes.

2. the other reason to know it is to predict someone's ability on a task, and in any such situation there is better evidence you could use for that. Although this one's kinda illegal anyway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.).

3. a superintelligent computer would not take over the world.

[0] The Lesswrong guy, the main advocate of this one, didn't graduate high school but would like to be seen as intelligent, which means it's convenient to believe that intelligence is so inherent you don't have to prove it by performing well at school.

[dragonwriter]

No, IQ is just the test result; the theoretical phenomena understood to be underlying it are things like g and task-specific factors.

[astrange]

You're claiming this study used a test that it could have a "the test result" for, but it didn't - it's a meta analysis using another meta analysis, whose different studies all used different tests:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5... <- the one in the article

https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/10.1289/ehp.7688 <- the one it refers to

> We contacted investigators for all eight prospective lead cohorts that were initiated before 1995, and we were able to retrieve data sets and collaboration from seven. The participating sites were Boston (Bellinger et al. 1992); Cincinnati (Dietrich et al. 1993) and Cleveland, Ohio (Ernhart et al. 1989); Mexico City, Mexico (Schnaas et al. 2000); Port Pirie, Australia (Baghurst et al. 1992); Rochester, New York (Canfield et al. 2003); and Yugoslavia (Wasserman et al. 1997).

I checked two of the studies from 1989:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/089203...

> The test used was the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa022848

> We measured blood lead concentrations in 172 children at 6, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, and 60 months of age and administered the Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale at the ages of 3 and 5 years.

So they didn't all take the same test[0]. This supports my claim, which is that people who believe IQ research also believe that all test results produce the same valid statistic called IQ as long as the test calls itself an IQ test.

I actually can't think of a time I've seen an online IQ arguer claim that any given test result isn't an accurate representation of an IQ. They certainly also think it about things like SAT scores and old national-IQ studies where they gave the tests in second/third languages or just made up the numbers.

[0] if it was the same test, isn't the norm process to convert from raw scores to normally distributed ones be different in different years? Not sure how that part is done.