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Comment by exo762 | Hacker News Reader

You've missed his point.

First. Its not that EQ does not describe certain personal characteristics. It is that EQ can actually be described as a combination of other existing, well established traits. Thus it is not an independent variable. EQ is just a bad design.

As for your "trust me, I'm an authority vibe" remark... OP has referenced a lot of papers to properly argument his point. And he is an actual authority.

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I'm aware he's an authority, which is exactly the reason I caution against blind acceptance.

Hmm...you realize that he (a) explains ad nauseam and (b) cites relevant research. So how is this "blind acceptance"?

Whereas you don't appear to be an authority, made a fairly broad claim ("so much wrong..."), explained nothing and cited...crickets.

You are right regarding my broad claim - I stand corrected. You are also right regarding my lack of authority, but experience shows that authority (professional or otherwise) is not always backed up by a broader understanding. If I'm wrong I'll be the first to admit it. The professor is saying there is no such thing as EQ. What I understand he means is that there is no such thing as EQ in psychology, and therefore the concept does not exist or is worthless. I'm in no position to argue with a professional in psychology on psychology. What I'm saying is that psychology doesn't have a monopoly on defining what traits exist.

He explains this in more detail in the comments.

If we're going to do proof by paper (always dangerous in psychology, but never mind), consider this about IQ:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/

The evidence that IQ predicts success is dubious, and certainly not settled.

I also consider him wrong about EQ, although for more anecdotal reasons:

I have known people who can read individuals and social situations with extraordinary skill, make astonishingly accurate predictions about social and personal outcomes, and manipulate both with extraordinary efficiency and effectiveness.

I've also known high-IQ individuals who were worse than average at all of the above, and who suffered poor social, political, and financial outcomes as a result.

So IMO EQ is a recognisable skill, and it's clearly not the same as agreeableness in the Big Five.

It may not have been well-defined or well-researched in psychology, and the original book definition may not be accurate either. (I haven't read Golman, so I don't know what he says about it.)

But it's nonsense to pretend it simply doesn't exist.

We have no reason to believe there exists a trait like intelligence for emotional/social skills, all we have is people establishing its existence post-facto like you are doing here (from seeing some people are good at multiple social skills and assuming the existence of a common root trait).

It's like seeing some people are on average better at sports than others and saying there must be a "sportiness" trait that determines how good you are at sports. Instead we know it's a combination of various different things, many of which are independent of each other.

I've read the paper you provided, and it doesn't have a single professional point to make against IQ tests, the g factor, their predictive ability and correlation on job performance or anything else really.

Rather than rigorously discussing on what is technically wrong with the corpus of evidence and how it could be improved, she throws and regurgitates FUD in so many areas that it is nigh-impossible to address them all.

Thanks for wasting fifteen minutes of my life, OtherHobbes.

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