Best-selling introductory psychology books give misleading view of intelligence | Hacker News Reader

Best-selling introductory psychology books give misleading view of intelligence

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157 pointsDanAndersen155 comments

Gottfredson's paper is a paper that I have read, and I see it is being used as the analytical framework for criticizing psychology textbooks. I do research for writing popular writings on psychology, so I have a whole bunch of introductory psychology textbooks in the office where I am typing this, and I have to agree that introductory psychology textbooks leave a LOT to be desired in representing the consensus of modern psychology research. That's true about research on human intelligence and true about any other psychology topic: the introductory textbooks only do a so-so job.

That said, one might wonder where to find good information about current psychology research. Sometimes there are review articles that update practitioners on current research, which are incidentally read by scientists in other disciplines. I'll note for the record that not all psychologist agree EITHER with the review article I will link here, but it is a good readable account of current issues in the psychological research on human intelligence and well worth a read for Hacker News participants who are curious about these issues. It refers to many of the most important papers in the field, most of which I have read over the last three decades.

Nisbett, R. E., Aronson, J., Blair, C., Dickens, W., Flynn, J., Halpern, D. F., & Turkheimer, E. (2012). Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments. American Psychologist, 67, 130-159. doi:10.1037/a0026699

(Disclaimer: I have met many of the researchers on human intelligence, including Gottfredson, at professional conferences, but my views of what the overall research says and who has the best leads on open research questions are my own.)

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...

Intelligence studies : Left :: Climate science : Right

The Left views the expert consensus on intelligence in much the same way that the right views the expert consensus on climate change. The consensus view is rejected not because of evidence, but because of what it does to their model of the world and fear that it will open the door to great abuses in the future (increased government regulation for climate change, and increased racism and discrimination for intelligence studies).

I find it unusual that one can use a polarized axiom as the basis for what's considered rational thought. Life is deep, unfathomably complex, nuanced, and believe or not, bipartisan. You can introduce more flavour by expanding your window beyond two disparate colours.

It's commentary on how politics quickly interfere with rational thought when things hit too close to a key pillar. Particularly after this last presidential election people have made their political leanings a core part of their identity so anything that's a threat to a political belief is an attack on their identity.

Climate Science and Psychology are very different types of science. Linking intelligence and race is anti-science, not science. Climate science doesn't need consensus, because it is actual science (not on the level of physics or chemistry, but much closer than Psychology)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

So am I downvoted because the downvoters believe race and intelligence is linked, or because we have some staunch Psychology defenders?

So just going to downvote and not try to engage? That's pretty anti-Hacker News. Feel free to actually, you know, present an argument if you disagree with me.

Regardless of why members may have down voted your comment above, in my experience commenting on voting will attract downvotes because it's against the guidelines:

> "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Indeed, but also: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." A downvote with no comment is a shallow dismissal.

Down voted because you dismissed a whole discipline as not "actual science". It certainly has it's issues, the replicability problem is a stain on the whole discipline for instance, but in many ways it is a truer science than climate science is. Psychology is much more experiment driven than much of climate science due to the difficulty of creating planets to test with that allow us to isolate factors.

Downvoted, but also older comments of mine on unrelated topics were downvoted. That is "shallow". I don't see how Psychology is truer science, mostly because of the ethics. I studied Psych a great deal in undergrad, and while it is experiment driven, it is no where near the "hardness" of climate science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence

There is an entire scientific debate about it in the field of psychology. Claiming it is anti science is willful ignorance.

Without a randomized experiment on babies of different races born to surrogates, it is difficult to say that observed differences in intelligence between races is due to genetics or to prenatal and postnatal environment. 50 years ago, it was assumed that Chinese and Indians were stupid according to the correlational data available at the time, and Chinese Americans whose ancestors arrived in the US in the 19th century still perform poorly in tests of general intelligence, but it is now abundantly clear that this isn't due to a genetic racial disadvantage.

The left would say that environment can and should be fixed.

This is why people do twin studies. Orphaned twins that were separated at birth are as close to a natural instrument as one could ever hope to get.

Unless you can control for the surrounding culture and allow for ~150 years of development of same, even twin studies will be of limited power.

Twin studies have shown that at least 30% of intelligence is determined by post adoption environment. (This is a lower bound because adopters must meet a minimum bar, limiting the differences in adoption environments.) Add that with prenatal environment, and you could have differences in intelligence distributions across races entirely explained, but again, twin studies aren't enough to show that.

There is an iconic study that is exactly what you're looking for, and may be the reason such studies are also no longer carried out. It is the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study [1]. They had an array of children broken into transracial, black, and white all be adopted by wealthy white families in Minnesota. Everything was controlled so much as possible including adoption age (less than one year in all cases), family selection, and so on. They even controlled for geography - every single child within the sample living within a 150 mile radius of a fixed point. It then measured the IQ of the children at age 7 and at age 17.

At age 7 the difference in IQ between a adopted white child and adopted black child was 20.1 points. At age 17 this changed to 17.8 points. The difference for a half black child and a white child was 6.1 at age 7, and 8.3 at age 17. The goal of the study was to show the opposite of what it ended up showing. Consequently many individuals, including the authors of the study themselves, have still tried to argue that this is not evidence of a genetic link to IQ. Arguments against it have run the gamut from environmental factors from before the children were adopted (which again was less than 1 years old in all cases) to skin color causing environmental effects. These certainly could be contributing factors, however they would undermine any and all results of the study - which is indicative of a 'nuclear' after-the-fact effort to undermine their own results, rather than a reasoned concern.

That concern is also mitigated by an an unbelievably fortuitous 'accident' that helped create a further control sample. A number of the parents of the interracial children believed that the biological parents of these children were both black. And consequently these children certainly would have believed the same, which would lead one to believe that any environmental affects that would have affected black children more negatively than transracial children would also have affected these children similarly. In reality, they ended up scoring comparably to the interracial children whose parents knew they were interracial.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...

I am aware of that study, and it is not what I am looking for. It does not control for prenatal environment or even fully control for postnatal environment prior to adoption. It does not even control for the cause of putting children up for adoption across races.

I know a a few climate change deniers who would be convinced if we could do a study in which we compared the temperature on a planet that was the exact same distance from a star that was the same age and type as our sun that had exactly the same environment as Earth but had not undergone the Industrial Revolution with the increase in CO2.

"Race" derives from, and interacts with, precisely the same institutional social structures which are principle determinants to capability and opportunity, ranging from chemical and biological hygiene factors (including contaminants and pollutants such as lead, asbestos, particulate inhalants, prenatal and early childhood nutrition), to psychological factors (stress and trauma, general socialisation), educational opportunities and environments, and far more.

The fact that the definitions and consequences, no matter how ultimately arbitrary the first should be so deeply intertwined and pervasive, is hardly surprising.

Your argument is not a scientific one.

There is no alternative hypothesis for climate change that fits the data. As the sibling commenter noted, there are many credible alternative hypotheses for the observed differences in general intelligence across races that do fit the data (and moreover, predate GP's study and were the preferred explanation of that study's authors), and from what we have seen with Asians as a prior, I am more inclined to believe them until an experiment can separate the competing hypotheses.

If you want to challenge a hypothesis it's insufficient to simply try to spread uncertainty, you need to create and provide data for an alternative hypothesis. That people, and groups of people, are radically different is supported by everything we know. Genetic factors influence every aspect of our beings, and so to argue that intelligence is somehow immune to this is something that requires evidence. That was the entire point of this study - to show that once environmental factors are carefully controlled for, IQ differences disappear. However, it ended up showing the exact opposite.

When there is a hypothesis that is heavily supported by data, something that might be right, but lacks data, is not a credible alternative. This is the same fallacy that 'climate deniers' make. They think that by arguing that our understanding of climatic systems is limited (which is indeed true) that they can then argue that therefore we can claim alternatives that lack the same scale of evidence (such as that climate change is natural and the CO2 link is a correlation, not causation). That's not how this works...

---

And there's one meta aspect, I want to consider here for a minute. First consider the case of the numerous parents and children who were led to believe that their child was biologically black. These children, and their adoptive parents, would have behaved in a fashion identical to all other parents of biologically black children. Yet, they performed academically and on the IQ exams at the same level as their genetic peers, other transracial children.

This works as a phenomenal control for environmental factors after the period of adoption. And the extremely early period of adoption means if there is indeed an environmental effect happening here then it's either prenatal or in the earliest stages of infancy. Do you understand how enormous the incentive to discover this would be, if people genuinely believed it? You're talking about raising the IQ of millions of people by up to 20 points. That is something that would radically reshape society and would be, by a very wide margin, one of the most important discoveries of the social sciences ever.

Yet oddly enough, nobody seems to be running experiments to try to control for environmental factors to see what exactly it might be that all black parents seem to be doing to their children that's lowering their IQ so much. And this isn't something that would be hard. You'd simply need to offer enough to a sample of families seeking to have children, of differing raises, to have their behavior monitored immediately following conception. What would that take? $10k and free medical checkups? I'm sure that'd be plenty, and there would certainly be grants available to fund it. Yet... nobody seems to be going this route. Think about that for a minute. Actions - or the lack thereof, as always, speak much more loudly than words.

> If you want to challenge a hypothesis it's insufficient to simply try to spread uncertainty, you need to create and provide data for an alternative hypothesis.

You've simply repeated my point. All of the existing data supports GP's sibling's competing hypotheses.

> When there is a hypothesis that is heavily supported by data, something that might be right, but lacks data, is not a credible alternative.

The competing hypotheses are supported by exactly the same data and are further supported by the data from the Asian diaspora and by the twin study data. You must find an experiment that supports one hypothesis and rejects the others, which is what climate science has plenty of.

> That people, and groups of people, are radically different is supported by everything we know. Genetic factors influence every aspect of our beings, and so to argue that intelligence is somehow immune to this is something that requires evidence.

You make a giant leap. Intelligence is partly inherited -- that is true according to twin studies (which don't control for the fact that adopters have to meet a certain bar and therefore can't show the actual effect of post-natal environment and also don't control for prenatal environment). However, claiming that the difference in intelligence between racial groups is due to genetic differences vs. due to environmental differences is not supported by evidence. In 1947, the literacy rate in India was 12%. After seeing the rise in literacy rate over the past 70 years, you would be hard-pressed to claim that this deficiency was genetic.

It seems you can parrot the concepts of scientific reasoning that I explained in the GP post but are simply unable to apply them.

If you're actually interested in seeing what experiments have been done and what the results are, this [1] lengthy but also plain english study provides an excellent overview of some 30 years of research results and what has been discovered. It goes over common misconceptions and arguments in quite extensive detail.

IQ is dominantly heritable. The consensus on heritability (that is the percent of deviation that's explained by genetics alone) has been increasing over time. It used to be believed to be 'only' around ~60% whereas more recent results have shown it to be upwards of 80%. There are lots of strange things about IQ that can lead to poor measurement, like the fact that environmental roles can play some in young children, yet play a negligible role for people as early as adolescence. Anyhow, that paper again provides a great overview of all the issues here. If you're not up for it, Wiki has a page on it [2]. But I'm already cringing there. On the first page, I noticed some editor apparently and literally thinks regression to the mean means two people with high IQ are more likely to produce children of average IQ... Wiki has gotten really quite awful, but I digress!

I'm unsure what you think you're referencing with the "Asian diaspora" or twin study data. Twin study data is conclusive on this topic. I could spam you with sources here, but seriously just searching (google scholar is a useful tool) for iq twin study will lead to a very one-sided picture. If you can provide some papers on the "Asian diaspora" that'd be appreciated, though.

[1] - https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jense...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

The OP did go to the trouble of specifying prenatal and postnatal environment. That study does nothing to normalise prenatal environment, which would be extremely difficult to create a natural experiment for, and it takes an unusually extreme degree of faith in the construction of the study to argue that there is no "reasoned concern" that skin colour might have significantly affected the environments of a cohort of children brought up during the forced busing era.

Both sides are right about their concerns. The fears are legitimate.

Governments can and do use climate change as a pretext to seize additional power, and increasing the price of energy is unquestionably a regressive "tax" that harms the poor and working class a lot more than it harms the wealthy.

History demonstrates that if you legitimize any rationale for considering any group of people superior to one another, people will run with that all the way to the death camps. The PC doctrine of equality is a "noble lie" of sorts and a reaction to millennia of bloodshed and unbelievable suffering.

This has no bearing on the truth or falsehood of the research but I'm not entirely convinced these things should be ignored when discussing it.

If climate change is real and manmade and if IQ is mostly genetic and a significant predictor of success, does it follow that the poor should be made poorer through more costly energy and should be discriminated against on the basis of IQ scores?

Wait... If IQ is mostly genetic and a significant predictor of success, how could the poor be discriminated against on the basis of IQ scores?

Is it a perfect predictor of success? If someone knows you have a low IQ they might not even give you a chance to try.

In the real world this reasoning applies to things like studies on gender differences and performance in different disciplines. Let's imagine there really is a solid scientific case that women are, say, 20% less likely to be good at programming. (Just making up a number.) If this became common knowledge, companies just wouldn't bother hiring women for programming positions. As a result the women who are as good at programming as men don't get a chance.

Rinse and repeat for evidence of racial differences in IQ, etc. If it were in fact true that blacks had on average 5-10% lower IQs than whites (making up another number) and if this were common knowledge, nearly all blacks would face intense discrimination including those with IQs the same as or higher than average whites.

These examples might sound like typical "social justice warrior" fodder. Let me throw out a totally different kind of example to escape that framing.

There's a stereotype out there that male programmers and other male science/engineering types are on average more socially awkward and less socially intelligent than the general population. Now let's say there emerges actual solid scientific evidence for this, and let's say that evidence becomes common knowledge. Would this cause, say, women to just reflexively avoid dating men in technical professions? Would it cause men in technical professions to be passed over for management roles on the perception that they just "don't have the social skills?"

A case can be made that biological differences in ability should be somewhat verboten in public discourse because human beings are terrible at statistics and will lazily extrapolate averages to entire groups. Scientific evidence for a statistical bias in ability that applies to any identifiable sub-group of humans can easily lead to blanket discrimination against that entire sub-group regardless of the strength or mutability of the effect or the long term reliability of the science.

Edit:

The long term reliability issue may actually be a stronger argument than the statistical innumeracy of the average person.

Once something like this becomes "common knowledge" it is very hard to educate people otherwise even if the science is revised. Take fat for example. I still know people who eat margarine because "butter is bad" in spite of the fact that we've known for over a decade that fats aren't necessarily so bad for you and that trans fats (present in margarine) are much worse. Unless you have certain metabolic or circulatory issues butter is much better for you than margarine, but try telling your grandparents.

Let's say some systematic difference in ability becomes common knowledge and then the science is found to be faulty or -- as is often the case with such things -- reality turns out to be a lot more complex than we thought. How many generations would it take to de-educate the population and how many lives would be ruined in the meantime?

We don't generally publish the latest research on biological weapons synthesis or implosion geometries for compact nuclear weapons that use very little fissile material. Studies on race and gender and how they relate to IQ and ability aren't quite as dangerous as these but they should probably be discussed in obscure journals in coded language and should never ever be reported in the popular science press. Society just isn't mature enough to deal with this stuff.

Edit #2:

I'm not arguing it should be illegal to discuss such things or anything like that, just that several good arguments can be made that it's irresponsible to popularize it.

I would like to point out that within this comment you argue quite correctly that averages of groups should not be extrapolated to the entire group. However in most of your argument you propose that companies and societies will extrapolate IQ research to the group and discriminate on those bases.

Now I'm not saying anything about your personal views about the research, but I think in order to fix the cultural and societal discrimination you touch upon we should emphasize exactly the reasoning you expounded about the nuance of averages. We know that there is more differences within groups than between them and I think to deter the effects of discrimination we need to emphasize analysis on the individual level and to have a real and honest discussion about the issues and to make statistical reasoning more prevalent among the general population.

I wish, but after 40 years on this planet I've come to the conclusion that certain systemic forms of irrationality are incredibly difficult to "educate out" of the population. I suspect that we fall for these things over and over because our central nervous systems just haven't evolved to be very good at certain kinds of reasoning. Maintaining rationality in these areas is effortful and as soon as we slack off we slip back into familiar shortcuts.

I'll be more optimistic about this when I see sales of lottery tickets start dropping dramatically and when stuff like this stops happening:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCcwn6bGUtU

Gambling and silly financial schemes are driven by the same sorts of logical fallacies as those I discussed up top.

I'm on the far left, and while I am comfortable with whatever the scientific consensus on intelligence is at the moment and how it develops in the future, I am very recalcitrant about allowing that understanding into politics, policy or most discussions I want to have about anything.

Looking towards the past on how (pseudo)science about intelligence has been leveraged to commit atrocities, and looking at the reasons why so many on the right really really really like bringing up IQ and whatnot, I'll pass. At best the conversation dissimulates the urge to justify hierarchies of dominance-- the same fucking reason why the right likes to bring up anything from biology. At worst you get enthusiastic eugenicists; meeting such people at, say, conferences or other programmer venues (i'm sure programmers skew both towards higher IQ and views that the strong should crush the weak) is like stepping on a cow pie.

Not to mention, I know plenty of people who would score high on intelligence tests, perhaps much higher than I would. Some of them seem to leverage that intelligence to be far stupider than anyone dumber than them could manage (us programmers again...).

The point being-- the gap between scientific research on intelligence and what it means for A) society, and B) my personal life is a chasm I have no reason to bridge.

Couldn't a conservative say exactly the same about climate change research? How historically climate change research has been used to justify increasing government powers?

What would you feel if someone said about climate change something like "I am very recalcitrant about allowing that understanding into politics, policy or most discussions I want to have about anything"?

Do you honestly, truly think this is a productive question?

Yes, someone could make structurally the same post I did about any topic instead of intelligence research, even right down to the grammar. Turns out that completely changes the meaning of the post!

The answer is that I think climate research has clear and obvious input into not just state policy but how we structure large scale human activity in general. So, I would think such a conservative was wrong, and perhaps an asshole too depending on how earnest they are.

But you could have already guessed, so did I miss the point of your question?

You are saying that there is a set of (hypothetically) true facts about the universe that you will not allow into not only state policy, by which I assume you mean fundamental societal decisions, but also general human behavior?

Not categorically. Just in most circumstances with most people. This doesn't sound like it should be controversial? I don't care about the opinion of most people in most circumstances about software methodology either.

I don't get right's focus on hierarchies of dominance: even if those exist biologically and affect our neurology, can't we as a society decide to build ways to trancend them(positively), like many other societies did through history ? Isn't that what culture is all about ?

What societies have transcended dominance hierarchies?

Often,but not always, Hunter gatherer societies are very egalitarian(one example is the Aborigines). And they built it intentionally, for example, by randomly swapping arrows before going hunting so the guy who made the kill wouldn't consider himself better. And if someone did, the group put him down.and for sure , the income equality was also important.

When you're talking about these cohesive egalitarian groups of hunter-gatherers, how many people might be in any individual group? The context I'm asking in is that I would suspect this type of arrangement could be pretty effective up to Dunbar's Number. Once your "group" gets above Dunbar's Number (estimated 100-250) it would become increasingly difficult to function without hierarchical structures.

This may be true. But we know that Scandinavia and Sweden are much less hierarchical than the US, and they function well as complex societies.

Scandinavian countries have virtually no racial or cultural diversity. For example, 97% of Finland's population is of Finnish or Swedish heritage. Over 70% of the Finnish population belongs to the Finnish national religion, Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, and a portion of their taxes are handed over to the church. Finland has an immigration policy in-line with mainstream US Republican proposals such as being means-tested rather than a random lottery and it's not weighted towards diversity at all. Lastly, Scandinavian countries have equal or worse gender representation for careers like nursing and engineering.

Scandinavia deserves plenty of credit for the legislative efforts they've made towards egalitarianism, but it's important we put our perception of them into context.

>I am very recalcitrant about allowing that understanding into politics, policy or most discussions I want to have about anything.

The problem is that differential outcomes are used as a measurement of systemic bias. Well, you weren't willing to look at the differential inputs, so how could you possibly make claims about the differential outcomes?

> The point being-- the gap between scientific research on intelligence and what it means for A) society, and B) my personal life is a chasm I have no reason to bridge.

The problem is that well-meaning people on the left come to the table full of assumptions and intuitions about how reality works and what causes inequality, and base their policy positions on these. People on the right bring up biology because it can expose weaknesses in these assumptions and beliefs.

> Looking towards the past on how (pseudo)science about intelligence has been leveraged to commit atrocities

You can also look at how blank slatism and Lysenkoism were leveraged to commit atrocities in the USSR. Science and pseudo-science have been use to justify all kinds of horrible regimes. That isn't a license to ignore reality and form policy based on unfounded beliefs.

> That isn't a license to ignore reality and form policy based on unfounded beliefs.

Did I say anything about unfounded beliefs? I didnt. I even said I accept research on intelligence. Not basing policy on X is not the same thing as basing policy on X.

But I'll bite. Tell me a way that intelligence research should inform policy that isn't immediately morally repugnant.

Some aspects of school/district curriculums that shouldn't/can't be tailored to individual ability should still be tailored to the general ability of the student body. In areas with rapidly shifting demographics, this data might help inform decision making. Obviously, in almost any conceivable case, there is plenty of other, sharper data that renders the race data unnecessary; but when the almost entirely Ashkenazi school becomes 75% African refugees and chooses to put on a less lexically complex play, this research will have constructively informed policy.

> Did I say anything about unfounded beliefs? I didnt. I even said I accept research on intelligence.

I wasn't commenting on your personal beliefs. I was commenting on your position that certain true facts should not be spoken in a political context. To me, that is the same as saying that people should be free to make policy without being challenged if their beliefs are incorrect.

> But I'll bite. Tell me a way that intelligence research should inform policy that isn't immediately morally repugnant.

No Child Left Behind in the USA is (I think) widely regarded as a failed piece of legislation. It is based on the idea that the only reason kids don't succeed in school is because schools are failing them. It heavily penalized schools that can't get their achievement scores up. Intelligence research can provide one leg of a counterargument that kids are different in all kinds of ways, and proscriptively mandating equality of outcome makes for bad policy.

"i'm sure programmers skew both towards higher IQ and views that the strong should crush the weak". Well, that's settled that then! Nice to be sure.

"Races" as they exist at all are essentially crude amalgamations of phenotypes and regional groupings, they are not genetically precise labels that we can use to draw definitive conclusions regarding genetics. This doesn't mean that we cannot observe patterns or make predictions about racial groupings, only that those observations are ascribed to a grouping that does not account for the complexity of genetics beyond what can be detected by the naked eye.

The fact that "race" is such a blurry thing should make potential statistical differences wash out, and yet they persist. They persist in both visible and non-visible traits such as height and disease patterns.

Well, the last time intelligence studies achieved political importance, we ended up with the eugenics movement, which was

1. the kind of issue that the 'left' considers a problem, and

2. just a wee bit embarrassing.

On the other hand, if what some would describe as the consensus view is true, then a suitable breeding program, perhaps even forced, would be a moral imperative.

Next time on Hacker News: Brave New World: dystopia or utopia?

It seems like there's a subset of psychological researchers that want so bad to debunk the years of research into IQ. I get that there are some uncomfortable implications that arise from accepting IQ as a measure of overall intelligence, but, from my understanding, IQ is an excellent predictor of income, social status, and academic & job performance.

My opinion is that we are doing society a huge disservice by dismissing IQ.

I’m not interested in an individuals IQ predictions

I’m interested in theories that accurately model objectively as possible reality

If IQ is a good measure for some applications, fine

If it’s not when it comes to describing the reality of reality itself, not just contemporary social life, it should be pushed aside for a method that does better

This is largely anecdotal, so make of it what you will: I've observed high IQ scores to correlate more often with troubled lives than exceptional performance in job and status. It seems to me that these people tend to extremes and environmental aspects play a strong role in how these tendencies develop. Outright dismissing IQ would be detrimental, but its predictive value seems vague beyond some basic observations.

It's predictive to an extant. Many people who have taken up the mantel of IQ have taken it too far. And their (largely political) detractors have dismissed them merely because they have taken it too far. But much of it is still true from a more measured perspective.

Which has some very inconvenient / awkward implications for many people who are seeking to dismiss it outright, rather than dismiss particular proponents of it...

But taking any idea to the extremes, bulldozing over context and constraints of the data, and making grand generalizations from very simple base ideas is the bread and butter of politics, economics, and any bestselling non-fiction.

Popular discourse may be a tribal battle between extremes, but real life isn't...

If you look at job performance: http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2003-11198-010

Yes, but then again, I'll posit that having Blue Eyes is correlated with income. But I'd like to see someone to try to defend that position scientifically.

In reality, all I've done is created an artificial group which is heavily skewed towards richer countries. The color of the eyes had nothing to do with IQ, and yet it's correlated.

So what, if anything, is the IQ test measuring? How do you know you haven't simply written a test which measures how much time the person has to think about brain teasers? Researchers should ask these questions to determine if the correlation is actually caused by anything real, or if it's better explained by some other underlying factor.

> Researchers should ask these questions to determine if the correlation is actually caused by anything real, or if it's better explained by some other underlying factor.

Yes, absolutely! But this only works if people apply the same skepticism towards the theories they find more politically palatable. See: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands...

Since people are notoriously bad at being self-skeptical, the best way to learn what is actually true is by encouraging viewpoint diversity: https://heterodoxacademy.org/

> Since people are notoriously bad at being self-skeptical, the best way to learn what is actually true is by encouraging viewpoint diversity:

The problem with that concept is that if the available evidence actually does strongly support a position, seeking viewpoint diversity means actively selecting people who either cannot analyze the evidence or who wilfully ignore it's content.

Doing so within the research community may help the competent, and honest subset of the community avoid getting stuck in ruts formed by the subtle accumulation of confirmation bias from past results (if the other group doesn't end up getting filtered out by then over time, despite being present in the community, which is improbable), but it also means that you have to actively promote crackpots and their pet theories to do it; in terms of learning what is actually true, I don't think that's a net win.

> The problem with that concept is that if the available evidence actually does strongly support a position, seeking viewpoint diversity means actively selecting people who either cannot analyze the evidence or who wilfully ignore it's content.

We're not talking about diversity of opinion on whether gravity is real. We're talking about viewpoint diversity on questions that involve far more ambiguity, complexity, and interpretation, like how to measure human intelligence. Questions where the evidence can point in multiple directions depending on what data is collected and how it is interpreted.

I think the site addresses this well:

> For simple problems or fully resolved technical matters there is little need for viewpoint diversity. Sometimes there is just one answer, or just one way to approach a problem. But for “wicked problems” — those that can be framed in multiple ways and that may trigger passions or partisan motivations–viewpoint diversity is essential. --https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-problem/

> Since people are notoriously bad at being self-skeptical, the best way to learn what is actually true is by encouraging viewpoint diversity: https://heterodoxacademy.org/

I don't know if this is because of my European point-of-view but that site seems to be exactly the opposite. It seems to identify changes in opinion on universities as an inherent problem and that the former ratio should be promoted. Furthermore it clumps together far-left & liberal in some absurd common pool "proving" the lack of diversity of opinion. I mean a lot of European "diversity of opinion" is in precisely that single pool.

I don't think the site is arguing for historical ratios or that changes of opinion are bad. It is arguing against orthodoxy: situations where certain ideas become so sacred that questioning them is no longer tolerated. If demographics were skewed towards the left, but the left-leaning majority was willing to critically engage dissenting ideas, there would be no problem. Instead the dominance of the left (at least in the US/UK) seems to function largely through socially-enforced orthodoxy, where dissent is punished and stigmatized.

I have heard that this is not as much of a problem outside of the Anglosphere, so if you are from continental Europe you might experience this differently.

> I don't think the site is arguing for historical ratios or that changes of opinion are bad. It is arguing against orthodoxy: situations where certain ideas become so sacred that questioning them is no longer tolerated.

Paradoxically it seems to be doing both at the same time. Here's a quote from the site:

> "For example, as the graph shows, in the 15 years between 1995 and 2010, the American academy went from leaning left to being almost entirely on the left. Similar trends and problems are occurring in the UK and Canada, and to a lesser extent in Australia."

How should I interpret this as something other than "We've seen a progressive shift during this certain period and we don't like it"? This says nothing about how diverse the opinions are - especially when you clump together a very wide spectrum of thought into "the left". For example, what goes for moderate/conservative ideas in the US translates normally to very hard right in many western-european countries (although admittedly less so recently), making it traditionally quite a fringe part of the political scene. But at the same time the European diversity of opinion is, in my opinion at least, far better than the essential two-party (both being firmly right-wing as well) scene of US politics.

> Instead the dominance of the left (at least in the US/UK) seems to function largely through socially-enforced orthodoxy, where dissent is punished and stigmatized.

This idea seems to be popular at the moment, but I can't find any proper backing for this claim - that one is disproportionately worse than its counter-parts - other than repetition.

> This idea seems to be popular at the moment, but I can't find any proper backing for this claim - that one is disproportionately worse than its counter-parts - other than repetition.

I don't know if the left is any more guilty of orthodoxy, but as the left currently dominates academia, we can see more examples of the left enforcing orthodoxy in academic settings. For example, FIRE tracks campus disinvitations from both the right and the left, but the vast majority come from the left: https://www.thefire.org/resources/disinvitation-database/

What's the value of this point-in-time, and inherently case-by-case, data?

That's not even a true statement.

In fact, you actually don't need to apply skepticism towards your pet political topics, in order to apply skepticism to the IQ test. Funny thing, the physics of this world seem to allow you to treat unrelated things differently. Even more so, your ability to predict the movement of the stars doesn't depend on reading articles from Flat Earthers either. Weird!

I was talking about theories specifically related to the IQ test. "Every demographic has a priori equal IQ" is a politically palatable theory that many people want to believe. People need to be as skeptical towards this as they are towards "advantaged groups measure higher IQ because they are inherently smarter."

>How do you know you haven't simply written a test which measures how much time the person has to think about brain teasers?

Come on man, do you really think a century's worth of psychologists never considered such trivial questions?

This kind of response is, in my opinion, anti-academic.

A better response would be too try to find some literature on the subject.

One aspect of IQ is your ability to solve certain kinds of abstract problems. OP asked what if the IQ tests just test your ability to solve certain kinds of abstract problems.

OP's post didn't seem like a genuine academic inquiry but instead a weak emotional attempt to dismiss something they don't like.

Fallacy: Appeal to authority. Besides, obviously they have, which is the reason I said it.

And even further: researchers say that you can study for IQ tests to get a higher score. Presumably general intelligence is not something you can cram for. This is one of the reasons psychologists argue the IQ test is not an accurate system, and may or may not be just testing secondary effects of intelligence (like brain teaser ability).

Of course IQ tests test for secondary effects of intelligence. In what way does that invalidate it? It's important to remember we're talking about population level distributions here. A person could theoretically test well for some form of IQ but actually be a moron. That would mean nothing with regard to the efficacy of the test or validity of IQ in general.

I've had psychology professors tell me their industry is pretty much 'full of shit' ... how much damage has Freud et al done to our understanding of ourselves?

Much as certain people are very keen on the idea of G, I imagine "attitude towards being tested" and "willingness to guess the unknown answers" - both of which I'd expect to correlate with income within populations - are underrated factors in scores on timed group IQ tests.

If you control for race and income the effect of blue eyes will probably go away. The effect of IQ does not.

Regarding brainteasers, there is no evidence that practicing a certain brainteaser will improve your performance on entirely different ones. IQ measures the ability to perform well on novel tasks.

For that line of reasoning to work, you'd have to prove that the IQ test only presents novel challenges unrelated to practice tests. I think that's a much higher bar than you are thinking, and I'd be interested to know how they would prove it.

Obviously in the limit every test shares something with some other test. But it's not like it's hard to find cases where practice on one task fails to generalize to another task: in fact it's the norm, and it's exactly this empirically observed lack of generalization that motivated the concept of IQ and g in the first place. For example, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27474138

Funny you should bring that up, I pondered the term "quotient" yesterday, and guessed it must be from latin "quot" (what? yes, "what?"). The mantra goes "dividend / divisor = quotient". Sure you need to take the nominator into account, but where do you draw the line? On the one hand, the environmental factors are averaged because it would be hard to draw a line for each individual. On the other hand, the real kicker is to take two tests, and divide the two quotients, eliminating constant factors and only looking at the rate of improvement. Of course the assumption of constant environmental "divisors" is illusionary, only symbolic.

"Quotient" is very fitting also because testing is trying to divide subjects into groups. "Divide" is also very fitting: "vide" ("see") is heavily linked to knowledge, ob-vi-ously (more strikingly in German: "offensichtlich").

In fact, language started out as sign language, and simply looking into a direction is used as a sign even by apes. I believe "to tell" also derives from that. So there is a strong connection between visual thinking and language ... and math: It's symbolic reasoning, even to tell derives from counting (as in "to recount a story", e.g.) -- "tell" and "talk", etc, ultimitely derive from * del (de-?), "speak" is similar to "spy" and "spect", this is really fundamental; Which brings me back to divide, "di-" is akin to "two". Learning is inherently about telling two things appart.

For complex problems, talking up in terms of two is far too inefficient, though. E.g. we see three dimensions and so on and so forth. So, I guess IQ testing concerns the ability to coordinate X associations at once. It is not about head-nuts. Only, for higher X it will generally involve reading comprehension. And I can report that there is a sharp cut-off at some X for me. The time limit then is only set to a limit at which solving at all is increasingly unlikely. But, I guess the tests are biased to which coordination tasks are usually performed, ie. which capabilities can be expected. This will be tested in the beginning of a test as control.

So, those tests are engineered to test intelligence in combination with specific domain skills, which are expected prerequisit in specific domains. That is circular rsasoning, yes, circjlar reasoning is fundamental, because ... counting is based on the two modulo ring (that satisfies the me, at least, although of course there's much more to it).

Is IQ an excellent "predictor of income, social status, and academic & job performance" or merely associated with those?

IQ can be measured in middle school (before the student has a job or income), and the resulting score can be used to predict future income and job performance. In that sense, it is a predictor rather than a mere association.

Ok, but there are still myriad confounding factors, even at that age. Do students from higher income schools in aggregate have higher IQs than those from lower income schools?

All of these things are controlled for.

These are professors whose job it is to make sure you don't have such confounding variables.

You even have twin studies where one twin was adopted by rich and one by poor parents and it still holds.

Source?

What about Stoolmiller in Psychol. Bull. 125:392-409 who found families deciding to adopt forming a pointedly restricted range. Being for example exceedingly intelligent with IQ over 120 on average, which is obviously different than general average.

There's a lot of different forms of intelligence that IQ does not measure.

The practice tests I've seen tended to ask a lot of abstract questions that, in some cases, seemed to rely on having a specific set of cultural experiences. I remember encountering a question that asked me to clarify the meaning of a 'common' expression, and thinking, "how lucky am I to have been exposed to and know just what this question refers to? Would I have a lower IQ just because I was an immigrant or something?" (It was the US version of the MENSA practice exam on their website circa several years ago)

I'm of the opinion that intelligence is unmeasurable, if even comprehendable by us mortals, and that the best proxy we have is one's propensity to learn and be curious.

Seems that measuring intelligence is yet another example of the folly of human artifice

IQ test questions are abstract because they designed measure abstract thinking capabilities.

Abstract thinking is the definition of intelligence because of its general applicability to learning. All learning, be it math, language, engineering, music, etc, amounts to recognizing patterns, generalizing them, and applying the generalization to a different problem.

I'd like to point out that basically every academic admission test (SAT, ACT, GRE, MCAT, etc) is an IQ test mixed in with some domain-specific knowledge testing.

No offense, but having the opinion that intelligence is not measurable is roughly as ignorant as believing the the solar system is geocentric. It requires throwing aside or ignoring a massive amount of scientific evidence and consensus.

Why not? What makes you think currently-established science measures true "intelligence" and not just whatever phenomenon the test is measuring? To use heliocentrism as an example, how can you possibly know whether our current understanding is accurate or just the next heliocentrism (that we haven't disproven yet)?

Some of the smartest people I know wouldn't do well on an IQ test. Many of the questions are abstract but not all of them -- at least in my case several of those questions seemed more cultural than anything else. (And in some cases these supposedly 'abstract' questions seem to have a possibility-space of answers that even the test-writers did not anticipate.) If you define intelligence as the quantification of one's experiences, then sure, I'll roll with your argument, but experience (and abstract thinking) are just small parts of the overall equation, to which I think we still cannot grasp.

> Why not? What makes you think currently-established science measures true "intelligence" and not just whatever phenomenon the test is measuring? To use heliocentrism as an example, how can you possibly know whether our current understanding is accurate or just the next heliocentrism (that we haven't disproven yet)?

Essentially: predictive power. The reason heliocentricism became the standard model was because it predicted the movements of planets better than the geocentric model.

It's the same with IQ tests. They predict the success of individuals in many different fields. It's a predictor of income, academic achievement, and social status.

What I'm not saying is that IQ tests are perfect, they are not. As you say, there are language issues. But even with those issues, IQ can explain something like 25% of the variance in grades and 16% of the variance in income. It's also telling that more rigorous fields of study (math, physics, medicine) also correlated with higher IQs.

I'll close with the fact that IQ is not everything. It's only a measure of how quickly you'll pick up on something. It also has no impact on a person's mental health or general interests. A lazy person with a high IQ will probably not get very far in the world, neither will one that suffers from crippling depression or anxiety.

> A lazy person with a high IQ will probably not get very far in the world, neither will one that suffers from crippling depression or anxiety.

These factors seriously decrease the quality of IQ's predictive power, IMO. If you need to attach asterisks to an IQ assessment for a weakly-performing individual ("high IQ but lazy") then I wonder if IQ is the right measurement for that kind of criteria. Yes there is correlation between high IQ and hardcore nerdy professions but that does not mean the two are conclusively, 1.0-correlation linked.

Two comments:

- Lay people seem to have a very good intuition about the actual heritability of intelligence (taken to assess the genetic and environmental determinants of intelligence). [0]

- If you'd like to read an up-to-date and thorough literature review on human intelligence, I highly recommend "Intelligence: All That Matters" by Stuart Ritchie.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468694

Psychology as a field is one that is constantly becoming out of date. General consensus amongst psychologists often doesn't reach academic text quickly, because of the bureaucracy that exists inside the APA (American Psychological Association). See the controversy around the most recent version of the DSM.

I've observed that academics in the field will often take theory as most likely fact, if only because the actual published academic material hasn't caught up yet, but they've all been to the various conferences that are relevant to their particular field (social psychology, cognitive, etc).

Any study that is citing materials from over 20 years ago is grossly outdated. Many of the materials from even 10 years ago are becoming outdated. And now, more recently, we've started to examine the racial bias that exists in our systems of research, so I expect past material to come under even further scrutiny.

Some people have researched this.

I remember reading "The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date" by Arbesman, and IIRC psychology papers had some of the lowest half-lives of all the sciences. In math the half-life of a paper was something like 85 years, but in pysch it was closer to 10. I forget the exact statistics and don't have the book here but it was pretty interesting.

Scientometrics and Eurekometrics are two areas of research that delve into this sort of thing more.

The most remarkable thing BY FAR: That some expert(s) are actually looking at and critiquing introductory textbooks!

This type of issue is present in nearly every field. Education would be dramatically improved if more actual experts reviewed more of the introductory materials (ideally all the way down to elementary school level).

>> To identify factual inaccuracies, Warne’s team used as a benchmark a consensus statement on intelligence research published in 1997 by Linda Gottfredson et al

Is the best way to define 'fact' really a twenty year old study?

Also, even if the results are believed, it doesn't seem to be a big deal. Afterall, they're reporting an average of 1 factual inaccuracy per book. When each book presents hundreds or thousands of truth claims, is 1 factual inaccuracy per book noteworthy? I'm willing to bet a much larger percentage of the 'scientific consensus' they define as 'fact' is in fact wrong.

I know eminent IQ researchers back at the time who declined invitations to sign on to the Gottfredson consensus statement (with good reason, in my opinion). On the other hand, it is still a reasonably fair statement of a lot of the consensus among IQ researchers, but as you say now twenty years out of date. (I read the consensus statement right after it was published.)

The next paragraph explains why. The study is still accurate and they picked something old enough that should be known outside of specialists.

If they compared to present day research then naturally many books published over the past 10 years wouldn’t know about it.

Link to the actual paper: http://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2018-07714-001.pdf

Thanks for sharing that link. The underlying paper is (of course) better than the popular article kindly submitted to open the interesting discussion here. In particular, the paper makes clear its own methodological limitations.

Thanks! I wasn't sure whether to link the summary blog post or the original paper. Having both is definitely good for the discussions here.

BPS is hit and miss. Sometimes they're great; sometimes they really mangle the science.

https://www1.bps.org.uk/networks-and-communities/member-micr...

First response from 2014: https://www.nationalelfservice.net/publication-types/report/...

Newer response to updated document from 2017: https://www.nationalelfservice.net/mental-health/psychosis/u...

It's a bit worrying that they get so much wrong.

This may be a bit off the deep end, but in 2014 the Journal of Intelligence had a special issue on the state-of-art for intelligence research (in psychology). It's open access :).

http://www.mdpi.com/journal/jintelligence/special_issues/int...

Just to make sure I understood, that link is a collection of hand-picked papers? I expected it to be a review article, summarizing a bunch of past work. Just wanted to be sure that I was looking at the right thing.

Yeah, that's right--it was a special issue of the journal, where they invited many people to write review articles on intelligence.

* Intelligence is a statistical construct defined based on a group of rather arbitrary tests.

That one is true.

"This contradicts the 1997 consensus statement which tackles this issue and concludes that “intelligence tests are not culturally biased”."

Well, glad we got that out of the way.

There's a ton of evidence that IQ tests are not culturally biased. For example, the SAT is a form of IQ test. So the performance of practically every college student in the country vs their SAT score is available to us. The predictive value of IQ is solid regardless of your own culture or the university in question.

What if both the SAT and "college performance" are biased in the same way?

Then job performance, income, criminality rates, health and mortality rates are also biased in the same way across cultures and time all around the globe.

>* Intelligence is a statistical construct defined based on a group of rather arbitrary tests.

>That one is true.

In what sense are they "rather arbitrary"? It sounds to me that you might be suggesting that there is little correlation between performance on different IQ tests or different parts of the same IQ test. But the authors of the paper claim (with cited evidence) that "a common g factor accounting for about half of variance on cognitive tasks has been found across many human cultures (e.g., Carroll, 1993; Dolan, 2000; Dolan & Hamaker, 2001; Frisby & Beaujean, 2015; Gurven et al., 2017; Reuning, 1972)".

"Arbitrary" in the sense of not being chosen based on an understanding of what "intelligence" is.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but g is defined by noting that there is a correlation in performance on loosely defined cognitive tasks and assuming that there is a single important variable explaining that correlation.

What you call an assumption actually sneaks in at a slightly different place. When you design multiple tests that can only correlate positively or not at all, you get a matrix with nonnegative entries. Of course when you factor it you find a dominant factor, there has to be a dominant factor (or some, if matrix has zeroes, unlikely in a noised case). Frobenius–Perron theorem guarantees that dominant factor for you. You can make up any set of traits, test for positive correlations this way and always get some dominant factor. Mathematics guarantees there will always be a g factor whether from real influence or as an artifact of factorization, if your tests can't correlate negatively.

How does one choose between a single g factor and multiple g factors?

They do not appear in the real data, you have one g stronger than all others. This g has as much explanatory power as noise. Frobenius–Perron guarantees it would always appear whether there is one strong underlying influence on the data or hundreds unrelated ones.

Factor analysis used to establish g doesn't and can't have the power to tell. There are numerous and intense attempts to paper over this mathematical fact by circumstantial evidence, I'm not up to date with all the contortions. I don't think they can make linear algebra a causal theory: when you want to replace your data with linear combination of factors there will happen to be a strongest factor.

To somewhat answer the direct question: how to check factors. There is Confirmatory Factor Analysis that checks how factors decay. You take out factors you see as accounting for most of the variance in the data and check if indeed not much partial correlation is left. This has most power to negate an influence but next to none or very little power to confirm it not being spurious.

These wikipedia pages don't look any good, but I don't want to evaluate that right now or chase better material https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmatory_factor_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_correlation

One of the most shocking things for me when I went through highschool a decade ago was how new things we learned about maths/physics showed the previous things we learned were not accurate. Things like relativity and time dilation, integrals/derivatives, etc.

This was further proved (but not that shocking then) when I went through Engineering in the University with fluid mechanics et al.

I think when learning a whole new topic, specially ones experienced at a practical level, we need to start at a point with some broad oversimplifications. Not saying that is what happens here since I know little about psychology, but I would expect the same to apply here. Then we will be ready to dig deeper.

When I was in elementary school my dad constantly pointed out that they were teaching me nothing but lies. Sometimes he'd ask me what we were learning and then he'd give me questions to fluster the teacher. Teachers either loved it, or hated it (most hated it).

For some topics it makes sense to start with a simplified view, but I don't understand the general trend of insisting it's actually correct while they do it. It's already hard to convince some kids to learn, when they later find out that most of it was lies it has to sap their motivation further.

The simple solution, when you're dealing with a simplified/incorrect version of something for educational purposes, admit that's what you're doing, and why.

An example of this madness: in my high school physics/chemistry class the teacher asked how many states of matter there are are, I raised my hand and said 4. She said, "Wrong, there are three." I said, "Solid, water, gas, and plasma. Four." Her response, "Look in your book, what does it say? THREE: water, solid, and gas."

I told her that plasma is the most common form of matter in the universe and a textbook wouldn't change that.

I got detention. I got detention for insisting plasma exists, in a high school science class.

You got detention for not counting Bose-Einstein condensates mate.

Weird, I had some stupid opinions but never got detention for them. But I also never interrupted class to say science was wrong about radiometric dating and evolution \-0-/

This is a general problem with organization and counting of abstract categories. All of my science, history, and social science courses in middle/high school were pretty much garbage, and as far as I can tell that is the norm in the US (and many other places; not through special fault of the teachers, but because the curriculum/textbooks are insipid).

“State of matter” is not a perfectly defined property, but only a simplified model of high-level aggregate behavior/interactions; individual particles have simpler interactions which are not categorized the same way. Scientists are happy to admit a new “state of matter” whenever they manage to observe a situation that doesn’t behave according to their previous models, and are happy to admit that the states of matter are just a simplified model, but some petty bureaucrats (like, sadly, many teachers) can’t handle this.

You can similarly get into trouble arguing about how many “kingdoms” there are of eukaryotes, or how many Romance “languages” there are, or how many “continents” there are, or the difference between crops and weeds or a fetus and a person or plagiarism and research.

Quizzing students on how well they can memorize and recall labels (and even worse, punishing them for knowing additional labels) is not just an incredible waste of human time and attention, but is actively harmful insofar as it disempowers students to ask and investigate their own questions and discourages them from seeking a deeper understanding of what they are learning.

I really appreciate the beginning of the MIT electronics textbook https://amzn.com/1558607358 which explicitly describes the abstractions used and their limitations, up front. Rare economics textbooks also do a decent job of this.

Oh yeah, I got that in University. If I remember correctly from thermodynamics, high pressure and heat above the triple point [1] makes the change from liquid to gas to be a continuum and not a discrete jump.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_point

I was also on the science/rebellious side, which was really cool learning since of course ~80-90% of the things I disputed I was wrong, which only made me learn and be more motivated! I built my model of why I thought something was not correct, if I thought it was strong enough I'll ask some key questions and then I'd learn about it.

I don't fully agree with no simplification though, but I agree your teacher reaction was wrong. I think saying something like "yes, there are more states, but these are the ones commonly found in nature" would be the best.

I've taught programming, and for example in Javascript I would just teach that there is a type that is Number. But I wouldn't go into detail between int, float, different bases, etc since it doesn't make sense in a really basic level when general knowledge is more important.

At points some people would ask me more advanced or old-school questions, like table layouts, then I would acknowledge those exist but there are better alternatives nowadays and that I would teach that.

I didn't say no simplification. I said, it can be useful, but at least admit what you're doing. So, I think we're in full agreement.

I think part of the issue is teacher ego, some teachers feel like they only have authority if they're always right. On the first day of my AP history in high school we were going over the dawn of man. My teacher listed a bunch of proto-humans, and then got to homo habilis, and said that homo habilis was a fully modern human. This piqued my curiosity, so I raised my hand and asked, "If they were fully modern humans, what is the distinction between them and homo sapiens?" My teacher yelled, "Are you trying to make me look like an idiot!?", and ran out of the room crying.

I asked less questions after that.

See Wittgenstein's "Lie-to-Children".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children

It's often easier to come up with a simplified (and more wrong) model than a more complex (but less wrong) one. If you're lucky, when the time comes to swap the second for the first, there won't be too much transactional cost or confusion in the process.

It's also useful to keep in mind that a major component of educational pedagogy is in fact the cultural normalisation that it entails. Ideally the keepers of that pedagogy (as with your high school science teacher) would be aware of this, would be aware of at least the next step along that conceptual ladder, and would acknowledge it when raised. That isn't always the case.

There's the point that accommodating constant challenges to a common model of understanding even if that model is wrong and a specific challenge is correct is expensive and disruptive. A major element of the investigations I've been pursuing over the past few years have concerned models, their accuracy, their adoption, their costs, and most especially, the process by which old models are replaced by new ones.

The name Thomas Kuhn may mean something to you. Worth reflecting on (or reading, if you haven't).

> One of the most shocking things for me when I went through highschool a decade ago was how new things we learned about maths/physics showed the previous things we learned were not accurate. Things like relativity and time dilation, integrals/derivatives, etc.

I can see this for relativity. If any physics is explicitly taught before relativity, it's going to be Galilean/Newtonian.

I'm having trouble thinking of anything taught before integrals and derivatives, though, that is shown to have been inaccurate once the student learns about integrals and derivatives.

At least in the US, my recollection is that before calculus we just get arithmetic, geometry (sometimes), algebra, and trigonometry, and that all holds up fine when we get calculus. I'm guessing you are not from the US, because you said "maths/physics" rather than "math/physics", so it is different here. What was it that learning integrals and derivatives revealed as inaccurate?

Elementary mathematics is not invalidated by calculus, unless you had a really bad teacher.

I'd say same with Newtonian and 20th century physics. Newtonian physics _is_ a proper mathematical model for large masses slow speeds, unless you need astronomically high precision. If you are calculating calories you spent on a treadmill, there is no need in knowing the speed of light.

With social sciences, this is completely different. A lot of knowledge there is de facto just-so story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

It's probably worth noting that the "consensus statement" cited here was only signed by 52 of the 131 researchers it was sent out to.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream_Science_on_Intell...

It's also worth noting that judging from the examples provided, the methodological approach of Warne et al. is to suggest textbook authors are guilty of a specified fallacy if they make any statement which appears to conflict with Gotfredsson's listed points in any way (even if that statement is itself cited, quite possibly true and not actually presented as a refutation - fallacious or otherwise - of any claims made about intelligence)

Hard right: everybody should take an IQ test Libertarian right: I take drugs to increase my IQ Libertarian left: there is no IQ Hard left: everybody has the same IQ

When laypeople misuse science and maths, (I am in this context a layperson btw) the consequences depend on the applicability of the subject to ordinary discourse and events.

Because I don't work in bomb science, power engineering or nuclear medicine, If I misuse facts about nuclear fission making decisions to hire a new staffer, the consequence is low. Nothing about nuclear fission informs what happens in the workplace. So the colloquial lack of understanding on my part as to what science actually says about nuclear physics is low.

When I mis-use understanding of I.Q. and g to make a hiring decision, the consequences are huge for the person hired and the organisation. Assumptions about normative behaviour, likely success, future hiring, application of applied knowledge, ability to learn, all these things have direct meaning and importance. The impact on the hire, or non-hire is also immense. Future promotion, reward, positional authority can all be affected by somebody in the psych space, working in H/R, mis-applying domain-specific knowledge around IQ and intelligence.

Its not nuclear physics, but its being mis-applied. Thats the problem. (that it's being mis-applied: not that it isn't nuclear physics. Although a quality of its mis-application is about it not being hard science: its guesswork, rei-fied through G and other statements of single-value measure against an imprecise measurement. I don't actually think social science is well named.)

This doesn't make any sense. He's taking a study over 20 years old designed to measure academic consensus and then using it to try and disprove 29 textbooks authored by leading psychologists. Couldn't the latter be said to be a (much more recent) form of academic consensus? Why should a measure of academic consensus over 20 years old be used as some kind of evidence against newer ideas?

Kinda related to this, probably a good idea to re-evaluate EQ while we're at it. Although, my gut feeling is that a healthy mix of IQ and EQ makes good worker bees (if that's the metric we're interested in).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_performance#Emotional_inte...

Those books are written by psychologists, maybe they have a good reason to be ... imprecise, underspecific? Be honest: nobody "knows"; Instigate thought: don't serve the truth on a silver tablet. That seems to be true for every advanced topic. Reverse psychology is still psychology.

I'm so confused now. Who is right about this?

For decades, the media have been misreporting what is known about intelligence, because it is politically incorrect. A good book documenting this is "The I. Q. Controversy: The Media and Public Policy" by Stanley Rothman and Mark Snyderman (1988).

A book that sent out a questionnaire to [mostly white] academics and then tried to conclude fact about different race's intelligence as a result of those questionnaires? It is fluff.

The whole methodology is set out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IQ_Controversy,_the_Media_...

Since most professors in the U.S. are white, especially in 1998 when the book was published, I wonder why you think that the professors surveyed being "mostly white" discredits the book. Do you have any evidence that non-white professors were systematically excluded from the study?

> I wonder why you think that the professors surveyed being "mostly white" discredits the book.

That wasn't what I said. What I said was:

> then tried to conclude fact about different race's intelligence as a result of those questionnaires

They surveyed one demographic and asked them to draw conclusions about another demographic without considering the innate biases of doing so. I called the book "fluff" which I stand behind. It doesn't provide any new scientific data, even the selection of questions, who they selected to send them to, and other actions by the researches introduced a ton of biasing issues.

Their whole goal was to discrete what they viewed as "liberal academia."

That "political correctness" as you call it is masking a much deeper problem.

If you believe that there are innate differences in intelligence then what do you do about it?

If we are not going to discriminate based on innate differentiators like gender, race, etc, then how can we discriminate based on intelligence, if it is innate?

The idea of social justice for people with innately low intelligence is very disruptive so better to pretend they don't exist.

>If we are not going to discriminate based on innate differentiators like gender, race, etc, then how can we discriminate based on intelligence, if it is innate?

I have to admit I feel a lot of anxiety trying to answer your question in good faith, because this is such a touchy subject.

Accurately measuring innate differences, if such things exist, is essential to determining if systemic bias exists and to what extent. If Ashkenazi Jews have a higher than average verbal IQ, maybe it's not surprising that they appear over-represented in top tier verbal IQ jobs (media, etc.). If East Asians have higher than average spacial intelligence, maybe it's not surprising that they appear over-represented in engineering disciplines.

Importantly, these statistical differences tell us nothing useful about any specific individual.

It is essential to discriminate in hiring on the basis of qualities that are relevant for the job. If a person's race or sex does not affect his or her ability to perform as a programmer, but his or her intelligence does, then of course you use perceived intelligence as a criterion. Athletic ability is heritable. How can sports teams not discriminate on the basis of athletic ability?

> How can sports teams not discriminate on the basis of athletic ability?

What applies to a few thousand people playing games does not necessarily apply to society at large.

> It is essential to discriminate in hiring on the basis of qualities that are relevant for the job

Yes, the job has to fit the person, but what about the salary? If a person can only qualify for a certain position based on their innate intelligence then they should not earn less because of that.

Jobs might be distributed based on innate intelligence but distributing income based on innate intelligence would seem to be counter to the anti-discrimination norms that our society lives by.

Also confused. Are they simply criticizing the experiments (whose results may still hold), or are there evidence that points to the contrary?

What’s their motive? More funding?

Sweet! Time to print new editions of all those textbooks! Time to buy a boat.

On one hand is, "A researcher in human intelligence at Utah Valley University". On the other are, "the 29 best-selling introductory psychology textbooks in the US - some written by among the most eminent psychologists alive".

Why would I believe the former? I'm not saying that Utah Valley U. researchers shouldn't raise questions, but that the standard for what I'm going to take at face value is much higher than one study that contradicts everyone else. One study is just the start of the start of a discussion. I think I'll let the body of evidence accumulate and let experts weigh in.

One psychological concept I'm familiar with is confirmation bias. This article confirms beliefs held by some at HN about political bias, authority, and accuracy in science, (and unfortunately, an effort to rationalize and justify racism by finding some basis for it). That doesn't make this report any more likely to be accurate. Apparently, 29 leading textbooks contradict it; if not for the bias, why not take 29 publications at face value instead of 1?

EDIT: a bunch of edits; sorry for the mess.

EDIT: I'll add that this one study was published "in an open-access article in Archives of Scientific Psychology". It's not even peer-reviewed [EDIT2: It is, in fact, peer reviewed; sorry. I still expect the textbooks to be reviewed much more carefully than one paper.]

Well, there is nothing to believe or not believe in this study; it simply points out that most of the books disagree with what's widely accepted in the field[0]. Which do you believe, the widely accepted theory or 29 books?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell%E2%80%93Horn%E2%80%93C...

> it simply points out that 29 books disagree with what's widely accepted in the field

The study claims that. The textbooks claim otherwise. Why do you believe the study's claims? (I'd believe Wikipedia less than either.)

You could also allow yourself to exist in a gray area where you find this interesting but do not believe you know the exact truth.

> I'd believe Wikipedia less than either.

That's where you make a mistake. Whatever the reason, the Wikipedia articles on the g factor, the intelligence quotient and Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory represent better what is widely accepted in the field than any other source. This somehow also turns out to be true for other academic fields.

Anyway, when source A says explicitly that source B is wrong but source B makes no such claim about source A, you should usually believe source A. But in this case you can know that the study is right by just learning for yourself what does happen to be widely accepted in the field and why it is widely accepted.

> represent better what is widely accepted in the field

How do you know this? Are you a practitioner in the field?

> when source A says explicitly that source B is wrong but source B makes no such claim about source A, you should usually believe source A

Yikes. That is scary: "You are wrong." You'd better respond or else that proves it.

"Newton is wrong." "Darwin is wrong about evolution." "Climate change scientists are all wrong." "Popper is wrong about postpositivism." "The legal system is wrong about the right to cross-examination."

They make some pretty specific claims though, it's not like it's "one researcher" vs "29 textbooks". Textbooks can be written poorly too, you know. For example:

> In contrast, fewer than a quarter of the books covered the most strongly supported contemporary, hierarchical theories, such as Carroll’s three-statrum model and CHC theory each of which posits the influence of a general intelligence on other cognitive abilities.

> The most common inaccuracy (appearing in nearly half the books) was that intelligence tests are biased against particular groups or individuals. This contradicts the 1997 consensus statement which tackles this issue and concludes that “intelligence tests are not culturally biased”.

By inspecting the supporting evidence for some of his claims. If the argument is supported by solid references then there is reason to take his analysis seriously.

Within psychology there's a subfield that studies intelligence. The introductory textbooks to the whole field of psychology should be giving a summary of the discoveries of each individual subfield. But when it comes to intelligence they are giving information that the intelligence specialists agree is incorrect or outdated.

It's not one expert against many, it's people outside a speciality refusing to accept the consensus from within that speciality.

> intelligence specialists agree

The author of one study says that; it's not a consensus of intelligence specialists. From what I know, textbooks are usually carefully reviewed by experts; in fact, they likely are far better reviewed than this study, which wasn't even published in a peer-reviewed journal [EDIT: As pointed out below, it is in fact peer reviewed; sorry, my mistake. I still expect textbooks to be more carefully reviewed than one random paper.]

From the article:

Reporting their findings in an open-access article in Archives of Scientific Psychology ...

Open access is something different from not being peer reviewed, it describes the amount of access granted to articles after publication, peer review is what happens before publication itself. It says it is a peer reviewed journal: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/arc/?tab=4

> Archives is staunchly peer reviewed, and the standards for publication in Archives are as high as those for any other APA journal. Therefore, only those manuscripts that are well-written and present research of the highest quality will be accepted for publication. Rejection rates are similar to those of other APA journals.

>which wasn't even published in a peer-reviewed journal

"Open access" is not the same as "not peer reviewed." There is no subscription required to get the articles in the journal, but it is peer-reviewed.

From the page for the Warne et al. paper from the OP link (http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-07714-001):

>Publication Type: Journal; Peer Reviewed Journal

From the publication announcing "Archives of Scientific Psychology" (http://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2013-03009-001.pdf):

>Archives of Scientific Psychology uses peer review to determine whether a submitted manuscript is suitable for publication. Authors are free to submit manuscripts that reveal their identity or that are prepared to keep reviewers unaware of who they are. We adopted this policy because we are unconvinced that evidence on peer review rules out the possibility that some reviewers’ evaluations of manuscripts are influenced by characteristics of authors (Shatz, 2004; Weller, 2001). Likewise, reviewers will be given the option of revealing themselves to the authors.

> From what I know, textbooks are usually carefully reviewed by experts; in fact, they likely are far better reviewed than this study

I've seen far too many minor-to-grave errors in almost every textbook I've read to believe that -- and I wasn't any kind of expert in most of the fields concerned.

Note: it is peer-reviewed.

"Archives is staunchly peer reviewed, and the standards for publication in Archives are as high as those for any other APA journal. Therefore, only those manuscripts that are well-written and present research of the highest quality will be accepted for publication. Rejection rates are similar to those of other APA journals."

https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/arc/index.aspx?tab=4

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