Wiki says that the average IQ of MDs, JDs, and PhDs is 125.[1] That is pretty far away from 70.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Other_ac...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Other_ac...
> Note that IQ tests correlate with SAT scores!
That is (in part) Nassim Nicholas Taleb's point: we use IQ to select for success, then say IQ is correlated with success. It is circular reasoning.
The more interesting measure is not jobs for which IQ is the main selection criteria to qualify for the training (your examples of MDs, JDs, and PhDs), but things where people create their own impact, lets say entrepreneurs, or world changing ideas (think Naler's Nudge).
I don't necessarily agree with this, BTW. Just linking the ideas back together.
This would only be correct if the SAT were expressly an IQ test, and we selected people based on SAT score for that reason.
To put it another way, making this point is kind of like selecting for tall players for a basketball team, then saying weight is correlated with fitness to be on a basketball team. That height and weight are correlated doesn't make this circular reasoning.
Tall is an absolute, objective measure of a real thing that exists. IQ is NOT a measure of a thing that exists.
Similar effects can be found throwing dice and ascribing the total to an IQ score, then telling parents, teachers what the poor kid's IQ is as though it were their height. It's insane.
https://sites.google.com/site/7arosenthal/
Per: Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1966 study, which deserves wider appreciation?
I want to emphasise 1966 was when this was published so it isn't overlooked as we all read pretty fast with these things.
edit:
Found a link to the original paper:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.488...
More recent criticism of the original:
https://thenewstatistics.com/itns/2018/04/03/weve-been-here-...
I don't understand your concept of something "existing" or not. Do you believe that a "speed" exist ? That a "center of gravity" exists ? That a "temperature" exist ? People who say "IQ is what IQ tests measure" sound to me like they could say "temperature is what thermometers measure". temperature does not "exist" it is molecules movements all the way down, yet it is a meaningful/useful concept. Same goes for IQ or "g factor".
Is Taleb saying that IQ is a bad metric, or is he saying that these other tests are academic and unrealistic, and then referring to them collectively as IQ tests because the results are correlated? Or something else?
> It is designed to assess reading comprehension as well as logical and verbal reasoning proficiency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_School_Admission_Test
The MCAT has one pure IQ test section out of four. However, all of these tests are highly g loaded. People who can do well on one of them can do well on the others with more or less preparation. That’s what g attempts to measure.
I don't know about mcat, but no, lsat isn't about that at all. It would be weird testing people for the thing they're trying to be admitted to. If you google 'lsat sample questions', it"s trivial to find what sort of thing is beimg tested for. Which is not 'complete the pattern', but closer to that (I would argue) than to substantive law questions.
By "law exam" I actually had in mind "the final exam" and whatever other tests you have to pass in order to not be thrown out of the program, once you're already in. (It seems the "bar exam" is not a prerequisite for a JD, though.) I guess the question is, which is more selective: law school admissions, or "who actually gets their degree once they're in law school"? Looks like the latter filter lets about one third through [1], while the former seems to pass one half if you just divide total admissions by total applications [2], although if we care more about "top law schools" I see various Google results saying it's more like 25%. So... reasonably similar-sized filters. Huh.
I also see an article titled "Law Schools With Low LSAT Medians Have Absurd Academic Attrition Rates" [3]. That would seem to support the notion that the LSAT genuinely is testing ability to do well at law, despite being a non-law exam.
[1] https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/l...
[2] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/legal_education/resources... , see "JD Applicant/Matriculant Data" for e.g. 2016, which shows 351k applications and 145k acceptances (I had to type in "=SUM(B7:B210)" and "=SUM(C7:C210)" to get those totals)
[3] https://abovethelaw.com/2018/01/law-schools-with-low-lsat-me...
Mismatching people to schools based upon an ideal hurts those people when they come unprepared relative to their peers. Many diverse people admitted through affirmative action with a dream to do the sciences abandon them for other less rigorous disciplines, and it doesn't have to be so if they were matched with a school without the social engineering attempts of ideologues.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...
As I understand it, most colleges have been using some form of linear regression model on many factors to filter admissions in a way that maximize returns (i.e. alumni donations) for decades now. Surely there is other evidence which shows that if SAT scores were actually a poor heuristic of potential success, schools would have stopped relying on them by now. (without having to bring race into the conversation)
Affirmative action is precisely an adjustment of admissions criteria such that ceterus paribus a candidate is more likely to be admitted. Yes, it's based on race, but if it was based on lottery, it would have the same effect: students with lower SAT scores are admitted to schools which otherwise require a certain threshold.
That they don't do as well, shows that the SAT is measuring something relevant to success in education.
Note that affirmative action would have this effect even if average IQ were the same across races, because schools vary in the SAT thresholds they set, and this would have the effect of propelling students into settings they aren't prepared to flourish in.
That said some people find legacy admissions unfair, but as a person that did not receive that I think it is fine because one of the purposes of any group is to provide advantage to the people in the group. The primary purpose of a long lived entity like an Ivy is to ensure the long term health of the culture that keeps it competitive, which includes providing continuity and a reason to invest for legacy families while also admitting new members from families that can provide mutual value to the entity.
My comment brought up a data set that could be used to evaluate the claim of the article that iq tests are meaningless for what they claim to measure. This data contradicts this claim.
The inclination of social justice believers to treat all people that look the same as a unit is too simplistic, because there is more variance within such groups than between them. It also fits the definition of racism unlike my comment, and saying someone is defined by their skin color is way beyond dog whistle territory.
If you have a rationale supporting your claim use that, because otherwise we can’t engage in productive discourse. I find it unethical when claims of racism like what you use here is used as a bludgeon tool to force others to accept actions or beliefs that are dogma in social justice while evidence shows it hurts those it claims this helps. Especially when those groups are unchosen, and applied by largely upper middle class and above white social justice activists for their political utility.
Also, I don't know if you're ignorant as to what a dog whistle is, or you're being purposefully obtuse, but "affirmative action" is extremely common talking point among actual racists, because it's a politically acceptable way to disparage racial minorities without directly using the word race; a dog whistle is a term that racists use to make racist commentary that's intended to make it clear to other racists that they're talking about race while still providing plausible deniability (i.e. accusing the other person of being the one to bring up race, when that was the topic from the beginning). "Affirmative action" is an extremely common dog whistle.
So, are you unaware of what a dog whistle is, or are you blowing the whistle?
It's particularly interesting in this case because the youtube link is Thomas Sowell speaking about the negative effects of Affirmative Action and he is a black American, would you say that he is dog whistling for racists?
Now onto the law itself, Affirmative Action is a racist policy as it advantages certain races over others, full stop. Recently asian students have brought a suit against Harvard (https://www.npr.org/2018/11/02/660734399/harvard-discriminat...), for their policies negatively effecting asian Americans. As a society we need to decide if we want to advantage some races over others. In my opinion it makes more sense to advantage people from poor backgrounds then it does based on race, as the black son or daughter of rich parents will have had more opportunities than the poor asian American. If you disagree with that I would love to understand why.
In addition, I fully agree that legacy admissions should be removed.
I want to be clear that I never accused the parent of being racist (and I don't have reason to believe he was being so). I just expressed that the specific choice of argument felt similar to rhetoric that racists do use, and that supporting it with non-racial evidence instead might better serve the argument. (I admit to also wanting to encourage readers to think critically about a topic so rife with racial tension on both sides)
>As a society we need to decide if we want to advantage some races over others. In my opinion it makes more sense to advantage people from poor backgrounds then it does based on race...
The justification for making it based on race is that it is a form of reparation to the collective racial communities, especially the black community, that have been negatively impacted by a deliberate effort by the government to keep them in a cycle of poverty (black codes, redlining, etc). The other goal is to have a broader ethnic representation in careers requiring a college-education, which is required to effectively remove the inherent internal prejudices in those circles (see also the push for getting women into STEM, and the backlash that they face upon entering due to the lack of women already there to set in-cultural norms).
An unfortunate side effects is that, taking only AA and diversity initiatives into account, a rich black person will have fewer opportunities than a poor Asian American, due to the already high proportion of East Asians in the relevant areas. That's more an issue of the extremely strong disparity of wealth and power in this country than an actual criticism of AA, however. Controlling for wealth, non-Asian POC will still often have fewer opportunities due the the strong influence of networking and in-group prejudice/bias on your career opportunities (which is one of the reasons that AA and diversity initiatives are required)
That being said, I don't know enough about the actual effects of said policies to judge their effectiveness, since I'm not a sociologist and assessing the real results of a policy with such complicated interactions is difficult. I can only speak confidently to the a priori justifications.
How is that not just a rhetorical trick for calling someone a racist without having to own up to it?
And your point about opportunity is demonstrably false; groups such as Nigerians do better than even Asians in educational and work achievement. There is also a historical african american upper class that consistently achieve in a similar manner across generations [2]. That should be celebrated, not ignored.
Statistically the african american family has fallen apart since the 60s, with 72% of kids growing up without a father up from 16%. The adverse outcomes of fatherless homes on kids is well known [1], and we should ask ourselves why this has become the normal case if we want the outcome of these groups to improve.
[1] https://www.rallypoint.com/shared-links/larry-elder-social-c...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_upper_class
IQ tests (of which there are a ton) are regularly calibrated, internationally comparable (there are some reasonably culturally neutral test protocols) and stable while SAT is a US-only metric.
Maybe SAT is calibrated to correlate with IQ tests?
We do? I have never seen IQ used for anything but online wankery. None of my most skilled coworkers have struck me as people outside the bell curve, and we have never had our IQ test results requested, or even measured in most cases.
Intelligence:Knowns and Unknowns
> are used for many purposes, such as selection, diagnosis, and evaluation. Many of the most widely used tests are not intended to measure intelligence itself but some closely related construct: scholastic aptitude, school achievement, specific abilities, etc. Such tests are es- pecially important for selection purposes. For preparatory school, it's the SSAT; for college, the SAT or ACT; for graduate school, the GRE; for medical school, the MCAT; for law school, the LSAT; for business school, the GMAT. Scores on intelligence-related tests matter, and the stakes can be high.
http://differentialclub.wdfiles.com/local--files/definitions...
https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
Retesting in selection: a meta-analysis of coaching and practice effects for tests of cognitive ability.
Previous studies have indicated that as many as 25% to 50% of applicants in organizational and educational settings are retested with measures of cognitive ability. Researchers have shown that practice effects are found across measurement occasions such that scores improve when these applicants retest. In this study, the authors used meta-analysis to summarize the results of 50 studies of practice effects for tests of cognitive ability. Results from 107 samples and 134,436 participants revealed an adjusted overall effect size of 0.26. Moderator analyses indicated that effects were larger when practice was accompanied by test coaching and when identical forms were used. Additional research is needed to understand the impact of retesting on the validity inferences drawn from test scores.
We don’t, though. The most financially successful people in the world are sports stars, movie stars, and business owners, none of whose success has anything to do with IQ scores. He bangs on IQ, but nobody actually uses IQ to select for anything – it’s actually prohibited by law in the US (https://www.britannica.com/event/Griggs-v-Duke-Power-Co). We do use SAT scores to determine admission to college, and SAT scores correlate pretty well with IQ scores, though, so I guess he’s indirectly complaining about SAT scores being used for college admissions? There’s nothing particularly new about this, though – people have complained for eons that measuring people’s test scores only tracks how good they are at taking tests. The problem is, true or not, tests are the only objective way we’ve ever come up with to figure out if somebody actually knows something.