https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
It's also worth noting that no one in the field of neuroscience (or genetics, for that matter) takes IQ seriously. It's solely an abstract toy for some psychologists to play with.
> "[IQ] ends up selecting for exam-takers, paper shufflers, obedient IYIs (intellectuals yet idiots), ill adapted for “real life”."
> "It is at the bottom an immoral measure"
> "If you want to detect how someone fares at a task, say loan sharking, tennis playing, or random matrix theory, make him/her do that task; we don’t need theoretical exams for a real world function by probability-challenged psychologists"
> "Only suckers don’t have that instinct."
This is just a trash article by a bitter science denier. IQ-deniers are for me not much different from anti-vaxxers. Yes, you are free to criticize aspects of the test but there is no denying that people have different thinking speeds, as "immoral" as that fact might be.
If you use your intelligence to learn something useful, that is, well, useful.
But if you just have intelligence and don't utilize it towards a purpose, it is useless, like an unused full battery.
What is the IQ needed to draw this implication?
It is possible to have a reasonable debate about whether intelligence is real, what exactly it means, and what outcomes it correlates with. This is obviously not the way to do it. This is pure clickbait, pretending to be smart math, because pictures with dots and number, plus textbook screenshots.
Some of the things he says make sense. But he exaggerates their importance, and completely strawmans his opposition. "If you want to detect how someone fares at [X], make him/her do that task; we don’t need theoretical exams" - thank you, Captain Obvious!
>this piece was meant for math PhDs
Lol it is absolutely not meant for math PhDs. I think anyone with a bachelor degree could follow the math (probably, I don't know much about the university system works in the US).
if nothing else, it measures your ability to take IQ tests, and IQ score has some correlation to “success” in western culture (note i’m not saying “intelligence” anywhere here).
As for neurosci I'll admit it's second-hand knowledge from my social circle and colleagues, though it could be that I live in a bubble and neuroscientists are secretly terrorized to share their mindbreaking findings on the first component of a PCA.
>if nothing else, it measures your ability to take IQ tests, and IQ score has some correlation to “success” in western culture (note i’m not saying “intelligence” anywhere here).
This is circular, since many of the required tests to be "successful" are similar to IQ tests or "g-loaded" as people like to say. Even then, the correlation is weak beyond very low IQs.