IQ is probably more well studied than any other phenomenon in the social sciences or psychology.
Also IQ is not science, it is something that is studied scientifically.
Also IQ is not science, it is something that is studied scientifically.
I think this means that either science is poor or the argument is.
In the case of astrology, I find interesting how a few millennia of human culture, stories, and epics have been projected on celestial bodies and carried along our history through this shared medium.
I would say that (if you really want to find a strong point) astrology can be seen as trying to distill human knowledge from our cultural substrata.
Whether we should do it or not is another topic.
What is your relation to science? Have you done any yourself?
Science is poor in the sense that it can be arbitrarily wrong and for arbitrarily long as humans can be. Yea, it's true. Does that trouble you?
I would argue that a combination of the simplicity of study of a phenomenon, the amount it's been studied, and the consistency of the results of that study correlate with the likelihood of it being true.
IQ is very simple to study, it's been studied exhaustively, and results of that study have been consistent. Outside of physics and some very basic biology there are few if any scientific phenomenon as likely to be true as IQ. Can you name a single phenomenon that has been as well studied in the modern era with the same consistency of results that has been untrue?
Btw you still haven't made a single argument against IQ. You've only been arguing against the totality of science and my credentials.
IMHO, the most biting criticism of IQ is that we (that is the psychology community at large) expect such a thing to exist, and so we treat anything that looks like it might fit that glove, no matter how poorly, as evidence of its existence. Our scientific methods aren't really capable of forcibly rebutting such a theory--see the existence of parapsychology, where psi is statistically known to exist (unless you're a skeptic). See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o... for a discussion of this phenomenon.
> I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that it is strong correlation with an innate, biological, causative metric that closely corresponds to a general, popular notion of "intelligence"--which is of course the use that pop psychology immediately attaches to it.
I don't think you need to correlate IQ with anything physical for it to exist. But it's been correlated with genes, amount of white matter, size of different regions in the brain etc...
Maybe we have a different idea of what IQ means.
I would say the IQ "theory" could be broken down into a couple of distinct hypotheses.
1. Problem solving is a skill/ability - People who are good at solving some types of problems, will be better than average as solving other types of problems.
2. We can test this ability - We can write down problems and ask them to solve them. Because of 1 this tells us how good they will be at solving other problems.
3. This ability helps with some real world tasks - The real world has lots of problems that benefit from problem solving ability.
When we put together this means we can predict a portion of someone's ability at a real world task we care about (like physics or software development) by estimating their problem solving ability through a test. Based on the evidence we currently have I don't know how this couldn't be true.
If I light someone on fire with gasoline this makes it no less useful for fueling a car.
Nah don’t bother. It’s HN.
But you knew that too right? You also knew that it was basically designed to keep undesirables out of the capital class too, right? Guess who those people were.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article
Lead everywhere is as toxic as assuming IQ measures some kind of general intelligence.
The question about IQ is does it measure anything? Is it predictive? And can that be useful? And the answer all three of those questions is obviously yes.