It's pretty funny that among the discoveries made in the field of psychology IQ is one of the strongest and most maligned at the same time. Meanwhile unreproducible junk is receiving accolades.
Like the entirity of personel selection for many, many years was based on IQ like measures, and it was the base for all of the work ETS have done on standardised testing (item response theory and all that).
Can you explain why you do not believe IQ to be rigorous?
>Can you explain why you do not believe IQ to be rigorous?
That's a much longer and more complicated argument than what I'm saying, which is simply that IQ is not anywhere near the most essential nor the most studied question in psychology. Classical conditioning is another. Attachment and critical periods in developmental psychology have received a lot of attention. In particular, pretty much any effect which generalizes in a simple and reliable way from humans to animals is easier to experiment on and has a stronger evidence base than IQ: instinctual drift, childhood amnesia, most of the theory of perception, etc.
The actual content and priorities of psychology as a field of scientific research is quite different from the few topics which get debated with unreasonably high frequency on the Internet.
Full disclosure, I have a doctorate in psychology (but have been out of the field almost a decade now), so am well aware of the "actual" psychological research.
Personally, for my money, IQ lead to the development of most of modern psychometrics, which I think is probably psychology's largest contribution to intellectual knowledge, but that's probably my quant bias showing.
Sure, behaviourism has had a bunch of successes, but it's only necessary for psychology, and definitely not sufficient.
Classical conditioning I'll give you, but I definitely didn't hear much about either instinctual drift or childhood amnesia relative to IQ.
> theory of perception, Which one? are you talking about the information processing model or the gestalt models? I'd probably agree with you on Gestalt, but not on IP (which I think is the steam-engine metaphor of the mind of our time).
I'd agree that it's not the most essential question, but it's definitely one of the most studied.
Sure wealth is an interesting thing to look at societally, but it offers no insight into human psychology.
Wealth is not a feature internal to an individual, it's something defined by a society/particular social structure and as such, it doesn't make a lot of sense to compare it to IQ (an individual difference variable measured by a test).
Wrong. The original goal of IQ testing was to predict which students needed special care. It is still very useful (albeit expensive) metric for that.
I just mentioned wealth here just to demonstrate that just because something correlates and predicts something, it doesn’t make it interesting. We know how wealth is inherited, and how people of wealth are privileged and generally more successful (at least if we measure success the same way as IQ proponents do). We know the mechanics of how wealth works and we know it is more societal then psychological. I took wealth as an example here just to weather the possibility the IQ is correlated and has this predictive power because of similar mechanics, i.e. not descriptive of psychology, but society.
You are entirely correct, turns out I misremembered.
Wealth is definitely not inherited the same way as IQ, in that it doesn't show any regression to the mean. We also know that adopted children from a lower-IQ family will show an IQ between their birth and adoptive parents, which is again very different from wealth.
I do agree that IQ is not a perfect metric, but can you describe why you think IQ is more reflective of society than anything else?
Assets/wealth is actually pretty uncorrelated with IQ among adults.
Saying that wealth is the same thing as IQ is a conservative position, IMO.
Why aren't those two sides of the same coin? I mean, smart people can generally figure out how to accrue and maintain wealth.
Someone will say by way of counter-example that, let's say the Kardashians are not smart. But they seem awfully clever at manipulating their publicity in ways that bring them wealth.
So it really seems to have more to do with whether one has a narrow conception of intelligence as being able to, say, find new theories in QCD or derive relativity, rather than being able to figure out how to accomplish things beneficial to themselves. Which might be D-K in effect, but who knows?
That said, if wealth and IQ correlates—which I’m not sure it does—you cannot say which causes which, or even if either causes the other. It is just as plausible that wealthy folks have better training taking tests which will lead to higher test scores in general, including IQ scores.
https://rpadgett.butler.edu/ps320/coursedocs/Richardson-Norg...
Now if you manage to convince me that there is a correlation, twin studies is not enough to convince me of the causation. Twin studies are controversial as they do not provide a random sample and have a number of inherit biases.
And even if you find a way to convince me that the causation is not wealth → IQ, it is still not enough to convince me that IQ causes wealth. You still have to eliminate any third variable that causes both.
This is all after you’ve convinced me that IQ is a useful and interesting metric (see nibling comments), as well as useful and unbiased, all of which is up for debate in academic studies as of yet. Good luck.
I wasn't talking about Twin studies. It is a fact that among adopted kids their intelligence correlates almost as much with their biological parents as for non adopted kids. Adopted kids is such a big group that there is no lack of data.
We have, actually! It's just that they've all been implemented already. Iodine supplementation was huge. (Childhood Iodine deficiency results in an adulthood IQ deficit of ~15 points)
The next big IQ improvement looks like it might be iterated embryo selection [0] which is currently possible and will soon be practical, but has a whole host of ethical issues attached to it. (Is it right for the children of the rich to get another advantage like this? (Not a question for the Talebs of the world who think IQ is bunk, but one I'm sure many will be asking) Is throwing away dozens of viable embryos ethical? Are we 'playing god'? And further down the line, is using CRISPR-Cas9 to directly edit the genome of your descendants OK?)