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Comment by lmohseni | Hacker News Reader

Cognitive elite? Or cultural elite. Given that IQ scores purport to measure cognitive faculty but instead measure cultural fluency.

(Changed pretend to purport)

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That's not as true as one would hope. There's not a lot of "cultural fluency" involved in matching squares, unless you're from the jungle and have grown up never seeing any squares. (The theory that people who grew up not looking at corners would be less able to perceive square shapes has received some attention, but we have to admit that doesn't have much relevance to people living in modern countries like America or India .)

Now, cultural fluency questions have appeared on IQ tests, especially in the past. However that's not so much an attack on the idea of "g" as it is a problem with antiquated methods of measuring it.

That's not to say that IQ tests are that accurate. The biggest confounder I know of is ADHD, which causes the tests to come out five whole points lower on average. I'm sure there are others.

> There's not a lot of "cultural fluency" involved in matching squares

There are a lot of cultural factors involved in believing a seemingly pointless exercise like matching squares is worth doing. You have to believe that something good can come out of it in general; and you have to believe that something good can come out of it specifically for yourself.

Accurately measuring the performance of someone who is not interested in demonstrating their performance seems like an impossible task for anyone but GLaDOS from the Portal series. ;)

More seriously, random pattern matching questions are the best you can do to control for the not-caring factor, because they eliminate the advantage of test prep. The SAT has a significant test prep factor, which I agree is highly confounded by "culture" (a byword for how much your parents make you study) and the circumstances and opportunities related to test prep, including the motivation of the student, and the availability of a place to study and study materials. IQ tests are significantly more meritocratic than algorithms interviews or the SAT.

I've never taken an IQ test and never plan to. I took the SAT, but it has significantly changed over the years; my score today would not be translatable to my score then.

OT, but I really love GlaDOS and hope there's another Portal soon.

If you haven't seen it yet, check out "Portal Reloaded" on Steam. It's a fan-made game like "Portal Stories Mel" from a few years ago, but Reloaded goes as far as adding entirely new mechanics. It's about as close as we'll ever get to Portal 3.

That could be true, but it’s still a good measure of IQ. This “cultural” angle is a narrative that started from criticisms of SAT vocab tests and critics of IQ tests latched onto it and hope they can convince everyone that IQ isn’t real and everyone is equally smart in their own way

Colleges don't filter their entrants by matching squares. Even the SAT test could be said to be culturally biased in a way that discounts rural ways of life and their rich legacy of traditional knowledge.

Ironically, college admissions would get a lot more egalitarian if they switched to IQ tests, because the long list of confounding factors (or "privileges" as some people call them) like the availability of free hours to study in, have much less impact on matching abstract symbols in rows than they have on the SAT or other partially knowledge-based tests.

I'm not sure if we want to do that because the capacity for working hard is often more valuable than "g". One's capacity and willingness to work hard for a long time is impossible to untangle from one's circumstances including one's upbringing. Fairly testing for that is much harder than testing for g but it may be too crucial to ignore.

It probably wouldn't make much difference. There's pretty good correlation between SAT and IQ. See e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/

That correlation is not invariant to cultural factors. Your own link mentions some of these - namely, "epistemic belief of learning, performance-avoidance goals, and parental education", for which we can easily measure variation across ethnicity (which of course is a lot more visible and more easily operationalized that a more nuanced understanding of culture, including urban vs. rural).

The paper you linked doesn't report the correlation as far as I could see, but it did cite a paper that said it was 0.86[0]. That's great for a social sciences correlation, but not so great as a way to be fair. 0.86 leaves a lot of room for other processes - and in competitive scenarios at the top of the distribution, the confounders could make all the difference.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15147489/

That is an important distinction (or at least the idea that IQ only measures a very narrow and not so significant part of a persons intelligence). I would surmise that a lot of those graduating with high IQs have also acquired the arrogance to believe that they should manage society, not just businesses. They can point to IQ scores and high salaries to prove their supposed superiority. In that way, IQ has become a cultural myth for reinforcing mandate to rule; we even have magazines comparing the IQs of different presidents throughout history, as estimated by pseudo-psychologists. The cultural elite have become something of a ruling/chattering class, more so than before, with greater and greater divides between different sectors of society. It is all quite ironic, since it could be argued that the elites today have less critical thinking abilities than our classically educated ancestors, many of whom expressly rejected a belief in elite rule. Fixation on IQ and wealth can be like the Cyrenians who wasted their wealth teaching their war horses to dance, then getting defeated when the enemy played flutes in battle, causing their horses to dance.

They who count their wealth to measure their worth are those that would measure the worth of their home by the piles of sawdust produced in making it.

-Thief 3, some Hammerite (paraphrased)

IQ is a meme, and once you get away from the ivory tower and see how everyone else has to make it, you realize just how jacked the entire thing is. The thing in this case being the prestige class. Noblis oblige is dead, the new money is stark raving mad, the old money couldn't give a shit more. Nobody has any more of a clue than anyone else, and the executable bad idea is valued over and above the good idea that just doesn't seem quite ready to crystallize yet.

The biggest curse in my opinion is to see and grok the magnitude and nature of the problems but to not be in a position to do much about them besides trying to explain it to a handful of people and hope a couple understand, are in a spot and mindset to do something about it, take it, and run with it. It's kind of like being a Chief or high level enlisted in the armed forces from what I gather. Too busy getting things done to keep the status quo moving, but also facilitating bottom up information propagation and nudging the command structure in the right direction via reality checks.

Oh... The dreams that have died from learning how the world really works. They are a plenty.

>> Fixation on IQ and wealth can be like the Cyrenians who wasted their wealth teaching their war horses to dance, then getting defeated when the enemy played flutes in battle, causing their horses to dance.

Source for the story, please?

It's the Sybarites, not the Cyrenians, and that's the origins of "sybaritic".

> But they had carried their luxury to such a pitch that they had taught even their horses to dance at their feasts to the music of the flute. Accordingly the people of Crotona, knowing this, and being at war with them, as Aristotle relates in his History of the Constitution of Sybaris, played before their horses the air to which they were accustomed to dance; for the people of Crotona also had fluteplayers in military uniform. And as soon as the horses heard them playing on the flute, they not only began to dance, but ran over to the army of the Crotonians, carrying their riders with them.

-- Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists

The Aristotlean source he cites is lost.

Thank you! That explains why I couldn't find it; heard it in a history of philosophy class ages ago :)

Thanks.

> we even have magazines comparing the IQs of different presidents throughout history, as estimated by pseudo-psychologists.

Which magazine / when? It sounds like this might actually contain some insight into the thinking of the magazine's editors, which could be interesting (so long as one is careful to assign no truth value to the content).

Edit: Googling has led me to a few, all citing this one paper from 2006. Political Psychology, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Aug., 2006), pp. 511-526 TLDR: The methodology is a bit loose, taking biographical achievements in earlier life and correlating them with people of known intelligence who did similar things. This leads to the perhaps-unsurprising result that they were all estimated at above-average IQ. I'm not sure why a 2006 paper would be turned into article fodder now.

Thank you! That is even more info than I had. Odd how so many places picked it up in the last couple of years

IQ is highly correlated with reaction times.[1] It's extremely difficult to explain that result if you assume IQ is purely cultural, rather than neurological.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5608941/

Is this true? Plenty of IQ tests are extremely simple pattern recognition. The science of measuring human cognitive performance is plagued by cultural taboos more so than process issues.

Sort of; even the non-verbal portions have different means across cultures, AND the neuropsychological abilities that predicted higher scores differed across cultures as well.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24055883/

So what exactly an IQ test is measuring differs between cultures (though it certainly is measuring -something- since there are other correlations), since even the separately identifiable and measurable abilities that lead to someone doing well on an IQ test differ across cultures.

I think you’re half-right there.

To my understanding, IQ tests do measure generalized intelligence, and a lot of standardized tests correlate to them fairly well.

However, elite universities have been deemphasizing standardized tests for decades in favor of fuzzier admissions criteria. This, among other things, enables discrimination against minorities that overperform on standardized tests (historically Jews, currently Asians).

You’re right that the elite class is a self-selected cultural elite, but standardized tests are less of a tool and more of an impediment to their self-selection process.

I'm gonna need a source that "cultural fluency" determines your ability to rotate weirdly-shaped little 3d objects around in your head

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