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Comment by seneca | Hacker News Reader

Agreed on all counts.

> For reasons I don't fully understand, there's a lot of folks in the social sciences these day that seem to be waging war on the very concept that you can describe intelligence generally (and IQ tests specifically).

The unfortunate reality is that social sciences are largely corrupted by political activism. Their activities are often prescriptive social engineering that attempt to use their perceived scientific authority rather than actual descriptive science. Put simply, they are saying what they want to be so, rather than what is so.

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"Corrupted by political activism" is probably going too far. It's not controversial to acknowledge that lots of historical attempts to measure intelligence have been pretty biased in favor of English speaking white men. Many of those attempts were biased just because of unexamined biases (the kind everyone has). Unfortunately some were also very deliberate spins (one notable example being the book The Bell Curve).

I think it's reasonable to conclude that measuring intelligence isn't valuable enough for all of the negative externalities attached to it given how the world currently is. But then from there it's easy to make the easy jump to saying it's impossible to measure intelligence without those negative externalities, which is probably not true. But if you can't measure intelligence without significant bias, you aren't really measuring it at all, you're just measuring your biases.

> It's not controversial to acknowledge that lots of historical attempts to measure intelligence have been pretty biased in favor of English speaking white men.

Do you have some specific examples of this purported bias?

> Unfortunately some were also very deliberate spins (one notable example being the book The Bell Curve).

Specifically what spin are you referring to?

> I think it's reasonable to conclude that measuring intelligence isn't valuable enough for all of the negative externalities attached to it given how the world currently is.

Insufficiently valuable to whom?

I've heard the argument that even if there is a reliable measure of IQ and there is a measurable difference between groups of people, that knowledge only harms people and doesn't do any good, so we shouldn't pursue it anyways.

So I think to get everyone on the same page, you have to address that concern in some form, or there will be some people who are always against the idea of measurable intelligence.

I'm not sure that's the same argument. If a chemical engineer wants to explain why she won't research chemical weapon agents, she's not going to say "chemical weapons don't exist" or "everything's made of chemicals so chemical weapons aren't a coherent category". She'll say chemical weapons are a clear, coherent, and real idea, but the risks of understanding them better outweigh any potential benefits.

It's a reasonable argument, and one I personally tend to lean towards, but you can't meaningfully debate it if you don't have a shared understanding that a general factor does indeed exist.

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