IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle | Hacker News Reader

IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle

medium.com

I'm not sure if the article title and general tone is consistent with the actual interpretation of the data within the article. For instance: see this point within.

> To get the point, consider that if someone has mental needs, there will be 100% correlation between performance and IQ tests. But the performance doesn’t correlate as well at higher levels, though, unaware of the effect of the nonlinearity, the psychologists will think it does.(The statistical spin, as a marketing argument, is that a person with an IQ of 70 cannot prove theorems, which is obvious for a measure of unintelligence — but they fail to reveal how many IQs of 150 are doing menial jobs. So “vey low IQ” may provide information, while “very high IQ” may convey nothing better than random — it is not even a necessary condition.).

At the very least, even the author seems to be saying that IQ is a useful metric for understanding the world on the low end.

Indeed. It's always been hard to write a good title, but in this age of click-back it's hard to avoid writing a bad title.

> But the performance doesn’t correlate as well at higher levels, though, unaware of the effect of the nonlinearity, the psychologists will think it does.

Dunno what the author is trying to say. Most psychologists into IQ should know it is a normal distributed scale. And a correlation of 1 with any empiric data with IQ is just hyperbole. Who says there is any perfect correlation with something and IQ in the lowest range.

People with a lower IQ do menial jobs because it is all they can do, people with a higher IQ might do a menial job because that's what they want to do. Not everyone is motivated by wealth. In fact, the highest IQ's tend to belong to people who do not play well with others. Maybe leaning on a broom is just the ticket needed to happiness.

I kinda find it weird that from one of the main attack vectors of the article - that there is little correllation between IQ and wealth, the author concludes that therefore there is little correllation between IQ and merit, instead of saying there is little correllation between merit and wealth.

I don't think famous scientists like Einstein were particularly wealthy.

What is ‘merit’ exactly?

Wealth, according to libertarians and Taleb. Taleb seems to pick wealth because it's measurable, and then concludes IQ is worthless because it doesn't correlate with wealth. It's like the drunk looking for his keys near the lamp, not because he dropped them there, but because that's where the light is. Except Taleb has confidently declared that his keys must surely be near the light, making it seem like wealth is in fact the only thing he values.

Whatever "merit" is, it's certainly easier to define (differently for each of us, I'm sure) than "intelligence" is.

Seems like you can’t define it, and without a definition your criticism of the article is meaningless.

> I don't think famous scientists like Einstein were particularly wealthy.

Wealth is a means to get yourself novelty in the form of top notch products, services, experiences and trophy assets.

No amount of money would have bought Einstein the novelty he was seeking. Many people chase that dragon for their whole life and never get to take a hit.

Did not know:

"correlation is 80% between test and retest, meaning you being you explains less than 64% of your test results"

"IQ decorrelates as it goes higher"

"So “very low IQ” may provide information, while “very high IQ” may convey nothing better than random"

Did not read the article but to react to this point:

> "IQ decorrelates as it goes higher"

That is to be expected.

Let's say as an example we model performance as the equal sum of two gaussian distributed variables - inborn, static ability that changes between people, and how well someone is feeling on the day of the test. This is similar to how ELO scoring works in chess and video games.

In this case let's say a person scores 3 standard deviations above the average - this could either mean that person has 3 StdDev ability and an average day (a probablity of about 0.1%) OR he has 2 StdDev ability (2%) with an 1 StDev 'lucky' day (16%) for a probability of 0.3%.

This means, the further off center we go in the distribution the larger the proportion of the 'lucky' people will be, compared to innate high scorers.

Interesting point. It seems to be related with regression toward the mean.

Gaussian distributions are symmetrical, which means every argument about what happens at the high end equally applies to the low end. That's not what the article says: it says the low end (far below the mean) is highly correlated with performance, but the high end is not. By your argument, someone with an IQ of 70 should be more likely to be simply having a bad day than to have a natural "intelligence" (whatever TF that means) truly at that level.

Edit: On second thought, the argument works a little better if you assume that the variance of the "daily fluctuation" distribution is proportional to the magnitude of the "innate" one, so someone with an "innate" 70 varies +/- 7 per day, but someone with an "innate" 150 varies +/- 15.

> Gaussian distributions are symmetrical, which means every argument about what happens at the high end equally applies to the low end.

That's only relevant for the shape of the distribution. Any usage of the distribution will certainly include a comparison operation which is not symmetric across IQ 100.

IQ tests are like beauty pageants. Everyone knows what an attractive people looks like and while they might get confused they can certainly pick out 2 different people (if you get the right 2 people) and say one is prettier then the other.

The idea that you can claim a person's beauty quotient is 8.675 is of course insane. That beauty itself isn't tied to a particular moment in time is crazy too. Or that we could determine what degree beauty is heritable. Or even more laughable that some subsets of people are simply more inherently beautiful then others. (Except for woman of mixed Indonesian descent who are in fact inherently attractive.)

You go through all of that and then you hear back "But I know Marilyn Monroe is more attractive then my neighbor," and sure, enough she was but that gets you exactly no where close to what your claiming.

IQ is a measure of how well you do IQ tests. The background knowledge that is required to do that is not really related to the outside world, unless you're a Westerner.

Put a Masai (Maasai) cattleman next to a university graduate and give them the same IQ test. I venture to say that the uni graduate would win hands down. But the next test would make meaningless his 'western' background knowledge.

Put the Masai cattleman and the university graduate in the African countryside that covers the background knowledge that the Masai requires for his livelihood and leave them there. Go away and come back three months later. I venture to say that the Masai man would be fit and healthy. The uni graduate would very likely have perished.

> The background knowledge that is required to do that is not really related to the outside world, unless you're a Westerner.

The "background knowledge" is an odd term to use, since it's neither knowledge nor a background to anything, but anyways, the "background knowldge" ins't even useful to westerners. It's not in and of itself useful at all, and that is sort of the point. Most IQ tests are simple pattern recognition and deduction tests, because pasterns are simple and universal.

> IQ is a measure of how well you do IQ tests

We completely agree. They aren't intended to test anything except give you a score quantifying how well you do on IQ tests. On their own they are completely useless and irrelevant. Like a Scale that doesn't state any units, you might weight yourself and go "oh, I weigh 12.3 somethings" and that's not really relevant to anything. The usefulness of IQ comes entirely from the fact that we can correlate the score with other things. Just like the kilogram as a unit used in quantifying mass is useful because suddenly we can use it to correlate your score on the scale with risk of getting diabetes and other things.

IQ-score isn't a measure of knowledge, it isn't a measure of smartness, and it won't even correlate perfectly with how people would arrange people based on a perceived intelligence (though here id does get close). An IQ-score is just a score of how well you do in IQ-tests. But since there is a great deal of correlations we can draw from those correlations it's an extremely useful score. But of cause it comes under attack constantly by people who fell they are smarter than what the score suggests they are, and they might very well be smarter, maybe they are just not good at pattern recognition and deduction, that doesn't mean you're dumb. Just like weighing above a certain limit might mean you statistically have a larger change of having diabetes doesn't mean you automatically have it. But it's literally dumb when these people go out and try to argue that weighing things with scales doesn't work because they got diagnosed with diabetes even though the scale says their below the at risk group.

Taleb has always struck me as someone who writes not to inform his readers, nor even to entertain them, but rather to make himself sound smart. His books seem to be popular among people who also would like to sound smart. With that as my prior, him going on a sudden tirade against IQ tests, and about how everyone with an IQ lower than him is definitely genuinely stupider than him, but everyone with an IQ higher than him is not really smart and they're all just losers who wear socks in their Birkenstocks ... well, it sounds like he took an IQ test and the result sent him into an embarrassed rage. The Birkenstocks picture and its caption supports this theory.

The point of the picture of Birkenstocks?

I've read a number of things by the author and there are a lot of interesting points. But I personally find the tone hard.

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