Sounds like you're just making this up. Have any studies on this or something not anecdotal?
What I can find is a wikimedia entry with the image but no attribution except the "US Census" and no actual link to any publication put out by the Census Bureau. The archive link goes to a page that does not actually contain this graphic, or the data necessary to generate it, making it a bit suspect to begin with.
The census also don't systematically collect IQ scores or themselves administer IQ tests, making the details, data, and methodology of any study they produce paramount to interpreting this barebones graph. The title of the graph itself is borderline ridiculous, awkwardly stated at best and downright deceptive:
IQ tests are not a requirement for graduating college, and taking them at all is relatively uncommon these days.
As it stands, this image is worthless without context, and that context is oddly elusive except for an anonymous wikimedia post that did not cite the source with any specificity required to authenticate it.
It seems the author took the the percentage of the population that graduated high school/college each year and then found the corresponding percentile on an IQ bell curve and used those as the y-values. This methodology only makes sense if you assume that high school/college graduates are exactly the highest IQ population and that everyone who does not graduate isn't intelligent enough to do so. This chart also almost certainly doesn't normalize IQ over time, even though IQ is constantly redefined so that 100 is average while raw intelligence scores have increased over time [1].
What this chart actually shows is the highest possible IQ of the graduate with the lowest IQ in a given year, a statistic that seems to have dubious value.
Given that it’s all “common sense” people ought to skip the veneer and just say “more intelligent”, “less intelligent”, “much more intelligent”, and so on. That’s more honest rhetoric.
> as any other social construct like cheese, boat races or reading
> as any other social construct like HackerNews, children or milk
> as any other social construct like cars, transgenderism or pencils
> as any other social construct like social, construct or like
Yes, I'm assuming you're familiar with the topic.
HN members on average hold views on these topics that are more apt to view as socially constructed than other topics. By focusing on these topics, we can explore why they might be socially constructed and why those reasons are necessary and sufficient. Once establishing that, we can examine IQ to see if they apply as well.
Don't mistake me bringing them up as an endorsement or critique of them in and of themselves. Besides, bringing up global warning, the holocaust, and gender dysphoria will inevitably attract follow-ons who want to debate the validity of those topics.
I'm not here to do that. What I want to establish is what the salient aspects you think constitute a social construct by using these topics as an example. If you want to switch to a different set, by all means, go ahead and choose them instead. I personally think it will be a less productive discussion, but I'm willing to play along.
I don't know what you mean by that, but to me it gives an impression of run-off-the-mill bashing of "fake" and "bad" things like gender, race, religion, capitalism, nationality that we should re-think and re-make where "social construct" is used as an ambiguous slur by someone who learned about it on Reddit or BuzzFeed. I guess I wasn't the intended audience of that comparison.
> What I want to establish is what the salient aspects you think constitute a social construct by using these topics as an example.
I usually interpret "a social construct" in a way that ranges from being a synonym for "a social contract" to a synonym for something like Kantian appearance (insofar as conception of any object in mind is partly influenced by social institutions) depending on context. But many people seem to make it extremely hard to understand what they mean exactly. So providing examples helps understand what is being asserted. If someone starts talking that X is a social construct just like all that other bad stuff, asking them whether good stuff is a social construct helps ensure that they aren't engaged in agenda-posting or, at least, have far less wiggle room for pushing their rhetoric.
You might be confusing "social construct" with fake. That's not at all what I'm saying.
First off I'm setting aside the argument that intelligence is constructed or not. Ssecondly, social ontologists would say that you're arguing from grounding.
You're arguing that because one thing is grounded in the other and the latter is real that the former is real as well. It also sounds like this is taken as axiomatic, to which I simply say, prove that's how grounding works.
There are multitudes; and that’s exactly why such statements are vapid and contain no information. You failed to clarify what you meant and only managed to make a vague reference to Berger.
There are thousand contradictory ways to interpret what “a social construct” means (see The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking), but the most important thing about that statement is that it allows a sociologist to say “it’s something I am an authority on”.
> Dismissing the entire subfield as vapid comes across as intellectually immature.
Would dismissing astrology be intellectually immature? I don’t think so.
> "constructivism bad because Marxism bad," is about as thought-limiting cliché as one can get
Indeed. Good that it is not what I’ve said.
Social construction is an lens of interpretation in the toolkit of critical thinking. I like to frame it as an epistemological question that simply asks, "How do you know that?" It's extremely powerful when used against topics where people make claims that are "obvious", "reality", "truth", or even "science".
Science itself is an epistomological framework and subject to interpretation from other (meta-)epistomological frameworks eg: scientific examination of social construction is just as valid a pursuit as the social construction of science. In fact that latter, the social construction of science, is the umbrella from which we can examine the concept of IQ. We can talk about it in terms of constitutiveness, grounding, expert-novice problems, &c.
>There are thousand contradictory ways to interpret what “a social construct” means (see The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking), but the most important thing about that statement is that it allows a sociologist to say “it’s something I am an authority on”.
You're describing science. Science "allows" people to say "it's something I am an authority on." This is because it's an epistomological framework independent of the validity of the subject. That's what epistomological frameworks do.
> Would dismissing astrology be intellectually immature? I don’t think so.
We can absolutely talk about the social construction of astrology independent of the truth claims of astrology. I'm sure you can agree with me that there is a profound difference between the two.
It is an extremely powerful rhetorical device, yes. You can equivocate IQ with “the social construct of IQ” and make seemingly profound statements.
> In fact that latter, the social construction of science, is the umbrella from which we can examine the concept of IQ. We can talk about it in terms of constitutiveness, grounding, expert-novice problems, &c.
Scientists that study IQ can study how useful it is as a metric, whether it has predictive power, whether it is biased, how it relates to common notions of intelligence, how it correlates to other traits, whether it should be used for welfare means testing, etc. The framework of social constructivism cannot help much with that: the flow of knowledge mostly runs in the opposite direction.
> You're describing science.
No, I am describing why sociologists like to use that concept.
> Science "allows" people to say "it's something I am an authority on."
Lots of things allow people to claim authority on something. That’s not what makes science science.
> This is because it's an epistomological framework independent of the validity of the subject. That's what epistomological frameworks do.
> We can absolutely talk about the social construction of astrology independent of the truth claims of astrology. I'm sure you can agree with me that there is a profound difference between the two.
I totally agree. That’s why “IQ is a social construct” is a vapid meaningless statement. You can put anything instead of IQ and it will make as much sense.
I am not sure what that cryptic insinuation is supposed to accuse me of.
> Can I ask how you were introduced to the concept?
I don't remember? It was probably 10 years ago or more.
"sociologists use to legitimize their expertise and colonize other fields of inquiry that were traditionally the domains of philosophers and scientists. The whole thing is just repackaged Marxist analysis of everything as a social relation."
Lead toxicity was identified more than 2000 years before the first IQ test, and was rather extensively studied during the Renaissance. The combination of blood lead and IQ tests was important in quantifying the existence and impacts of particular kinds and levels of environmental exposure that had been assumed to be forms of levels that would not be hazardous, but it was not important to identifying lead as a toxin.
So yes people on average where better at say mental math back then, but plenty of people still sucked at math etc.
I am mostly referring to the idea people have become less capable because fewer people know how to say repair their cars. Ignoring the fact cars just don’t break down as much and are also vastly more complicated today. So, basic car repair is both more difficult and less necessary.
I do wonder if selective schools have over-rotated in the theoretical direction though that's a debate with a very long history. I'm reading a bio of "Doc" Draper, for whom Draper Labs--which designed the Apollo Guidance Computer--is named. And I was just commenting to a friend literally last night that I bet a lot of the very hands-on engineers who tinkered as much as they did theory like Draper and Doc Edgerton (inventor the strobe) and others would probably never have gotten faculty appointments as prestigious universities today.
Personally, the courses where I did hands-on work are some of the ones I remember best.
The fact that we only hear about "great educated men" in the history books has more to do with a bias in society than with who actually got educated.
What we know is that the very wealthy often had private tutors for their daughters, and that some women also learned a lot from their parents. Records exist that describe the tutelage of aristocratic and royal women, and it's not hard to extrapolate that those professional tutors probably needed other clients (from the less-well-off aristocracy and merchants) to both "climb the ladder" and fill the gaps between aristocrats' daughters.
An interesting tidbit in this regard is that we actually do know that the women in the (middle class) Bach family were as musically-educated as the men, since they ended up as leading sopranos in opera houses. Some people theorize that the Bach women were the ones teaching their sons music, not the men.
Universities definitely aren't the only places to get educated, and they were a men's club for a shockingly long time. Women were getting higher education in more private settings.
>they were a men's club for a shockingly long time
But, yeah. A lot of elite universities had a rather small percentage of women well into the latter half of the 20th century. Those that have larger numbers was often because there were sister female schools like Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges. Dartmouth College didn't start admitting women until the 1970s.
There are plenty of female diarists. Court cases often delved into women’s lives. Women belonged to institutions like convents that kept records.
The real gaps in documentation aren’t based on gender but class. Not entirely clear what medieval peasants did with their time.
But even then, inquisitions kept meticulous records and regularly investigated small towns. Women were questioned as often as men.
Modern historians (pre-1970s) may have been less interested in women’s lives, but they weren’t necessarily less documented.
Edit: another big gap in records is from the wars of the 20th century. WWII and the wars of the 1990s destroyed “the record” in large parts of eastern europe.
I'm sure lots of them were smart and erudite.
Where's your data to back this up?
IQ is in practice affected by education (to a small extent and mostly in early childhood), but the whole point of it as a concept was to avoid measuring education. So I don't think it follows that higher IQ = more educated.
>In the 16 years since, although the number of applicants to the College has more than doubled, the size of Harvard’s undergraduate population has remained relatively constant. This year, the College admitted 2,037 students to the Class of 2020; in comparison, 2,035 students were admitted to the Class of 2004.
IMO when your non taxable endowment gets large but your undergrad population stays the same maybe part of the endowment should become taxable.
Acquiring non-Harvard land in Allston met with some backlash owing to how they went about it (sneakily, to avoid getting put over a barrel on price).
Building up rather than out would require knocking down buildings that range from historic to merely very old.
Suggesting that Harvard should just take more students as the number of applicants grows sort of ignores the constraints they operate under.
Non-affiliated former Boston resident.
Also I doubt there are any truly "historic" buildings at Harvard -- universities that really have historic buildings predate the USA by multiple centuries.
And no, they cannot simply create a new campus several miles away. Because even if most of the real estate within that radius wasn't ruinously expensive (though less so than Cambridge), transporting people between those two campuses would be a logistical nightmare. Traffic sucks, and public transportation is, on a good day, adequate[0].
Getting between the new science center in Allston and Harvard Square is about a 20 minute walk (hustling). Driving might shave 10 minutes off of that. Or it could add that much and more, depending on the time of day.
Harvard's med school is in Longwood, which presumably only works because the med students live off campus anyway and don't have to get to the main campus on a regular basis.
[0] See https://universalhub.com for examples. You're unlikely to have to look back more than a week.
In a world where NIMBYs weren't the most important people on the scene, building a tram (streetcar) line between those two campuses would be a working solution. High capacity, intervals can be adjusted to the needs of the school, no traffic jams on the track.
And Harvard sits on an enormous warchest, it could cover the costs handily.
But pushing such a construction project in contemporary atmosphere would take longer than landing on the Moon.
Fine, have a separate standalone campus, maybe on the west cvoast. Or just shift everything to the new campus. They could easily do this if they wanted to. They don't want to.
I've heard some schools even have online offerings, crazy.
I am trying my hand at networking and I find that I get ghosted like 80% of the time when people I talk to from these backgrounds find out I’m not as qualified on paper.
Should we all abandon Harvard now? Nah, this battle is everywhere.
Indeed. I don't understand the fascination with Harvard when you can go to MIT.
I knew a long ago admissions director at MIT. At least at the time, they basically had an x-y chart with quantitative on one axis and qualitative on the other. There was a quantitative lower-bound cutoff but, beyond that, the two factors could balance each other out. (e.g. decent but not not fantastic SATs could be balanced out by really eye-catching qualitative factors and vice versa.)
this better allows for competition to flourish imo
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
Source? There are many individuals who went to state schools or didn't go to college at all that have turned into billionaires, Nobel prize winners, etc.
Not to mention there's no evidence that the people who went to an elite school would have less of an impact if elite schools didn't exist.
They undoubtedly have higher impacts on society, not because they are the smartest, but because having an elite school degree unlocks opportunities that are not available to average person…for all our talks about meritocracy, humans still pay more attention to signaling, branding, and marketing…and the elite schools know how to milk that for money and power.
Again, any numbers on that?
"not because they are the smartest, but because having an elite school degree unlocks opportunities"
Or did they go to an elite school because they already came from money, which is the true source of those opportunities.
Current US Supreme Court:
Alito - Yale
Coney Barrett - Notre Dame
Brown Jackson - Harvard
Gorsuch - Harvard
Kavanaugh - Yale
Kagan - Harvard
Roberts - Harvard
Sotomayor - Yale
Thomas - Yale
https://www.developgoodhabits.com/successful-people-college/
I'm looking for actual stats.
you offer no data to differentiate between this being caused by their abilities, or their greater access to the networks that place people in high impact positions.