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Comment by cdrini | Hacker News Reader

I recently shifted my opinion on IQ tests a bit after watching a recent Veritasium video. He goes into the background/history/controversy of the test as well as some of the concrete impacts of the test and places where it's used. For example did you know the US military has an IQ minimum cutoff? And furthermore they have a second 'soft' cutoff, where only 20% of the military can have an IQ under a certain value. In the past they tried removing this second restriction, but had to reinstate it after seeing increases in casualties/indicators of reduced efficiency! So are IQ tests everything? No. But do they have no merit? Also no. It's somewhere in between.

Would highly recommend a watch https://youtube.com/watch?v=FkKPsLxgpuY

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IQ tests being invalid is more politics than science. Among other things, rejecting the existence of cognitive inequality is necessary to justify systemic racism via the continued existence of Asian quotas (Affirmative Action). Since lots of people benefit from this racism, there’s a huge interest in denial. In western countries, when there’s a few billion people in Asia, and you let a tiny amount in gatekeeping them on the basis of education/wealth/skills, it isn’t really all that much of a shock that they and their children are smarter then average. The only way this could NOT happen is if Asians were LESS intelligent than other groups on average.

IQ tests are hilariously predictive of success if you’re doing a task which is similar to taking an IQ test like academics. They strongly indicate certain mental disorders. Low IQ is more predictive of success than High IQ. Maybe people take the difference between scoring a FSIQ of 110 vs 140 entirely too seriously, but the difference between somebody with 60 vs 90 is staggering.

IQ tests are weakly predictive of academic success, especially on the high end (1SD+). In general, it only predicts 8-25% of variance, even when looking in both directions. That's pretty bad, an average exam does a far better job.

Additionally, the IQ of second generation Asian immigrants will revert to the mean. Not only that, but the advtange decreases rapidly as they age, while the academic advantage grows. And the advantage to begin with is very small - average Asian IQ is only about 2.5 points higher than for Whites, even looking at all generations together.

Given the impact of early childhood environment on IQ, and the huge disparity in academic effort across cultures, esp. those that constitute Asian immigrants, it's pretty clear that the idea that the disparity in Asian achievement cannot be explained by an inherited intelligence advantage. All the data is much more consistent with a culture that just drives students to study far harder.

This does make the argument that affirmative action is harmful even stronger, actually. There is no need to fall back to terrible science to do it. The idea that IQ isn't terribly useful is because it isn't terribly useful, except in very rare cases for diagnosis. The current scientific consensus is consistent with an even stronger argument that AA unfairly discriminates against Asian students.

> Low IQ is more predictive of success than High IQ.

I'm curious what you meant by that. Could you please explain?

A very low IQ has a very clear and predictable effect on life. A very high IQ does not.

Ah, I see. Ever the optimist, I was imagining the low IQ folks had maybe found some unexpected ways to compensate.

Thanks.

Not OP, but I understood that to mean any difference in IQ below average (100) has a high impact on success, but differences above 100 have relatively less impact

I think their point is a low IQ nearly always means low success, but a high IQ doesn't always mean high success.

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