Increasing IQ Is Trivial | Hacker News Reader

Increasing IQ Is Trivial

epistemink.substack.com

1 pointgeorge3d69 comments

IQ is silly, might as well be astrology for men.

For those looking for more than a pithy comment, check out the book "The Bell Curve Debate". IQ was a retrofit system intended to be a "predictor of many personal outcomes, including financial income, job performance, birth out of wedlock, and involvement in crime".

Oh okay. Look forward to seeing you test at 200 then.

judging by the article, he'll be selling perpetual motion devices and cancer cure in the next 3-6 months.

I mean, it's not that I doubt increases in IQ are possible. Let's be generous. Now what? To what extent can IQ change? Can I increase it without bound? To what extent are the changes permanent? To what extent are they reproducible? Can we train a person who might count as mentally disabled to score significantly higher on the test? If not, why not? Has the author tried? Does the author think nobody else has studied this? If the results aren't reproducible, then what are we to gain from this?

If you want to speak on scientific matters, you should probably do science.

the author only provides vague statements such as "it was a pleasant experience" or "slightly reduced exercise", and ends it with "read about this topic". so there's no question of reproducibility since there is no method to reproduce.

this is the equivalent of a scientist submitting a paper for publication with one sentence in Materials & Methods section: "we will let the readers infer the exact steps based on our conclusions"

entire article: "it's trivial to do, anybody can do it, look we did it for other things. it only cost me 400$"

HOW? "trust me bro"

Did add a quick explanation about methods at the end ... I forgot that when I say "you can read the science around this topic to see how" and provide some links to examples of papers, people don't actually do it.

using that same logic I can say "I cured my pancreatic cancer, read the science around this topic to see how"

it's more like, in a world with thousands of oncologists that treat pancreatitis cancer, saying: You should go to one, I'm not going to recommended mine in particular, but I went to one and she cured my cancer, so maybe you should give it a shot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com