Intelligence is not like height

The point of such indicators is to make predictions about the real world. "If you're 5'6'', this mattress is a good fit" or "People taller than 6ft will be 2.4 times more likely to develop back problems".

Now imagine you try do anything intelligence-related, like hiring the best person for a job. If the variation between person A taking your intelligence test in week 1 and week 2 is higher than between person A and person B, you cannot use this metric to decide who is more intelligent — unless you're prepared to run the test dozens of times, and are fine with the "intelligence" of the person you're hiring regularly dipping below and above the "intelligence" of the other person you could've also hired. At that point you can very much go by firmness of handshake instead.

It's often under the label "verbal comprehension".

I once was administered an in-person WAIS-IV IQ test, which has been called the "Gold Standard of IQ Tests," from a licensed clinical psychologist for the purposes of diagnosing a medical syndrome.

On the verbal reasoning portion, I distinctively remember being asked two questions that sat wrong with me (paraphrasing):

1. "Who was Sacagawea?"

2. "Who was Catherine the Great?"

There were also vague questions in the word definition/comparison section.

I distinctively remember one of the questions being (paraphrasing):

"Compare and contrast the two words 'Practical' and 'Pragmatic.' What do the two words have in common and what are their differences?"

My issue, especially with the latter question, is what type of answer is acceptable?

I could say something like, "'Practical' and 'Pragmatic' both describe being concerned with reality or feasibility vs. theory."

But what about the differences? What if I said something like, "Well, there is no such things a 'Pragmatic' joke."

Would I have been correct, wrong, a smart ass, or at the mercy of the psychologist's opinion? Would I be marked wrong because it wasn't what the test authors' intended answer despite me being technically correct?

I see this claim a lot, but what is even meant by "western education" here? IQ tests show similar results in most countries that have /any/ form of formal compulsory education. It's clear that education or lack of education can affect IQ scores, but not so much that IQ tests are biased by the specification type of education.

The best research I've seen on the matter concludes that education biases the results because in order to receive and participate in an IQ test you need to have some base level of language understanding of the terminology used in the IQ test itself, which implies that you've received some minimal amount of education. The most common IQ test used in the United States, the Stanford-Binet (SB5) generally recommends not administering it to people under the age of 8 years old for this reason, and there are specialized tests for children that show reduced bias for education when used on non-educated populaces.

Or, in summary, it seems standard IQ tests bias for /any/ education, not specifically "western" education. In other words, there's no cultural bias as claimed.

There are certain types of schizophrenia that are highly heritable and others that are more sporadic. Highly pathogenic variants tend to be very rare because those regions of the genome are under evolutionary constraint.

GWAS are used is to figure out which genes may be involved in the pathology. So we are essentially looking at rare cases of inherited disease to figure out which genes might play a role in more common non inherited versions.

I don't think it's appropriate to measure intelligence as a correlation between the few things a statistician cares about, personally. It would be a naively meritocratic view to think performing well at the highest paying jobs is a decent measure for intelligence.

> intelligence can be reasonably defined as "knowledge and skills to be successful in life, i.e. have higher-than-average income"

I think it just crumbles under light scrutiny. People have higher income for all kinds of observable reasons that don't have to do with intelligence. I have higher income than other employees at the same level just based on where I live.

Intelligence is something that is defined by academics. Surprise surprise that it it measures how people perform in a narrow set of academic skills.

IQ also correlates strongly with economic and social class, which also correlates strongly with crime and happiness and probably also divorce. If you think, then, that race, as a determinate measure of IQ, is determinate of economic and social class, then you are actually a racist, plain and simple. But, you might not think that, I'm just trying to point this out to you.

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Nobody is claiming there are no genetic differences between populations of people. People are reiterating that race is an entirely socially-constructed concept. Human racial categories are not based on genetics.

> It’s why the Germans look so distinct to Australians and so on

As a white person, they both look like average white people with Northwestern European heritage to me. If you had a room with 100 random white people, I guarantee you I couldn't pinpoint to the Aussies or Germans by looks alone.

Race is not defined by genetics. Genetics were used to justify race. Race is also extremely nebulous. According to the US Census, an average Norwegian, Sicilian, Mexican, and Arab are all considered to be white. Again according to the US Census, on average, if you are from southwest Pakistan, you are Asian. If you are from southeast Iran, you are... caucasian? See how stupid this classification is?

I would bet good money that the genetic difference between someone from Iran (White) vs. Pakistan (Asian) is substantially less than someone from Pakistan (Asian) vs. South Korea (Asian).

Race is not genetics; genetics are objective reality, race is not. Race is a series of socio-economic labels applied to people based on purely external factors, and highly un correlated with any genetic variation.

And finally and perhaps most importantly, no studies of race ever look at any genetics to define the races, they look at the regular proxies. A black-skinned child of a black-skinned mother and a white-skinned father is typically considered "black" even if they are just as black as they are white, genetically (or even more, if the black-skinned parent also had a white-skinned parent).

How could you calibrate a cultrually-specific test like most IQ tests are by comparing with another culture?

I'm also pretty sure that people don't use the same tests across "the West", so that seems dubious to begin with.

> I believe IQ has also risen steadily with time in the west. It might have risen an entire standard deviation. It's called Flynn's effect, 3 points per decade.

That is more easily studied, as you can use the same test across generations and notice trends.

respectfully I would suggest you've misunderstood mine

Why must it be wrong? The data is quite clear that a person of a given ethic group is most likely to associate with other people of the same ethnic group. If we are to assume that intelligence is determined by environmental factors, it is quite likely that intelligence will vary by ethnic group due to ethnic groups tending to group around different environments.

> such as that group being descended from people who were enslaved or who practiced polygamy or who don't prevent first cousins from marrying.

For those who believe that intelligence is heritable, isn't that exactly what they are talking about? I don't see how it is missed.

Right, which is why the intelligence:height comparison exists at all. It is, to the best of our understanding, that the right genes are required to become eight feet tall, so to speak, but that you also need to right environment to actually get there. "8-foot genes" alone does not guarantee you will become eight feet tall, and that's what the height comparison tells.

> And how is the maximum potential determined?

I'm not sure that it is, nor does it need to be for any practical purpose.

> "Feynman has these genes and was a genius. If you have these genes you should be a genius too." We both know genetics and intelligence do not work like this.

Hence why the height comparison has been made. It is an example where environmental factors are generally accepted, and easily observed (you don't need any special tools to recognize when someone is tall) within accepted conditions.

> We can assume this, but we cannot possibly confirm this.

Well, then the assumption is good enough, isn't it? It is just a communication device anyway. It doesn't even actually have to be true so long as it effectively communicates the idea, and based on what you are saying I'm certain it does as you are echoing what it says exactly.