iq_throw_123

> Meanwhile, unbiased research has shown for a long time that there is no significant variations in IQ between races when considering socioeconomic factors.

I get that you're new to this topic, but you should at least understand which side you're on. "...there is no significant variations in IQ between races when considering socioeconomic factors" is indeed the mainstream IQ field's side, but the HBD position isn't the opposite of that, it's, "I totally agree, now explain to me again why a test of intrinsic aptitude would need to be adjusted for socioeconomic factors."

It's a mug's game, defending these tests. When IQ correlates to real-world outcomes like salary and academic achievement, they call it evidence that the test works. Then when you point out that salary and academic achievement level have group differences across race (and gender, and religion, and marital status, and height...) for reasons unrelated to intelligence, they say you need to control for those variables. But they don't actually do that! You will never hear an IQ researcher say that someone with a lower IQ is actually smarter than someone with a higher IQ when you consider the neighborhood they grew up in. They just wait long enough for you to forget the particulars, and go back to acting like IQ is an intrinsic genetic quality that's independently measurable. "Wechsler is much better than those dirty biased tests like the SAT" from one side of the mouth, and "We know it's accurate, look how well it correlates to SAT scores" from the other. A mug's game, I tell you.

And all because they can't just admit that g-factor is a statistical artifact and IQ just a test score. That was the point of the Niceness Quotient analogy: it would have the same problems, but the problems would be obvious without 100 years of thinking psychometry was scientific. If one race had higher average NQs than another, there wouldn't be a debate at all, the whole wiki page[0] would just be "Of course the results are weird, Niceness isn't measurable. We tried our best, and the results are kind of useful in some contexts, but it's not actually a trait, just a subjective concept."

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_race_and_intell...

How would that test do at predicting achievement in archery? How about curling? Are those not "real" sports, or is athleticism a squishy human concept rather than an objectively measurable value?

> This reeks of anti-intellectualism by the way ("can't trust the experts!"), but I am curious to know what you're referring to.

I'm referring to HBD. Respectfully, if you're not familiar with that then you have a lot of prior art to catch up on before you expound on how well-grounded psychometry is.

> IQ tests measure something real and objective called the g factor

Sure, and NQ tests do too, because look how well graciousness correlates with cheerfulness! That can't be an accident, can it?

Less snarkily, a better analogy would be athletic ability. Suppose you take a bunch of people and measure how fast they can run, how well they can shoot free throws, and how far they can throw a football. Will the results be correlated? Of course, some people are more athletic than others. Does that mean there's a quantity called 'athleticism' that we can objectively measure with a number? No; and not because all people are equally athletic, but because you're trying to take a squishy subjective English language word and pretend it's a scalar value.

> I would hardly call it a "whole field".

The problem isn't the size of the field, it's that academics work within their field, they don't refute it. There's a very uncomfortable result about IQ tests that a generation of psychologists have tried to explain away, and I maintain that the reason they haven't succeeded is because they are institutionally incapable of saying, "Hey, maybe this is pseudoscience."

Imagine that, 150 years ago or whenever, some clever soul had decided to make a written test to measure niceness, and called the test score Niceness Quotient. And the first version sucked, but some other folks iterated on it and over time the test was improved until it correlated pretty well to the sorts of things you would think that niceness would correlate to. 150 years of progress later, we'd have a whole field of Niceometry and researchers trying to isolate sub-areas like charity, friendliness, etc, and trying to suss out an underlying factor of general amiability, and the whole thing would be so well embedded in to the culture that almost no one remembers that "nice" is just a regular word with no objective or scientific definition, and that we measure it with a written test not because that's a good way to measure niceness but because we can't find a better way.