American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the 'Reverse Flynn effect'(popularmechanics.com)
popularmechanics.com
American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the 'Reverse Flynn effect'
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a43469569/american-iq-scores-decline-reverse-flynn-effect/
549 comments
Is the test different year-on-year? I thought they were somewhat standardized instruments (or at least standard question pools drawn from randomly). Not my area of expertise though.
I’m not clear on that either. I think they use different tests but try to calibrate them to be similar year over year with a shared question bank?
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When IQ tests were invented folks didn't know about tests, at least in the US. They were rural immigrants who could maybe read. So when asked logic questions, they would answer pragmatically and be 'wrong'. That had some impact on perceived early low results.
As folks became better-read and educated they began to understand that IQ test questions were a sort of puzzle, not a real honest question. The answer was expected to solve the puzzle, not be right in any way.
E.g. There are no Elephants in Germany. Munich is in Germany. How many elephants are there in Munich? A) 0 B) 1 C)2
Folks back then might answer B or C, because they figure hey there's probably a zoo in Munich, bet they have an elephant or two there. And be marked wrong.
As folks became better-read and educated they began to understand that IQ test questions were a sort of puzzle, not a real honest question. The answer was expected to solve the puzzle, not be right in any way.
E.g. There are no Elephants in Germany. Munich is in Germany. How many elephants are there in Munich? A) 0 B) 1 C)2
Folks back then might answer B or C, because they figure hey there's probably a zoo in Munich, bet they have an elephant or two there. And be marked wrong.
That theory could be plausible, except Flynn used results from Raven's Progressive Matrices, which is just pattern recognition. There are no questions about elephants or text-based questions that could introduce cultural bias. It's simply picking the shape that matches the pattern presented in a grid.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Progressive_Matrices
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Progressive_Matrices
Good point about the Raven's Progressive Matrices, but I still think the parent's hypothesis that we have improved at test taking is relevant. Outside of verbal reasoning there are a lot of soft factors that influence test taking ability. People who haven't taken a timed test before would probably perform worse than expected simply because it is an unfamiliar context, and unfamiliarity tends to create higher stress/anxiety which is known to be bad for cognitive performance in novices. A group that has taken hundreds of tests will probably score better on a test in an unfamiliar subject than another unprepared group that isn't used to taking tests simply because they have some meta-knowledge about test taking.
Yes, I think unfamiliarity might actually be the main explanation here.
IQ tests in general were popular 20 years ago and have since fallen out of fashion quite significantly: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=IQ%20tes...
The lower performance may simply be due to people being less familiar/trained on the type of questions that IQ tests tend to ask.
IQ tests in general were popular 20 years ago and have since fallen out of fashion quite significantly: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=IQ%20tes...
The lower performance may simply be due to people being less familiar/trained on the type of questions that IQ tests tend to ask.
I've often heard from humanities academics that STEM majors do not confer critical thinking skills.
I really wonder what do the people in humanities consider “critical thinking”. Mathematics and formal proofs are the epitome of logical thought IMHO - while arguments in the humanities often don’t have the same level of rigor; nor are their p-tests as stringent as in the physical sciences. So what exactly is it that’s they think is missing from STEM?
Edit: Don’t just downvote. Explain. That’s what we are here for.
Edit: Don’t just downvote. Explain. That’s what we are here for.
I live in a college town, and have lots of liberal arts friends in academia, and have had this discussion many times, a discussion that has a lot of peril, as they get upset very easily about this issue!
As near as I can tell, when they say "critical thinking" they really mean "persuasive thinking". Humanities, given its lack of rigor (or ability to have rigor) compared to STEM, often falls back on persuasive arguments, and so studying them requires you to become persuasive if you want to excel. This is why they can often come into conflict with STEM "arguments" - STEM isn't about persuasion, but about proof and testing and evidence and ... math! You can't persuade the laws of the universe, they are just something that exists. That's why they consider scientists so pedantic.
Anyway, that's the theory I've developed, I hope it has persuaded you some, but if not, it is likely that I trained as an engineer and am rather tepid with my persuasive skills ;)
As near as I can tell, when they say "critical thinking" they really mean "persuasive thinking". Humanities, given its lack of rigor (or ability to have rigor) compared to STEM, often falls back on persuasive arguments, and so studying them requires you to become persuasive if you want to excel. This is why they can often come into conflict with STEM "arguments" - STEM isn't about persuasion, but about proof and testing and evidence and ... math! You can't persuade the laws of the universe, they are just something that exists. That's why they consider scientists so pedantic.
Anyway, that's the theory I've developed, I hope it has persuaded you some, but if not, it is likely that I trained as an engineer and am rather tepid with my persuasive skills ;)
I studied CS and it seems to me that it did not taught critical thinking all that much. It taught logical thinking. We have tendency to create simplified model of the world, make logical inferences on it and then ignore actual messy real world evidence when it contradicts our theories.
So, the caricature of a STEM student will make theory in his mind and then ignored pretty much all nuance in the article the theory is based on.
Another example would be bias. The history students are specifically trained to deal with bias in source material and accept that every single historical source is biased by own point of view. The amount of STEM graduates who split world into two neat categories "biased" and "non-biased" is staggering.
All of these are elements of critical thinking.
So, the caricature of a STEM student will make theory in his mind and then ignored pretty much all nuance in the article the theory is based on.
Another example would be bias. The history students are specifically trained to deal with bias in source material and accept that every single historical source is biased by own point of view. The amount of STEM graduates who split world into two neat categories "biased" and "non-biased" is staggering.
All of these are elements of critical thinking.
Yes. This one is so pernicious. One problem is that most stem disciplines are built upon equation based models or something related. This works great for math, great for physics, good for chemistry, and not great for biology, really bad for psych or econ. Equation based models have neat linear-causal thinking that simply fails in understanding complex systems in all but the most reductive questions. Most stem students leave hs/bachelors thinking the world is mostly linearly causal. Hell even most doctors think this way - like a mechanic. Discussing the world’s current set of wicked problems with these linear thinkers is unimaginably painful.
> We have tendency to create simplified model of the world, make logical inferences on it and then ignore actual messy real world evidence when it contradicts our theories.
That's not the world of engineering - the "E" in STEM - though.
That's not the world of engineering - the "E" in STEM - though.
I would argue that if you cannot first think logically then the supposed "critical thinking" you are doing is little more than you expressing things in a more or less persuasive way. In this case, persuasion is more hinged on charisma than anything material.
Logical thinking is the precursor to proper critical thinking.
Logical thinking is the precursor to proper critical thinking.
That's an interesting wording. Indeed critical thinking has nothing to do with mathematics, because mathematics is preoccupied with validity of logic (logical thought), sound logic is not a concern, because valid logic can be trivially converted into sound logic by postulating the premises. In practice this results in mathematicians' beliefs in paradoxes and platonism, which are results of valid unsound logic.
You can't have a sound argument if the argument isn't valid though. A sound argument is just a valid argument with premises that are true.
Careful here. STEM definitely requires critical thinking, but crtical thinking is not just 'formal proofs', which is only useful when you're dealing with problems that are already obviously formalizable. This is not the case with the majority of problems in the humanities, e.g. history, literature, and large swathes of philosophy where data is qualitative.
Humanities majors are equipped with their own toolbox of concepts the same way STEM majors are equipped with theirs. For example, a philosophy major would learn important distinctions such as analytic/synthetic, extension/intension, descriptive/prescriptive, a priori/a posteriori, ontological/epistemological, type/token and so on. These are not concepts that you read once and remember and you've 'learned' them. It takes a lot of reading and writing and thinking and arguing over the course of years to grok. When done well, it can greatly illuminate a problem. Expressing the argument formally or in symbolic logic is usually a trivial exercise afterwards, the nature of philosophical inquiry puts the 'critical thinking' prior to the formal parts.
For example, consider the SEP article on Two-Dimensional Semantics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/two-dimensional-semantics...
The article is riddled with formal sections containing matrices and symbolic logic. But these are not the argument itself, and the people who came up with this framework did not arrive at this analytically through formal proofs. Rather, the formal aspects are only used to aid the intuition and remove ambiguity for readers. The bulk of the thinking requires creative and precise conceptual analysis that borrows and reinterprets a variety of well-trodden ideas in other areas of philosophy.
The more sociological and cultural departments of humanities probably have their own set of skills that are considered their versions of critical thinking. I imagine in cultural theory, one probably needs to know several interpretations of history to analyze their problems, since that fields literally deals with how historical baggage muddies the way we even define said problems to begin with. A STEM education, in a vacuum, is not going to be equipped with those tools. Why would they be? To think critically about cultural theory requires understanding facts that are embedded in its subject specific concepts. My ability to work through proofs in discrete mathematics is not going to be helpful here. But my ability to analyze history through say, systems of power is probably going to be necessary. That kind of thinking is missing from STEM, and trivially so -- it literally has nothing to do with STEM.
That is not a failure or criticism of STEM. That would be akin to criticizing English Lit departments for not engaging with math. But (and this is often the context "critical thinking" as a boon that the humanities offers is brought up) being able to recognize a politician's actions as bullshit is going to require more than just 'formal proof' -- it's going to require an ability to sort through social, historical, qualitative, ethical, and philosophical landmines. That ability is critical thinking.
Humanities majors are equipped with their own toolbox of concepts the same way STEM majors are equipped with theirs. For example, a philosophy major would learn important distinctions such as analytic/synthetic, extension/intension, descriptive/prescriptive, a priori/a posteriori, ontological/epistemological, type/token and so on. These are not concepts that you read once and remember and you've 'learned' them. It takes a lot of reading and writing and thinking and arguing over the course of years to grok. When done well, it can greatly illuminate a problem. Expressing the argument formally or in symbolic logic is usually a trivial exercise afterwards, the nature of philosophical inquiry puts the 'critical thinking' prior to the formal parts.
For example, consider the SEP article on Two-Dimensional Semantics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/two-dimensional-semantics...
The article is riddled with formal sections containing matrices and symbolic logic. But these are not the argument itself, and the people who came up with this framework did not arrive at this analytically through formal proofs. Rather, the formal aspects are only used to aid the intuition and remove ambiguity for readers. The bulk of the thinking requires creative and precise conceptual analysis that borrows and reinterprets a variety of well-trodden ideas in other areas of philosophy.
The more sociological and cultural departments of humanities probably have their own set of skills that are considered their versions of critical thinking. I imagine in cultural theory, one probably needs to know several interpretations of history to analyze their problems, since that fields literally deals with how historical baggage muddies the way we even define said problems to begin with. A STEM education, in a vacuum, is not going to be equipped with those tools. Why would they be? To think critically about cultural theory requires understanding facts that are embedded in its subject specific concepts. My ability to work through proofs in discrete mathematics is not going to be helpful here. But my ability to analyze history through say, systems of power is probably going to be necessary. That kind of thinking is missing from STEM, and trivially so -- it literally has nothing to do with STEM.
That is not a failure or criticism of STEM. That would be akin to criticizing English Lit departments for not engaging with math. But (and this is often the context "critical thinking" as a boon that the humanities offers is brought up) being able to recognize a politician's actions as bullshit is going to require more than just 'formal proof' -- it's going to require an ability to sort through social, historical, qualitative, ethical, and philosophical landmines. That ability is critical thinking.
> data is qualitative
I always felt that just means it's poorly defined. If you can't precisely define what exactly it is you are arguing about and what are the premises in play then we are just wasting everyone's time.
> It takes a lot of reading and writing and thinking and arguing over the course of years to grok.
But that's just learning the domain.
I'm under the impression that humanities people claim that they can think in a different way that STEM people can't.
Frankly, I feel almost everything can be processed via first order logic - I know there are some really niche things that can't.
I always felt that just means it's poorly defined. If you can't precisely define what exactly it is you are arguing about and what are the premises in play then we are just wasting everyone's time.
> It takes a lot of reading and writing and thinking and arguing over the course of years to grok.
But that's just learning the domain.
I'm under the impression that humanities people claim that they can think in a different way that STEM people can't.
Frankly, I feel almost everything can be processed via first order logic - I know there are some really niche things that can't.
> always felt that just means it's poorly defined.
No, it just means that it’s qualitative. Why would qualitative descriptions of entities mean it’s poorly defined? Take for example in philosophy of mind where qualitative descriptions of the colour red are more relevant to the discussion than quantitative descriptions of it, such as it’s frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum. In this example, having a qualitative description of the colour red, or a qualitative description of what qualia is (if it were to exist) is actually necessary in order to engage with the problem.
> Frankly, I feel almost everything can be processed via first order logic - I know there are some really niche things that can't.
What do you mean by processed?
There’s a difference between whether propositions can be expressed in first order logic vs. whether the argumentation itself is derived from first order logic. People did not sit down with a table of axioms to figure out all of aerodynamics by decree. Like many fields of inquiry, it took deduction, induction, abduction, and the scientific method. Writing things down via first order logic came after.
Your average philosophy graduate student is comfortable expressing virtually any proposition in first order logic, or even other types of symbolic logic. But I can assure you that modal arguments regarding, say, philosophy of mind, are conceived and argued in prose, with symbolic modal logic being used to aid the reader. What does that tell you about “processing via first order logic”?
No, it just means that it’s qualitative. Why would qualitative descriptions of entities mean it’s poorly defined? Take for example in philosophy of mind where qualitative descriptions of the colour red are more relevant to the discussion than quantitative descriptions of it, such as it’s frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum. In this example, having a qualitative description of the colour red, or a qualitative description of what qualia is (if it were to exist) is actually necessary in order to engage with the problem.
> Frankly, I feel almost everything can be processed via first order logic - I know there are some really niche things that can't.
What do you mean by processed?
There’s a difference between whether propositions can be expressed in first order logic vs. whether the argumentation itself is derived from first order logic. People did not sit down with a table of axioms to figure out all of aerodynamics by decree. Like many fields of inquiry, it took deduction, induction, abduction, and the scientific method. Writing things down via first order logic came after.
Your average philosophy graduate student is comfortable expressing virtually any proposition in first order logic, or even other types of symbolic logic. But I can assure you that modal arguments regarding, say, philosophy of mind, are conceived and argued in prose, with symbolic modal logic being used to aid the reader. What does that tell you about “processing via first order logic”?
> Take for example in philosophy of mind where qualitative descriptions of the colour red are more relevant to the discussion than quantitative descriptions of it, such as it’s frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum.
How is it more relevant? Is there some property of the color red that physics doesn't cover?
> Your average philosophy graduate student is comfortable expressing virtually any proposition in first order logic, or even other types of symbolic logic.
So can mathematicians and most engineers. So we are on the same level.
So what is it that students of humanities supposedly can do that STEM can't?
How is it more relevant? Is there some property of the color red that physics doesn't cover?
> Your average philosophy graduate student is comfortable expressing virtually any proposition in first order logic, or even other types of symbolic logic.
So can mathematicians and most engineers. So we are on the same level.
So what is it that students of humanities supposedly can do that STEM can't?
They can make fluffy, borderline poetic phrases like "qualitative descriptions of the color red" that, frankly, mean nothing. Emotional sure, but the actual quality of a color is its wavelength for instance.
It is poorly defined: that is why it isn't maths, yet.
What is the purpose of philosophy? In its most basic sense to teach one how to live a good life. Abstract concepts like justice, fairness, ideal social structures, social values flow from this basic question.
Any precise definition of any of the above concepts is open to question, and societies and institutions to some extent embody sets of answers to them. The domain evolves over time, ideas change, pressures brought about by various outside phenomena change.
After all, we are simply a collection of organisms evolving in an environment that we don't understand, according to rules we dimly discern.
This is not to contribute to any STEM vs the humanities fight: it's fundamentally an arbitrary division of knowledge, and neither side benefits from the division. The STEM side is prone to a naive scientism and an amorality that is much to the detriment of the species. On the other hand, the humanities has unfortunately largely devolved into a sort of philosophical rag and bone yard.
Frankly, both sides should get together and have sex for a while. Something might come out of it.
What is the purpose of philosophy? In its most basic sense to teach one how to live a good life. Abstract concepts like justice, fairness, ideal social structures, social values flow from this basic question.
Any precise definition of any of the above concepts is open to question, and societies and institutions to some extent embody sets of answers to them. The domain evolves over time, ideas change, pressures brought about by various outside phenomena change.
After all, we are simply a collection of organisms evolving in an environment that we don't understand, according to rules we dimly discern.
This is not to contribute to any STEM vs the humanities fight: it's fundamentally an arbitrary division of knowledge, and neither side benefits from the division. The STEM side is prone to a naive scientism and an amorality that is much to the detriment of the species. On the other hand, the humanities has unfortunately largely devolved into a sort of philosophical rag and bone yard.
Frankly, both sides should get together and have sex for a while. Something might come out of it.
> If you can't precisely define what exactly
Or if no one can define or agree on the definition those subjects should just be ignored by everyone?
In economics for instance if you try to achieve this you can often end with an oversimplified model which mostly pointless and not particularly useful unless you're writing a schoolbook for undergraduates.
In a way it might be closer to medicine than to more exact sciences (just with no way to directly test your hypothesis...). You're analyzing a very complex dynamic system with many unknown or not easily definable or measurable variables. Even if you manage to come up with a model which makes sense it might be suddenly become nearly useless when something unpredicted in that system changes.
> that they can think in a different way that STEM people can't
Maybe they can and maybe they can't, I guess that depends on the individual. But you ussually do need to think in certain ways which are likely to not be very familiar to some people whose only background is in exact sciences.
Or if no one can define or agree on the definition those subjects should just be ignored by everyone?
In economics for instance if you try to achieve this you can often end with an oversimplified model which mostly pointless and not particularly useful unless you're writing a schoolbook for undergraduates.
In a way it might be closer to medicine than to more exact sciences (just with no way to directly test your hypothesis...). You're analyzing a very complex dynamic system with many unknown or not easily definable or measurable variables. Even if you manage to come up with a model which makes sense it might be suddenly become nearly useless when something unpredicted in that system changes.
> that they can think in a different way that STEM people can't
Maybe they can and maybe they can't, I guess that depends on the individual. But you ussually do need to think in certain ways which are likely to not be very familiar to some people whose only background is in exact sciences.
> Or if no one can define or agree on the definition those subjects should just be ignored by everyone?
Don't see why we can't have multiple mutually exclusive definitions, as long as they are clearly defined, then we can have different lines of argument - kind of like with geometry and the parallel postulate; and which one reality matches is a separate issue we can independently investigate.
> Maybe they can and maybe they can't, I guess that depends on the individual. But you ussually do need to think in certain ways which are likely to not be very familiar to some people whose only background is in exact sciences.
I'm curious as to exactly how the thinking is different. An example would be nice.
Don't see why we can't have multiple mutually exclusive definitions, as long as they are clearly defined, then we can have different lines of argument - kind of like with geometry and the parallel postulate; and which one reality matches is a separate issue we can independently investigate.
> Maybe they can and maybe they can't, I guess that depends on the individual. But you ussually do need to think in certain ways which are likely to not be very familiar to some people whose only background is in exact sciences.
I'm curious as to exactly how the thinking is different. An example would be nice.
Your post all sounds very good. Have an upvote!
But here's the thing. How does this critical thinking methodology fit in with the strong leftward tilt? I don't know of any successful Marxist societies (forcible or voluntary), so why do critical thinkers think they can get Marxism to work?
Here's a topical example:
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/violent-enough-to-stand-...
When the facts don't fit Marxist theory, the researcher gets cancelled.
Here's what I see is the difference between humanities critical thinking, and STEM critical thinking. In STEM, if you design an airplane, and the airplane doesn't fly, no amount of wishful thinking and rhetorical reframing is going to make it fly. The humanities have no such constraint.
For another example, Seattle recently completed a $1 Billion new terminal at Seatac to accommodate new larger planes. After it was finished, they discovered that the airplanes did not fit in the slots for them. There's just no way to spin that one into a success.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-t...
But here's the thing. How does this critical thinking methodology fit in with the strong leftward tilt? I don't know of any successful Marxist societies (forcible or voluntary), so why do critical thinkers think they can get Marxism to work?
Here's a topical example:
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/violent-enough-to-stand-...
When the facts don't fit Marxist theory, the researcher gets cancelled.
Here's what I see is the difference between humanities critical thinking, and STEM critical thinking. In STEM, if you design an airplane, and the airplane doesn't fly, no amount of wishful thinking and rhetorical reframing is going to make it fly. The humanities have no such constraint.
For another example, Seattle recently completed a $1 Billion new terminal at Seatac to accommodate new larger planes. After it was finished, they discovered that the airplanes did not fit in the slots for them. There's just no way to spin that one into a success.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/sea-t...
> How does this critical thinking methodology fit in with the strong leftward tilt? I don't know of any successful Marxist societies (forcible or voluntary), so why do critical thinkers think they can get Marxism to work?
Frankly this way of talking about humanities as a whole does betray lack of critical thinking on itself. For start, back in real world and in real actual universities, critical thinking does not mean Marxism.
> When the facts don't fit Marxist theory, the researcher gets cancelled.
If you mean this as a statement about actual universities, this is a lie. I mean, so much that it seems more like talking point from TV designed to make people agree with actual legislature banning actual books.
Frankly this way of talking about humanities as a whole does betray lack of critical thinking on itself. For start, back in real world and in real actual universities, critical thinking does not mean Marxism.
> When the facts don't fit Marxist theory, the researcher gets cancelled.
If you mean this as a statement about actual universities, this is a lie. I mean, so much that it seems more like talking point from TV designed to make people agree with actual legislature banning actual books.
> critical thinking does not mean Marxism
I didn't say it did. I said that there's something wrong with the critical thinking that goes on in the humanities department when they wind up advocating Marxism, despite Marxism having a dismal historical record of relentless failure.
I didn't say it did. I said that there's something wrong with the critical thinking that goes on in the humanities department when they wind up advocating Marxism, despite Marxism having a dismal historical record of relentless failure.
I don't believe Marxism would work in practice, I believe you'd always just get a _different_ one percenter class composed of party leaders instead of business owners, but I'm not sure that it's actually been given a fair trial. To steel man their argument, communist countries always had the world's top economic and military superpowers like USA doing whatever to could to prevent communism from spreading. I'm no history surgeon, but I can't think of a time when it was tried without external interference.
The strong leftward tilt is because part of the political ideology of the left is that society is not currently already leftist (it obviously isn’t — we live in a capitalist world) and critical theorists analyze our society under the historical and structural conditions as to why our society is the way it is. More quantifiable explanations are going to draw from anthropology, economics, sociology and political science. More qualitative explanations are necessarily more philosophical, so that means drawing from thinkers like Marx. That should be expected.
That does not mean that every person in those departments is a communist. Marx simply did a lot of early table-setting for critiquing capitalism. Later thinkers did a lot to extend and refute him, so I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that critical theorists are trying to make “Marxism work”. To my knowledge, orthodox Marxists hate a lot of critical theory. Foucault, for example, is widely read in these circles, but as much as he criticized capitalism and society, he was ultimately a neoliberal. Politics is messy and critical theory is not a monolith.
The wishful thinking part cuts both ways. Leftists members of the academy would probably criticize liberals for wishful thinking that say, the capitalist status quo with some modifications could actually save us from climate catastrophe, or that the most sensitive and important parts of being human are not lost when we live under what they consider a structurally unjust system. Or the blind optimism that the “moral arc of history bends towards justice”.
Given that Marxist-Leninism has failed (although MLs would argue otherwise), I agree with the sentiment that it would be unwise to “try it again”. But an honest and charitable engagement with Marx would show that the claims he makes are rather minimal and broad. His relevance is tied to the fact that he can be reinterpreted, and it would be wrongheaded to see it as any more dogmatic than run of the mill non-leftist, folk politics. The guy simply had a lot to say about the industrial revolution.
That does not mean that every person in those departments is a communist. Marx simply did a lot of early table-setting for critiquing capitalism. Later thinkers did a lot to extend and refute him, so I don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that critical theorists are trying to make “Marxism work”. To my knowledge, orthodox Marxists hate a lot of critical theory. Foucault, for example, is widely read in these circles, but as much as he criticized capitalism and society, he was ultimately a neoliberal. Politics is messy and critical theory is not a monolith.
The wishful thinking part cuts both ways. Leftists members of the academy would probably criticize liberals for wishful thinking that say, the capitalist status quo with some modifications could actually save us from climate catastrophe, or that the most sensitive and important parts of being human are not lost when we live under what they consider a structurally unjust system. Or the blind optimism that the “moral arc of history bends towards justice”.
Given that Marxist-Leninism has failed (although MLs would argue otherwise), I agree with the sentiment that it would be unwise to “try it again”. But an honest and charitable engagement with Marx would show that the claims he makes are rather minimal and broad. His relevance is tied to the fact that he can be reinterpreted, and it would be wrongheaded to see it as any more dogmatic than run of the mill non-leftist, folk politics. The guy simply had a lot to say about the industrial revolution.
You're not rebutting Walter's argument successfully. Everything you've said there is extremely subjective, difficult to pin down and mostly an emotional argument to begin with. Even your starting "obvious" premise that society isn't already leftist would get howls of disagreement from many quarters of society and because nothing that comes out of the humanities is in any way precise or rigorous it would be impossible to even resolve that dispute. You wouldn't even ever get to the point of arguing about whether Marx's claims were really "minimal" (lol) or whether he has "relevance" or was not "dogmatic"!
Whereas we built an airport and the plane doesn't fit is something not something anyone can argue about. Either the planes fit or they don't. Humanities academia devolves into Marxism so fast exactly because it's not pinned down by reality in that way, which is why it should just be abolished. Why should the rest of us be forced to pay for gibberish like "cyborg techno-feminism"?
Whereas we built an airport and the plane doesn't fit is something not something anyone can argue about. Either the planes fit or they don't. Humanities academia devolves into Marxism so fast exactly because it's not pinned down by reality in that way, which is why it should just be abolished. Why should the rest of us be forced to pay for gibberish like "cyborg techno-feminism"?
You’re making a lot of criticisms, but you haven’t shown me why what I’ve said is extremely subjective, or why it’s an emotional argument.
First of all, it is obvious that society isn’t already leftist. If you’re citing “many quarters of society howling in disagreement”, you’ll have to show me to 1) the data and 2) this somehow changes the actual nature of our society. Do you actually think that we live in a leftist society? I certainly do not see a plurality of worker co-ops walking down the street, and last I checked, the vast majority of the means of production are still privately owned. I am not going to explain my argument again as to why this gives critical theory a leftist bent.
Your argument seems to be motivated by the fact you don’t like some of the conclusions drawn out by academics in the humanities because they don’t fit your priors. To me, it’s obvious you fall right Dunning-Kruger’s trap, having read and understood virtually nothing about the subjects in question if you’re citing “cyborg techno feminism” as an example of “Marxist devolution”. You’re really proving the point here that a lack of engagement with the humanities leads to a lack critical thinking.
First of all, it is obvious that society isn’t already leftist. If you’re citing “many quarters of society howling in disagreement”, you’ll have to show me to 1) the data and 2) this somehow changes the actual nature of our society. Do you actually think that we live in a leftist society? I certainly do not see a plurality of worker co-ops walking down the street, and last I checked, the vast majority of the means of production are still privately owned. I am not going to explain my argument again as to why this gives critical theory a leftist bent.
Your argument seems to be motivated by the fact you don’t like some of the conclusions drawn out by academics in the humanities because they don’t fit your priors. To me, it’s obvious you fall right Dunning-Kruger’s trap, having read and understood virtually nothing about the subjects in question if you’re citing “cyborg techno feminism” as an example of “Marxist devolution”. You’re really proving the point here that a lack of engagement with the humanities leads to a lack critical thinking.
revelio(1)
> "cyborg techno-feminism"?
Naomi Wu is an excellent engineer and a luminary for the DIY space.
Naomi Wu is an excellent engineer and a luminary for the DIY space.
I'm not sure how you define a "Marxist society", but if this means an economic system where there's no notion of owning capital to collect economic rent from it, then MAREZ (Zapatistas) would seem to qualify.
To some extent also AANES (Rojava). Although that one is a hybrid economy where co-ops and wage labor small businesses coexist, it's roughly a 80/20 split in favor of the former, although there's no clear line there as some co-ops use wage labor as well. For the most part, this happens because the local councils actively support co-ops with loans, so organizing as one gives you an initial advantage.
To some extent also AANES (Rojava). Although that one is a hybrid economy where co-ops and wage labor small businesses coexist, it's roughly a 80/20 split in favor of the former, although there's no clear line there as some co-ops use wage labor as well. For the most part, this happens because the local councils actively support co-ops with loans, so organizing as one gives you an initial advantage.
There's also a "Marxist-Leninist society" where it is a transitional one to socialism and communism like the USSR and China.
Well, they claimed to have socialism and to be building communism, but Marx himself would hardly approve or consider it "socialism" if comparing notes. There's a reason why Lenin and company were seen as hacks by many Marxists of their time.
But I don't think Walter had that degree of precision in mind when he said "Marxist". It sounded more like a generic label for anti-capitalist left to me, so I went with the broad definition to match that.
But I don't think Walter had that degree of precision in mind when he said "Marxist". It sounded more like a generic label for anti-capitalist left to me, so I went with the broad definition to match that.
Critical thinking != Critical Theory
To make a long complicated story short, Marxism is the study of how class contradictions resolve themselves. Using Hegelian dialectics, it poses different classes against each other and theorizes what the synthesis would become. It could be said that this (and branching philosophies like critical theory) is the ultimate end result of Western philosophy, hence the leftward tilt of the humanities.
In an ideal sense, Marxist theory should be capable of updating itself to match actual conditions. In a degenerated dogmatic sense, it can be used to force actual conditions to fit within a narrow and false theory.
There is no end to the different interpretations of Marxism and the arguments and debates between them, because there's only so many real world examples that could be tested and examined.
Compared to an engineering problem, Marxist theory ends up touching so many fields and variables on a global scale that the problem space ends up being orders of magnitude greater. There's too much to examine and make sense of, so interpretations end up being strategies on how to navigate through this problem space and how to achieve Marxist theories and goals, either orthodixcally or heterodoxically.
In the example of that anthropologist, it does not go into detail with what the Marxists disagreed with. However, I think a Marxist argument could be made for the wars over women in that their society is of a more primitive stage where stealing women was a part of their socioeconomics. Their system works out so that a population equilbirum is achieved.
In works like Engel's On the Origin of the Family..., there is a Marxist interpretation of how humans orient themselves accordingly to the Marxist theory that the base economics form the superstructure of the culture and society. In more advanced societies, they went through agricultural revolutions that vastly increased the population and reshaped how societies must function to keep order.
Another example of Marxist theory gone wrong could be the USSR, and you have Marxists either defending or condemning it for various reasons. It could then be said that the Chinese Marxists learned from the USSR to create their own branched off lineage to prevent similar collapse and to forge their own path towards the Marxist stages of socialism and communism. (And of course you have Marxists condemning China too. Tl;Dr: the arguments are largely either China must develop before being advanced enough for socialism or China must advance to a socialist stage or else it will gravitate back towards complete capitalist control.)
Edit: That being said, while STEM has rigorous methodologies to verify truths, the fields can also be swept up by orthodoxies and heterodoxies and different interpretations. There's always been the derisive websh*t meme for fads on Hacker News. Or there's the unsolved problems in physics with different interpretations to resolve them. The scientific process did have its roots in philosophical developments after all.
In an ideal sense, Marxist theory should be capable of updating itself to match actual conditions. In a degenerated dogmatic sense, it can be used to force actual conditions to fit within a narrow and false theory.
There is no end to the different interpretations of Marxism and the arguments and debates between them, because there's only so many real world examples that could be tested and examined.
Compared to an engineering problem, Marxist theory ends up touching so many fields and variables on a global scale that the problem space ends up being orders of magnitude greater. There's too much to examine and make sense of, so interpretations end up being strategies on how to navigate through this problem space and how to achieve Marxist theories and goals, either orthodixcally or heterodoxically.
In the example of that anthropologist, it does not go into detail with what the Marxists disagreed with. However, I think a Marxist argument could be made for the wars over women in that their society is of a more primitive stage where stealing women was a part of their socioeconomics. Their system works out so that a population equilbirum is achieved.
In works like Engel's On the Origin of the Family..., there is a Marxist interpretation of how humans orient themselves accordingly to the Marxist theory that the base economics form the superstructure of the culture and society. In more advanced societies, they went through agricultural revolutions that vastly increased the population and reshaped how societies must function to keep order.
Another example of Marxist theory gone wrong could be the USSR, and you have Marxists either defending or condemning it for various reasons. It could then be said that the Chinese Marxists learned from the USSR to create their own branched off lineage to prevent similar collapse and to forge their own path towards the Marxist stages of socialism and communism. (And of course you have Marxists condemning China too. Tl;Dr: the arguments are largely either China must develop before being advanced enough for socialism or China must advance to a socialist stage or else it will gravitate back towards complete capitalist control.)
Edit: That being said, while STEM has rigorous methodologies to verify truths, the fields can also be swept up by orthodoxies and heterodoxies and different interpretations. There's always been the derisive websh*t meme for fads on Hacker News. Or there's the unsolved problems in physics with different interpretations to resolve them. The scientific process did have its roots in philosophical developments after all.
Marxist failures are always written off as being caused by not being "true" Marxism.
STEM has had many false theories (like the sun revolves around the earth). The virtue of STEM is when the facts contradict the theories, the theories get revised, even if the old guard has to die off before the corrected theory replaces it. With Marxism, however, the facts get re-written to conform to Marxism, rather than the other way around.
One of the beauties of the scientific method is it tests the predictions a theory makes. If the predictions come true, the theory is validated. If the predictions don't pan out, the theory is false.
A famous example is Einstein's Relativity theory predicted that gravity bends light. Einstein became world famous when decades later, this bending was observed.
Marxist theory also makes predictions, but none of those predictions pan out. This never discourages the critical thinkers in the humanities, which leaves me unimpressed with the critical thinking skills of it.
STEM has had many false theories (like the sun revolves around the earth). The virtue of STEM is when the facts contradict the theories, the theories get revised, even if the old guard has to die off before the corrected theory replaces it. With Marxism, however, the facts get re-written to conform to Marxism, rather than the other way around.
One of the beauties of the scientific method is it tests the predictions a theory makes. If the predictions come true, the theory is validated. If the predictions don't pan out, the theory is false.
A famous example is Einstein's Relativity theory predicted that gravity bends light. Einstein became world famous when decades later, this bending was observed.
Marxist theory also makes predictions, but none of those predictions pan out. This never discourages the critical thinkers in the humanities, which leaves me unimpressed with the critical thinking skills of it.
This is a seriously cold take that’s infamously descended from Karl Popper’s argument that Marxism is unscientific. It’s obviously the case that Marxism is unscientific under Popper’s criterion of falsifiability for science, but
1) it’s contentious in Popper’s field itself on whether this criterion is right (it is generally accepted today that he is wrong) and
2) it’s contentious on whether Popper even understands Marx’s theory of history, which is where his criticism comes from, and
3) even if we decide by fiat that the predictions made by Marxism are unscientific, that does not preclude it from being a source of knowledge, or prevent Marxism from being imported as a normative political or ethical framework.
The whole “not true Marxism” thing usually comes from the mouths of people who’ve never read Marx, let alone explicitly non-Marxist thinkers who were influenced by Marx. In other words, the kinds of people who have never given this serious thought at all, but have likely watched some YouTube videos or read a couple articles. There is really no such thing as “true Marxism”. Marxism in practice has ranged from the USSR to Zapatista, which are very different from one another, but they are both no more “truly Marxist” than the other. The only person who could decide that is probably the guy himself, who is long dead.
>This never discourages the critical thinkers in the humanities, which leaves me unimpressed with the critical thinking skills of it.
If nuance and actual engagement with primary source material (as opposed to whatever it is you’re doing) does not count as “critical thinking”, then I strongly believe we cannot have any further discussion here.
1) it’s contentious in Popper’s field itself on whether this criterion is right (it is generally accepted today that he is wrong) and
2) it’s contentious on whether Popper even understands Marx’s theory of history, which is where his criticism comes from, and
3) even if we decide by fiat that the predictions made by Marxism are unscientific, that does not preclude it from being a source of knowledge, or prevent Marxism from being imported as a normative political or ethical framework.
The whole “not true Marxism” thing usually comes from the mouths of people who’ve never read Marx, let alone explicitly non-Marxist thinkers who were influenced by Marx. In other words, the kinds of people who have never given this serious thought at all, but have likely watched some YouTube videos or read a couple articles. There is really no such thing as “true Marxism”. Marxism in practice has ranged from the USSR to Zapatista, which are very different from one another, but they are both no more “truly Marxist” than the other. The only person who could decide that is probably the guy himself, who is long dead.
>This never discourages the critical thinkers in the humanities, which leaves me unimpressed with the critical thinking skills of it.
If nuance and actual engagement with primary source material (as opposed to whatever it is you’re doing) does not count as “critical thinking”, then I strongly believe we cannot have any further discussion here.
Rigor in modern non-STEM academics is extremely abstract at best, and clouded with clique-derived "registers" of language that only the in-group shares. This language spills out into some drivel like the following I found the other afternoon:
Modern academia outside of most STEM programs leads to things like this. I've seen a few English 101 professors that valiantly try to get their freshman past a 5th grade reading and writing level (to some success) and to actually think critically. But once you enter the hallowed halls of academia and begin to learn the language and methods of reasoning, which are lacking. I can call out one such methodology (it has a name that I've long forgotten) that allows one to make claims and assertions about the contents of a text without considering the authorial intent at all. It is essentially a codified method of casting aspersions. So-and-so becomes a gay lover, such-and-such is an allegory for communism, and so on.
I'll go ahead and blame 'process philosophy', the rejection of the absolute, the rejection of the spiritual, the obsession with a mechanistic existence, and the blind faith that -- somehow -- humanity is getting better all the time.
Where our reasoning faculties are now has been centuries in the making, even the founding fathers of the United States argued about rationalism and its rejection of the divine.
But the rationalists prevailed, and after them Marx, Lenin, Freud, and others.
And now we're here.
This article utilises feminist technoscience studies' notions of bodily 'materialisation' and 'ontological choreographies', offering a cyborg feminist account...
Modern academia outside of most STEM programs leads to things like this. I've seen a few English 101 professors that valiantly try to get their freshman past a 5th grade reading and writing level (to some success) and to actually think critically. But once you enter the hallowed halls of academia and begin to learn the language and methods of reasoning, which are lacking. I can call out one such methodology (it has a name that I've long forgotten) that allows one to make claims and assertions about the contents of a text without considering the authorial intent at all. It is essentially a codified method of casting aspersions. So-and-so becomes a gay lover, such-and-such is an allegory for communism, and so on.
I'll go ahead and blame 'process philosophy', the rejection of the absolute, the rejection of the spiritual, the obsession with a mechanistic existence, and the blind faith that -- somehow -- humanity is getting better all the time.
Where our reasoning faculties are now has been centuries in the making, even the founding fathers of the United States argued about rationalism and its rejection of the divine.
But the rationalists prevailed, and after them Marx, Lenin, Freud, and others.
And now we're here.
I am no academic of any kind, but it strikes me as arrogant to quote that text and claim it to be drivel, while nodding in agreement to
“Word embeddings utilize neural networks to create high-dimensional vector representations of words [..]”
I had to look up ontological choreography and it‘s just a concept, not unlike the weird jargon in CS. Is there at least a tiny speck of a sliver of possibility that we lack actual perspective and competency in these fields?
“Word embeddings utilize neural networks to create high-dimensional vector representations of words [..]”
I had to look up ontological choreography and it‘s just a concept, not unlike the weird jargon in CS. Is there at least a tiny speck of a sliver of possibility that we lack actual perspective and competency in these fields?
I looked up both terms, being familiar with neither offhand.
The term "ontological choreography" comes across to me as something like an arrangement or dance of meanings and appears to have been coined by someone whose concern was normalization of LGBTQ families via surrogate parents and possibly other technology. I could not have guessed any connection there from the actual meanings of those words and it doesn't really convey any information I know how to use.
Reading "Word embeddings utilize neural networks to create high-dimensional vector representations of words" is something precise enough that I could probably make software to create an embedding and feed it to a neural net given time and a few more details. It sounds like it's not so distant from what I did more than 20 years ago making a simple Markov chain in a few lines of Perl. The only ambiguous part is what the neural networks actually do with the Markov chain of words, because that's not stated in your quote.
The term "ontological choreography" comes across to me as something like an arrangement or dance of meanings and appears to have been coined by someone whose concern was normalization of LGBTQ families via surrogate parents and possibly other technology. I could not have guessed any connection there from the actual meanings of those words and it doesn't really convey any information I know how to use.
Reading "Word embeddings utilize neural networks to create high-dimensional vector representations of words" is something precise enough that I could probably make software to create an embedding and feed it to a neural net given time and a few more details. It sounds like it's not so distant from what I did more than 20 years ago making a simple Markov chain in a few lines of Perl. The only ambiguous part is what the neural networks actually do with the Markov chain of words, because that's not stated in your quote.
I'll give you that the term, heck even the field, is fuzzy. I could not give you a good description of either, but that's also true of homological algebra and interpretive dance.
> I could not have guessed any connection there from the actual meanings of those words and it doesn't really convey any information I know how to use.
The word "I" is important here. I could not do anything with this either: "Let X be a compact connected Riemann surface of genus g, equipped with a holomorphic differential ω having a non-zero integral over X [..]"
I'm not saying social studies have the same level of rigor and precision, but it's another thing entirely to dismiss a whole field of study just because you couldn't reproduce it in perl.
Some topics just cannot be grasped with tweezers. You just have to try to be precise with the fuzziness and that's not easy.
> I could not have guessed any connection there from the actual meanings of those words and it doesn't really convey any information I know how to use.
The word "I" is important here. I could not do anything with this either: "Let X be a compact connected Riemann surface of genus g, equipped with a holomorphic differential ω having a non-zero integral over X [..]"
I'm not saying social studies have the same level of rigor and precision, but it's another thing entirely to dismiss a whole field of study just because you couldn't reproduce it in perl.
Some topics just cannot be grasped with tweezers. You just have to try to be precise with the fuzziness and that's not easy.
I think, every academic discipline, we should demand it demonstrate that its got something true and useful to say. And, “Word embeddings utilize neural networks to create high-dimensional vector representations of words..." – "word embeddings" and "neural networks" are true (they clearly exist), and they are clearly useful (we can do things with them, that we couldn't do before). Their truth and usefulness is really beyond dispute; any impartial person, sufficiently familiar with the discipline, has to admit that. Of course, there are still some things up for debate – how far these technologies will scale, whether scaling them or searching for completely new approaches to replace them is the more fruitful path for future research, etc. But the basic validity of the concepts (truth and usefulness) no longer is.
Compare that to the following sentence taken from the field of "feminist technoscience": "Examples of masculine-coded technologies under these categories included ARPANET..." [0] Even if we can provide some kind of meaningful definition of "masculine-coded technology" such that ARPANET counts as one – is that saying anything true or useful? That seems far more open to debate than the equivalent questions for "word embeddings" and "neural networks". And that's why it isn't really fair to compare machine learning, as a discipline, to feminist technoscience – the truth and usefulness of the former is rather beyond dispute, the same things are much much more open to question for the latter.
> I'm not saying social studies have the same level of rigor and precision, but it's another thing entirely to dismiss a whole field of study just because you couldn't reproduce it in perl.
There are some approaches to social studies, which while they might not be "reproducible in Perl", seem on a much firmer footing – I mentioned before the rational choice theory of religion, advocated by the late sociologist Rodney Stark. It is far easier to derive testable hypotheses from it, for one thing. People write whole books attacking it (whether successfully or not) – like Steve Bruce's Choice and Religion – precisely because it makes claims which are firm enough to be attacked.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_technoscience
Compare that to the following sentence taken from the field of "feminist technoscience": "Examples of masculine-coded technologies under these categories included ARPANET..." [0] Even if we can provide some kind of meaningful definition of "masculine-coded technology" such that ARPANET counts as one – is that saying anything true or useful? That seems far more open to debate than the equivalent questions for "word embeddings" and "neural networks". And that's why it isn't really fair to compare machine learning, as a discipline, to feminist technoscience – the truth and usefulness of the former is rather beyond dispute, the same things are much much more open to question for the latter.
> I'm not saying social studies have the same level of rigor and precision, but it's another thing entirely to dismiss a whole field of study just because you couldn't reproduce it in perl.
There are some approaches to social studies, which while they might not be "reproducible in Perl", seem on a much firmer footing – I mentioned before the rational choice theory of religion, advocated by the late sociologist Rodney Stark. It is far easier to derive testable hypotheses from it, for one thing. People write whole books attacking it (whether successfully or not) – like Steve Bruce's Choice and Religion – precisely because it makes claims which are firm enough to be attacked.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_technoscience
I just read the feminist technoscience article and I found it very interesting and can imagine it being very relevant to some people.
The ARPANET thing is actually an interesting example, because the Department of Defense (war) is very obviously masculine-coded. It seems reasonably true to say that a lot of technology and science is masculine coded for all sorts of different reasons. Honestly, it’s trivially true to suggest that engineering is seen as a masculine profession because of particular historical circumstances, some of which probably had to do with explicitly patriarchal societies, so I don’t see what the fuss is. I can totally see why someone who spends a lot of time thinking about gender and ways of making a more egalitarian society would find this interesting and useful. It might be very niche, but so is any sufficiently advanced topic in research.
I also don’t really know who is to say one thing (machine learning) is more useful than another (feminism). You could be right, but that is a value driven claim which, ironically, is something that is going to be parsed out in philosophical debate and prose, not lines of code.
It seems to me that most complaints against the “fuzziness” of studies in the humanities are the politically bent ones, which makes me suspicious that the disdain is for particular political views or conclusions, as if to dismiss these views as spurious and non-academic. It’s certainly not scientific, but that does not mean it is not serious, and science is certainly not the final or only arbiter of what is real or worthy of intellectual consideration.
The ARPANET thing is actually an interesting example, because the Department of Defense (war) is very obviously masculine-coded. It seems reasonably true to say that a lot of technology and science is masculine coded for all sorts of different reasons. Honestly, it’s trivially true to suggest that engineering is seen as a masculine profession because of particular historical circumstances, some of which probably had to do with explicitly patriarchal societies, so I don’t see what the fuss is. I can totally see why someone who spends a lot of time thinking about gender and ways of making a more egalitarian society would find this interesting and useful. It might be very niche, but so is any sufficiently advanced topic in research.
I also don’t really know who is to say one thing (machine learning) is more useful than another (feminism). You could be right, but that is a value driven claim which, ironically, is something that is going to be parsed out in philosophical debate and prose, not lines of code.
It seems to me that most complaints against the “fuzziness” of studies in the humanities are the politically bent ones, which makes me suspicious that the disdain is for particular political views or conclusions, as if to dismiss these views as spurious and non-academic. It’s certainly not scientific, but that does not mean it is not serious, and science is certainly not the final or only arbiter of what is real or worthy of intellectual consideration.
> I also don’t really know who is to say one thing (machine learning) is more useful than another (feminism).
Okay, but "feminist technoscience" and "feminism" are not the same thing.
"Machine learning" is a tool which can obviously be used to do useful things–although no doubt harmful things too. "Feminism" is a diverse set of values and policy preferences, which promote themselves as beneficial for women – and while we can debate the details, very few would disagree that many women have derived real-world personal benefits from at least some of those policies. My late grandmother used to complain about how – in the late 1940s – she was forced to resign from her bank job (which she loved) the week before her wedding, because the bank's policy was not to employ married women. She absolutely welcomed the law being changed to make those kinds of corporate policies illegal, and while she didn't benefit from that law change personally, her daughters-in-law (my mother included) and grand-daughters did. We can debate whether everything feminists ask for is right (they aren't all asking for the same things anyway), but (unless you are some kind of ultra-reactionary), it is rather obvious that some of their ideas have been positive developments for women, and for society in general. By contrast, what good could "feminist technoscience" do for my grandmothers, my mother, my wife, my sister, my daughter?
Okay, but "feminist technoscience" and "feminism" are not the same thing.
"Machine learning" is a tool which can obviously be used to do useful things–although no doubt harmful things too. "Feminism" is a diverse set of values and policy preferences, which promote themselves as beneficial for women – and while we can debate the details, very few would disagree that many women have derived real-world personal benefits from at least some of those policies. My late grandmother used to complain about how – in the late 1940s – she was forced to resign from her bank job (which she loved) the week before her wedding, because the bank's policy was not to employ married women. She absolutely welcomed the law being changed to make those kinds of corporate policies illegal, and while she didn't benefit from that law change personally, her daughters-in-law (my mother included) and grand-daughters did. We can debate whether everything feminists ask for is right (they aren't all asking for the same things anyway), but (unless you are some kind of ultra-reactionary), it is rather obvious that some of their ideas have been positive developments for women, and for society in general. By contrast, what good could "feminist technoscience" do for my grandmothers, my mother, my wife, my sister, my daughter?
> I also don’t really know who is to say one thing (machine learning) is more useful than another (feminism). You could be right, but that is a value driven claim
It might be a value driven claim, but it's also easy to imagine that societies who value machine learning and other engineering over feminism and other social justice studies are likely to outcompete the latter. At least assuming social justice issues aren't severe enough to cause a civil war to be fought or some such.
It might be a value driven claim, but it's also easy to imagine that societies who value machine learning and other engineering over feminism and other social justice studies are likely to outcompete the latter. At least assuming social justice issues aren't severe enough to cause a civil war to be fought or some such.
> it's also easy to imagine that societies who value machine learning and other engineering over feminism and other social justice studies are likely to outcompete the latter
It is also easy to imagine otherwise, eg. murderous AIs killing off humanity and other AI dystopia that many people are concerned about these days. I don't think they're likely, but as far as imagination goes, it's possible. And if that actually happens, it's arguable that wasting time over "useless" concepts in the humanities is a better survival strategy for societies.
Specifics aside, I think it's quite hilarious that people in a tech discussion forum think tech is objectively more useful to society than whatever other field that they're totally unfamiliar with.
It is also easy to imagine otherwise, eg. murderous AIs killing off humanity and other AI dystopia that many people are concerned about these days. I don't think they're likely, but as far as imagination goes, it's possible. And if that actually happens, it's arguable that wasting time over "useless" concepts in the humanities is a better survival strategy for societies.
Specifics aside, I think it's quite hilarious that people in a tech discussion forum think tech is objectively more useful to society than whatever other field that they're totally unfamiliar with.
For the record, I'm no proponent of feminist cyborgism. I'm a programmer, I don't know shit. But I find these statements interesting. I held them for a long time and am now doubting their usefulness:
> Their truth and usefulness is really beyond dispute;
That's what I call things that can be picked up by tweezers, concrete issues that have clear and unambigious manifestations that we all - or virtuall all - agree on.
Those are the easy things. It's very comfortable to pick them up and turn them around and analyze them. There is no ambiguity, no pesky fuzziness. I understand why certain personality types gravitate towards it and I belief myself to be such one, but I'd say be careful about proclaiming them the only things worth studying.
Sometimes things are not that clearly demarcated and even in a rigorous field such a abstract mathematics the concept of "usefulness" is not of primary concern. Also sometimes the reality of a thing itself is not obvious and needs to be studied. Sometimes it's not even clear what we are looking at - try reading anything by Heidegger. Philosophy is a field riddles with those kind of studies.
> is that saying anything true or useful? That seems far more open to debate
Throw me a bone here, but is the fact that it's not yet clear if it is true or useful, but cannot be ruled out immediately a signal that there's more to it than we currently know? Again, not saying "biomedical homological technofeministic cyborgism wrt ecosystemical unidirectionalism" (me having fun now) is equivalent to studying the properties of neural networks, but just pointing out that reality is multifaceted and that you cannot just skip entire domains of reality just because you cannot replicate it in, again, perl (or math). It's uncomfortable, it lacks precision, but we have to start somewhere and math ain't cutting it.
> Their truth and usefulness is really beyond dispute;
That's what I call things that can be picked up by tweezers, concrete issues that have clear and unambigious manifestations that we all - or virtuall all - agree on.
Those are the easy things. It's very comfortable to pick them up and turn them around and analyze them. There is no ambiguity, no pesky fuzziness. I understand why certain personality types gravitate towards it and I belief myself to be such one, but I'd say be careful about proclaiming them the only things worth studying.
Sometimes things are not that clearly demarcated and even in a rigorous field such a abstract mathematics the concept of "usefulness" is not of primary concern. Also sometimes the reality of a thing itself is not obvious and needs to be studied. Sometimes it's not even clear what we are looking at - try reading anything by Heidegger. Philosophy is a field riddles with those kind of studies.
> is that saying anything true or useful? That seems far more open to debate
Throw me a bone here, but is the fact that it's not yet clear if it is true or useful, but cannot be ruled out immediately a signal that there's more to it than we currently know? Again, not saying "biomedical homological technofeministic cyborgism wrt ecosystemical unidirectionalism" (me having fun now) is equivalent to studying the properties of neural networks, but just pointing out that reality is multifaceted and that you cannot just skip entire domains of reality just because you cannot replicate it in, again, perl (or math). It's uncomfortable, it lacks precision, but we have to start somewhere and math ain't cutting it.
Well, anyone given sufficient study can chase down those definitions to precise terms that can be used to make things.
If I wanted to normalize LGTBQ families with "ontological choreography" I can't get enough meaning out of that to even know where to begin to help.
If I wanted to normalize LGTBQ families with "ontological choreography" I can't get enough meaning out of that to even know where to begin to help.
One element of lack of critical thinking is taking something you dont understand at all, make bad faith attempt at reading it and then extrapolate the result the the whole of humanities.
Your intellectual humility is refreshing. Most of these discussions devolve into very obvious cases of Dunning-Kruger effect.
> Rigor in modern non-STEM academics is extremely abstract at best, and clouded with clique-derived "registers" of language that only the in-group shares. This language spills out into some drivel like the following I found the other afternoon:
There's still a significant chunk of philosophy which isn't like that at all. Sure, there's a lot of "Continental philosophy" which ends up looking largely indistinguishable from the "critical theory" cant to which you object (although, maybe, it is unfair to tar all of it with that brush). But philosophy in the analytic/Anglo-American tradition has maintained much of its immunity against that disease.
Similarly, there's still plenty of work published in fields such as history, economics, sociology, political science, etc, which (mostly or entirely) sticks to good old-fashioned factual arguments. For example, sociology of religion – try reading the late Rodney Stark's work on applying rational choice theory to the study of religions, or Eric Kaufmann's contributions to religious demography – you won't find any "cyborg feminism" in either of them.
There's still a significant chunk of philosophy which isn't like that at all. Sure, there's a lot of "Continental philosophy" which ends up looking largely indistinguishable from the "critical theory" cant to which you object (although, maybe, it is unfair to tar all of it with that brush). But philosophy in the analytic/Anglo-American tradition has maintained much of its immunity against that disease.
Similarly, there's still plenty of work published in fields such as history, economics, sociology, political science, etc, which (mostly or entirely) sticks to good old-fashioned factual arguments. For example, sociology of religion – try reading the late Rodney Stark's work on applying rational choice theory to the study of religions, or Eric Kaufmann's contributions to religious demography – you won't find any "cyborg feminism" in either of them.
As someone who has studied in the analytic tradition, I think it's wildly uncharitable to consider Continental philosophy a disease. A lot of it is very poorly written, but extremely illuminating. Good thinking is humble and prudent, the way many people who think within a scientific materialist or Anglo-American philosophical tradition dismiss enormous bodies of work that has a very different framework is lamentable, and something I regret doing as a naive undergrad who only wanted ordinary English, "rigorous", or "mathematical" philosophy.
Why don't we like the alleged 'relativism' of Continental philosophy? That tells us something about the culture we live in, and is worth thinking about it. Ironically, it's the concepts in Continental philosophy that allows us to talk about it the best, even if by doing so we end up disagreeing with its most notorious thinkers. Just my two cents.
Why don't we like the alleged 'relativism' of Continental philosophy? That tells us something about the culture we live in, and is worth thinking about it. Ironically, it's the concepts in Continental philosophy that allows us to talk about it the best, even if by doing so we end up disagreeing with its most notorious thinkers. Just my two cents.
> As someone who has studied in the analytic tradition, I think it's wildly uncharitable to consider Continental philosophy a disease.
I should point out that I did say (with added emphasis):
> Sure, there's a lot of "Continental philosophy" which ends up looking largely indistinguishable from the "critical theory" cant to which you object (although, maybe, it is unfair to tar all of it with that brush)
In other words, a lot of it really is that bad – but not all of it.
I myself have to admit I've always been rather fascinated by Foucault, and I think a lot of what he has to say is rather interesting and of contemporary relevance–especially his viewpoint that sexual orientation is a set of contingent cultural constructs, rather than some essential reality of persons
Žižek too – I've read some of his essays, sometimes he makes some insightful points (to me at least) – although I haven't read his philosophical works, and his essays I've read, I'm not sure if they should be classified as "philosophy" per se
> Why don't we like the alleged 'relativism' of Continental philosophy?
How does it answer the classic objection that relativism is self-defeating?
I don't think "relativism" is the biggest complaint though. The biggest complaint is obscurantism–which risks dressing up the trivial as profound, and hiding falsehoods behind fancy language. And imprecision–analytic philosophy is very much about precise definitions and precise arguments, which makes it easier to judge whether an argument succeeds or fails, and to work out whether the parties to a dispute are actually arguing about the same thing or just talking past each other–Continental philosophy tends to be much more impressionistic in character, making it harder to work out what people are saying, and to judge the quality of their arguments
I should point out that I did say (with added emphasis):
> Sure, there's a lot of "Continental philosophy" which ends up looking largely indistinguishable from the "critical theory" cant to which you object (although, maybe, it is unfair to tar all of it with that brush)
In other words, a lot of it really is that bad – but not all of it.
I myself have to admit I've always been rather fascinated by Foucault, and I think a lot of what he has to say is rather interesting and of contemporary relevance–especially his viewpoint that sexual orientation is a set of contingent cultural constructs, rather than some essential reality of persons
Žižek too – I've read some of his essays, sometimes he makes some insightful points (to me at least) – although I haven't read his philosophical works, and his essays I've read, I'm not sure if they should be classified as "philosophy" per se
> Why don't we like the alleged 'relativism' of Continental philosophy?
How does it answer the classic objection that relativism is self-defeating?
I don't think "relativism" is the biggest complaint though. The biggest complaint is obscurantism–which risks dressing up the trivial as profound, and hiding falsehoods behind fancy language. And imprecision–analytic philosophy is very much about precise definitions and precise arguments, which makes it easier to judge whether an argument succeeds or fails, and to work out whether the parties to a dispute are actually arguing about the same thing or just talking past each other–Continental philosophy tends to be much more impressionistic in character, making it harder to work out what people are saying, and to judge the quality of their arguments
I put relativism is scare quotes because Continental philosophy doesn't espouse relativism, but is often accused of it. It does espouse a cynicism for structuralism and has a penchant for scientific anti-realism, but both those views (when we re-express it in ordinary "analytic" language) are contentious while respectable, but not incredulous, and have sophisticated arguments.
But -- and as a reply to the complaints of its obscurantism -- it's also not obvious that arguments in Continental philosophy can be re-expressed in an atomic way without losing its fundamental essence. If we could, then and only then can we accuse thinkers of being fluffy and imprecise obscurantists. However, many of these philosophies are ones that criticize reductive, logocentric discourse to begin with! In other words, that is a feature, not a bug of the philosophical tradition.
But -- and as a reply to the complaints of its obscurantism -- it's also not obvious that arguments in Continental philosophy can be re-expressed in an atomic way without losing its fundamental essence. If we could, then and only then can we accuse thinkers of being fluffy and imprecise obscurantists. However, many of these philosophies are ones that criticize reductive, logocentric discourse to begin with! In other words, that is a feature, not a bug of the philosophical tradition.
> I put relativism is scare quotes because Continental philosophy doesn't espouse relativism, but is often accused of it.
Well, Nietzsche himself insists that his "perspectivism" isn't a mere "relativism" or "subjectivism". But, exactly what the difference between the the former and the latter is, is complicated and murky and debatable, and I don't think we should exclude the possibility that counterarguments against the latter may end up succeeding against the former as well.
> But -- and as a reply to the complaints of its obscurantism -- it's also not obvious that arguments in Continental philosophy can be re-expressed in an atomic way without losing its fundamental essence.
I think it is hopeless to read Nietzsche, for example, as presenting some sort of ordered philosophical system, like Aquinas' Summa or Spinoza's Ethics. But, I think, Nietzsche is under-appreciated as a poet. And reading some of his works as poetry and fiction – you can extract some ideas from them which are very amenable to being put in a precise form. For example, eternal recurrence – he may well have not meant it so literally, but there certainly are cosmological theories in which eternal recurrence is entirely literal, and I think one could fruitfully work out the philosophical implications of such a theory using traditional analytic methods
> However, many of these philosophies are ones that criticize reductive, logocentric discourse to begin with!
For me, it really comes down to this – I've read some Nietzsche, and I enjoyed it – even when he's wrong, he's entertaining. I tried reading Derrida – and I gave up. Nietzsche convinced me he had something worthwhile to say; Derrida failed to do so before he ran out of my attention.
Well, Nietzsche himself insists that his "perspectivism" isn't a mere "relativism" or "subjectivism". But, exactly what the difference between the the former and the latter is, is complicated and murky and debatable, and I don't think we should exclude the possibility that counterarguments against the latter may end up succeeding against the former as well.
> But -- and as a reply to the complaints of its obscurantism -- it's also not obvious that arguments in Continental philosophy can be re-expressed in an atomic way without losing its fundamental essence.
I think it is hopeless to read Nietzsche, for example, as presenting some sort of ordered philosophical system, like Aquinas' Summa or Spinoza's Ethics. But, I think, Nietzsche is under-appreciated as a poet. And reading some of his works as poetry and fiction – you can extract some ideas from them which are very amenable to being put in a precise form. For example, eternal recurrence – he may well have not meant it so literally, but there certainly are cosmological theories in which eternal recurrence is entirely literal, and I think one could fruitfully work out the philosophical implications of such a theory using traditional analytic methods
> However, many of these philosophies are ones that criticize reductive, logocentric discourse to begin with!
For me, it really comes down to this – I've read some Nietzsche, and I enjoyed it – even when he's wrong, he's entertaining. I tried reading Derrida – and I gave up. Nietzsche convinced me he had something worthwhile to say; Derrida failed to do so before he ran out of my attention.
> I myself have to admit I've always been rather fascinated by Foucault, and I think a lot of what he has to say is rather interesting and of contemporary relevance–especially his viewpoint that sexual orientation is a set of contingent cultural constructs, rather than some essential reality of persons
Personally, I find it extremely troubling to take sexual philosophy from someone who advocated for 12 year olds to be considered "of age" to have sex with anyone, and himself molested prepubescent children in Tunisia.
Personally, I find it extremely troubling to take sexual philosophy from someone who advocated for 12 year olds to be considered "of age" to have sex with anyone, and himself molested prepubescent children in Tunisia.
If true (and I’m not saying it isn’t)-that’s despicable-but also irrelevant to the truth or falsehood of Foucault’s claim that sexual orientation is a historically contingent social construct.
A philosopher’s personal misdeeds don’t-in general-count as evidence against their theories. If the theories directly serve to justify their misdeeds, that might be some reason to discount them-but Foucault’s claim that sexual orientation is a historically contingent social construct has no direct bearing on the issue of sexual abuse of minors, so allegations that he engaged in that aren’t relevant to them
A philosopher’s personal misdeeds don’t-in general-count as evidence against their theories. If the theories directly serve to justify their misdeeds, that might be some reason to discount them-but Foucault’s claim that sexual orientation is a historically contingent social construct has no direct bearing on the issue of sexual abuse of minors, so allegations that he engaged in that aren’t relevant to them
It's funny, I feel that most of the worst offenders are those that synthesize continental philosophy with American analytical tradition. The continental thinking becomes a prescription to be followed and applied analytically. And you get this weird feminist cyborgs.
I truly believe that US academia mangled and caricatured very deep and insightful thinkers.
I'd be very interested in the "analytic/Anglo-American tradition" crowd. Can you recommend any books? I'd even take a college primer on the subject.
I will definitely take a look at Stark's and Kaufmann's work.
I will definitely take a look at Stark's and Kaufmann's work.
The analytic/continental split happened around the 19th century. Both traditions read more or less the same thinkers in Western philosophy (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, the Enlightenment Rationalists, the Enlightenment Empiricists, the Enlightenment Idealists, Kant) up until then. Once you hit the 19th century, stick with the readings that deal with the problems set out by Frege, Russell, and Moore, who are trying to get as close to science and formalizing problems in a clear, mathematical way as possible. As a result, the philosophical agenda uses conceptual engineering as a general approach. Generally speaking, any topic that fits into a "Philosophy of X" (e.g. Philosophy of mind, language, ethics, action, etc) is part of the analytic tradition.
The continental thinkers (starting with Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger) are asking questions like "What is one's place in the world?" or "How do forces of history affect the deepest parts of people?" or "How does our Western scientific worldview limit other kinds of knowledge?" On the surface, this is going to seem a lot more 'subjective' and is partly why it gets obscure very, very fast. Personally, I think it's still worth reading, but that's because I find those issues interesting to begin with.
The continental thinkers (starting with Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger) are asking questions like "What is one's place in the world?" or "How do forces of history affect the deepest parts of people?" or "How does our Western scientific worldview limit other kinds of knowledge?" On the surface, this is going to seem a lot more 'subjective' and is partly why it gets obscure very, very fast. Personally, I think it's still worth reading, but that's because I find those issues interesting to begin with.
> "How does our Western scientific worldview limit other kinds of knowledge?"
Feyerabend's "Against Method" comes to mind here. I haven't touched his work in a long time. It seems I've some reading to do.
Feyerabend's "Against Method" comes to mind here. I haven't touched his work in a long time. It seems I've some reading to do.
My own personal introduction to philosophy came from Edwards and Pap's now rather dated 1965 textbook A Modern Introduction to Philosophy–my father did an introduction to philosophy course at university in the late 1960s, and that was the main textbook they used, and teenage me was rather excited to discover it on his bookshelf. I myself did 1st year philosophy at university in 2000, but only one unit (logic) actually had a textbook, the others I did (epistemology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, political philosophy) just used photocopied books of readings (I remember we had readings from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Berkeley, Kant–and some more recent authors whose names escape me now). I found a site with a whole set of free university-level philosophy textbooks – https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/subjects/philosophy – although I can't vouch for them since I haven't read any of them myself
Some philosophers whose works I've read and enjoyed: Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia; Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons; Peter Singer's Practical Ethics; Graham Priest's In Contradiction; Graham Oppy's Arguing about Gods; Edward Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God – that's a rather eclectic and idiosyncratic list, including books by authors which radically disagree with each other (e.g. Feser's book tries to prove God exists, Oppy's book argues all known proofs of God's existence fail) - but you definitely won't find any of that "critical theory" cant in any of them
Some philosophers whose works I've read and enjoyed: Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia; Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons; Peter Singer's Practical Ethics; Graham Priest's In Contradiction; Graham Oppy's Arguing about Gods; Edward Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God – that's a rather eclectic and idiosyncratic list, including books by authors which radically disagree with each other (e.g. Feser's book tries to prove God exists, Oppy's book argues all known proofs of God's existence fail) - but you definitely won't find any of that "critical theory" cant in any of them
> I'll go ahead and blame 'process philosophy', the rejection of the absolute, the rejection of the spiritual, the obsession with a mechanistic existence, and the blind faith that -- somehow -- humanity is getting better all the time.
This is a lump of mostly unrelated things, to the point where people who are likely to religiously embrace some of them would be just as likely to be horrified by the others. And don't even get me started on the "rejection of the divine" - what passes for rigor in religious apologetics can easily rival the worst of modern social studies.
Indeed, isn't it very much the opposite - that, after a period of rationalism promoted as a virtue, we have entered a period of new dogmatic spiritualism?
This is a lump of mostly unrelated things, to the point where people who are likely to religiously embrace some of them would be just as likely to be horrified by the others. And don't even get me started on the "rejection of the divine" - what passes for rigor in religious apologetics can easily rival the worst of modern social studies.
Indeed, isn't it very much the opposite - that, after a period of rationalism promoted as a virtue, we have entered a period of new dogmatic spiritualism?
If we interpret the claim charitably as 'STEM majors do not confer critical thinking skills to a greater degree than other majors', I don't think it's obviously unfair, with some caveats.
Solving a problem with one or more right answers is very different from critical thinking. Anecdotally I've seen people coming from a heavy STEM background struggle with nuance and ambiguity more than people coming from a well-rounded or heavy humanities background. I doubt the programs themselves are worse for critical thinking (good luck controlling for confounds), but it's not obvious they're better, either.
Solving a problem with one or more right answers is very different from critical thinking. Anecdotally I've seen people coming from a heavy STEM background struggle with nuance and ambiguity more than people coming from a well-rounded or heavy humanities background. I doubt the programs themselves are worse for critical thinking (good luck controlling for confounds), but it's not obvious they're better, either.
> I doubt the programs themselves are worse for critical thinking (good luck controlling for confounds), but it's not obvious they're better, either.
A lot of engineers I’ve encountered who have little social science or humanities experience seem to not be well equipped to critically evaluate works in those disciplines when they do encounter them. Which makes them vulnerable to crackpot ideology, or just latching onto the first thing they encounter that makes sense to them.
It works both ways though. Many a non-technical CEO has been talked into buying some worthless overpriced piece of enterprise software over the objections of their IT department.
A lot of engineers I’ve encountered who have little social science or humanities experience seem to not be well equipped to critically evaluate works in those disciplines when they do encounter them. Which makes them vulnerable to crackpot ideology, or just latching onto the first thing they encounter that makes sense to them.
It works both ways though. Many a non-technical CEO has been talked into buying some worthless overpriced piece of enterprise software over the objections of their IT department.
But your experience isn't universal or even common. Most of the engineers I've encountered can and do critically evaluate work in social science and the humanities, correctly conclude it's built on a very flimsy foundation of scientism, has little value and that this is why social science/humanities academics are so vulnerable to crackpot ideologies. Something much more strongly associated with universities than engineering organizations. Critical theory did not come from Boeing.
> Most of the engineers I've encountered can and do critically evaluate work in social science and the humanities, correctly conclude it's built on a very flimsy foundation of scientism, has little value
"correctly conclude", huh. You're basically saying "people with similar backgrounds as mine reject the theories proposed by people with very different backgrounds, and I think they're quite right".
I probably have a similar background as you do compared with a professor in social science, so I might agree with your conclusion (that a lot of theories in humanities are flimsy), but I see nothing to indicate (except your assertion) that those engineers you know actually evaluate work in social sciences and the humanities critically. Maybe they reject them because they sound so alien and unfamiliar?
If you mean they're "critical" because they don't easily buy into those crackpot theories, perhaps consider the crackpot theories in the software engineering profession -- Agile methodology? Test driven development? Best way to interview programmers? Benefits of using $fad_framework? These are actually questions that could in theory be answered using social science methodologies. Yet what we do as a profession is simply cargo cult what the big names do. IMHO a tech CEO being sold on useless "Agile" methodologies is basically the equivalent of "a non-technical CEO has been talked into buying some worthless overpriced piece of enterprise software".
"correctly conclude", huh. You're basically saying "people with similar backgrounds as mine reject the theories proposed by people with very different backgrounds, and I think they're quite right".
I probably have a similar background as you do compared with a professor in social science, so I might agree with your conclusion (that a lot of theories in humanities are flimsy), but I see nothing to indicate (except your assertion) that those engineers you know actually evaluate work in social sciences and the humanities critically. Maybe they reject them because they sound so alien and unfamiliar?
If you mean they're "critical" because they don't easily buy into those crackpot theories, perhaps consider the crackpot theories in the software engineering profession -- Agile methodology? Test driven development? Best way to interview programmers? Benefits of using $fad_framework? These are actually questions that could in theory be answered using social science methodologies. Yet what we do as a profession is simply cargo cult what the big names do. IMHO a tech CEO being sold on useless "Agile" methodologies is basically the equivalent of "a non-technical CEO has been talked into buying some worthless overpriced piece of enterprise software".
I really like the example of the non-technical CEO being talked into buying something, for the opposite reason projectazorian intended. There are in many cases hidden business dynamics driving those decisions that make them globally optimal, even though they look like local extrema to Joe Engineer. Mutual backstratching with investors and board members, for example, gets a lot of shit done. The real system is much wider than the one most engineers see, and in that wider system the non-technical CEO may just be the best engineer of all.
Or they may be an idiot. That happens, too.
Or they may be an idiot. That happens, too.
I think a lot of engineers would agree with you that the evidence for TDD, Agile and $fad_framework is weak. Those sorts of debates are a HN staple, so I wouldn't want to criticize the whole field of software engineering because of the popularity of these concepts. Indeed Agile is often criticized for being insisted on by non-developers.
Social sciences aren't criticized for being crackpot anyway, that's a strawman, it's more for the standard reasons that they produce a lot of claims but the evidential basis is weak. If social science was riven with internal debate in which these weak claims were constantly and publicly attacked, then we could compare it to the software world, but in practice we don't see that and dubious claims that come from one or two people often persist for decades before anyone decides to take a second look.
Social sciences aren't criticized for being crackpot anyway, that's a strawman, it's more for the standard reasons that they produce a lot of claims but the evidential basis is weak. If social science was riven with internal debate in which these weak claims were constantly and publicly attacked, then we could compare it to the software world, but in practice we don't see that and dubious claims that come from one or two people often persist for decades before anyone decides to take a second look.
What makes your experience more common or universal than theirs? Sounds like two sets of anecdata.
> Anecdotally I've seen people coming from a heavy STEM background struggle with nuance and ambiguity more than people coming from a well-rounded or heavy humanities background.
Engineers deal with ambiguity all the time. They do so in a logical and systematic fashion using statistics and probability. Noise is an unfortunate fact of life.
Engineers deal with ambiguity all the time. They do so in a logical and systematic fashion using statistics and probability. Noise is an unfortunate fact of life.
We're talking about undergraduate degree programs, which for STEM consist substantially of problem sets and tests that have right answers. Sometimes they're just answers, sometimes they're more like Pareto frontiers, sometimes they're programs, but in any case the bulk of the work is verifiable, which is a luxury. It's a bit (but only a bit) like the difference between solving a chess puzzle and actually playing chess. We teach people with puzzles, then send them out into the world to play real games.
They do teach statistics in undergrad engineering though.
They do, substantially in the form of problem sets and tests that have right answers. This is the point; it's not a counterpoint.
But the statistics they learn is exactly what they use to deal with noise.
People are ambiguous in ways that defy statistical reasoning.
> Anecdotally I've seen people coming from a heavy STEM background struggle with nuance and ambiguity more than people coming from a well-rounded or heavy humanities background.
It could also be that folks that dislike nuance and ambiguity self-select to go into STEM fields because the problems and answers/solutions are more clear-cut and 'concrete'.
Also:
* https://xkcd.com/451/
It could also be that folks that dislike nuance and ambiguity self-select to go into STEM fields because the problems and answers/solutions are more clear-cut and 'concrete'.
Also:
* https://xkcd.com/451/
> Solving a problem with one or more right answers is very different from critical thinking.
Its also very different from what STEM majors do. In life there are no specific right answers just ones that aren't wrong. STEM majors dont live in a world of binary right/wrong problems any more than anyone else does.
Its also very different from what STEM majors do. In life there are no specific right answers just ones that aren't wrong. STEM majors dont live in a world of binary right/wrong problems any more than anyone else does.
STE majors might not, but I am not sure I can go along with you on the M. ;)
Math is all about making proofs. There are infinite ways to prove something, and proofs are often asscesed partially based on aesethetic value.
If anything, i think it applies to the m more than the ste.
If anything, i think it applies to the m more than the ste.
Every subject claims to teach critical thinking. If I learned it anywhere, it was from my parents, both scientists. Observing my kids, the high school classes that seemed to teach the most about critical thinking were in English and social studies. Unfortunately, STEM was heavily burdened by test prep.
> STEM was heavily burdened by test prep
That's the wrong way to learn STEM, and is the fault of your high school.
Sadly, I know some highly educated STEM professionals who rigorously use the scientific method to separate truth from crap in their field. Outside their field, the scientific method goes right out the window and they rely on emotional arguments and wishful thinking.
That's the wrong way to learn STEM, and is the fault of your high school.
Sadly, I know some highly educated STEM professionals who rigorously use the scientific method to separate truth from crap in their field. Outside their field, the scientific method goes right out the window and they rely on emotional arguments and wishful thinking.
>>> That's the wrong way to learn STEM, and is the fault of your high school.
Indeed, but I would say the high school "system" as a whole, burdened by pressure from parents. And pressure from the state, which was rewarding and punishing schools for test scores and other metrics.
Middle class parents were just gaa-gaa over pushing their kids into STEM programs at top colleges, to the point where it was kind of overbearing. I might have been one of those parents, but my neighbor, a high school math and physics teacher, talked me out of it when my kids were younger.
At the same time, some of the non-STEM classes were pretty hard nosed, like the one were they took apart media and advertising.
Fortunately my kids learned the scientific method at home, same place they learned to read. But it was for the love of knowledge and learning, not to get ahead. That's also how I learned it.
Indeed, but I would say the high school "system" as a whole, burdened by pressure from parents. And pressure from the state, which was rewarding and punishing schools for test scores and other metrics.
Middle class parents were just gaa-gaa over pushing their kids into STEM programs at top colleges, to the point where it was kind of overbearing. I might have been one of those parents, but my neighbor, a high school math and physics teacher, talked me out of it when my kids were younger.
At the same time, some of the non-STEM classes were pretty hard nosed, like the one were they took apart media and advertising.
Fortunately my kids learned the scientific method at home, same place they learned to read. But it was for the love of knowledge and learning, not to get ahead. That's also how I learned it.
In a rapidly overcomplicated world where people are forced into hyper-specialization, everyone compartmentalizes.
The irony of demonstrating a lack of critical thinking ability by claiming to be the great teachers of it has always been extremely amusing to me.
Don’t correct them, it’s honestly better this way.
Don’t correct them, it’s honestly better this way.
Both the beauty and horror of non-stem courses is that they require a degree of abstract reasoning on par with computer science.
What one does with that reasoning is up to them (and it is often twisted in laughable ways, see the portion of an abstract I posted up-thread). Often times the brightest thinkers have been from 'soft' sciences like history or sociology. I think it is because of the abstraction required to reasonable think about these subjects.
What one does with that reasoning is up to them (and it is often twisted in laughable ways, see the portion of an abstract I posted up-thread). Often times the brightest thinkers have been from 'soft' sciences like history or sociology. I think it is because of the abstraction required to reasonable think about these subjects.
As a humanities graduate i can confirm there is almost no critical thinking going on in that department outside economics. I wouldn't put too much stock in anything a contemporary humanities academic says.
Maybe they're confusing critical thinking with critical theory? That's an unfortunate near collision of names if there ever was one
To make it worst, the majority of people who complain about critical theory have no idea what it is and never studied legal theory. They just react to moral panic they see around them.
I think the more accurate description is that the people pushing critical theory purposefully make it as obtuse and confusing as possible because if they say plainly that a critical theory is distinguished from a regular theory by being activist in nature seeking emancipation from some poorly defined slavery/injustice people will point out that activism by definition has a result in mind and is inherently not rational in the face of observation, as the conclusion has already been decided so it is, at best, an abuse of words to call this crap a theory. The collision of names is likely on purpose because there is no validity to the "solutions" proposed by the "theory" (although there is some validity to some of the observations of injustice, as with any good lie there is a kernel of truth)
This isn't made any better by the two semi distinct historical roots of the modern schools of this crap bringing in either marxism by way of the frankfurt school or postmodernism (or increasingly some combination of the two). In general it becomes pretty obvious that it is a self contradicting mess that has no place in society, let alone at institutions of higher learning.
This isn't made any better by the two semi distinct historical roots of the modern schools of this crap bringing in either marxism by way of the frankfurt school or postmodernism (or increasingly some combination of the two). In general it becomes pretty obvious that it is a self contradicting mess that has no place in society, let alone at institutions of higher learning.
Have you, or is this a very uncharitable gloss on what they actually were saying?
Yes, many times, from many of them. Google "stem majors lack critical thinking skills". To drive the point home, google will autocomplete it for you.
As someone who did a double degree in philosophy and computer science concurrently, I am here to tell you: STEM majors very often do lack critical thinking skills.
I have watched very smart physics majors struggle mightily (with success, in the end!) in a philosophy of science class because (a) they've implicitly absorbed an extremely naive epistemology, usually some Popperian but simplified thing, (b) they don't have a lot of practice reading and writing prose, and (c) their main coursework has focused on using existing models and methodologies to the near total exclusion of evaluating, analyzing, or comparing them.
Incidentally, that was in a class taught by someone with a graduate degree in STEM himself, who collaborates with working scientists on some of his work as a philosopher— this was an instructor who could very much speak the language of undergrad STEM students.
Critical thinking is also a matter of habit and temperament as much as it is being able to identify (un)sound reasoning itself. If you're not accustomed to seriously examining the structure and functioning of institutions, processes, and social practices, you ain't got it— even if you're extremely sharp with your logical and mathematical intuitions and skills.
That said, widespread innumeracy seems to me much more widely condoned socially than STEMlord parochialism, and is just as detrimental. Especially at an undergraduate level, I think we would benefit from rolling back our increasing specialization a bit. Everyone should have some experience with the work of mathematicians— writing proofs— and everyone should have some engagement with the history-of and philosophy-of some of the STEM disciplines, imo.
This is probably a good time to remind everyone that the empirical sciences are facing an extremely widespread methodological crisis right now¹. I point that out not to say that scientists are stupid or that the problems that add up to the replication crisis are easy to solve, but because critical thinking is exactly what scientists need to do and are doing when they work to address the replication crisis! It's not wrong to push for more emphasis on developing critical thinking skills and habits in science education.
--
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
I have watched very smart physics majors struggle mightily (with success, in the end!) in a philosophy of science class because (a) they've implicitly absorbed an extremely naive epistemology, usually some Popperian but simplified thing, (b) they don't have a lot of practice reading and writing prose, and (c) their main coursework has focused on using existing models and methodologies to the near total exclusion of evaluating, analyzing, or comparing them.
Incidentally, that was in a class taught by someone with a graduate degree in STEM himself, who collaborates with working scientists on some of his work as a philosopher— this was an instructor who could very much speak the language of undergrad STEM students.
Critical thinking is also a matter of habit and temperament as much as it is being able to identify (un)sound reasoning itself. If you're not accustomed to seriously examining the structure and functioning of institutions, processes, and social practices, you ain't got it— even if you're extremely sharp with your logical and mathematical intuitions and skills.
That said, widespread innumeracy seems to me much more widely condoned socially than STEMlord parochialism, and is just as detrimental. Especially at an undergraduate level, I think we would benefit from rolling back our increasing specialization a bit. Everyone should have some experience with the work of mathematicians— writing proofs— and everyone should have some engagement with the history-of and philosophy-of some of the STEM disciplines, imo.
This is probably a good time to remind everyone that the empirical sciences are facing an extremely widespread methodological crisis right now¹. I point that out not to say that scientists are stupid or that the problems that add up to the replication crisis are easy to solve, but because critical thinking is exactly what scientists need to do and are doing when they work to address the replication crisis! It's not wrong to push for more emphasis on developing critical thinking skills and habits in science education.
--
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
It's a good reminder, but in this context you really ought to mention that STEM is the least affected by the replication crisis, while "softer" fields like sociology and psychology are the most affected.
That's true. Alarmingly, medicine is pretty badly affected, though! Basic science seems to do better.
And as computer people, our house is not clean either, despite the formal character of computer science. Empirical results in computer science, demos and benchmarking done in the field, and more, also matter and are often non-reproducible just a few years after publication— if source code is provided with the paper at all, which it often has not been.
Science is amazing, both for its processes and achievements. But there's lots of important work being done and yet-to-be-done on science itself. Critical thinking is essential to that work, and it goes beyond formal reasoning or puzzle-solving in the small.
And as computer people, our house is not clean either, despite the formal character of computer science. Empirical results in computer science, demos and benchmarking done in the field, and more, also matter and are often non-reproducible just a few years after publication— if source code is provided with the paper at all, which it often has not been.
Science is amazing, both for its processes and achievements. But there's lots of important work being done and yet-to-be-done on science itself. Critical thinking is essential to that work, and it goes beyond formal reasoning or puzzle-solving in the small.
Google will autocomplete it for me but then pretty much all the results I see are STEM proponents refuting this supposedly common criticism.
Completions for "stem majors lack cr": crossword, crossword clue, critical thinking skills, creative
Completions for "humanity majors lack cr": crossword, crossword clue
No humanity majors refuting the claim that they lack critical thinking skills, maybe because that is never claimed in the first place?
Completions for "humanity majors lack cr": crossword, crossword clue
No humanity majors refuting the claim that they lack critical thinking skills, maybe because that is never claimed in the first place?
A bit of a logical leap in my mind to infer from that that there a bunch of of people saying STEM majors "lack critical thinking skills."
Then who are said STEM majors refuting?
Perhaps they read a defense of liberal arts majors as having certain benefits including teaching critical thinking skills and decided to take this as an affront? I don’t know. Lots of groups have strange persecution complexes.
Straw men?
> To drive the point home, google will autocomplete it for you.
I'm not sure if the irony here was intended or not. But it is poignant.
I'm not sure if the irony here was intended or not. But it is poignant.
This is where The Algorithms have a fun hidden place in our daily lives. I tried a number of variations of that phrase and couldn't get Google to autocomplete it for me without getting to "stem majors lack crit". Before that it was suggesting math/calculus and chemistry skills without any mention of critical thinking.
If anything, it's the exact opposite, although either proposition seems dubious at best.
Critical thinking skills are conferred to children in a much earlier age than the decision whether to pursue humanities/STEM or even go to college at all.
I've certainly met people for whom having a PhD would be like putting lipstick on a pig.
Critical thinking skills are conferred to children in a much earlier age than the decision whether to pursue humanities/STEM or even go to college at all.
I've certainly met people for whom having a PhD would be like putting lipstick on a pig.
Maybe that's true, but seems reasonable to retort that humanities majors do not confer empirical investigation skills.
But… why would they answer B or C when they were just told the right answer was A? That doesn’t make any sense. They don’t need to ‘figure’ anything when they’ve been told that there are zero. That’s not even a puzzle, that’s just series of statements.
That’d be like if you told me a tree was 10 feet tall, then asked me how tall it was and I said “10 feet 1 inch” because I figured it had grown at least an inch in the interim. Why figure when you should already know?
That’d be like if you told me a tree was 10 feet tall, then asked me how tall it was and I said “10 feet 1 inch” because I figured it had grown at least an inch in the interim. Why figure when you should already know?
> But… why would they answer B or C when they were just told the right answer was A?
Because there's a decent chance the initial statement isn't true.
[EDIT] To clarify, it's the difference between a seasoned test-taker understanding implicitly that they're looking at a (very simple) logic puzzle, not a question about reality, and someone taking the question at face-value (and assuming the first statement's some kind of trick, or simply an error). In a sense, answering it "correctly" demands that you act dumber.
[EDIT 2] I just checked, out of curiosity, and in fact the person who answers it "wrong" is closer to correct than the person who answers it "right", in actual reality. In a not-unreasonable sense, the "moron" who gets this wrong is more-correct than the trained monkey who answers zero. There's a zoo, evidently within the borders of Munich, and they do have elephants.
Because there's a decent chance the initial statement isn't true.
[EDIT] To clarify, it's the difference between a seasoned test-taker understanding implicitly that they're looking at a (very simple) logic puzzle, not a question about reality, and someone taking the question at face-value (and assuming the first statement's some kind of trick, or simply an error). In a sense, answering it "correctly" demands that you act dumber.
[EDIT 2] I just checked, out of curiosity, and in fact the person who answers it "wrong" is closer to correct than the person who answers it "right", in actual reality. In a not-unreasonable sense, the "moron" who gets this wrong is more-correct than the trained monkey who answers zero. There's a zoo, evidently within the borders of Munich, and they do have elephants.
I feel like this is the Men in Black Will Smith testing montage.
To augment your points -
This example makes me recall a Ted Talk by James Flynn (Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents'). There's a very relevant case he discusses, which I'll copy a snippet of the transcript:
[quote]
Now let me give you a sample of some of his interviews. He talked to the head man of a person in rural Russia. They'd only had, as people had in 1900, about four years of schooling. And he asked that particular person, what do crows and fish have in common? And the fellow said, "Absolutely nothing. You know, I can eat a fish. I can't eat a crow. A crow can peck at a fish. A fish can't do anything to a crow." And Luria said, "But aren't they both animals?" And he said, "Of course not. One's a fish. The other is a bird." And he was interested, effectively, in what he could do with those concrete objects.
And then Luria went to another person, and he said to them, "There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is a city in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?" And the fellow said, "Well, if it's large enough, there ought to be camels there." And Luria said, "But what do my words imply?" And he said, "Well, maybe it's a small village, and there's no room for camels." In other words, he was unwilling to treat this as anything but a concrete problem, and he was used to camels being in villages, and he was quite unable to use the hypothetical, to ask himself what if there were no camels in Germany.
A third interview was conducted with someone about the North Pole. And Luria said, "At the North Pole, there is always snow. Wherever there is always snow, the bears are white. What color are the bears at the North Pole?" And the response was, "Such a thing is to be settled by testimony. If a wise person came from the North Pole and told me the bears were white, I might believe him, but every bear that I have seen is a brown bear." Now you see again, this person has rejected going beyond the concrete world and analyzing it through everyday experience, and it was important to that person what color bears were -- that is, they had to hunt bears. They weren't willing to engage in this. One of them said to Luria, "How can we solve things that aren't real problems? None of these problems are real. How can we address them?" Now, these three categories -- classification, using logic on abstractions, taking the hypothetical seriously -- how much difference do they make in the real world beyond the testing room? And let me give you a few illustrations.
[/quote]
---
We're educated to think that "abstract thinking" is a "good thing". But it doesn't really have to be the case. Of course I understand that for some complex real problems, the solution lies in finding and exploiting abstract connections, but I'd argue that a lot of modern society's problems lie in leaky or flawed abstractions that do more harm than good, but we still believe in those abstractions over real things. For example, we tend to cling onto "pretty" theories even when contradicted by factual data. We fight imaginary enemies all the time. We classify things into abstractions and apply generalizations, forgetting the nuances that differentiate them in the first place.
The polar bear example was particularly striking to me, because for somebody who hasn't seen a polar bear before, it probably sounds like a trick question testing whether you're gullible enough to believe there are pink little men on Mars. Yet with modern "seasoned test-takers" they'd just take whatever premise given to them without asking questions -- probably the exact opposite of what you'd actually want from a person that knows how to think critically.
This example makes me recall a Ted Talk by James Flynn (Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents'). There's a very relevant case he discusses, which I'll copy a snippet of the transcript:
[quote]
Now let me give you a sample of some of his interviews. He talked to the head man of a person in rural Russia. They'd only had, as people had in 1900, about four years of schooling. And he asked that particular person, what do crows and fish have in common? And the fellow said, "Absolutely nothing. You know, I can eat a fish. I can't eat a crow. A crow can peck at a fish. A fish can't do anything to a crow." And Luria said, "But aren't they both animals?" And he said, "Of course not. One's a fish. The other is a bird." And he was interested, effectively, in what he could do with those concrete objects.
And then Luria went to another person, and he said to them, "There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is a city in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?" And the fellow said, "Well, if it's large enough, there ought to be camels there." And Luria said, "But what do my words imply?" And he said, "Well, maybe it's a small village, and there's no room for camels." In other words, he was unwilling to treat this as anything but a concrete problem, and he was used to camels being in villages, and he was quite unable to use the hypothetical, to ask himself what if there were no camels in Germany.
A third interview was conducted with someone about the North Pole. And Luria said, "At the North Pole, there is always snow. Wherever there is always snow, the bears are white. What color are the bears at the North Pole?" And the response was, "Such a thing is to be settled by testimony. If a wise person came from the North Pole and told me the bears were white, I might believe him, but every bear that I have seen is a brown bear." Now you see again, this person has rejected going beyond the concrete world and analyzing it through everyday experience, and it was important to that person what color bears were -- that is, they had to hunt bears. They weren't willing to engage in this. One of them said to Luria, "How can we solve things that aren't real problems? None of these problems are real. How can we address them?" Now, these three categories -- classification, using logic on abstractions, taking the hypothetical seriously -- how much difference do they make in the real world beyond the testing room? And let me give you a few illustrations.
[/quote]
---
We're educated to think that "abstract thinking" is a "good thing". But it doesn't really have to be the case. Of course I understand that for some complex real problems, the solution lies in finding and exploiting abstract connections, but I'd argue that a lot of modern society's problems lie in leaky or flawed abstractions that do more harm than good, but we still believe in those abstractions over real things. For example, we tend to cling onto "pretty" theories even when contradicted by factual data. We fight imaginary enemies all the time. We classify things into abstractions and apply generalizations, forgetting the nuances that differentiate them in the first place.
The polar bear example was particularly striking to me, because for somebody who hasn't seen a polar bear before, it probably sounds like a trick question testing whether you're gullible enough to believe there are pink little men on Mars. Yet with modern "seasoned test-takers" they'd just take whatever premise given to them without asking questions -- probably the exact opposite of what you'd actually want from a person that knows how to think critically.
"there are no elephants in Germany" can mean "there are literally zero elephants in Germany" or it can mean "elephants are not endemic to Germany". Only the first excludes answers b and c. The latter does not. Language is often imprecise =)
Maybe they don't believe there are no elephants in Germany.
If someone came up to you on the street and said "You are an elephant. Are you an elephant?" you wouldn't say "yes".
If someone came up to you on the street and said "You are an elephant. Are you an elephant?" you wouldn't say "yes".
Humanities offers 'genre' as a solution to this problem. A test, we would say, might be more expected to seek formal proof based on self-contained assertions. As such, it is different to a conversation in the street.
This leaves the test author with a challenge of establishing genre as test rules-of-engagement.
This leaves the test author with a challenge of establishing genre as test rules-of-engagement.
As an AI language model, I cannot be an elephant sinc I don’t have a physical body or consciousness.
Well, it was worth a try.
Well, it was worth a try.
Well...I could be the elephant in the room...
Because “are” can mean several things. One could assume that it means “in the wild” (ignoring things like zoos).
Compare these to reading comprehension tests on the SAT. Many of those questions ask “why did the author write x?” And all answers are valid insights to the whole piece, but only one is derived from X. It has to be learned to read questions literally imo. It’s not intuitive that questions are as dumb as they are. You must explicitly silence intuition, outside knowledge, social norms towards more impressive seeming insights, awareness of the bigger idea, etc.
Sounds like the test markers should take a note from the Hacker News guidelines!
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Here is a bulleted GPT summary of the "Practical Validity" section of the "g factor" Wikipedia article (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) ):
-General intelligence (g) is the best predictor of job performance.
-The predictive validity of g is higher than work experience.
-G facilitates the acquisition of job-related knowledge, resulting in better job performance.
-G provides predictive validity for all jobs, regardless of complexity level.
-Specific aptitude tests tailored for each job do not add predictive validity over general intelligence tests.
-These findings could impact employee selection and training practices in various industries.
-General intelligence (g) is the best predictor of job performance.
-The predictive validity of g is higher than work experience.
-G facilitates the acquisition of job-related knowledge, resulting in better job performance.
-G provides predictive validity for all jobs, regardless of complexity level.
-Specific aptitude tests tailored for each job do not add predictive validity over general intelligence tests.
-These findings could impact employee selection and training practices in various industries.
What if what we’re really measuring is a person’s ability to play along with poorly explained rules?
"Poorly explained" probably, but culturally indoctrinated among middle-upper class city dwellers to the detriment of rural, under-educated classes.
This is interesting but do you have a source for this, is this authoritatively known? Or is it just an theory you came up with? I can't quite tell which way you're trying to present this.
Call me dishonest then but that seems like failing to actually apply logic.
Is it though? It’s pretty easy to read the first line as something like “Elephants are not native to Germany” and then assume the Munich question is a trick question. In fact the person who answers 1 or 2 because of the possibility of a zoo is actually using smarter logic than someone who takes it at face value.
But it doesn't say "elephants are not native to Germany." It says "there are no elephants in Germany." I don't see what's so much "smarter."
Ok… but you seem to be completely missing the fact that there literally ARE actually elephants in Germany. In zoos. So if you know this fact a priori, and the test says the statement “there are no elephants in Germany. How many elephants are in Germany?” - are you just blindly still going to take it at face value and answer 0 (which is incorrect in the real world) or do you think maybe the test is trying to trick you or is simply getting the base facts or wording wrong? You’d only answer 0 if you knew this was very specifically a logic puzzle (which is evident to us now, but not so evident to someone who has never seen a logic test before).
I’m the context of a conversation or something sure I might challenge the premise directly. If someone is expecting me to write a number on a sheet of paper it seems obvious I’m not being invited to challenge the premise and I’m writing 0.
All of this deduction you just did requires prior knowledge of the existence of logic tests and that written tests work like that, which is purely modern cultural knowledge. No one is born knowing that a “written test” is a thing. There was a time period in history where this was NOT obvious, even though it is obvious to anyone now.
In 1904 people had never seen a math problem?
You assume the illiterate or under-educated classes to have seen a math problem? Or have the incentive to play this pointless "game" called an IQ test? (unless they're paid a dollar for every "correct" answer they give)
Are you making a claim about the past or today? If the former, public education had been established for close to a century already, so yes, I do have the expectation that levels of exposure would not be that much worse than today. If the latter then it doesn’t exactly explain why people have gotten better at it over time.
> I do have the expectation that levels of exposure would not be that much worse than today
I would expect that in 2023 everyone would know how to search for "literacy rate in 1900" in Google (or Bing if you will) instead of asserting your flawed expectations and wasting everyone's time.
I would expect that in 2023 everyone would know how to search for "literacy rate in 1900" in Google (or Bing if you will) instead of asserting your flawed expectations and wasting everyone's time.
There is still a specific “logic puzzle” mindset you need to have.
Out of context, a sentence like “there aren’t penguins in Texas”, could be synonymous to “penguins aren’t native to Texas”, at least to my ear.
It takes some familiarity with these kinds of questions to know that you’re meant to interpret these premises as axiomatically true and then derive a conclusion purely from the premises.
Out of context, a sentence like “there aren’t penguins in Texas”, could be synonymous to “penguins aren’t native to Texas”, at least to my ear.
It takes some familiarity with these kinds of questions to know that you’re meant to interpret these premises as axiomatically true and then derive a conclusion purely from the premises.
If taking statements at face value is a "logic puzzle mindset" then I guess I have one. I don't know what to tell you. I find the other way perverse.
That only makes sense if you assume the purpose of the test is to correctly apply logic rather than guess the actual number of Elephants in Germany. Someone who's not familiar with standardized testing may assume the latter is more important.
The answer to that question is already given.
And yet, you yourself likely don't believe that, right? You know with high likelihood that elephants exist somewhere in Germany. Yet you are still willing to repeat what you know is probably a lie - there are 0 elephants in Munich.
Because, of course, you know you're taking a test and they expect on tests that the problem statement is symbolic, just there to pose a logic puzzle.
That's the idea we're talking about here.
For your convenience: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elephants+in+germany&t=h_&iax=imag...
Because, of course, you know you're taking a test and they expect on tests that the problem statement is symbolic, just there to pose a logic puzzle.
That's the idea we're talking about here.
For your convenience: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elephants+in+germany&t=h_&iax=imag...
In the math problems they give to children there’s probably no Juanita with five apples either but children seem to be able to work with that premise.
That's another good example. Until you tell them the test isn't about real people, they can easily construct narratives where the answer is different than the 'right' one. Maybe they know a Juanita with an apple tree, that will let you pick your own. Maybe they always cut up apples at home so everybody gets half an apple, and the rest are put in the fridge for later. And so on.
Thanks for illustrating the problem so neatly!
Thanks for illustrating the problem so neatly!
So they don't understand that logic gets rid of the "reality thing". OK. A lot of people don't get it.
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.
This is a terrible analogy, IQ tests measure something real and objective called the g factor : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)
Also, intelligence tests are but a tiny part of psychology, I would hardly call it a "whole field".
Also, intelligence tests are but a tiny part of psychology, I would hardly call it a "whole field".
> 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."
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."
The g factor is predictive of performance in jobs and income though. Even in your own example, yes we could make a test that involves running and throwing, and yes it would be predictive of performance in various sports. One of the tests for aerobic capacity is called VO2max. It is a number with units mL/g/min. Like IQ, this is not the only factor but it does have predictive power.
The result of a test can be predictive of job performance simply because the result of /any/ test would be predictive of it, because it shows you're willing and able to take and complete tests. This does not mean the score on a specific test is "real".
Minimal example: if you gave a test to a living person and a corpse, only one of them would finish it, and that one would also have a higher income.
Also note the "highest intelligence" jobs don't always have the highest income, like academia, but rather involve taking lots of tests as a prerequisite.
Minimal example: if you gave a test to a living person and a corpse, only one of them would finish it, and that one would also have a higher income.
Also note the "highest intelligence" jobs don't always have the highest income, like academia, but rather involve taking lots of tests as a prerequisite.
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?
The amount of strength to draw an archery bow, and steady ones body, would be closely related to strength and VO2Max - with O2 being required for both muscle activity and holding ones breath. And curling is a highly phsyical sport, and for sweepers () its very similar to a full body sprint for each hurl.
There are plenty of metrics you can use to quantify someones atheletic capability, not least of which is your bodies ability to hold and transport oxygen.
() I don't know the technical term, but the point stands.
There are plenty of metrics you can use to quantify someones atheletic capability, not least of which is your bodies ability to hold and transport oxygen.
() I don't know the technical term, but the point stands.
This study found a correlation between VO2max and archery performance of 0.68 https://aassjournal.com/browse.php?a_id=897&slc_lang=en&sid=...
As noted in the study, the largest influence they tested for archery performance was height. I'd bet a large sum of money that height is also a strong positive influence on many sports (eg basketball), similar to how G is an influence on many cognitive 'sports' like occupations. We can easily measure height and most would have no trouble believing that (largely genetic) factor greatly influences athletic performance. Why is IQ so different?
As noted in the study, the largest influence they tested for archery performance was height. I'd bet a large sum of money that height is also a strong positive influence on many sports (eg basketball), similar to how G is an influence on many cognitive 'sports' like occupations. We can easily measure height and most would have no trouble believing that (largely genetic) factor greatly influences athletic performance. Why is IQ so different?
Wonder if it's likewise applicable to snooker.
Well i listed 2 activities, you could certainly add more to the test. Just as we add many questions to an IQ test.
Even if the test doesn't predict performance in every single sport, that doesn't mean it has zero predictive power in all sports.
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Similarly, I'm not saying IQ is destiny or even the largest factor in any given endeavour, its not. But its equally wrong to say its not a factor at all. It is somewhere in the middle.
Like most metrics, it doesn't capture the entirety of the squishy concept as you say, but it does capture something about it.
I think we understand this in many other areas. Look at PE ratio or revenue growth for a stock, look at goals on target for a football striker, VO2max or running economy for a runner, mileage for a car. IQ is understandably more controversial but the concept is the same.
Even if the test doesn't predict performance in every single sport, that doesn't mean it has zero predictive power in all sports.
---
Similarly, I'm not saying IQ is destiny or even the largest factor in any given endeavour, its not. But its equally wrong to say its not a factor at all. It is somewhere in the middle.
Like most metrics, it doesn't capture the entirety of the squishy concept as you say, but it does capture something about it.
I think we understand this in many other areas. Look at PE ratio or revenue growth for a stock, look at goals on target for a football striker, VO2max or running economy for a runner, mileage for a car. IQ is understandably more controversial but the concept is the same.
Didn't take much googling:
https://aassjournal.com/browse.php?a_id=897&slc_lang=en&sid=...
I didn't see any specific research related to curling, but it is definitely a fairly high peak intensity activity that demands a high level of fitness:
https://curlnoca.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Curling-Heart...
https://aassjournal.com/browse.php?a_id=897&slc_lang=en&sid=...
I didn't see any specific research related to curling, but it is definitely a fairly high peak intensity activity that demands a high level of fitness:
https://curlnoca.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Curling-Heart...
Is g factor more predictive of income than the financial class of the family you were born into?
Why not just associate intelligence with how wealthy your parents are and call it done?
Why not just associate intelligence with how wealthy your parents are and call it done?
> Is g factor more predictive of income than the financial class of the family you were born into?
No, but it predicts variation that is not explained by family wealth.
> Why not just associate intelligence with how wealthy your parents are and call it done?
Because they are separate factors with distinct contributions.
No, but it predicts variation that is not explained by family wealth.
> Why not just associate intelligence with how wealthy your parents are and call it done?
Because they are separate factors with distinct contributions.
that something is predictive does not mean it measures something else. Nobody will argue with you that IQ tests are predictive of some things, but it still doesn't measure intelligence. It measures something, whatever that something is, that has some predictive power on some other things
Respectfully, you chose the wrong hill to die on. Psychology has many squishy parts, but psychometry is basically the closest thing it has to a hard science.
The other comment adresses your NQ argument, but here's something I don't understand: "There's a very uncomfortable result about IQ tests that a generation of psychologists have tried to explain away"
This reeks of anti-intellectualism by the way ("can't trust the experts!"), but I am curious to know what you're referring to. It can't be the validity or reliability of IQ tests, surely? Both have been very solidly established for a long time.
The other comment adresses your NQ argument, but here's something I don't understand: "There's a very uncomfortable result about IQ tests that a generation of psychologists have tried to explain away"
This reeks of anti-intellectualism by the way ("can't trust the experts!"), but I am curious to know what you're referring to. It can't be the validity or reliability of IQ tests, surely? Both have been very solidly established for a long time.
> 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.
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.
HBD is so fringe I had a hard time googling it. Just because a subset of a subfield is politically motivated and hateful does not invalidate the whole field. That intelligence testing can be misrepresented to defend racism is an argument against humans, not against the science.
Meanwhile, unbiased research has shown for a long time that there is no significant variations in IQ between races when considering socioeconomic factors. We've determined this with, guess what, psychometry, and it is the overwhelming consensus in psychology. If this was your main gripe with it, rest assured that the field you so underestimate is entirely dismissive of it.
It seems to me you're just looking for ways to dismiss decades of research based on misinformation perpetuated, overwhelmingly, by non-experts. Congratulations, you are in this group.
Meanwhile, unbiased research has shown for a long time that there is no significant variations in IQ between races when considering socioeconomic factors. We've determined this with, guess what, psychometry, and it is the overwhelming consensus in psychology. If this was your main gripe with it, rest assured that the field you so underestimate is entirely dismissive of it.
It seems to me you're just looking for ways to dismiss decades of research based on misinformation perpetuated, overwhelmingly, by non-experts. Congratulations, you are in this group.
> 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...
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...
Brilliant!
Thoughts on this comment about the supposed hidebound nature of the field of psychometrics?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798887
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798887
The problem is there are no sources and many claims. I can barely tell what point, if any, they're trying to make.
They don't seem to know about the g factor, which I've linked to many times today. The existence of it means one thing: smart is smart. If you're above average at "mental labor", you're also above average at learning the tools you can leverage to make your labor better faster. This would explain why the calculator didn't shatter the economic predictiveness of the g factor, and neither did the computer, and neither will ChatGPT until it becomes a true AGI. Until mental labor stops being a thing, g factor will always be a strong (though not absolute) predictor of economic success, and so will IQ tests, since they measure it.
I don't see how the comment is related to the article however. The g factor going down in general wouldn't change this correlation; it's still better to be smarter no matter what the average is.
They don't seem to know about the g factor, which I've linked to many times today. The existence of it means one thing: smart is smart. If you're above average at "mental labor", you're also above average at learning the tools you can leverage to make your labor better faster. This would explain why the calculator didn't shatter the economic predictiveness of the g factor, and neither did the computer, and neither will ChatGPT until it becomes a true AGI. Until mental labor stops being a thing, g factor will always be a strong (though not absolute) predictor of economic success, and so will IQ tests, since they measure it.
I don't see how the comment is related to the article however. The g factor going down in general wouldn't change this correlation; it's still better to be smarter no matter what the average is.
> The g factor going down in general wouldn't change this correlation; it's still better to be smarter no matter what the average is.
Women are famously known to not be more attracted to smarter men (by which I mean, men who the women consider more intelligent, and who are emphasizing intelligence over other things.) They're probably right; if it was evolutionarily fit, we'd already have it. But we have enough trouble with childbirth as is, and populations that are considered smarter (by people who believe IQ tests are validly constructed and administered) also often have more genetic diseases.
People who actually understand statistics like Taleb don't believe that IQ is a valid measurement or that it makes you a better person, of course, because "single number go up means better" is not how real life works.
Women are famously known to not be more attracted to smarter men (by which I mean, men who the women consider more intelligent, and who are emphasizing intelligence over other things.) They're probably right; if it was evolutionarily fit, we'd already have it. But we have enough trouble with childbirth as is, and populations that are considered smarter (by people who believe IQ tests are validly constructed and administered) also often have more genetic diseases.
People who actually understand statistics like Taleb don't believe that IQ is a valid measurement or that it makes you a better person, of course, because "single number go up means better" is not how real life works.
I believe based on that account's other responses in that thread they are highly dismissive of g ("Yes, psychometrics researchers believe in psychometrics.")
> The existence of it means one thing: smart is smart. If you're above average at "mental labor", you're also above average at learning the tools you can leverage to make your labor better faster.
But isn't this highly reductive? The very responses in this thread attempt to explain the improvement in spatial reasoning can be attributed to video games, at least three responses independently advance that hypothesis. If societal responses to the tests change over time, doesn't that mean the tests themselves are not objective across all time periods?
Funnily enough, that comment suggests that someone who grinded thousands of hours of Tetris would have higher spatial reasoning than a novice, and that's the precise category that the study in the OP reports has improved.
> Until mental labor stops being a thing
But the point is, mental labor changes over time. The measure of g measured by arithmetic tests might go down if society deemphasizes arithmetic because of technological changes. What exactly goes into g, and are those measures the only possible ways of quantifying intelligence?
> I can barely tell what point, if any, they're trying to make.
The comment is highly critical of modern psychometrics, because they argue that the tests in those field have not caught up with societal shifts that impact the results on those tests, using "working memory" as an example. Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia article on g you linked above mentions the following:
"One theory holds that g is identical or nearly identical to working memory capacity. Among other evidence for this view, some studies have found factors representing g and working memory to be perfectly correlated. However, in a meta-analysis the correlation was found to be considerably lower."
So sounds like experts disagree on the specifics.
Also, their thesis is fairly straightforward:
>> The more general critique is that "intelligence research" has ossified around Cargo Cult psychometrics. At one point, "orally administered arithmetic word problems" were a fantastic proxy for economically useful mental faculties. That is no longer true. As the set of useful capacities change, so too should psychometric evaluations. Both because treatment effects are going to make cross-generational comparisons worse than useless, and also because the thing being measured has become irrelevant.
> it's still better to be smarter no matter what the average is.
Certainly, but the devil's in the details.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35514949
> The existence of it means one thing: smart is smart. If you're above average at "mental labor", you're also above average at learning the tools you can leverage to make your labor better faster.
But isn't this highly reductive? The very responses in this thread attempt to explain the improvement in spatial reasoning can be attributed to video games, at least three responses independently advance that hypothesis. If societal responses to the tests change over time, doesn't that mean the tests themselves are not objective across all time periods?
Funnily enough, that comment suggests that someone who grinded thousands of hours of Tetris would have higher spatial reasoning than a novice, and that's the precise category that the study in the OP reports has improved.
> Until mental labor stops being a thing
But the point is, mental labor changes over time. The measure of g measured by arithmetic tests might go down if society deemphasizes arithmetic because of technological changes. What exactly goes into g, and are those measures the only possible ways of quantifying intelligence?
> I can barely tell what point, if any, they're trying to make.
The comment is highly critical of modern psychometrics, because they argue that the tests in those field have not caught up with societal shifts that impact the results on those tests, using "working memory" as an example. Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia article on g you linked above mentions the following:
"One theory holds that g is identical or nearly identical to working memory capacity. Among other evidence for this view, some studies have found factors representing g and working memory to be perfectly correlated. However, in a meta-analysis the correlation was found to be considerably lower."
So sounds like experts disagree on the specifics.
Also, their thesis is fairly straightforward:
>> The more general critique is that "intelligence research" has ossified around Cargo Cult psychometrics. At one point, "orally administered arithmetic word problems" were a fantastic proxy for economically useful mental faculties. That is no longer true. As the set of useful capacities change, so too should psychometric evaluations. Both because treatment effects are going to make cross-generational comparisons worse than useless, and also because the thing being measured has become irrelevant.
> it's still better to be smarter no matter what the average is.
Certainly, but the devil's in the details.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35514949
No, actually it is thoroughly debunked as a measure of anything useful (except scores below ~80) and its significance as a predictor is miniscule. I recommend you read this: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
That article is largely a pseudoscientific swindle, and it has repeatedly been rebutted, please see https://archive.ph/PCvgk.
Overall I'd recommend not taking a single article and using it as something that can refute a whole science.
Overall I'd recommend not taking a single article and using it as something that can refute a whole science.
How about a whole book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
How about a video essay which summarizes other critiques:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
What if you look at the numerous false predictions of IQ research:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
Or a peer reviewed summary which got published in an academic journal with over a 100 citations:
http://www.swisswuff.ch/files/richardson2002whatiqteststest.... (PDF)
Overall I’d recommend regularly reviewing the literature to assess where the scientific consensus is around a theory is. To date, the literature does not support any consensus around the theory of general intelligence nor the efficacy of IQ as a theory for intelligence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
How about a video essay which summarizes other critiques:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
What if you look at the numerous false predictions of IQ research:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
Or a peer reviewed summary which got published in an academic journal with over a 100 citations:
http://www.swisswuff.ch/files/richardson2002whatiqteststest.... (PDF)
Overall I’d recommend regularly reviewing the literature to assess where the scientific consensus is around a theory is. To date, the literature does not support any consensus around the theory of general intelligence nor the efficacy of IQ as a theory for intelligence.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
Doesn't this author have a terrible reputation? And he's known for standing by disproven theories? I'm surprised you didn't find a better example.
> How about a video essay which summarizes other critiques:
Sorry, I haven't watched these 2 hours and 40 minutes, can I read the summary somewhere? Hopefully it's better than Nassim's article.
> Or a peer reviewed summary which got published in an academic journal with over a 100 citations
What is a peer reviewed summary? Is it like a meta-analysis? But honest questions: how much weight do you think this has? Are the citations supporting it or criticising it?
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
Looks like an example of bad science that was caught and exposed? Why do you think this reflects badly on the rest of the research?
> To date, the literature does not support any consensus around the theory of general intelligence nor the efficacy of IQ as a theory for intelligence.
You are asking for consensus. Do you mean an ultra majority? There's no consensus even on whether climate change is real, only 97% of scientist think so. Could you give percentages of who supports what on the science of IQ.
Doesn't this author have a terrible reputation? And he's known for standing by disproven theories? I'm surprised you didn't find a better example.
> How about a video essay which summarizes other critiques:
Sorry, I haven't watched these 2 hours and 40 minutes, can I read the summary somewhere? Hopefully it's better than Nassim's article.
> Or a peer reviewed summary which got published in an academic journal with over a 100 citations
What is a peer reviewed summary? Is it like a meta-analysis? But honest questions: how much weight do you think this has? Are the citations supporting it or criticising it?
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
Looks like an example of bad science that was caught and exposed? Why do you think this reflects badly on the rest of the research?
> To date, the literature does not support any consensus around the theory of general intelligence nor the efficacy of IQ as a theory for intelligence.
You are asking for consensus. Do you mean an ultra majority? There's no consensus even on whether climate change is real, only 97% of scientist think so. Could you give percentages of who supports what on the science of IQ.
Is there any source of scrutiny you’d accept as valid criticism?
Seriously though, the burden of proof shouldn’t be on the anti-IQ crowd. IQ is a new construct, that proponents have been trying to justify for over half a century. At some point, repeated failures to convince a broader field of its utility should be evidence enough that it might not be worth investigating. Yes, sometimes there are worthy theories which receive unfair treatment, like e.g. continental drift, however even Wegener’s theory took less than 50 years to be accepted, and I bet IQ research has received orders of magnitude more funding and attention than Wegener ever did.
To date, the only evidence for IQ and the g-factor comes from the tests them selves, the construct is not used in any models outside of the field of psychometrics (while psychometrics them selves is becoming more and more fringe as a science). It’s use has historically been focused around racist conjectures and eugenics.
Even though I shouldn’t I’m still gonna give one more shot at finding evidence of the increasing irrelevance of IQ in modern science. I searched for “IQ cognitive psychology” on google scholar. While I did find some attempts of researchers trying to merge psychometrics and Cognitive Psychology, however when Dennis et.al (2009) actually went ahead and looked how useful IQ was in a common neurodevelopmental model, they found it was simply in the way:
> Using IQ as a matching variable or covariate has produced overcorrected, anomalous, and counterintuitive findings about neurocognitive function.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-inter...
In my search results I also found another paper, which I couldn’t access, dating all the way to 1988, which seems to be making the same case as I that IQ is on its way to the history books: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0168863880840087...
Seriously though, the burden of proof shouldn’t be on the anti-IQ crowd. IQ is a new construct, that proponents have been trying to justify for over half a century. At some point, repeated failures to convince a broader field of its utility should be evidence enough that it might not be worth investigating. Yes, sometimes there are worthy theories which receive unfair treatment, like e.g. continental drift, however even Wegener’s theory took less than 50 years to be accepted, and I bet IQ research has received orders of magnitude more funding and attention than Wegener ever did.
To date, the only evidence for IQ and the g-factor comes from the tests them selves, the construct is not used in any models outside of the field of psychometrics (while psychometrics them selves is becoming more and more fringe as a science). It’s use has historically been focused around racist conjectures and eugenics.
Even though I shouldn’t I’m still gonna give one more shot at finding evidence of the increasing irrelevance of IQ in modern science. I searched for “IQ cognitive psychology” on google scholar. While I did find some attempts of researchers trying to merge psychometrics and Cognitive Psychology, however when Dennis et.al (2009) actually went ahead and looked how useful IQ was in a common neurodevelopmental model, they found it was simply in the way:
> Using IQ as a matching variable or covariate has produced overcorrected, anomalous, and counterintuitive findings about neurocognitive function.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-inter...
In my search results I also found another paper, which I couldn’t access, dating all the way to 1988, which seems to be making the same case as I that IQ is on its way to the history books: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0168863880840087...
The most important point of Taleb's is right near the top, in particular anything with graphs. This article pretty much just ignores that entire section (especially the quiz part is a very nice illustration for the statistically challenged). It doesn't even address the point that the outcome graph with the lower tail blocked is basically an entirely random distribution.
Then it happily continues to use the graphs and averaged results, that Taleb showed contain almost no signal, as if nothing happened.
This is not a serious rebuttal.
Then it happily continues to use the graphs and averaged results, that Taleb showed contain almost no signal, as if nothing happened.
This is not a serious rebuttal.
> 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
Admittedly I haven't really studied statistics, but can't you do something like measure those abilities for a population, do a PCA, and define athleticism to be the first principal component?
Admittedly I haven't really studied statistics, but can't you do something like measure those abilities for a population, do a PCA, and define athleticism to be the first principal component?
And then you find out that the first component is height x age. :)
PCA/CCA almost never tells you what the components are. ICA is a bit better at that but still not great.
PCA/CCA almost never tells you what the components are. ICA is a bit better at that but still not great.
Thankfully I believe this is changing. Stephen Jay Gould is among the top cited authors within psychology despite not being a psychologist. The psychologists Gould criticized are slowly dying of (e.g. Arthur Jensen) or being fired in disgrace (e.g. Richard Lynn). A new generation of psychologist aren’t picking up their theories, and a new generation of policy makers are distancing them self from IQ science (e.g. the SAT was renamed for this purpose).
I think psychologists have spent enough ink on this non-sense and correctly moved on. It is now up to historians to talk about how damaging this theory truly was, and what the motivation was of policy makers that believed in this pseudo-science. Gould did a terrific job doing exactly that, and a more recent work of Angela Saini Superior: The Return of Race Science is another powerful account of this history, although she is not as optimistic about the state of affairs as I am.
I think psychologists have spent enough ink on this non-sense and correctly moved on. It is now up to historians to talk about how damaging this theory truly was, and what the motivation was of policy makers that believed in this pseudo-science. Gould did a terrific job doing exactly that, and a more recent work of Angela Saini Superior: The Return of Race Science is another powerful account of this history, although she is not as optimistic about the state of affairs as I am.
IQ tests produce a number, because they're tests and all tests produce a number. This does not mean the number means anything or existed before the test did. (Especially now that we have AIs that can take tests, do they contain a "g factor"?)
A lot of scientific research is bad and you shouldn't trust it when it comes from a pre-credibility revolution field!
A lot of scientific research is bad and you shouldn't trust it when it comes from a pre-credibility revolution field!
Then you would have a branch of computer science “Artificial Niceness”…
Can someone actually explain how IQ tests work? By work, I mean how are the tests engineered, and the results computed.
Long time ago someone explained to me that the engineering of IQ tests was actually drafted from a very large pool of (regularly updated) questions, where statistical significance was extracted to form a _core symposium_ of questions to sample from. Also, the IQ score itself was normalized to be normally distributed centered at 100.
With this understanding, I was under the impression that IQ was a relative measure, at a specific point in time, of one's placement in the distribution.
Which meant to me that IQ cannot "drop" across a population, the mean will always be 100. And IQ scores cannot be compared on a time series basis, since they are only cross sectional measures.
Is that all wrong? Is there some truth to it?
Long time ago someone explained to me that the engineering of IQ tests was actually drafted from a very large pool of (regularly updated) questions, where statistical significance was extracted to form a _core symposium_ of questions to sample from. Also, the IQ score itself was normalized to be normally distributed centered at 100.
With this understanding, I was under the impression that IQ was a relative measure, at a specific point in time, of one's placement in the distribution.
Which meant to me that IQ cannot "drop" across a population, the mean will always be 100. And IQ scores cannot be compared on a time series basis, since they are only cross sectional measures.
Is that all wrong? Is there some truth to it?
An IQ test is a relative measure of where you are relative to the population at the point of time where the test was normalized.
That point of time is somewhere in the past. And when tests are renormalized, there is a conversion of "this score on the old test is that score on the new test". This allows for comparisons of IQ over time, across different versions of the same test. This is how the Flynn effect was first discovered.
Tests usually have solid conversions between them, you can can compare across different tests as well. Such conversions allow more verification of the Flynn effect.
If you go back far enough, you will find tests for children measuring mental age vs physical age, taking a ratio, and multiplying by 100. They fell on a distribution that was close enough to normal centered at 100 with a standard deviation of 15 or 16 that adult tests were developed to match them.
Since we don't know all the factors behind the Flynn effect in the first place, we also don't know all the factors behind why it might be reversing now.
That point of time is somewhere in the past. And when tests are renormalized, there is a conversion of "this score on the old test is that score on the new test". This allows for comparisons of IQ over time, across different versions of the same test. This is how the Flynn effect was first discovered.
Tests usually have solid conversions between them, you can can compare across different tests as well. Such conversions allow more verification of the Flynn effect.
If you go back far enough, you will find tests for children measuring mental age vs physical age, taking a ratio, and multiplying by 100. They fell on a distribution that was close enough to normal centered at 100 with a standard deviation of 15 or 16 that adult tests were developed to match them.
Since we don't know all the factors behind the Flynn effect in the first place, we also don't know all the factors behind why it might be reversing now.
There is a raw score underlying any given IQ test that is an absolute value. It might just be as simple as the number of questions you get right. When testing a population, these scores form a normal distribution. We then scale the raw scores so that the mean/median or center of the distribution becomes an IQ of 100. So the raw scores can be compared across time and can vary, even though the IQ cannot as you said.
Hum, but my understanding was that the whole point of the normalization was that the raw scores are not in a scale that is meaningful outside of the symposium which they were placed in?
Does it really make sense to compare raw scores from different tests? If that were the case then the normalization step would be useless, we would have an absolute measure of intelligence.
Does it really make sense to compare raw scores from different tests? If that were the case then the normalization step would be useless, we would have an absolute measure of intelligence.
A new test that was substantially different from an earlier test would have to be compared against it to make sure it was measuring the same stuff, and I have seen a few studies checking how well different tests were correlated.
Well yes, if you look at the paper summary they are comparing the scores for an overlapping set of questions, all from one question bank used in many tests if i understand correctly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo&t=5877s
It's a 2 hour video essay that covers psychometry generally as a lens to understanding a book called the Bell Curve that was a flashpoint for questions about the validity of IQ science generally (but most especially how it applies to race). It took a good chunk of my Sunday to get through it, but it was really enjoyable and gave me a ton of insight into a ton of buzzwords and studies I had heard of but couldn't really dig my teeth into.
I think with this topic, getting a briefer, less nuanced summary than something like this would be a mistake because of how much misunderstanding of these topics permeates popular culture. The video also provides a number of studies and books to keep going beyond the relatively breif 2 hours of content it provides.
It uses the famed/infamous book the Bell Curve as a case study and delves into how they were originally created, how they are updated, how the term hereditery when used in genetics means something that is sometimes counter-intuitive to the definition used in popular culture (for example whether someone wears earings has high heritability, whereas having 2 arms has effectively zero herritability) the statistical meaninfullness of factorization (G-factor) of domains of IQ into a single numerical value, how these domains came to be defined, the current state of understanding regarding the local vs enviornmental source of IQ for individuals, how the Flynn effect was observed, etc.
But to answer a bit of your earlier question. When IQ tests are created, they create a set of questions, test it on a sample group, and set the average value to 100 and higher/lower scores depending on what the distribution of correct answers is. The Flynn effect happened because researchers noticed while the average for new tests always is set at 100, people scoring 100 on a more recent test were generally scoring even higher on previous years tests. The article of the reverse Flynn effect is a little bit sensationalist because as it mentions while some areas (like Spatial Reasoning) are improving, others are apparently starting to get lower. This calls into question a bit the idea of a G-Factor which is an assumption that their is a common factor of intelligence that covaries across all IQ domains (spatial reasoning, reaction time, etc... ) which is the theoretical reasoning behind IQ being meaningfully represented as a single numerical value rather than a multi-dimensional value.
It's a 2 hour video essay that covers psychometry generally as a lens to understanding a book called the Bell Curve that was a flashpoint for questions about the validity of IQ science generally (but most especially how it applies to race). It took a good chunk of my Sunday to get through it, but it was really enjoyable and gave me a ton of insight into a ton of buzzwords and studies I had heard of but couldn't really dig my teeth into.
I think with this topic, getting a briefer, less nuanced summary than something like this would be a mistake because of how much misunderstanding of these topics permeates popular culture. The video also provides a number of studies and books to keep going beyond the relatively breif 2 hours of content it provides.
It uses the famed/infamous book the Bell Curve as a case study and delves into how they were originally created, how they are updated, how the term hereditery when used in genetics means something that is sometimes counter-intuitive to the definition used in popular culture (for example whether someone wears earings has high heritability, whereas having 2 arms has effectively zero herritability) the statistical meaninfullness of factorization (G-factor) of domains of IQ into a single numerical value, how these domains came to be defined, the current state of understanding regarding the local vs enviornmental source of IQ for individuals, how the Flynn effect was observed, etc.
But to answer a bit of your earlier question. When IQ tests are created, they create a set of questions, test it on a sample group, and set the average value to 100 and higher/lower scores depending on what the distribution of correct answers is. The Flynn effect happened because researchers noticed while the average for new tests always is set at 100, people scoring 100 on a more recent test were generally scoring even higher on previous years tests. The article of the reverse Flynn effect is a little bit sensationalist because as it mentions while some areas (like Spatial Reasoning) are improving, others are apparently starting to get lower. This calls into question a bit the idea of a G-Factor which is an assumption that their is a common factor of intelligence that covaries across all IQ domains (spatial reasoning, reaction time, etc... ) which is the theoretical reasoning behind IQ being meaningfully represented as a single numerical value rather than a multi-dimensional value.
someguydave(2)
My understanding at a high level is that an IQ test is basically made by generating a bunch of cognitive tasks that putatively test different aspects of cognitive functioning (e.g. verbal reasoning, visuospatial reasoning, attention, working memory, etc.). For most people, performance on one type of cognitive task (e.g. verbal reasoning) is highly correlated with performance on the other types of cognitive tasks.
This allows you to model the test as a hierarchical statistical model with some general intelligence factor (denoted G) at the top and then specific cognitive tasks branch off from there. You can then infer what G is just by statistical inference on the "branches" (the performance on the individual cognitive tasks); similar to how you might infer someone's height if you only had access to their leg and arm lengths, as these are highly correlated with each other and also with height.
I believe IQ scores are always population normed to have a mean of 100 but unnormalized scores are likely available to compare across time.
This allows you to model the test as a hierarchical statistical model with some general intelligence factor (denoted G) at the top and then specific cognitive tasks branch off from there. You can then infer what G is just by statistical inference on the "branches" (the performance on the individual cognitive tasks); similar to how you might infer someone's height if you only had access to their leg and arm lengths, as these are highly correlated with each other and also with height.
I believe IQ scores are always population normed to have a mean of 100 but unnormalized scores are likely available to compare across time.
> For most people, performance on one type of cognitive task (e.g. verbal reasoning) is highly correlated with performance on the other types of cognitive tasks.
It's cool that that's your understanding, but you're wading into territory that gets people sterilized and killed. I have a lot of trust in science, but not here. This video was informative for me: https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo
For example, here's an IQ test; let's say its given to 5,000,000 Canadians, and 3,000 Texans (1):
(1) I asked ChatGPT to come up with this test.
(edit: formatting)
It's cool that that's your understanding, but you're wading into territory that gets people sterilized and killed. I have a lot of trust in science, but not here. This video was informative for me: https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo
For example, here's an IQ test; let's say its given to 5,000,000 Canadians, and 3,000 Texans (1):
* What is the capital city of Canada?
* Which Canadian province is the largest by land area?
* Who is considered the "Father of Medicare" in Canada?
* Name the two official languages of Canada.
* Which Canadian team won the Stanley Cup in 2017?
* What is the national sport of Canada?
* What is the name of Canada's national anthem?
* Name the famous Canadian dish made with fries, cheese curds, and gravy.
* Who was the first Prime Minister of Canada?
* In which Canadian city is the CN Tower located?
(1) I asked ChatGPT to come up with this test.
(edit: formatting)
This is why IQ tests switched to Raven’s progressive matrices [1] a long time ago. RPM avoids these issues of cultural bias.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Progressive_Matrices?w...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven's_Progressive_Matrices?w...
IQ is a construct representing intelligence. The aim is to refine this construct so that it is a) externally consistent with what constitutes our understanding of human intelligence and b) internally consistent so that various things we deem high or low IQ are consistent with other things we deem high or low IQ. The things here are items, which are question:answer pairs.
IQ is an example of factor analysis [0] where an unobserved "general intelligence factor" g is derived from observed items. The items are chosen so that responses correlate with each other and with g (basically, if the same person took two IQ tests with different questions then the score should be about the same). There may be some intermediate factors like verbal ability or spatial ability. The items here will be chosen so that they correlate only with items of the same factor--e.g. verbal items correlate with verbal items but do not correlate with spatial items.
A raw score on the test is not meaningful; individuals are compared against the population of test takers to determine their rank in the population. First, raw scores of the population are normalized so that the mean is 100 and the standard deviation is 15 (this is arbitrary; it's just the scale they use). Then an individual test taker can be compared with the population on this scale. The percentile rank can be obtained directly from the IQ score and vice versa.
You have some questions about the shifting mean of 100. In practice the normed distribution is computed from a norming group rather than recomputing the norm after ever test. A particular population can shift from the norming group (either over time or because it's a group with different characteristics) which is where things like the Flynn Effect come from. So a lot depends on the norming group.
I hope that answered some of your questions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_analysis
IQ is an example of factor analysis [0] where an unobserved "general intelligence factor" g is derived from observed items. The items are chosen so that responses correlate with each other and with g (basically, if the same person took two IQ tests with different questions then the score should be about the same). There may be some intermediate factors like verbal ability or spatial ability. The items here will be chosen so that they correlate only with items of the same factor--e.g. verbal items correlate with verbal items but do not correlate with spatial items.
A raw score on the test is not meaningful; individuals are compared against the population of test takers to determine their rank in the population. First, raw scores of the population are normalized so that the mean is 100 and the standard deviation is 15 (this is arbitrary; it's just the scale they use). Then an individual test taker can be compared with the population on this scale. The percentile rank can be obtained directly from the IQ score and vice versa.
You have some questions about the shifting mean of 100. In practice the normed distribution is computed from a norming group rather than recomputing the norm after ever test. A particular population can shift from the norming group (either over time or because it's a group with different characteristics) which is where things like the Flynn Effect come from. So a lot depends on the norming group.
I hope that answered some of your questions.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_analysis
IQ measures something but that something is definitely intelligence, no matter what people try to tell you. Let's all just stop pretending it measures intelligence
It’s a hard test that doesn’t require specific knowledge and has a short time limit to prevent bruteforcing.
The questions are in difficulty order and they’re all worth the same so because of the time limit you won’t be able to answer them all correctly. The quicker you are at solving problems, the higher the score you will get.
Your score then shows how you compare to the population percentage wise and that’s your IQ. The average score would give you an average IQ.
The questions are in difficulty order and they’re all worth the same so because of the time limit you won’t be able to answer them all correctly. The quicker you are at solving problems, the higher the score you will get.
Your score then shows how you compare to the population percentage wise and that’s your IQ. The average score would give you an average IQ.
I think this video by `Shaun` is informative and well-researched (articles and books are cited). It's long; the creator isn't especially succinct, but it's as entertaining as the material allows, and the subject's complex enough to warrant a video that's a couple of hours long. https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo
They say scores in spatial reasoning went up while analogies, vocabulary, and numerical reasoning declined.
Hmmm I wonder if an increase use of videogames paired with a decrease in the amount of time parents can spend communicating with their children might be related.
Note that over the last 30 years it's vastly transitioned from one parent staying home raising children to both parents working.
Hmmm I wonder if an increase use of videogames paired with a decrease in the amount of time parents can spend communicating with their children might be related.
Note that over the last 30 years it's vastly transitioned from one parent staying home raising children to both parents working.
If the Norwegians are to be believed then no.
> A study of Norwegian military conscripts' test records found that IQ scores have been falling for generations born after the year 1975, and that the underlying cause of both initial increasing and subsequent falling trends appears to be environmental rather than genetic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
> A study of Norwegian military conscripts' test records found that IQ scores have been falling for generations born after the year 1975, and that the underlying cause of both initial increasing and subsequent falling trends appears to be environmental rather than genetic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
There is ongoing debate among academics, even in Norway...
In 2019, a group of researchers from the University of Oslo published a study that found no evidence of a decline in IQ scores over time in Norway, despite claims of such declines in other countries. The researchers argued that the methodology used in previous studies may have contributed to false conclusions about declining IQ scores.
In contrast, a group of researchers from the University of Amsterdam published a study in 2018 that reported a decline in IQ scores in the Netherlands over the past several decades. The researchers suggested that changes in educational systems, such as increased emphasis on testing and memorization, may be contributing to the decline.
In 2019, a group of researchers from the University of Oslo published a study that found no evidence of a decline in IQ scores over time in Norway, despite claims of such declines in other countries. The researchers argued that the methodology used in previous studies may have contributed to false conclusions about declining IQ scores.
In contrast, a group of researchers from the University of Amsterdam published a study in 2018 that reported a decline in IQ scores in the Netherlands over the past several decades. The researchers suggested that changes in educational systems, such as increased emphasis on testing and memorization, may be contributing to the decline.
A few years ago I did a pretty thorough reading of one of these Norwegian studies and the methodology was... abysmal. I don't remember which direction the reported effect was in, but I do remember that the way they computed it meant that it was the reverse direction of what the true effect should have been. Kind of an impressive mistake.
Made me pretty skeptical of the FE literature.
Made me pretty skeptical of the FE literature.
[deleted]
Reminds me of this "The humble pocket calculator should have taken Sociology by storm half a century ago." post criticizing how psychometrics has become bunk as it hasn't kept up with the times:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798887
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798887
Humans are incredibly adaptive. Is there much reason to have an expansive vocabulary nowadays? We are taught to speak and write as concisely and understandably as possible. We can look up the definition of any word at our fingertips. "[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books." - Einstein.
Maybe these tests are declining because they are measuring skills that are decreasingly relevant? I'm not certain I believe this myself but it's an interesting thought.
Maybe these tests are declining because they are measuring skills that are decreasingly relevant? I'm not certain I believe this myself but it's an interesting thought.
Your vocabulary is tied to your expressive power and your ability to form coherent and compelling arguments. I'd argue that without an expansive vocabulary you would struggle to write with precision let alone brevity.
Not that its wrong to question, I just think you'd need to do more work supporting the idea that language skills are less important today for some reason.
Not that its wrong to question, I just think you'd need to do more work supporting the idea that language skills are less important today for some reason.
Using a rare word with a marginally different meaning to convey an idea more precisely and concisely depends on the person on the other end of the conversation knowing that word and the marginal difference in meaning it conveys. The moment you can't trust people to distinguish between two synonyms, one of them becomes useless. As we communicate with wider groups whom we have less familiarity with, the amount you can trust nuance to be conveyed decreases. And logically as already rare words become more rarely used, the likelihood that your audience is familiar with them further decreases.
Someone who focuses on clearly explaining thoughts using small numbers of commonly understood words will be much better at forming coherent and compelling arguments than someone who instead invests the same resources in learning a vast but useless vocabulary.
Someone who focuses on clearly explaining thoughts using small numbers of commonly understood words will be much better at forming coherent and compelling arguments than someone who instead invests the same resources in learning a vast but useless vocabulary.
> Your vocabulary is tied to your expressive power and your ability to form coherent and compelling arguments
There is even more to it. Language can influence (prev.: limits) your thinking and ability to categorize. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
(Removed misleading reference)
There is even more to it. Language can influence (prev.: limits) your thinking and ability to categorize. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
(Removed misleading reference)
Isn't this Sapir-Whorf, which has been disproven? At least the last time I read of it in relation to 1984.
[deleted]
Yup, linguistic determinism is nonsense, thanks for pointing that out. I edited my comment.
> We can look up the definition of any word at our fingertips.
So what? Being able to understand expressive language and quickly context shift vocabulary is extremely valuable. If you don't have the vocabulary to identify context, being able to look up the definition of words will only get you so far. Additionally, you can't write words if you don't know that they exist.
So what? Being able to understand expressive language and quickly context shift vocabulary is extremely valuable. If you don't have the vocabulary to identify context, being able to look up the definition of words will only get you so far. Additionally, you can't write words if you don't know that they exist.
All, I am not saying that having a solid vocabulary isn't valuable. Of course it is valuable. What I am saying is that potentially, for most people, having a vastly expansive vocabulary might not be as valuable as it used to be.
That only makes it even more valuable for one to possess it because it sets you apart from everyone else.
I've previously wondered if people are learning vocabulary they wouldn't be willing to put in a test.
This site is dense in terms and acronyms that generally will not appear in a dictionary, which does not appear to be unusual. Many interests and professions have a frightening number of terms and acronyms now.
This site is dense in terms and acronyms that generally will not appear in a dictionary, which does not appear to be unusual. Many interests and professions have a frightening number of terms and acronyms now.
> We are taught to speak and write as concisely and understandably as possible.
One day... I believe.
One day... I believe.
Plus the focus on teaching for the test and the move away from critical thinking in schools. I had to teach critical thinking myself to my kids and also how to research and cross reference. I have two sets of encyclopedias and a pile of other reference books and showed them how to use them. What they teach in schools now is vastly different from when I went to school. Public education has gone from teaching critical thinking and problem solving to group thinking, homogenizing and memorizing the 'correct' answers, no understanding required.
Not sure where you got your data, but from what I can find, the rate of stay at home parents has mostly stayed unchanged between 1989 and 2018: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/24/stay-at-hom...
'30 years ago' is 1970 to 2000 I bet :)
Hahaha you raise a good point. I'm thinking in the perspective of 90s view on stay-home parents shrinking where as since 2000's that trend has changed:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/08/7-key-findi...
Nearly 50% of households in the 70s had a stay-at-home parent. So a larger number of parents today grew up with working parents than 5 decades ago.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/08/7-key-findi...
Nearly 50% of households in the 70s had a stay-at-home parent. So a larger number of parents today grew up with working parents than 5 decades ago.
Huh that is interesting.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/estimate...
Here is a pretty clear indication that people are just not having children.
Maybe the percentage of stay at home parents has stayed the same but the number of stay at home parents has shrunk because the number of all parents has just shrunk as well.
None of that really helps indicate why IQ in certain metrics related to communication would be in decline. Since the percentages are the same you would think outcomes would be similar then.
So are kids getting dumber or are parents just getting worse?
Or other factors in our environment are contributing to this. An increase in smart devices autocorrecting and doing 'math' for us for example.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/estimate...
Here is a pretty clear indication that people are just not having children.
Maybe the percentage of stay at home parents has stayed the same but the number of stay at home parents has shrunk because the number of all parents has just shrunk as well.
None of that really helps indicate why IQ in certain metrics related to communication would be in decline. Since the percentages are the same you would think outcomes would be similar then.
So are kids getting dumber or are parents just getting worse?
Or other factors in our environment are contributing to this. An increase in smart devices autocorrecting and doing 'math' for us for example.
What about this: stay at home parenting comment was as pure attempt on pushing ideology as can be. There were so many changes in the meantime - parenting is more intense, kids read less, kids watch videos more, kids socialize differently, school system is more demanding and kids finish more years of schooling, that taking a single aspect and making conclusions off it is unlikely to end up with reasonable results.
[deleted]
Could this have to so with smart people increasing pursuing hedonism over reproduction? Maybe Idiocracy was right all along.
From a strict evolutionary perspective I have doubts that a high IQ is useful anymore.
From a strict evolutionary perspective I have doubts that a high IQ is useful anymore.
The point of the original Flynn effect being a big deal was that the changes were faster than was possible with genetics alone.
A big part of "The Bell Curve" was arguing that no interventions could change IQ except genetics and so any money spent on low IQ people (African-Americans in the book, but the author followed up by attacking poor people more generally) was a pointless waste.
It turns out he wasn't just an asshole, he was also wrong.
A big part of "The Bell Curve" was arguing that no interventions could change IQ except genetics and so any money spent on low IQ people (African-Americans in the book, but the author followed up by attacking poor people more generally) was a pointless waste.
It turns out he wasn't just an asshole, he was also wrong.
I've never read the "Bell Curve", and I'm not a huge fan of Charles Murray's work in general, but, from the first line in Wikpedia:
"The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in which the authors argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors."
That statement completely contradicts what your claim about the book, and now I am disinclined to trust you.. Later on another statement also completely contradicts what you are saying:
"According to Herrnstein and Murray, the high heritability of IQ within races does not necessarily mean that the cause of differences between races is genetic. On the other hand, they discuss lines of evidence that have been used to support the thesis that the black-white gap is at least partly genetic, such as Spearman's hypothesis. They also discuss possible environmental explanations of the gap, such as the observed generational increases in IQ, for which they coin the term Flynn effect"
"The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in which the authors argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors."
That statement completely contradicts what your claim about the book, and now I am disinclined to trust you.. Later on another statement also completely contradicts what you are saying:
"According to Herrnstein and Murray, the high heritability of IQ within races does not necessarily mean that the cause of differences between races is genetic. On the other hand, they discuss lines of evidence that have been used to support the thesis that the black-white gap is at least partly genetic, such as Spearman's hypothesis. They also discuss possible environmental explanations of the gap, such as the observed generational increases in IQ, for which they coin the term Flynn effect"
Absolutely not what Murray said in the bell curve. It's not a very hard book to attack, so I'm not sure why people always go for strawmen. Please post anything from the book that comes anywhere close to saying IQ is 100% genetic.
I didnt say they said it was 100% genetic. I said:
> A big part of "The Bell Curve" was arguing that no interventions could change IQ except genetics
So its like a "climate change denier" who says "oh I dont deny climate change, its just that I oppose every commonly accepted way to combat it and therefore am in complete policy alignment with actual climate change demiers (who all love my work despite a literal reading being that I’m saying they are wrong)."
> A big part of "The Bell Curve" was arguing that no interventions could change IQ except genetics
So its like a "climate change denier" who says "oh I dont deny climate change, its just that I oppose every commonly accepted way to combat it and therefore am in complete policy alignment with actual climate change demiers (who all love my work despite a literal reading being that I’m saying they are wrong)."
"no interventions could change IQ except genetics" and "IQ is 100% genetic" are the same statement.
And yet here we are discussing The Bell Curve, a book that simultaneously claims that "it is agnostic" as to whether racial IQ gaps are environmental or genetic, but thinks that there's no point in any interventions to reduce or eliminate low IQs.
I think they're liars that at the very least want you to believe the gap is mostly genetic. But they've carefully avoided ever directly stating that, because of the Nazi eugenics vibe that would give off.
So to try to avoid being accused of misrepresenting these disingenuous liars, I stated not that they believe it's 100% genetic, but rather that they believe no interventions would help.
It's their logical inconsistency, not mine.
I think they're liars that at the very least want you to believe the gap is mostly genetic. But they've carefully avoided ever directly stating that, because of the Nazi eugenics vibe that would give off.
So to try to avoid being accused of misrepresenting these disingenuous liars, I stated not that they believe it's 100% genetic, but rather that they believe no interventions would help.
It's their logical inconsistency, not mine.
> A big part of "The Bell Curve" was arguing that no interventions could change IQ except genetics and so any money spent on low IQ people (African-Americans in the book, but the author followed up by attacking poor people more generally) was a pointless waste.
It should be self-evident that you can lower IQ through environment (injury, developmental issues, malnourishment, etc.). So even if you believe there's a genetic ceiling to IQ, Flynn effect (and reverse) don't contradict that.
It should be self-evident that you can lower IQ through environment (injury, developmental issues, malnourishment, etc.). So even if you believe there's a genetic ceiling to IQ, Flynn effect (and reverse) don't contradict that.
I agree it probably isn’t genetics alone, notably the increase in visual spatial skills I would suspect to have more to do with video games than genetics.
I have yet to read “the bell curve” said, but did they really use an argument that flew in the face of the abundant evidence of IQ increases unlinked to genetics as a result of better nutrition and education? Hell America gained a few IQ points nationwide from banning leaded gasoline alone so we also knew of environmental means to affect IQ levels. This was all known about and very well established at the time of authorship. Is there an excerpt?
I have yet to read “the bell curve” said, but did they really use an argument that flew in the face of the abundant evidence of IQ increases unlinked to genetics as a result of better nutrition and education? Hell America gained a few IQ points nationwide from banning leaded gasoline alone so we also knew of environmental means to affect IQ levels. This was all known about and very well established at the time of authorship. Is there an excerpt?
I haven't read it either, but even just a quick look at Wikipedia shows the other responders don't know what they're talking about:
> According to Herrnstein and Murray, the high heritability of IQ within races does not necessarily mean that the cause of differences between races is genetic. On the other hand, they discuss lines of evidence that have been used to support the thesis that the black-white gap is at least partly genetic, such as Spearman's hypothesis. They also discuss possible environmental explanations of the gap, such as the observed generational increases in IQ, for which they coin the term Flynn effect. At the close of this discussion, they write:
> > If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Part_III._The_N...
The part I find especially amusing is how often the Flynn effect is used to refute The Bell Curve, even though the term "Flynn effect" comes from The Bell Curve.
> According to Herrnstein and Murray, the high heritability of IQ within races does not necessarily mean that the cause of differences between races is genetic. On the other hand, they discuss lines of evidence that have been used to support the thesis that the black-white gap is at least partly genetic, such as Spearman's hypothesis. They also discuss possible environmental explanations of the gap, such as the observed generational increases in IQ, for which they coin the term Flynn effect. At the close of this discussion, they write:
> > If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Part_III._The_N...
The part I find especially amusing is how often the Flynn effect is used to refute The Bell Curve, even though the term "Flynn effect" comes from The Bell Curve.
There are many ways to refute The Bell Curve. In addition to the Flynn effect, the science in it are plain bad, the policy proposals they enlist don’t necessarily follow their scientifically flawed results, it repeatedly cites a disgraced eugenicist as source, it was never peer reviewed etc. At this point, nothing in this book should be accepted as nothing more than a poor attempt at scientific racism. Let alone should anyone take any sort of scientific consensus. Other than the fact that it was wrong.
This YouTube video[1] does a fair job of summarizing the bulk of what is wrong with this book. But IMO very fact that the book is an apologia for eugenicists should be enough of a critique, you shouldn’t need any more.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
PS. Regarding the naming of the Flynn effect:
> Flynn stated that, if asked, he would have named the effect after Read D. Tuddenham who "was the first to present convincing evidence of massive gains on mental tests using a nationwide sample" in a 1948 article
This YouTube video[1] does a fair job of summarizing the bulk of what is wrong with this book. But IMO very fact that the book is an apologia for eugenicists should be enough of a critique, you shouldn’t need any more.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
PS. Regarding the naming of the Flynn effect:
> Flynn stated that, if asked, he would have named the effect after Read D. Tuddenham who "was the first to present convincing evidence of massive gains on mental tests using a nationwide sample" in a 1948 article
The reason they discuss (and name) the Flynn effect, is because it is one of the most obvious objections to their claims.
Either IQs are going up (and racial gaps closing) on a non evolutionary timescale due to environmental changes that should be studied and encouraged by government policy or IQs are not a good measure of genetic intelligence.
Their policy preferences are for the government not to intervene to improve IQ scores or close racial gaps. But they also want to make radical policy based on IQ because it's such an important measure.
Either IQs are going up (and racial gaps closing) on a non evolutionary timescale due to environmental changes that should be studied and encouraged by government policy or IQs are not a good measure of genetic intelligence.
Their policy preferences are for the government not to intervene to improve IQ scores or close racial gaps. But they also want to make radical policy based on IQ because it's such an important measure.
> Either IQs are going up (and racial gaps closing) on a non evolutionary timescale due to environmental changes that should be studied and encouraged by government policy or IQs are not a good measure of genetic intelligence.
Or 3) they're going up at the same rate, so gaps aren't closing. That's what I've always understood to be happening.
Or 3) they're going up at the same rate, so gaps aren't closing. That's what I've always understood to be happening.
I think even the Bell Curve admitted that the numbers showed the gap closing, so your 3 is therefore a relatively extreme position for the specific case discussed, but certainly a valid permutation.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2907168/
Scrolling down to the graphs that have all sorts of breakdowns, it looks like in general it hasn't been converging. The third group, which breaks down by race/age, looks like a mixture of noisy sameness and diverging.
Scrolling down to the graphs that have all sorts of breakdowns, it looks like in general it hasn't been converging. The third group, which breaks down by race/age, looks like a mixture of noisy sameness and diverging.
They address this:
> For example, Hauser (1998) and Grissmer et al (1998) documented convergence of the race difference in data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Until the current study, this finding could be explained by a differential Flynn Effect in which minority scores increased at a steeper rate. However, we found no interaction in our data; the three different race categories each showed substantial FE’s, but they also tracked closely to the same consistent increase.
So again, they accept the gap is closing, but their result suggests this is not due to a differential Flynn effect, but to something else.
> For example, Hauser (1998) and Grissmer et al (1998) documented convergence of the race difference in data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Until the current study, this finding could be explained by a differential Flynn Effect in which minority scores increased at a steeper rate. However, we found no interaction in our data; the three different race categories each showed substantial FE’s, but they also tracked closely to the same consistent increase.
So again, they accept the gap is closing, but their result suggests this is not due to a differential Flynn effect, but to something else.
The second part of what you quoted disagrees, they don't agree the gap is closing. They make it explicit near the bottom:
> The effect itself is strong and consistent, but we found no differential gender or race FE, nor was there much of a differential urbanization status identified. The positive finding of a differential FE in relation to maternal education (and at a smaller level, household income) at the older ages is suggestive of some of the dynamics of the process leading to the Flynn Effect. However, we do not consider our findings to be confirmatory in any sense.
> The effect itself is strong and consistent, but we found no differential gender or race FE, nor was there much of a differential urbanization status identified. The positive finding of a differential FE in relation to maternal education (and at a smaller level, household income) at the older ages is suggestive of some of the dynamics of the process leading to the Flynn Effect. However, we do not consider our findings to be confirmatory in any sense.
[deleted]
You are being overly charitable.
He worked at the American Enterprise Institute, so if you just imagine their attitude to the scientific facts of climate change, transposed onto genetics, you'll have a good idea of what they were saying. So it's not so much as not being aware of the science, but of not liking the obvious policy conclusions it leads to and so having to work really hard to counter it.
https://www.desmog.com/american-enterprise-institute/
He worked at the American Enterprise Institute, so if you just imagine their attitude to the scientific facts of climate change, transposed onto genetics, you'll have a good idea of what they were saying. So it's not so much as not being aware of the science, but of not liking the obvious policy conclusions it leads to and so having to work really hard to counter it.
https://www.desmog.com/american-enterprise-institute/
> did they really use an argument that flew in the face of the abundant evidence of IQ increases unlinked to genetics as a result of better nutrition and education?
Yes they did, and they did a lot worse than that. And that is the reason why the scientific community was very fast to discredit this book. The science in it were bad, to say the least. It wasn’t even peer reviewed. I think the decline in IQ research is in large part thanks to the pushback this book rightfully got.
It is actually nice that this books is raised here, because the journal this study was published in Intelligence has its ties to true believers of The Bell Curve. Richard J. Haier is the editor in chief signed an editorial defending this book back in 1994. And the board included disgraced eugenicist Richard Lynn (whos discredited pseudo-scientific work cited throughout the book) was on the editorial board until 2018.
Yes they did, and they did a lot worse than that. And that is the reason why the scientific community was very fast to discredit this book. The science in it were bad, to say the least. It wasn’t even peer reviewed. I think the decline in IQ research is in large part thanks to the pushback this book rightfully got.
It is actually nice that this books is raised here, because the journal this study was published in Intelligence has its ties to true believers of The Bell Curve. Richard J. Haier is the editor in chief signed an editorial defending this book back in 1994. And the board included disgraced eugenicist Richard Lynn (whos discredited pseudo-scientific work cited throughout the book) was on the editorial board until 2018.
> Yes they did, and they did a lot worse than that
See above reply. Wikepedia completely contradicts what you are saying. I also know what you're saying about AEI is mostly garbage, too.
See above reply. Wikepedia completely contradicts what you are saying. I also know what you're saying about AEI is mostly garbage, too.
What is going on with Bell Curve apologists all of a sudden replying to this post. I thought the debate was slowly fading out and than I count 5 different account replying within an hour.
Groupthink is increased when topic is controversial.
On both sides of course. One group will regard it as settled and the other refuted.
On both sides of course. One group will regard it as settled and the other refuted.
"Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%,[6] with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%.[7] IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults. The heritability of IQ increases with the child's age and reaches a plateau at 18–20 years old, continuing at that level well into adulthood." [0]
You're denying settled science. Trying to tie it to the Bell Curve to assassinate the basic character of the science isn't tricking anyone. Pronouns in your profile only make this bad faith move easier to identify.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
You're denying settled science. Trying to tie it to the Bell Curve to assassinate the basic character of the science isn't tricking anyone. Pronouns in your profile only make this bad faith move easier to identify.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
Really? Using the fact that someone put pronouns in their profile is a bad faith move? Your account is literally a throwaway.
Calling these twin studies as settled science is the most bad faith move here, since the chief problem of this section of The Bell Curve is that it confuses heritability with genetic determination, a mistake that informed scientists wouldn’t make. Unsurprisingly, that is why there is widespread scientific backlash against it.
Believe it or not, twin black babies separated at birth and raised with white parents are still treated as black by society.
Calling these twin studies as settled science is the most bad faith move here, since the chief problem of this section of The Bell Curve is that it confuses heritability with genetic determination, a mistake that informed scientists wouldn’t make. Unsurprisingly, that is why there is widespread scientific backlash against it.
Believe it or not, twin black babies separated at birth and raised with white parents are still treated as black by society.
>Really?
Yes really.
>Using the fact that someone put pronouns in their profile is a bad faith move?
No, putting pronouns in your profile is a red flag for bad faith moves.
>Your account is literally a throwaway.
Which means you can expect unadulterated facts.
>Calling these twin studies as settled science is the most bad faith move here
No it's not, stop denying the science.
>since the chief problem of this section of The Bell Curve is that it confuses heritability with genetic determination
The Bell Curve makes no confusion between heritability and genetic determination.
>mistake that informed scientists wouldn’t make
Good thing the Bell Curve didn't make that mistake!
>Unsurprisingly, that is why there is widespread scientific backlash against it.
There wasn't much scientific backlash to it because it's fairly bulletproof. The backlash was because of contained heretical topics, and may have pointed to blasphemous conclusions.
>Believe it or not, twin black babies separated at birth and raised with white parents are still treated as black by society.
"Believe it or not, twin Asian babies separated at birth and raised with white parents are still treated as Asian by society."
You're almost there /r/selfawarewolves.
Yes really.
>Using the fact that someone put pronouns in their profile is a bad faith move?
No, putting pronouns in your profile is a red flag for bad faith moves.
>Your account is literally a throwaway.
Which means you can expect unadulterated facts.
>Calling these twin studies as settled science is the most bad faith move here
No it's not, stop denying the science.
>since the chief problem of this section of The Bell Curve is that it confuses heritability with genetic determination
The Bell Curve makes no confusion between heritability and genetic determination.
>mistake that informed scientists wouldn’t make
Good thing the Bell Curve didn't make that mistake!
>Unsurprisingly, that is why there is widespread scientific backlash against it.
There wasn't much scientific backlash to it because it's fairly bulletproof. The backlash was because of contained heretical topics, and may have pointed to blasphemous conclusions.
>Believe it or not, twin black babies separated at birth and raised with white parents are still treated as black by society.
"Believe it or not, twin Asian babies separated at birth and raised with white parents are still treated as Asian by society."
You're almost there /r/selfawarewolves.
Twin studies can't prove something is caused by "genetics"[0]; twins are not free of environmental factors and don't necessarily have the same genome. Genetics, like many scientific fields that can't do real experiments, is just people abusing statistics for fun.
[0] if it did, this wouldn't mean anything, because it can't be used to make predictions, because you don't know if any random person X you are trying to predict trait Y of has these "genetics".
[0] if it did, this wouldn't mean anything, because it can't be used to make predictions, because you don't know if any random person X you are trying to predict trait Y of has these "genetics".
I don't really have a horse in this race but you're basically denying the ability of science to have anything to say outside of the hard sciences, which I disagree strongly with.
"Can't be used to make predictions"... seriously? These factors can be used to make predictions. Now whether these things are just correlates with other more fundamental factors, or causal - I thought that was where the conflict was.
https://xkcd.com/435
"Can't be used to make predictions"... seriously? These factors can be used to make predictions. Now whether these things are just correlates with other more fundamental factors, or causal - I thought that was where the conflict was.
https://xkcd.com/435
[deleted]
No, economics can make useful predictions because they understand proper study design. Most other fields can't though.
How heritable is height?
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/26/health/human-height-chang...
For bonus points: why has the heritability of height changed over time and varied by country?
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/26/health/human-height-chang...
For bonus points: why has the heritability of height changed over time and varied by country?
>How heritable is height?
Very, somewhere in the 80% range: "The estimated heritability was 0.79 (SE 0.09) for height and 0.40 (SE 0.09) for BMI, consistent with pedigree estimates." [0][1]
>For bonus points: why has the heritability of height changed over time
It hasn't.
>and varied by country?
It hasn't.
Love it when the bonus questions are easier than the main questions.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/landmark-study-resol...
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/588020v1
Very, somewhere in the 80% range: "The estimated heritability was 0.79 (SE 0.09) for height and 0.40 (SE 0.09) for BMI, consistent with pedigree estimates." [0][1]
>For bonus points: why has the heritability of height changed over time
It hasn't.
>and varied by country?
It hasn't.
Love it when the bonus questions are easier than the main questions.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/landmark-study-resol...
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/588020v1
If George Carlin was a philosopher, perhaps Mike Judge is also more than a physicist, musician, and director. Giving Brian May a run for his money.
When the collective hive mind of a society is organized around anti-intellectualism (the core ethos of America), then it will subsidize a combination of stupid (less talent) and mental laziness (lack of productive application of talent). This is how a society enters the dustbin of history and emerges as a brutal and backwards people.
When the collective hive mind of a society is organized around anti-intellectualism (the core ethos of America), then it will subsidize a combination of stupid (less talent) and mental laziness (lack of productive application of talent). This is how a society enters the dustbin of history and emerges as a brutal and backwards people.
America in 2023 is more intellectual than any society that existed in or before the 20th century. How extreme does intellectualism have to get before America is no longer considered anti-intellectual? Does manual labour need to be banned and does 75% of the population need post-secondary degrees?
America and western society is so taken with intellectualism that they spend their prime years for having children doing precocious amounts of studying while their brains are in a state of peak plasticity. Americans right now are like modern day Irish elk who need increasingly large antlers (degrees) to win the reproductive game but are so encumbered by this that it becomes difficult to reproduce at all. So fertility is sub-replacement and Americans have reacted by bringing in immigrants so they can spend more time working on their degrees.
What sort of immigrants do they bring in? University graduates!
America and western society is so taken with intellectualism that they spend their prime years for having children doing precocious amounts of studying while their brains are in a state of peak plasticity. Americans right now are like modern day Irish elk who need increasingly large antlers (degrees) to win the reproductive game but are so encumbered by this that it becomes difficult to reproduce at all. So fertility is sub-replacement and Americans have reacted by bringing in immigrants so they can spend more time working on their degrees.
What sort of immigrants do they bring in? University graduates!
> anti-intellectualism (the core ethos of America)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BARTERICMP25UPZSUSA
> lack of productive application of talent
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12027662
?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BARTERICMP25UPZSUSA
> lack of productive application of talent
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12027662
?
I like your comment because it could be expressed by someone on the far right as much as the far left.
As an aside, I think Idiocracy is the weakest of Mike Judge's works.
As an aside, I think Idiocracy is the weakest of Mike Judge's works.
From a strict evolutionary perspective it probably hasn't been for a long time and likely never was as significant on an individual level as people like to believe.
The only things being selected for in modern humans, if anything, are going to be things like disease resistance, maybe tolerance to some chemical contaminants in food & water, air pollution. And even then only in some parts of the world.
The only things being selected for in modern humans, if anything, are going to be things like disease resistance, maybe tolerance to some chemical contaminants in food & water, air pollution. And even then only in some parts of the world.
Nope - sexual selection still takes place regardless of environmental survival factors.
And sexual selection takes place faster and can lead populations to scenarios that induce natural selection.
And sexual selection takes place faster and can lead populations to scenarios that induce natural selection.
It's useful. You have to think on the macro scale. The evolution of the entire population rather then individuals.
On the individual level stupider people reproduce more so evolutionary speaking it's more efficient to be stupid. However if a small portion of the population has high IQ they can move society forward via say the discovery of electricity, mathematics, etc, etc. This propels every individual forward as a whole at the detriment of a few individuals who are to nerdy or geeky to get laid that often.
Thus from a high level perspective, there is selection pressure that works on the population of people that makes it so that our genes have the mechanisms in place to produce an occasional genius via specific combinations of traits or via simple on/off switch mutations that easily occur.
For reference this is a short and informative video on the aforementioned topic: https://youtu.be/sP2tUW0HDHA
On the individual level stupider people reproduce more so evolutionary speaking it's more efficient to be stupid. However if a small portion of the population has high IQ they can move society forward via say the discovery of electricity, mathematics, etc, etc. This propels every individual forward as a whole at the detriment of a few individuals who are to nerdy or geeky to get laid that often.
Thus from a high level perspective, there is selection pressure that works on the population of people that makes it so that our genes have the mechanisms in place to produce an occasional genius via specific combinations of traits or via simple on/off switch mutations that easily occur.
For reference this is a short and informative video on the aforementioned topic: https://youtu.be/sP2tUW0HDHA
yucky(3)
IQ hasn't been beneficial to evolution for over 100 years. Once means-tested welfare came into existence, being low-IQ became more advantageous. The reason Europe was able to take over the world is that they taxed the poor (low-IQ) more than the rich in the dark ages and the rich out-bred the poor for at least 2 generations.
Very arguably social welfare resulted in the biggest increase in IQ levels in history as general health, nutrition, and education improved. Also social welfare improved social mobility which should cause IQ to have more of an impact rather than less of one.
I am not rejecting this point but I have a hard time accepting it Carte Blanche. If anything if IQ is lowering for generic reasons I would suspect birth control as a cause especially since it’s a more recent phenomenon than means tested welfare.
I am not rejecting this point but I have a hard time accepting it Carte Blanche. If anything if IQ is lowering for generic reasons I would suspect birth control as a cause especially since it’s a more recent phenomenon than means tested welfare.
Social welfare could do BOTH things - dramatically increase IQ for the next generation (that grows up with proper nutrition etc) while also remove the selective pressure that increased IQ over the course of centuries.
Social welfare hasn’t been centuries. Many social welfare programs have barely been 1 generation. The big ones (social security, food stamps) aren’t even 1 century old!
One of the first European world powers after the dark ages, Portugal, was not more advanced than many of the areas it attacked except for in weaponry since Europe had been infighting while other math and science was being pursued in eastern parts of the world. Regardless of what percentage of motivation you ascribe to "we want their shit" vs "we want them to take our religion," I don't think you can say it was an advantage or motivation driven by intelligence.
("The rich outbred the poor" also seems very dubious, labor was still very manual, so you gotta have someone to do it.)
("The rich outbred the poor" also seems very dubious, labor was still very manual, so you gotta have someone to do it.)
Portugal was advanced at being the geographically westernmost mainland European country, and at fighting with the Moors for long enough to adopt lateen sails.
[deleted]
I take full credit for this, mostly though my HN comments. You're welcome.
your reddit style comments
your*
I do not understand what it is I have the honor of you trying to tell me
Looking at the paper here [1], it appears there was stability, then a rise up to 2011 followed by a global drop in 2012/2013, and then more stability (Fig 1). It is implausible that things could change so quickly for everyone. A spurious effect related to methodology is surely the most likely answer? I haven't read the text in detail. Fitting a linear relationship to the above as they do in the paper seems a bit crazy to me, but I'm not a psychologist.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
I'd blame smartphones.
Honest question that keeps bothering me.
In the absence of reasonably strong natural selection pressure to select for IQ, how could IQ not be falling over time?
In the absence of reasonably strong natural selection pressure to select for IQ, how could IQ not be falling over time?
Some guesses for why there may be hidden selection pressure:
Academics often stereotype “jocks” and high social status seekers as stupid. However, it often requires brains to succeed in sports and social interactions. But it is technically difficult to measure high “intuition”. I know some very very smart people that fail academically (I know they are smart because I see them achieve seemingly impossible outcomes, not because I have their skills). I strongly suspect that selecting for high non-academic skills will select for general intelligence. If one lacks skill X (e.g. the stereotypical nerd[1] with low social skills) then one usually lacks the ability to recognise people that are highly skilled in skill X (and worse often assumes the skill is useless or denigrates those with the skill or thinks they could be highly skilled if they wanted to).
There could be bubbles of selection pressure - subgroups where high IQ leads to having more kids. So long as the subgroup intermingles, then there is a population level pressure for higher intellect.
It is possible that unsmart people remove themselves from the gene pool before reproduction, or unsmart people reproduce less.
One or two outlier smart men that have thousands of children could have a massive selection pressure. Are we not all descended from Ghengis Khan?
Smartness has thousands of factors, and selection pressure on some hidden factors could easily have an outcome on general intelligence.
[1] Counterpoint “Being smart seems to make you unpopular” implies popular people are not smart: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Academics often stereotype “jocks” and high social status seekers as stupid. However, it often requires brains to succeed in sports and social interactions. But it is technically difficult to measure high “intuition”. I know some very very smart people that fail academically (I know they are smart because I see them achieve seemingly impossible outcomes, not because I have their skills). I strongly suspect that selecting for high non-academic skills will select for general intelligence. If one lacks skill X (e.g. the stereotypical nerd[1] with low social skills) then one usually lacks the ability to recognise people that are highly skilled in skill X (and worse often assumes the skill is useless or denigrates those with the skill or thinks they could be highly skilled if they wanted to).
There could be bubbles of selection pressure - subgroups where high IQ leads to having more kids. So long as the subgroup intermingles, then there is a population level pressure for higher intellect.
It is possible that unsmart people remove themselves from the gene pool before reproduction, or unsmart people reproduce less.
One or two outlier smart men that have thousands of children could have a massive selection pressure. Are we not all descended from Ghengis Khan?
Smartness has thousands of factors, and selection pressure on some hidden factors could easily have an outcome on general intelligence.
[1] Counterpoint “Being smart seems to make you unpopular” implies popular people are not smart: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Conscientiousness and having long-term time horizons is dysgenic. People afflicted with those traits tend to reproduce less, and, to the extent that they're heritable, the genes coding them will gradually decrease in prevalence in the gene pool.
That is not how heritability works; it's how genetic determination works, which is a separate concept.
I’ve floated this idea before especially in the context of ADHD being framed as a disease because it has social costs, personal costs, and causes disruptive behavior. That may all be true but people with ADHD also have more unprotected sex and the vast majority of western society is wiping themselves out on account of not having enough unprotected sex to sustain themselves. It’s just that anything which interferes with utilitarianism and hedonism is framed as a disease.
In the absence of reasonably strong natural selection pressure to select for red hair, how could red hair not be disappearing over time?
This is somewhat tongue in cheek, obviously. But to spell out my point, genetic inheritance is way more complex than most of the comments here are treating it.
If you can’t confidently explain how people with brown hair can keep having red-headed kids, it might be challenging to understand why average parents can produce smart kids (or vice versa).
This is somewhat tongue in cheek, obviously. But to spell out my point, genetic inheritance is way more complex than most of the comments here are treating it.
If you can’t confidently explain how people with brown hair can keep having red-headed kids, it might be challenging to understand why average parents can produce smart kids (or vice versa).
Why would it fall? Steady seems just as fair an expectation in absence of pressure either way
Because the chance of random mutation to increase an IQ (or improve anything whatsoever) is far smaller than to lower it (or degrade anything).
Change randomly a random line of code in any source code, and tell me how often it happens to work better than before.
Change randomly a random line of code in any source code, and tell me how often it happens to work better than before.
Same reason animals living in darkness lose their sight. There's a cost to keeping the hardware, and no rewards.
It is not. IQ doesn’t measure a kind of intelligence which inherits, and is subject to natural selection (there is even a debate whether such intelligence exists; or at least is of any significant between individuals).
IQ at best measures something that correlates with SAT. And with better education, less exposure to damaging pollutants, etc. it should always be on the rise (as demonstrated by the Flynn effect; an effect which this poor paper desperately tries to refute).
IQ research has always been about proving the superiority of one race over others, this superiority doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t stop these pseudo-scientist from trying. They bend the definition of “intelligence” and device test batteries (and in this case, interpret test battery) in skewed and bias ways to manipulate results like these. Regrettably media outlets like the Popular Mechanics and lifestyle journalists like Tim Newcomb take these researchers at their words and publish their results, despite their results pretty much being lies.
IQ at best measures something that correlates with SAT. And with better education, less exposure to damaging pollutants, etc. it should always be on the rise (as demonstrated by the Flynn effect; an effect which this poor paper desperately tries to refute).
IQ research has always been about proving the superiority of one race over others, this superiority doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t stop these pseudo-scientist from trying. They bend the definition of “intelligence” and device test batteries (and in this case, interpret test battery) in skewed and bias ways to manipulate results like these. Regrettably media outlets like the Popular Mechanics and lifestyle journalists like Tim Newcomb take these researchers at their words and publish their results, despite their results pretty much being lies.
The heritability of IQ is very well established, usually estimated in the 50-80% range. You are fighting an uphill battle here because even if people haven’t seen the scientific evidence this effect is so strong that virtually everybody has seen anecdotal evidence of high IQ parents having high IQ children, but just seem to assert a very heterodox and counter-intuitive position without further elaboration.
It is incredibly arguable if during an obesity crisis if population wide health is actually improving and if population wide health isn’t improving that could certainly contribute to lower IQ. We’re also seeing population wide declines of health in other ways like sperm count. Food is becoming less nutritious as soil depletes. Our fish stocks being about to collapse is going to be another hit against brain health as omega 3s will become rarer in the diet.
It is incredibly arguable if during an obesity crisis if population wide health is actually improving and if population wide health isn’t improving that could certainly contribute to lower IQ. We’re also seeing population wide declines of health in other ways like sperm count. Food is becoming less nutritious as soil depletes. Our fish stocks being about to collapse is going to be another hit against brain health as omega 3s will become rarer in the diet.
“Heritability” may or may not have anything to do with genetics or biology. For example socioeconomic status and proximity to zip code are also heritable.
> “Heritability” may or may not have anything to do with genetics or biology. For example socioeconomic status and proximity to zip code
Twin studies [1]. Different parents, socioeconomic statuses, possibly countries. Sustained significant statistical effects. That’s the genetic component of intelligence.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105 first four references
Twin studies [1]. Different parents, socioeconomic statuses, possibly countries. Sustained significant statistical effects. That’s the genetic component of intelligence.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105 first four references
This isn't responsive to the parent comment. There may be a strong discernible genetic component of intelligence, but it doesn't proceed logically from heritability studies; heritability is the ratio of genetically determined variance over all variance, and so can mean either maximum genetic determination, minimum determination, or anything in between.
I get that you're probably trying to take this thread in a different direction from raw heritability numbers, but the parent commenter was, correctly, rebutting a flawed previous argument based solely on heritability.
I get that you're probably trying to take this thread in a different direction from raw heritability numbers, but the parent commenter was, correctly, rebutting a flawed previous argument based solely on heritability.
Twin studies provide evidence that there is a biological component to intelligence. They do not tell us how much more biologically likely it is for high-IQ parents to produce high-IQ kids—which is usually what people mean by the “heritability” of IQ.
In plain English: the twin studies show us how similar twins are, but they don’t tell us how true the movie Idiocracy is.
In plain English: the twin studies show us how similar twins are, but they don’t tell us how true the movie Idiocracy is.
> do not tell us how much more biologically likely it is for high-IQ parents to produce high-IQ kids
"Individual differences in intelligence tend to cluster in families" [1].
There are studies which include "parents in a twin design." They found "no significant shared environmental influence [between the adoptive and non-adoptive children]: all variance could be explained by additive genetic factors and environmental factors that are not shared by children raised in the same family" with "significant genetic transmission for intelligence...found at all ages" (§ 1.3).
[1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...
"Individual differences in intelligence tend to cluster in families" [1].
There are studies which include "parents in a twin design." They found "no significant shared environmental influence [between the adoptive and non-adoptive children]: all variance could be explained by additive genetic factors and environmental factors that are not shared by children raised in the same family" with "significant genetic transmission for intelligence...found at all ages" (§ 1.3).
[1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...
But are the parents actually high-IQ, or do they exhibit some other set of characteristics that correlate with high-IQ children?
Why are you looking so hard for ghosts in the machine here?
It's a simple question. Frederick I of Prussia, father of Frederick the Great, attempted to marry off his soldiers of great stature with tall women, to create generations to fill the ranks of his Potsdam Giants. That endeavor did not result in anything strategically fruitful. One may observe that heritable traits can manifest across generations in different ways.
The previous response did not directly say if those studies suggested high-IQ parents resulted in high-IQ children. So did it?
The previous response did not directly say if those studies suggested high-IQ parents resulted in high-IQ children. So did it?
sfblah(1)
I’m not fighting an uphill battle. Ever since The Bell Curve came out, there has been a slow but steady distancing of both psychological research and policy makers from the whole field of IQ research. Modern psychology couldn’t care less about on the heritability factor of IQ, and most policy makers don’t want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. Heck the SAT has even been renamed as they don’t want to be affiliated with anything resembling IQ any more.
The heritability of IQ is only well established within true believers of a pseudo-science tightly linked with the eugenics movement. Most psychologists today believe that the supposed heritability was observed because of bias within the research. And given the people who were doing these research in the 1970s and the 1980s, and their motivation for doing those, there is no question on what these biases were. Some of the researchers went so went quite far in bending the data such that it would fit their narrow—and racist—world view. They tried really hard to define intelligence such that it would make rich white people smarter, they were regrettably successful for far to long, but ultimately failed.
Your anecdotal evidence of high IQ parents (ugh!) having high IQ children is the same anecdotal evidence that sociologists have been describing for decades that high SES parents have high SES children, and is the main reason for why parents with high SAT scores are likely to have children with high SAT scores.
What IQ researchers discovered was basically the same thing that Marx described in 1867, class, however the eugenics were no communists, and instead of providing the simpler explanation, that society rewards the ruling elite, and wealth inherits, the eugenics went all conspiratorial and blamed other races for their perceived decline in society.
The heritability of IQ is only well established within true believers of a pseudo-science tightly linked with the eugenics movement. Most psychologists today believe that the supposed heritability was observed because of bias within the research. And given the people who were doing these research in the 1970s and the 1980s, and their motivation for doing those, there is no question on what these biases were. Some of the researchers went so went quite far in bending the data such that it would fit their narrow—and racist—world view. They tried really hard to define intelligence such that it would make rich white people smarter, they were regrettably successful for far to long, but ultimately failed.
Your anecdotal evidence of high IQ parents (ugh!) having high IQ children is the same anecdotal evidence that sociologists have been describing for decades that high SES parents have high SES children, and is the main reason for why parents with high SAT scores are likely to have children with high SAT scores.
What IQ researchers discovered was basically the same thing that Marx described in 1867, class, however the eugenics were no communists, and instead of providing the simpler explanation, that society rewards the ruling elite, and wealth inherits, the eugenics went all conspiratorial and blamed other races for their perceived decline in society.
The following is my opinion, based on my research:
* IQ is real, measurable and heritable. The evidence for this is overwhelming.
* Nobody argues about the broad heritability of other human traits such as hair/eye color, height, athletic ability and the like.
* The argument over IQ is a consequence of terrible historical experiences with eugenics and racial discrimination. Many have adopted the quasi-religious viewpoint that IQ is not heritable to sidestep the discussion.
* As a consequence, social policy resembles the cycles and epicycles of Ptolemy's cosmology. Namely, all manner of social, economic and historical outcomes which are explained parsimoniously by understanding IQ as heritable are instead attributed to a Rube-Goldberg machine of racism, class warfare and the like.
* Accepting IQ as heritable does not, in an enlightened society, require acceptance of racism or classism, any more than people are forced to discriminate against those who, say, are genetically weaker athletes due to low relative VO2 levels.
* Social policy could be enhanced and better targeted by targeting those at the lower end of the IQ curve with subsidies such as basic income.
* Accepting IQ as real, heritable and measurable represents one of the only paths out of the present morass of corrupt political patronage programs around specific groups, just as rejection of Ptolemy's worldview enabled turning away from the demon-haunted world of religion.
* IQ is real, measurable and heritable. The evidence for this is overwhelming.
* Nobody argues about the broad heritability of other human traits such as hair/eye color, height, athletic ability and the like.
* The argument over IQ is a consequence of terrible historical experiences with eugenics and racial discrimination. Many have adopted the quasi-religious viewpoint that IQ is not heritable to sidestep the discussion.
* As a consequence, social policy resembles the cycles and epicycles of Ptolemy's cosmology. Namely, all manner of social, economic and historical outcomes which are explained parsimoniously by understanding IQ as heritable are instead attributed to a Rube-Goldberg machine of racism, class warfare and the like.
* Accepting IQ as heritable does not, in an enlightened society, require acceptance of racism or classism, any more than people are forced to discriminate against those who, say, are genetically weaker athletes due to low relative VO2 levels.
* Social policy could be enhanced and better targeted by targeting those at the lower end of the IQ curve with subsidies such as basic income.
* Accepting IQ as real, heritable and measurable represents one of the only paths out of the present morass of corrupt political patronage programs around specific groups, just as rejection of Ptolemy's worldview enabled turning away from the demon-haunted world of religion.
People say IQ is "heritable" all the time, but it's easy to say that without giving any evidence that one understands what heritability means. Lots of things are heritable and not genetically determined, and there are things that are absolutely genetically determined that aren't really heritable.
If you're going to build a whole chain of logic, one that attempts to solve racism somewhere in the middle and ends with the "demon-haunted world of religion", it's useful to clearly define your terms first.
If you're going to build a whole chain of logic, one that attempts to solve racism somewhere in the middle and ends with the "demon-haunted world of religion", it's useful to clearly define your terms first.
I was using "heritable" as a synonym for "genetically determined." Thanks for the clarification. To be a bit more specific, it is obviously possible to environmentally lower someone's IQ from their genetic potential. Examples include lead poisoning and denial of basic nutrition. Similarly, you can environmentally prevent someone from being able to run as fast as they might genetically have been able to by injuring their legs in various ways in childhood.
in both of those cases, as in all things genetic, expanding the ceiling is a far different matter. There is no known treatment I could have been given to enable me to run a 2 hour marathon. Similarly, there is no known way to cause a 100-IQ person to reliably test at a 140 IQ.
That said, progress is being made on artificial intelligence and genetics, so that could all change.
in both of those cases, as in all things genetic, expanding the ceiling is a far different matter. There is no known treatment I could have been given to enable me to run a 2 hour marathon. Similarly, there is no known way to cause a 100-IQ person to reliably test at a 140 IQ.
That said, progress is being made on artificial intelligence and genetics, so that could all change.
I don't understand how your logic holds together once you concede that heritability doesn't mean "genetically determined". This is the problem with lots of arguments about "heritability" of IQ; heritability is simply the ratio of genetic effects to the total variance in a population. If we're asking whether IQ is genetic, then saying that something is "highly heritable" is simply restating the question.
(I find it helpful to remember that lipstick-wearing is highly heritable despite zero genetic determination, and number of toes isn't very heritable at all despite total genetic determination.)
In particular, you can't convincingly go from discussing the seemingly profound effects acknowledging IQ heritability will have on racism, in order to avoid "demon-haunted" religious arguments, to a shrug and a handwave about genotypic (and epigenetic) effects vs. environmental effects. With due respect to your good-faith attempt to establish a logical baseline to this whole situation, the demons are haunting your argument, not those of people who'd push back on it.
It's an earlier rebuttal and you can find more precise and current ones now, but Ned Block's heritability piece is a good starting point for this stuff (you can just Google for "ned block heritable", the SERP will be dozens of links to it.)
(I find it helpful to remember that lipstick-wearing is highly heritable despite zero genetic determination, and number of toes isn't very heritable at all despite total genetic determination.)
In particular, you can't convincingly go from discussing the seemingly profound effects acknowledging IQ heritability will have on racism, in order to avoid "demon-haunted" religious arguments, to a shrug and a handwave about genotypic (and epigenetic) effects vs. environmental effects. With due respect to your good-faith attempt to establish a logical baseline to this whole situation, the demons are haunting your argument, not those of people who'd push back on it.
It's an earlier rebuttal and you can find more precise and current ones now, but Ned Block's heritability piece is a good starting point for this stuff (you can just Google for "ned block heritable", the SERP will be dozens of links to it.)
Sorry, we're at the thread depth limit here, but in brief, I simply disagree with your assertion that IQ isn't primarily genetic. I enjoyed your exhortation to agree with you ("please reconsider"). It reminded me of one time, in Paris, when two Mormon missionaries said something similar.
I understand you think your view is scientific, but it just isn't. There is plenty of data on many, many traits being genetically determined, and IQ is no different. IQ absolutely has relatively less research, which enables you to poke holes in what is there. The reason there is less research is because of a quasi-religious belief that studying such a thing is "wrong." That belief would not exist if there weren't a substantial fear that such research would show conclusively that people have predetermined genetic ceilings for IQ (as they do for many other traits such as maximum VO2, height, etc.).
I see no convincing argument here that environmental explanations should be the prior. It's just like religion. Activists have essentially outlawed IQ research, then insisted on compelling evidence to change their minds. Such situations remind me of Galileo and his telescope.
The saddest part of all of this is watching society tear itself apart, laboring under the false assumption that the culture is beset by racist boogiemen. While evil people do undoubtedly exist, the vast majority of people are well-meaning. Being honest about IQ research would enable people to see that.
I understand you think your view is scientific, but it just isn't. There is plenty of data on many, many traits being genetically determined, and IQ is no different. IQ absolutely has relatively less research, which enables you to poke holes in what is there. The reason there is less research is because of a quasi-religious belief that studying such a thing is "wrong." That belief would not exist if there weren't a substantial fear that such research would show conclusively that people have predetermined genetic ceilings for IQ (as they do for many other traits such as maximum VO2, height, etc.).
I see no convincing argument here that environmental explanations should be the prior. It's just like religion. Activists have essentially outlawed IQ research, then insisted on compelling evidence to change their minds. Such situations remind me of Galileo and his telescope.
The saddest part of all of this is watching society tear itself apart, laboring under the false assumption that the culture is beset by racist boogiemen. While evil people do undoubtedly exist, the vast majority of people are well-meaning. Being honest about IQ research would enable people to see that.
As you can see, we're not in fact at the thread depth limit.
You suppose IQ to be genetically determined. That's fine, but you stated previously that it was heritable, which is a claim you could marshal evidence for, unlike your current claim. It's for that reason that it's important to distinguish the two concepts. It's you who brought in the claim that the evidence for heritability is "overwhelming". By your new definition of the term, I've reduced "overwhelming" to "hand-wavy" (your new evidence seems to consist of "other things are known to be genetically determined, and research into IQ determination has been "outlawed"). Not great.
It's unsurprising that people are reluctant to talk about this stuff given the level of rigor it's approached with.
You suppose IQ to be genetically determined. That's fine, but you stated previously that it was heritable, which is a claim you could marshal evidence for, unlike your current claim. It's for that reason that it's important to distinguish the two concepts. It's you who brought in the claim that the evidence for heritability is "overwhelming". By your new definition of the term, I've reduced "overwhelming" to "hand-wavy" (your new evidence seems to consist of "other things are known to be genetically determined, and research into IQ determination has been "outlawed"). Not great.
It's unsurprising that people are reluctant to talk about this stuff given the level of rigor it's approached with.
You're a funny person. Have you never even heard of "cancel culture"? The world must be super confusing to people who think the issue with IQ research is "lack of rigor." It's not lack of rigor, it's the (sometimes successful) calls by students to fire tenured professors for being "racists". I wouldn't research it either!
Your first sentence is a complete misread of my comment, so I'm not going to reply. I said exactly the opposite of what you claim I said. Please re-read what I wrote and try again.
Edit:
I read a bit of Ned Block's piece. I believe he more or less immediately dismisses my view as "Extreme geneticism". While I don't agree that different groups in a given country grow up in the same circumstances, I also don't believe this matters much, if at all. If life teaches anything, it's that it's incredibly difficult to construct a machine that absolutely prevents the success of one group or another. Life is diverse and adaptable and finds a way. There are plenty of examples of groups historically facing terrible environments who nonetheless prospered.
Block also complains about a lack of sufficient data on the question of IQ. Fine, but one must immediately ask why there is such a lack of data. And that returns us to the demon-haunted world of quasi-religious opposition to such research.
Bottom line is, if you want to argue for the Rube Goldberg machine of -isms that produce differential outcomes in groups, prove it. I believe that, just as in other areas of human endeavor such as athletics, the prior should be that genetics are the most important input.
Edit:
I read a bit of Ned Block's piece. I believe he more or less immediately dismisses my view as "Extreme geneticism". While I don't agree that different groups in a given country grow up in the same circumstances, I also don't believe this matters much, if at all. If life teaches anything, it's that it's incredibly difficult to construct a machine that absolutely prevents the success of one group or another. Life is diverse and adaptable and finds a way. There are plenty of examples of groups historically facing terrible environments who nonetheless prospered.
Block also complains about a lack of sufficient data on the question of IQ. Fine, but one must immediately ask why there is such a lack of data. And that returns us to the demon-haunted world of quasi-religious opposition to such research.
Bottom line is, if you want to argue for the Rube Goldberg machine of -isms that produce differential outcomes in groups, prove it. I believe that, just as in other areas of human endeavor such as athletics, the prior should be that genetics are the most important input.
You literally just said that you were using "heritability" as a synonym for "genetic determination". No, you can't do that.
We can ask why there isn't evidence of genetic determinism in intelligence, and you can claim it's because of demonic opposition to the research, and I can claim that it's because studies into those genetic connections haven't been productive, but either way, heritability statistics don't give you an answer. It's one thing to suggest that a paucity of results should motivate more studies, but what you're doing is closer to suggesting that a paucity of results is evidence for the claim. Obviously, no.
We can ask why there isn't evidence of genetic determinism in intelligence, and you can claim it's because of demonic opposition to the research, and I can claim that it's because studies into those genetic connections haven't been productive, but either way, heritability statistics don't give you an answer. It's one thing to suggest that a paucity of results should motivate more studies, but what you're doing is closer to suggesting that a paucity of results is evidence for the claim. Obviously, no.
You should read all of Ned Block's piece. It's very good.
He is not just dismissing your view as "extreme geneticism". He literally explains how fallacious it is to conflate heritability with genetic determination. Using that to make judgments about genetic determination of IQ is therefore methodologically flawed and the only intellectual honest course of action is to dismiss these types of judgments outright.
He is not just dismissing your view as "extreme geneticism". He literally explains how fallacious it is to conflate heritability with genetic determination. Using that to make judgments about genetic determination of IQ is therefore methodologically flawed and the only intellectual honest course of action is to dismiss these types of judgments outright.
sfblah(3)
We've reached the maxiumum thread depth, but in brief: Your two comments directly contradict one another. You wrote:
> I don't understand how your logic holds together once you concede that heritability doesn't mean "genetically determined".
And you wrote:
> You literally just said that you were using "heritability" as a synonym for "genetic determination". No, you can't do that.
I'm not sure which sentence I'm supposed to take as you saying what you mean, but yes, I can say I'm using "heritability" as a synonym for "genetic determination."
And, of course there is plenty of evidence that IQ is genetic. That's most of the reason why it's become a taboo area of research. If people were sure it was a waste of time, they'd just tell researchers to go ahead and check. Instead, they taboo it because they're afraid of what it would mean for their view of society if it turned out to be true, which it surely is.
As I mentioned in another thread, your claim that it's not genetic should not be the prior here. That would be like me claiming that people's maximum height being environmental should be the prior. It's just preposterous. Of course physical traits are primarily genetic. The brain is a physical object, therefore its structure is primarily genetic.
> I don't understand how your logic holds together once you concede that heritability doesn't mean "genetically determined".
And you wrote:
> You literally just said that you were using "heritability" as a synonym for "genetic determination". No, you can't do that.
I'm not sure which sentence I'm supposed to take as you saying what you mean, but yes, I can say I'm using "heritability" as a synonym for "genetic determination."
And, of course there is plenty of evidence that IQ is genetic. That's most of the reason why it's become a taboo area of research. If people were sure it was a waste of time, they'd just tell researchers to go ahead and check. Instead, they taboo it because they're afraid of what it would mean for their view of society if it turned out to be true, which it surely is.
As I mentioned in another thread, your claim that it's not genetic should not be the prior here. That would be like me claiming that people's maximum height being environmental should be the prior. It's just preposterous. Of course physical traits are primarily genetic. The brain is a physical object, therefore its structure is primarily genetic.
I mean, you can say it, but (a) you're flatly and obviously wrong, and (b) what you're saying is extremely misleading, because there is a lot of research demonstrating heritability of IQ, and none of it establishes genetic determination of IQ. To redefine such an important term flips the status bit from good faith discussion to something else. I'd like to assume good faith! So: reconsider.
Later
You've extensively edited your comment. In response to those edits: if you look back at my comments, I think you'll see that I haven't made a claim about genetic determinism at all, only that the evidence you've presented doesn't support it.
Later
You've extensively edited your comment. In response to those edits: if you look back at my comments, I think you'll see that I haven't made a claim about genetic determinism at all, only that the evidence you've presented doesn't support it.
Nothing can ever establish that intelligence is determined by genetics, because environment always happens to you after genetics do - if it's not affecting your intelligence that just means you've got the wrong environment. (Other factors come into causation when you hold the environment constant, but nobody ever says that!)
Or in other words, the reason you're not smarter is because nobody's invented a surgery to make you smarter yet. And the reason you're not less smart is that nobody's hit you over the head with a rock. If either of those scenarios happened, your ancestry wouldn't get to object much.
Or in other words, the reason you're not smarter is because nobody's invented a surgery to make you smarter yet. And the reason you're not less smart is that nobody's hit you over the head with a rock. If either of those scenarios happened, your ancestry wouldn't get to object much.
Great arguments. Can you give an example of an environment that would enable a cat to play chess as well as me? No? Then there must be a genetic component to IQ.
We are actually at the thread limit. Here's how it works: You can reply to me, but I can't reply to you, since your message is the one that causes us to hit the limit.
I don't think we're really having a productive discussion here, since we're talking past each other, but so I'll just reiterate a key point you're ignoring:
It is virtually impossible to research IQ in Western universities, and doing so risks a loss of tenure.
Now, you're asking for rigor in proving to you that IQ is genetic. I'm arguing that genetic determination of IQ should be the prior, thus a priori no rigor is needed. And, the environmentalists should be saddled with the necessity of disproving genetic determination, not the other way round. You offer no refutation of this argument.
But, your demand for rigor is already preposterous on its face, because researching this topic is virtually impossible! And, those who do research it are immediately slandered as white supremacists and targeted with methodological critiques that, if applied equally to all social sciences, would sink essentially all well-meaning studies in this area.
I genuinely don't understand what mental gymnastics people go through to convince themselves that, in the face of essentially every other important human trait being genetically determined (even sexual orientation!), IQ is somehow exempt. My best guess it's a consequence of wanting to "belong" in a society that has rendered my views taboo. That was a key function of Catholicism in the 1400s in Europe. Groupthink has its place.
In any event, if you reply, please specifically explain to me why I should take your demands for more research data seriously when people who argue what you're arguing have made such research unfundable.
I don't think we're really having a productive discussion here, since we're talking past each other, but so I'll just reiterate a key point you're ignoring:
It is virtually impossible to research IQ in Western universities, and doing so risks a loss of tenure.
Now, you're asking for rigor in proving to you that IQ is genetic. I'm arguing that genetic determination of IQ should be the prior, thus a priori no rigor is needed. And, the environmentalists should be saddled with the necessity of disproving genetic determination, not the other way round. You offer no refutation of this argument.
But, your demand for rigor is already preposterous on its face, because researching this topic is virtually impossible! And, those who do research it are immediately slandered as white supremacists and targeted with methodological critiques that, if applied equally to all social sciences, would sink essentially all well-meaning studies in this area.
I genuinely don't understand what mental gymnastics people go through to convince themselves that, in the face of essentially every other important human trait being genetically determined (even sexual orientation!), IQ is somehow exempt. My best guess it's a consequence of wanting to "belong" in a society that has rendered my views taboo. That was a key function of Catholicism in the 1400s in Europe. Groupthink has its place.
In any event, if you reply, please specifically explain to me why I should take your demands for more research data seriously when people who argue what you're arguing have made such research unfundable.
I assure you there is no such thread limit (or if there is, we aren't close to it).
You suppose me to be attempting to refute an argument that IQ is genetically determined. I don't have to do that. No valid argument has been presented that it is. Your original argument supposed that the evidence for genetic determination was "overwhelming", but you believed that because you mistook the term "heritability" as a synonym for "genetic", when it is in fact a ratio "genetic/everything".
As for research funding: you also can't get a grant to prove that the Earth is flat, and that fact is persuasive to some people, who have taken to renaming the atmosphere the "atmosflat". Generally, you want your logic to be stronger than that of flat-Earthers.
That doesn't make your supposition that IQ is genetically determined wrong (I think it's wrong, but don't pretend to have demonstrated that). It just makes your logic faulty.
You suppose me to be attempting to refute an argument that IQ is genetically determined. I don't have to do that. No valid argument has been presented that it is. Your original argument supposed that the evidence for genetic determination was "overwhelming", but you believed that because you mistook the term "heritability" as a synonym for "genetic", when it is in fact a ratio "genetic/everything".
As for research funding: you also can't get a grant to prove that the Earth is flat, and that fact is persuasive to some people, who have taken to renaming the atmosphere the "atmosflat". Generally, you want your logic to be stronger than that of flat-Earthers.
That doesn't make your supposition that IQ is genetically determined wrong (I think it's wrong, but don't pretend to have demonstrated that). It just makes your logic faulty.
(Here, I'll demonstrate.)
For completeness, it appears HN prevents you from replying to a post until it's been there for something like 15 minutes. I mistakenly interpreted that as a thread limit.
Responding to your message below. It is the case, as you can see in this screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/q0VjGgJ
Note the lack of a reply button. You must be a real hoot in person.
Responding to your message below. It is the case, as you can see in this screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/q0VjGgJ
Note the lack of a reply button. You must be a real hoot in person.
> I find it helpful to remember that lipstick-wearing is highly heritable despite zero genetic determination
I don't understand what is being claimed. Are you suggesting that twin studies show (or would show) that children inherit lipstick-wearing behavior from their parents, even when raised apart from them?
If this behavior is inherited, but is not genetic, what is the claimed mechanism by which it is inherited?
I don't understand what is being claimed. Are you suggesting that twin studies show (or would show) that children inherit lipstick-wearing behavior from their parents, even when raised apart from them?
If this behavior is inherited, but is not genetic, what is the claimed mechanism by which it is inherited?
They are raised in a similar (or even the same) culture. The environment is a pretty powerful driver for inheritance. Genes is not the end all be all of things that are inherited across generations.
But heritability is a statistic that is specifically designed to distinguish between genetic and environmental factors. A trait whose variance has no genetic influence would have 0 heritability, unless I am missing something.
> Suppose you buy a bag of seed corn from a hardware store. This is not some sort of fancy cloned corn, but ordinary genetically varied corn of the sort that farmers planted long before there was a science of genetics. Grow one handful of it in a carefully controlled environment in which the seeds get uniform illumination and uniform nutrient solution. The corn plants will vary in height, and because the environment is uniform, the heritability of height will be 100 percent. Now take another handful of corn from the same bag, and grow it in a similarly uniform environment but with a uniformly poor nutrient solution. Again, the plants will vary in height, but all will be stunted. Once more the heritability of height is 100 percent. Despite the 100 percent heritabilities of height within each group, the difference in height between the groups is entirely environmentally caused. So we can have total heritability within groups, substantial variation between groups, but no genetic difference between the groups.
https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/230/1/19...
https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/230/1/19...
Heritability is the ratio of genetically-produced variation to total variation in some population. Overwhelmingly people who wear lipstick have a clear genetic difference from those who don't (XX vs. XY). It's a degenerate example meant to illustrate the point: heritability doesn't answer the question of genetic influence, but rather reframes it.
Now that we agree on what you mean by heritable, can you clarify what you mean by intelligence?
In traditional psychometrics intelligence is usually operationally defined in terms of the tests them selves. These tests correlate broadly with SAT scores and we can probably agree that disabilities and environments exists which gives people obvious disadvantage when taking the SATs, and that those people should be accommodated accordingly.
Given that you accept the operationally defined term for intelligence, how should we treat group difference in IQ any differently than how we treat (or aspire to treat) group difference in SATs? In other words, why should we care about IQ at all?
In traditional psychometrics intelligence is usually operationally defined in terms of the tests them selves. These tests correlate broadly with SAT scores and we can probably agree that disabilities and environments exists which gives people obvious disadvantage when taking the SATs, and that those people should be accommodated accordingly.
Given that you accept the operationally defined term for intelligence, how should we treat group difference in IQ any differently than how we treat (or aspire to treat) group difference in SATs? In other words, why should we care about IQ at all?
Good questions.
I believe it is worth studying and debating the definition of intelligence. I believe modern IQ tests do a reasonable job of crystallizing a value which is both meaningful and useful. In general, the goal is to quantify an individual's mental potential, which might be understood as their processor speed, amount of RAM in their brain, pre-programmed learning algorithm, and so forth. As with any concept in social sciences it's difficult to define it perfectly, but I believe it's worth the effort.
As for why we should care?
1. Western societies spend incredible amounts of resources on programs to equalize opportunity for people. Large fractions of this money in most western nations are allocated based on what I view to be a misunderstanding of what enables a person to prosper financially or otherwise. Examples include universal preschool and the like. Accepting the reality of IQ would assist in eliminating ineffective programs and allocating capital more effectively.
2. The quasi-religious doctrine of universal racism is an existential risk to modern liberal democracy, and it is built fundamentally on the false premise that IQ is environmental or doesn't exist. Eliminating that premise would allow consideration of other explanations for differential outcomes between groups that don't rely on accusations of hatred and bigotry.
3. Major research institutions across America and abroad, as well as large corporations, risk decreasing the rate of technological and economic progress by implementing programs built on a quasi-religious premise that people are treated vastly unequally for reasons having nothing to do with their capability. Accepting IQ as a valid science and explanation would not only de-taboo important potential areas of research, it would eliminate costly and wasteful efforts which will never bear fruit, as they seek to address problems which don't even exist.
4. An incorrect understanding of the causes behind achievement gaps provides onramps to corrupt political participants who take advantage of the basic logical fallacy that "false statements can imply anything" to redirect funding and attention away from pressing issues. Concretely, this results in death and violence resulting from failure to properly apply the law and failure to differentiate between what is true and what is false. "Without vision, a people perish."
5. Acceptance of IQ enables creation of tiered magnet schools, trade schools and other opportunities which benefit all of society, particularly those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder but who test high. Instead, at least in America, the trend is toward the elimination of all magnet programs because they are "racist." The harms here are obvious, and they all stem from an unwillingness to even consider that IQ exists and might be genetic.
6. Refusal to discuss IQ leads to it being something that is whispered about behind closed doors, but cannot be discussed openly. This directly harms those who are often (and often wrongly) associated with groups that might be thought to have lower IQs. Bringing the reality of IQ into the open enables a real conversation about it, and it allows confronting racists on much more solid ground, since the debate is no longer undergirded with taboos and untruths.
7. Acceptance of IQ allows targeting social programs toward the truly needy, accounting for the reality that in modern human life, IQ is the variable that best correlates with material success. This would eliminate injustices like affirmative action programs going to wealthy immigrants from other nations instead of those truly in need. It levels the playing field and could serve as a basis for rational policy such as targeted universal basic income.
8. AI research will ultimately force us to accept IQ as largely genetic. Accepting IQ now will avoid some sort of schism in the coming decades over this question, and allow a more rational discourse over AI's role in our lives and how to best harness it and avoid its risks.
Is that sufficient?
I believe it is worth studying and debating the definition of intelligence. I believe modern IQ tests do a reasonable job of crystallizing a value which is both meaningful and useful. In general, the goal is to quantify an individual's mental potential, which might be understood as their processor speed, amount of RAM in their brain, pre-programmed learning algorithm, and so forth. As with any concept in social sciences it's difficult to define it perfectly, but I believe it's worth the effort.
As for why we should care?
1. Western societies spend incredible amounts of resources on programs to equalize opportunity for people. Large fractions of this money in most western nations are allocated based on what I view to be a misunderstanding of what enables a person to prosper financially or otherwise. Examples include universal preschool and the like. Accepting the reality of IQ would assist in eliminating ineffective programs and allocating capital more effectively.
2. The quasi-religious doctrine of universal racism is an existential risk to modern liberal democracy, and it is built fundamentally on the false premise that IQ is environmental or doesn't exist. Eliminating that premise would allow consideration of other explanations for differential outcomes between groups that don't rely on accusations of hatred and bigotry.
3. Major research institutions across America and abroad, as well as large corporations, risk decreasing the rate of technological and economic progress by implementing programs built on a quasi-religious premise that people are treated vastly unequally for reasons having nothing to do with their capability. Accepting IQ as a valid science and explanation would not only de-taboo important potential areas of research, it would eliminate costly and wasteful efforts which will never bear fruit, as they seek to address problems which don't even exist.
4. An incorrect understanding of the causes behind achievement gaps provides onramps to corrupt political participants who take advantage of the basic logical fallacy that "false statements can imply anything" to redirect funding and attention away from pressing issues. Concretely, this results in death and violence resulting from failure to properly apply the law and failure to differentiate between what is true and what is false. "Without vision, a people perish."
5. Acceptance of IQ enables creation of tiered magnet schools, trade schools and other opportunities which benefit all of society, particularly those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder but who test high. Instead, at least in America, the trend is toward the elimination of all magnet programs because they are "racist." The harms here are obvious, and they all stem from an unwillingness to even consider that IQ exists and might be genetic.
6. Refusal to discuss IQ leads to it being something that is whispered about behind closed doors, but cannot be discussed openly. This directly harms those who are often (and often wrongly) associated with groups that might be thought to have lower IQs. Bringing the reality of IQ into the open enables a real conversation about it, and it allows confronting racists on much more solid ground, since the debate is no longer undergirded with taboos and untruths.
7. Acceptance of IQ allows targeting social programs toward the truly needy, accounting for the reality that in modern human life, IQ is the variable that best correlates with material success. This would eliminate injustices like affirmative action programs going to wealthy immigrants from other nations instead of those truly in need. It levels the playing field and could serve as a basis for rational policy such as targeted universal basic income.
8. AI research will ultimately force us to accept IQ as largely genetic. Accepting IQ now will avoid some sort of schism in the coming decades over this question, and allow a more rational discourse over AI's role in our lives and how to best harness it and avoid its risks.
Is that sufficient?
> In general, the goal is to quantify an individual's mental potential, which might be understood as their processor speed, amount of RAM in their brain, pre-programmed learning algorithm, and so forth.
If this is the goal, and we want to measure specific physical capabilities we know exist, why do we do it entirely by having people sit down and take tests and not by measuring their brain directly?
(It's because we don't know what the specific physical capabilities are, which is why we're pretending a descriptive statistic is causative.)
If this is the goal, and we want to measure specific physical capabilities we know exist, why do we do it entirely by having people sit down and take tests and not by measuring their brain directly?
(It's because we don't know what the specific physical capabilities are, which is why we're pretending a descriptive statistic is causative.)
Excellent observation. What your parent is describing is basically cognitive psychology, a healthy science making plenty of new observations, conceiving new models which predict behavior better and better, models that are than used in other fields, or inspire new science (particularly in neuropsychology).
Cognitive psychologists don’t use IQ (nor intelligence for that matter) in their models. Psychologists that do use IQ are doing so in scientific isolation (which is a red flag) and are stuck with the same models that were created in the 1970s, a sign of a dying field.
Cognitive psychologists don’t use IQ (nor intelligence for that matter) in their models. Psychologists that do use IQ are doing so in scientific isolation (which is a red flag) and are stuck with the same models that were created in the 1970s, a sign of a dying field.
I mean, just google `cognitive psychology iq` and you'll see that's false. It is used when folks can "get away with it." The issue isn't that there's some principled rejection of intelligence testing. It's that western elites have found it convenient to advance the alternate theory that differential outcomes are because of systemic oppression.
Because we don't know how to do that yet. But, eventually we will, and that will put this matter to rest.
> Examples include universal preschool and the like. Accepting the reality of IQ would assist in eliminating ineffective programs and allocating capital more effectively.
This assertion is rather indicative of the social attitudes that are paired with IQ-obsessed worldviews. Western societies might attempt to equalize opportunity based on the belief in the equality of outcomes now, but these sorts of programs were effected long ago on the basis of egalitarian ideals that sprang from the Enlightenment. Even if IQ revealed any such "biotruths" (which would be debated to the end of time anyway), it would not reverse centuries of Western thought which is based on equal opportunity.
In short, this view completely misunderstands how Western society actually responds to differing abilities between people. It's akin to supposing that society would tear down wheelchair ramps in order to allocate resources to those who can walk unassisted.
It's not even how many non-Western societies handle inequality among populations. China has had preferential treatment to ethnic minorities even back in imperial times:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_China
And India, even back to the days of the Raj:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India
> incorrect understanding of the causes behind achievement gaps provides onramps to corrupt political participants who take advantage of the basic logical fallacy that "false statements can imply anything" to redirect funding and attention away from pressing issues.
It's quite naive of you to suppose that any pseudoscientific evidence to the contrary wouldn't still be used to support those positions. If anything, in the hypothetical world where differences were shown to be immutable from birth, it would only strengthen the call to allocate resources to those who are less fortunate. It might normalize such a position in perpetuity, as it would then become a problem born not only of recent centuries of exploitation, but evolutionary timescales. Beware your faith in biotruths, for they can be just as easily weaponized against you.
> AI research will ultimately force us to accept IQ as largely genetic.
A non sequitur as confidently stated as it is vapid. One could say an AI wrote it, but ChatGPT is at least smart enough to hedge its bets.
This assertion is rather indicative of the social attitudes that are paired with IQ-obsessed worldviews. Western societies might attempt to equalize opportunity based on the belief in the equality of outcomes now, but these sorts of programs were effected long ago on the basis of egalitarian ideals that sprang from the Enlightenment. Even if IQ revealed any such "biotruths" (which would be debated to the end of time anyway), it would not reverse centuries of Western thought which is based on equal opportunity.
In short, this view completely misunderstands how Western society actually responds to differing abilities between people. It's akin to supposing that society would tear down wheelchair ramps in order to allocate resources to those who can walk unassisted.
It's not even how many non-Western societies handle inequality among populations. China has had preferential treatment to ethnic minorities even back in imperial times:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_China
And India, even back to the days of the Raj:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India
> incorrect understanding of the causes behind achievement gaps provides onramps to corrupt political participants who take advantage of the basic logical fallacy that "false statements can imply anything" to redirect funding and attention away from pressing issues.
It's quite naive of you to suppose that any pseudoscientific evidence to the contrary wouldn't still be used to support those positions. If anything, in the hypothetical world where differences were shown to be immutable from birth, it would only strengthen the call to allocate resources to those who are less fortunate. It might normalize such a position in perpetuity, as it would then become a problem born not only of recent centuries of exploitation, but evolutionary timescales. Beware your faith in biotruths, for they can be just as easily weaponized against you.
> AI research will ultimately force us to accept IQ as largely genetic.
A non sequitur as confidently stated as it is vapid. One could say an AI wrote it, but ChatGPT is at least smart enough to hedge its bets.
I’m gonna merge the thread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35518975 where you said:
> * Encouraging higher IQ parents to have more children through subsidies, thereby increasing the likelihood of future technological innovations assisting all mankind.
This is a schoolbook example of a eugenicist argument. Are you sure you want to go there?
I’m gonna assume that you meant something different than what I took from this, and you are not a eugenicists. However I do want to speak a little about why eugenicists are wrong.
The problem with trying to select for IQ is that there is no broad consensus about what constitutes a good intelligent trait. There are thousands of traits that work differently in thousands of situations. When there is no consensus, somebody must take authority. And if that authority has nefarious reasons, than we are pretty screwed. More likely no such trait, nor sets of traits exist. As Charles Darwin him self demonstrated, there is value in diversity. By not selecting for a single trait, and allowing our cognitive abilities to vary as much as possible, there is way more chances of something beneficial to our species to develop and be selected for.
Now this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t accommodate for disabilities. However it isn’t 1908 any more. We have better tests and metrics to detect disabilities, and we have better means of accommodating. IQ has run its course. We don’t need it anymore. The science has advanced, and the theory is obsolete.
And this ties to the above post, and other posts you’ve done in this tree.
You seem to think there is some scientific is pretty sound and there is some suppression going on:
> 6. Refusal to discuss IQ leads to it being something that is whispered about behind closed doors, but cannot be discussed openly. This directly harms those who are often (and often wrongly) associated with groups that might be thought to have lower IQs. Bringing the reality of IQ into the open enables a real conversation about it, and it allows confronting racists on much more solid ground, since the debate is no longer undergirded with taboos and untruths.
If you think that, you’d be wrong. Modern psychology looks for behavior, if a model predicts behavior, your pretty good. IQ does no such thing. So perhaps it is sociology, not psychology and is looking for population statistics, well... IQ is pretty bat at that too. There are number of other metrics which does that better. The simplest one being school grades. And to apply Occam’s razor, why invent an entire new construct intelligence when grades suffice.
We don’t not discuss IQ. It has been done extensively for well over a century now. and IQ has simply lost to better theories. There is no taboo, just sore loosers that keep on and on about a theory that holds no relevance any more. Just look at The Bell Curve it’s been almost 30 years and we are still talking about it, despite it being a schoolbook example of how to do bad science. We finished talking about N-rays and phrenology a long time ago, it is time we do so with IQ as well.
IQ is dead, it was never anything more than a bad theory which took way too long formally die.
> * Encouraging higher IQ parents to have more children through subsidies, thereby increasing the likelihood of future technological innovations assisting all mankind.
This is a schoolbook example of a eugenicist argument. Are you sure you want to go there?
I’m gonna assume that you meant something different than what I took from this, and you are not a eugenicists. However I do want to speak a little about why eugenicists are wrong.
The problem with trying to select for IQ is that there is no broad consensus about what constitutes a good intelligent trait. There are thousands of traits that work differently in thousands of situations. When there is no consensus, somebody must take authority. And if that authority has nefarious reasons, than we are pretty screwed. More likely no such trait, nor sets of traits exist. As Charles Darwin him self demonstrated, there is value in diversity. By not selecting for a single trait, and allowing our cognitive abilities to vary as much as possible, there is way more chances of something beneficial to our species to develop and be selected for.
Now this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t accommodate for disabilities. However it isn’t 1908 any more. We have better tests and metrics to detect disabilities, and we have better means of accommodating. IQ has run its course. We don’t need it anymore. The science has advanced, and the theory is obsolete.
And this ties to the above post, and other posts you’ve done in this tree.
You seem to think there is some scientific is pretty sound and there is some suppression going on:
> 6. Refusal to discuss IQ leads to it being something that is whispered about behind closed doors, but cannot be discussed openly. This directly harms those who are often (and often wrongly) associated with groups that might be thought to have lower IQs. Bringing the reality of IQ into the open enables a real conversation about it, and it allows confronting racists on much more solid ground, since the debate is no longer undergirded with taboos and untruths.
If you think that, you’d be wrong. Modern psychology looks for behavior, if a model predicts behavior, your pretty good. IQ does no such thing. So perhaps it is sociology, not psychology and is looking for population statistics, well... IQ is pretty bat at that too. There are number of other metrics which does that better. The simplest one being school grades. And to apply Occam’s razor, why invent an entire new construct intelligence when grades suffice.
We don’t not discuss IQ. It has been done extensively for well over a century now. and IQ has simply lost to better theories. There is no taboo, just sore loosers that keep on and on about a theory that holds no relevance any more. Just look at The Bell Curve it’s been almost 30 years and we are still talking about it, despite it being a schoolbook example of how to do bad science. We finished talking about N-rays and phrenology a long time ago, it is time we do so with IQ as well.
IQ is dead, it was never anything more than a bad theory which took way too long formally die.
Twin studies are hard to explain through any means other than genetics I've seen an analysis of them as recently as 2015, not just in the 70s and 80s.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270739/
>Your anecdotal evidence of high IQ parents (ugh!) having high IQ children is the same anecdotal evidence that sociologists have been describing for decades that high SES parents have high SES children
No, I've seen people who grew up with low SES but had parents/grandparents who were consistently A students or were employed in prestigious intellectual jobs, and lo and behold, they ended up doing better in things like school than you would expect for somebody of their SES.
>Bias, racism
I'm just going to turn this around on you. Why should I not believe you're bias and racist and simply want to disprove IQ testing so as to undermine the social position and access to societal resources certain groups have as a result of IQ testing and things like it such as standardised testing? There's plenty of profit in painting certain groups as oppressors whose success is actually just robbery, and not an accident of genetic difference, since this consequently justifies racist measures to correct this inequity. People can benefit from such notions both directly and socially through association with a popular movement.
I'm pretty sympathetic to the idea of IQ lacking validity because I can't make strongly convincing arguments that IQ predicts anything besides academic success and it's hard to then argue our measures of academic success aren't themselves arbitrary and disconnected from practical utility. It's arguably too hard and too arbitrary to distill "intelligence" down to a few standardised tests and prove those tests have cross-domain validity.
I don't have much sympathy to the idea that IQ is not heritable based on nothing but ad hominem and the idea this position is anti-racist because it's not what I read from the evidence.
>Your anecdotal evidence of high IQ parents (ugh!) having high IQ children is the same anecdotal evidence that sociologists have been describing for decades that high SES parents have high SES children
No, I've seen people who grew up with low SES but had parents/grandparents who were consistently A students or were employed in prestigious intellectual jobs, and lo and behold, they ended up doing better in things like school than you would expect for somebody of their SES.
>Bias, racism
I'm just going to turn this around on you. Why should I not believe you're bias and racist and simply want to disprove IQ testing so as to undermine the social position and access to societal resources certain groups have as a result of IQ testing and things like it such as standardised testing? There's plenty of profit in painting certain groups as oppressors whose success is actually just robbery, and not an accident of genetic difference, since this consequently justifies racist measures to correct this inequity. People can benefit from such notions both directly and socially through association with a popular movement.
I'm pretty sympathetic to the idea of IQ lacking validity because I can't make strongly convincing arguments that IQ predicts anything besides academic success and it's hard to then argue our measures of academic success aren't themselves arbitrary and disconnected from practical utility. It's arguably too hard and too arbitrary to distill "intelligence" down to a few standardised tests and prove those tests have cross-domain validity.
I don't have much sympathy to the idea that IQ is not heritable based on nothing but ad hominem and the idea this position is anti-racist because it's not what I read from the evidence.
[deleted]
> Most psychologists today believe that the supposed heritability was observed because of bias within the research.
This is the crux of your comment and its a huge statement. Do you have evidence supporting this claim?
This is the crux of your comment and its a huge statement. Do you have evidence supporting this claim?
From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ):
Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis.[11][12][13][14] The scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups.[15][16][17][18][19][20]
And a quick search on Google Scholar:
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0033-295X.1...
https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/230/1/19...
Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis.[11][12][13][14] The scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups.[15][16][17][18][19][20]
And a quick search on Google Scholar:
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0033-295X.1...
https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/230/1/19...
> Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis
Sure, but this is not the claim I originally quoted. I was taking about heritability, and you're taking now about disparities between groups.
Nevertheless it seems you agree the heritability of IQ is well established, which you were denying originally.
Sure, but this is not the claim I originally quoted. I was taking about heritability, and you're taking now about disparities between groups.
Nevertheless it seems you agree the heritability of IQ is well established, which you were denying originally.
No I don’t agree that heritability of IQ is well established.
First of all I do not believe that IQ is a good metric for intelligence, nor that intelligence is a useful scientific construct.
Secondly, there are whole subthreads here that go into the nuances of what heritability means for measured IQ. From what I’ve gathered is that findings which assign 50-80% of the variance to inheritance neglect to account for covariance, or use very biased assumptions about G×E correlations or G×E interactions which skewes the results in favor of genetic explanations, i.e. they are biased.
First of all I do not believe that IQ is a good metric for intelligence, nor that intelligence is a useful scientific construct.
Secondly, there are whole subthreads here that go into the nuances of what heritability means for measured IQ. From what I’ve gathered is that findings which assign 50-80% of the variance to inheritance neglect to account for covariance, or use very biased assumptions about G×E correlations or G×E interactions which skewes the results in favor of genetic explanations, i.e. they are biased.
> No I don’t agree that heritability of IQ is well established
> Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component ...
You have written both statements ...
> Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component ...
You have written both statements ...
I don’t understand? The second statement is a quote from wikipedia, and does not match my believes. It does not go into the nuance of what heritability entails, nor does it assign the large percentages which IQ advocates do. My believe can very well be:
It has been shown from biased studies that IQ has a large hereditary component, where these studies failed to account for genetic × environmental interaction and covariation.
By the way the wikipedia article it self goes into these nuances and caveats. Reading it, it is pretty clear that there may be a large inheritance factor to IQ, while at the same time large IQ differences between individuals have no genetic basis.
It has been shown from biased studies that IQ has a large hereditary component, where these studies failed to account for genetic × environmental interaction and covariation.
By the way the wikipedia article it self goes into these nuances and caveats. Reading it, it is pretty clear that there may be a large inheritance factor to IQ, while at the same time large IQ differences between individuals have no genetic basis.
Have these heritability studies been done in other countries where some of these biases might not exist?
There aren't that many, but here's one:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
It's a twin study. Here's a quote: "Mean IQ scores were modestly higher among those from higher SES backgrounds, but the magnitude of genetic influences on IQ was uniformly high across the range of SES." SES means "socio-economic status".
Honestly, the evidence for heritability of IQ is very strong. Arguing against it, in my opinion, borders on arguing that vaccines don't work. I actually understand why people do it (there's a lot of very bad history in how IQ data has been used). But I just think it's more important in the long run to tell the truth and find solutions based on the truth.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
It's a twin study. Here's a quote: "Mean IQ scores were modestly higher among those from higher SES backgrounds, but the magnitude of genetic influences on IQ was uniformly high across the range of SES." SES means "socio-economic status".
Honestly, the evidence for heritability of IQ is very strong. Arguing against it, in my opinion, borders on arguing that vaccines don't work. I actually understand why people do it (there's a lot of very bad history in how IQ data has been used). But I just think it's more important in the long run to tell the truth and find solutions based on the truth.
> Arguing against it, in my opinion, borders on arguing that vaccines don't work.
This is an interesting opinion. So vaccine research has produced a number of successful trials, the research is keeps furthering more knowledge, we develop new techniques, new models, new successful predictions, and new products which yield more successful trials. I consider this a healthy field of science and engineering.
Now how does IQ research fair next to vaccine research. The first IQ test was authored in 1908, not to measure intelligence among populations, but to assess learning disability. Since then IQ researchers have been trying to prove that IQ differences exists among populations. They have created and standardized new types of IQ tests that are supposed to show this difference exists. They have spent the past 100 years doing this, using fancy statistical methods, but have so far failed to convince the other fields of science (especially other fields within psychology), nor have they convinced policy makers (though they were pretty close during the eugenics craze). They have no theory of behavior other then this hypothetical general intelligence. They have no models that predict behavior, they have no products other then their intelligence tests, the tests are constantly criticized, have no successful double blind trials to show for them selves. The techniques are the same as in the 1970s, just plain old pen and paper tests with some factor analysis to spot the correlation they were hoping to spot (some would say, preconditioned or biased to spot).
If I were to be generous I would categorize IQ research among string theory as a scientific dead end. They had a theory, it didn’t go anywhere, and now the rest of the field has moved on. However given the history of IQ research and their ties to the eugenics movement, I’m not gonna give them this benefits. I believe IQ research, with the exception of Alfred Binet him self, was always about putting people in racial categories to show that one group was superior to another, with a made up construct they call intelligence.
This is an interesting opinion. So vaccine research has produced a number of successful trials, the research is keeps furthering more knowledge, we develop new techniques, new models, new successful predictions, and new products which yield more successful trials. I consider this a healthy field of science and engineering.
Now how does IQ research fair next to vaccine research. The first IQ test was authored in 1908, not to measure intelligence among populations, but to assess learning disability. Since then IQ researchers have been trying to prove that IQ differences exists among populations. They have created and standardized new types of IQ tests that are supposed to show this difference exists. They have spent the past 100 years doing this, using fancy statistical methods, but have so far failed to convince the other fields of science (especially other fields within psychology), nor have they convinced policy makers (though they were pretty close during the eugenics craze). They have no theory of behavior other then this hypothetical general intelligence. They have no models that predict behavior, they have no products other then their intelligence tests, the tests are constantly criticized, have no successful double blind trials to show for them selves. The techniques are the same as in the 1970s, just plain old pen and paper tests with some factor analysis to spot the correlation they were hoping to spot (some would say, preconditioned or biased to spot).
If I were to be generous I would categorize IQ research among string theory as a scientific dead end. They had a theory, it didn’t go anywhere, and now the rest of the field has moved on. However given the history of IQ research and their ties to the eugenics movement, I’m not gonna give them this benefits. I believe IQ research, with the exception of Alfred Binet him self, was always about putting people in racial categories to show that one group was superior to another, with a made up construct they call intelligence.
IQ testing has numerous applications. For example:
* SAT tests largely amount to IQ tests and are used extensively for college admissions in the US. College degrees from top US universities remain the most sought after degrees in the world.
* Magnet schools in urban areas regularly utilize IQ tests or their equivalents to elevate students into advanced coursework. This enables students to rise above their socioeconomic status.
* European secondary schools regularly use tests that correlate with IQ tests to track students into programs leading to universities versus technical schools. These tests help coordinate society and deploy human capital where it is most needed.
* Even the US military uses IQ tests to avoid accepting recruits who don't meet a certain standard. This aids in ensuring the security of western nations.
IQ testing could be used in additional areas, such as:
* Encouraging higher IQ parents to have more children through subsidies, thereby increasing the likelihood of future technological innovations assisting all mankind.
* Assisting in identifying individuals who need more support from society.
* Better understanding the causes behind social ills like poverty, drug addiction, homelessness and the like. Understanding that an individual's IQ is a stronger determinant of economic outcome than other variables, such as race, is a step toward a society with more solidarity and less friction.
I appreciate that you have a bias against intelligence testing, and I understand its genesis (your mention of the "eugenics craze" makes that clear). I'm suggesting society aim toward an enlightened view of these things where people's IQs don't identify them as "greater" or "lesser". Wishing IQ away is unlikely to work, particularly in a world about to experience the arrival of super-intelligent AI systems.
* SAT tests largely amount to IQ tests and are used extensively for college admissions in the US. College degrees from top US universities remain the most sought after degrees in the world.
* Magnet schools in urban areas regularly utilize IQ tests or their equivalents to elevate students into advanced coursework. This enables students to rise above their socioeconomic status.
* European secondary schools regularly use tests that correlate with IQ tests to track students into programs leading to universities versus technical schools. These tests help coordinate society and deploy human capital where it is most needed.
* Even the US military uses IQ tests to avoid accepting recruits who don't meet a certain standard. This aids in ensuring the security of western nations.
IQ testing could be used in additional areas, such as:
* Encouraging higher IQ parents to have more children through subsidies, thereby increasing the likelihood of future technological innovations assisting all mankind.
* Assisting in identifying individuals who need more support from society.
* Better understanding the causes behind social ills like poverty, drug addiction, homelessness and the like. Understanding that an individual's IQ is a stronger determinant of economic outcome than other variables, such as race, is a step toward a society with more solidarity and less friction.
I appreciate that you have a bias against intelligence testing, and I understand its genesis (your mention of the "eugenics craze" makes that clear). I'm suggesting society aim toward an enlightened view of these things where people's IQs don't identify them as "greater" or "lesser". Wishing IQ away is unlikely to work, particularly in a world about to experience the arrival of super-intelligent AI systems.
The geocentric model also had numerous applications. A standard's widespread adoption speaks nothing to its utility.
> Encouraging higher IQ parents to have more children
I'm no expert but this sounds exactly like eugenics or at least engineering the gene pool.
Do you really view lower IQ individuals as equal if you want them to have less children (at least as a ratio of total births)? The slippery slope argument would be that you're a few steps from sterilizations.
Are we sure that "super-intelligent AI systems" wouldn't displace intelligent individuals? Seems like they'd certainly be the ones wielding a middle-ground (say, GPT-6/7/8) most effectively but if an AI reached 100% coverage of human skills (imo unlikely in our life time) we wouldn't need any theoretical physicists.
Do you really view lower IQ individuals as equal if you want them to have less children (at least as a ratio of total births)? The slippery slope argument would be that you're a few steps from sterilizations.
Are we sure that "super-intelligent AI systems" wouldn't displace intelligent individuals? Seems like they'd certainly be the ones wielding a middle-ground (say, GPT-6/7/8) most effectively but if an AI reached 100% coverage of human skills (imo unlikely in our life time) we wouldn't need any theoretical physicists.
Do you believe that it is just IQ specifically that's flawed, or the notion of some kind of measurement linked to intelligence in general?
If you see the latter as problematic, and any research that incorporates it as flawed, then how do you provide scientific basis for the assertion that intelligence is not at all inheritable? Marx certainly isn't one.
If you see the latter as problematic, and any research that incorporates it as flawed, then how do you provide scientific basis for the assertion that intelligence is not at all inheritable? Marx certainly isn't one.
The latter: I believe that any kind of measurement (or theory for that matter) linked to some construct of a general intelligence is fundamentally flawed.
I don’t think we can construct a philosophical understanding on what intelligence is, as we are always bound to select an arbitrary set of traits which describes the bias of the researcher more than a useful model of behavior.
How do I provide scientific basis for the assertion that intelligence is not at all inheritable?
I don’t, but others do. If you believe you can select a set of traits which constitute an intelligent personality, which some researchers do (or rather assume for the sake of argument that it exists), then what you get is a large environmental effect on the supposed intelligence, a large cofactor of environment and inheritance, some genetical factor, but a close to 0 genetic bases for any group differences.
This is really a double tier rebuttal which states: Even if you are right (and you are not) that general intelligence exists, and that IQ is a useful measure of general intelligence (which is also false), you are still wrong that there is a genetic basis for any perceived inheritance of this supposed intelligence.
I don’t think we can construct a philosophical understanding on what intelligence is, as we are always bound to select an arbitrary set of traits which describes the bias of the researcher more than a useful model of behavior.
How do I provide scientific basis for the assertion that intelligence is not at all inheritable?
I don’t, but others do. If you believe you can select a set of traits which constitute an intelligent personality, which some researchers do (or rather assume for the sake of argument that it exists), then what you get is a large environmental effect on the supposed intelligence, a large cofactor of environment and inheritance, some genetical factor, but a close to 0 genetic bases for any group differences.
This is really a double tier rebuttal which states: Even if you are right (and you are not) that general intelligence exists, and that IQ is a useful measure of general intelligence (which is also false), you are still wrong that there is a genetic basis for any perceived inheritance of this supposed intelligence.
Thoughts on this post on the accuracy of IQ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798887
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29798887
I find it interesting because I did REALLY badly on oral tests. On the WISC-III I was doing extremely badly on the test until the examiner allowed me to write down my answers instead of giving them verbally and my measured IQ shot up like two standard deviations. I've been as far as 3 standard deviations apart in psychiatrist administered IQ tests, and my best and worst results in any given IQ test have also been about 3 standard deviations apart. My biggest theory is that I'm bottlenecked by how I both take in and communicate the information, I'm not very good at listening orally nor am I very good at communicating with my voice nor can I write very fast with a pencil. Not shockingly I was diagnosed with multiple learning disabilities and it's my opinion and the opinion of one psychologist I had that IQ testing is neither a reliable nor valid means of testing my intelligence.
I think the point being made more generally about IQ tests testing the wrong things is very valid and I do agree with it, but it extends beyond just IQ testing, it also raises questions about standardised academic testing. What I will point out though that any rebalancing of IQ tests or standardised tests at this point is likely to become an intensely political affair because these tests are used to justify gatekeeping access to status and societal resources, and any new tests would necessarily be far worse researched than existing tests, so I wouldn't expect current IQ testing methodology to be upended any time soon.
I think the point being made more generally about IQ tests testing the wrong things is very valid and I do agree with it, but it extends beyond just IQ testing, it also raises questions about standardised academic testing. What I will point out though that any rebalancing of IQ tests or standardised tests at this point is likely to become an intensely political affair because these tests are used to justify gatekeeping access to status and societal resources, and any new tests would necessarily be far worse researched than existing tests, so I wouldn't expect current IQ testing methodology to be upended any time soon.
How does an article like this get published without summarizing the specific results or quantifying the drop?
Nothing more to say about variation arising from geography around the US, such as urban vs rural, high vs low education, by age, etc, etc. And have other developed countries seen similar shifts?
It's like the authors overheard a single sentence on the topic in a bar and decided to turn it into an entire article without looking into it any further.
It's like the authors overheard a single sentence on the topic in a bar and decided to turn it into an entire article without looking into it any further.
Low IQ scores.
Seriously. A few time series plots would be far more informative than all that blather.
You submit it to a junk journal with a political agenda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_(journal)
Seriously though, they observed a reverse Flynn effect by taking a thin slice of negative test results from a test that doesn’t even measure IQ and finding it statistically significant. This kind of reminds of when climate deniers take a tiny slice of climate records and claim the earth is actually getting cooler.
---
Unsurprisingly you’ll actually find many IQ researchers in institutions which are still trying to deny climate change. E.g. Charles Murray is now working for the American Enterprise Institute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_(journal)
Seriously though, they observed a reverse Flynn effect by taking a thin slice of negative test results from a test that doesn’t even measure IQ and finding it statistically significant. This kind of reminds of when climate deniers take a tiny slice of climate records and claim the earth is actually getting cooler.
---
Unsurprisingly you’ll actually find many IQ researchers in institutions which are still trying to deny climate change. E.g. Charles Murray is now working for the American Enterprise Institute.
Fewer than half of the hypereducated peers I know have kids, while my gardener has 8 kids, so I expect that this trend will continue
Brother of a friend of mine has five children -- apparently success in Darwinian terms.
Two of them were born addicted to heroin.
Currently residing in a "sober living facility" last I heard, confidently talking about launching a career in retail management. The field looks attractive because he can "just tell people what to do".
Two of them were born addicted to heroin.
Currently residing in a "sober living facility" last I heard, confidently talking about launching a career in retail management. The field looks attractive because he can "just tell people what to do".
Education is not IQ
>Education is not IQ
This is true but I suspect people with higher IQs tend to have more education. Probably because they are "good" at learning while someone with a lower IQ struggles more and doesn't like it because of that.
This is true but I suspect people with higher IQs tend to have more education. Probably because they are "good" at learning while someone with a lower IQ struggles more and doesn't like it because of that.
It's because IQ is a test and more education means taking more tests, so there is circular causality.
My gardener is not high IQ. Good guy and hard worker but there has got to be some correlation between IQ and education.
Chris Langan was a bouncer for twenty years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
There's a correlation but there's at least a few intermediary variables. And it isn't linear -- people with very high IQs often have a difficult time with their educations.
> My gardener is not high IQ.
Wow! You must have ran a battery of IQ tests to assert this with such absolute certainty.
My father used to be a gardener to make ends meet. Because of a lack of education and a language barrier, I'm sure he would appear low IQ as well. Now he works in electronics manufacturing and the efficiency by which he debugs production problems and reasons from first principles would put many of my educated peers to shame. What can be easily dismissed as a lack of ability can be more reasonably explained by a lack of opportunity and resources. But it is easier for privileged people to look down on others and believe that everyone is in a position they deserve.
Wow! You must have ran a battery of IQ tests to assert this with such absolute certainty.
My father used to be a gardener to make ends meet. Because of a lack of education and a language barrier, I'm sure he would appear low IQ as well. Now he works in electronics manufacturing and the efficiency by which he debugs production problems and reasons from first principles would put many of my educated peers to shame. What can be easily dismissed as a lack of ability can be more reasonably explained by a lack of opportunity and resources. But it is easier for privileged people to look down on others and believe that everyone is in a position they deserve.
I don't look down on him. I'd rather live next to him than my existing neighbors. But do you think that maybe I have a better read on him than you do, given that I see him every 2 weeks and you have no idea who he is?
In my experience claims of knowing the intelligence of another person are often wrong. Enough so that I reserve judgement much more often than not.
I think the above is part of the doubt you are running into with your claim. You might be able to come up with evidence/stores that would lend credence to you conclusions about your gardener, but I do not think it would move your main point "there has got to be some correlation between IQ and education." forward.
I think the above is part of the doubt you are running into with your claim. You might be able to come up with evidence/stores that would lend credence to you conclusions about your gardener, but I do not think it would move your main point "there has got to be some correlation between IQ and education." forward.
Of course I could be wrong, but the number of times the guy screws up and the incredibly poor decisions he makes if not completely specified indicates some structural intellectual deficits. I don’t know whether that’s literally IQ or not.
The gardener is still not high IQ.
> interestingly, scores in spatial reasoning went up
Wild guess: video games. More Americans play or used to play video games than ever. And 3D games require players to understand an environment to navigate it.
Wild guess: video games. More Americans play or used to play video games than ever. And 3D games require players to understand an environment to navigate it.
The prevalence of maps in our lifes via handheld devices could also contribute.
"The Flynn Effect" is a very popular topic on HN, but the general understanding of it is way off. Ulric Neisser has a good analysis in "Rising scores on intelligence tests" in American Scientist 85(5):440-447 (1997).
I'll try to cover his main points...
The various intelligence tests that exist show some positive correlation. The factor "g" is this degree of correlation. The best measure of g is Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM), which is a test of visual reasoning. Intelligence tests are periodically revised and recalibrated. Flynn noticed that subjects were scoring higher on older versions. Scores on arithmetic, vocabulary, and general information showed small gains or even declines. The greatest gains were on g-loaded tests such as RPM.
Given the performance of current students in school subjects, such a rise in general intelligence doesn't seem plausible. Because of this, Flynn thinks the tests don't really measure intelligence.
Various theories have been put forward to account for the change. The gains were far too rapid to result from genetic changes. Another theory was that Americans became more familiar with test taking in general and that transferred to IQ tests, but the rise continued for decades after the spread of broader education. Also, the tests more closely related to school content were not the ones showing the rise.
Nutrition caused people to grow taller and have bigger heads, but there is very weak empirical support for a connection between nutrition and intelligence. Also, a purely biological basis for the change would indicate a rise in all aspects of intelligence, which clearly wasn't the case.
There is a well established effect of schooling on IQ, but populations of children before schooling have shown gains comparable to populations of adults after schooling. Also, groups of subjects at different levels of education showed about the same gains. Finally, schooling affects tests of content more than of reasoning, but that wasn't reflected in rising test scores.
Modern children increasingly have exposure to things explicitly designed to stimulate their intelligence, e.g. Sesame Street and preschool. Early childhood intervention programs have been shown to have no lasting effect on IQ. The most intensive environmental enrichment programs have been shown to have some lasting effect on IQ, but nowhere near comparable to the Flynn effect.
Neisser proposes that changes in the cultural environment have caused the rise. Modern industrial culture produces vastly more of complex visual media. He thinks our increasing practice in analyzing complex imagery has caused the gains in performance on visual reasoning tests.
I'll try to cover his main points...
The various intelligence tests that exist show some positive correlation. The factor "g" is this degree of correlation. The best measure of g is Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM), which is a test of visual reasoning. Intelligence tests are periodically revised and recalibrated. Flynn noticed that subjects were scoring higher on older versions. Scores on arithmetic, vocabulary, and general information showed small gains or even declines. The greatest gains were on g-loaded tests such as RPM.
Given the performance of current students in school subjects, such a rise in general intelligence doesn't seem plausible. Because of this, Flynn thinks the tests don't really measure intelligence.
Various theories have been put forward to account for the change. The gains were far too rapid to result from genetic changes. Another theory was that Americans became more familiar with test taking in general and that transferred to IQ tests, but the rise continued for decades after the spread of broader education. Also, the tests more closely related to school content were not the ones showing the rise.
Nutrition caused people to grow taller and have bigger heads, but there is very weak empirical support for a connection between nutrition and intelligence. Also, a purely biological basis for the change would indicate a rise in all aspects of intelligence, which clearly wasn't the case.
There is a well established effect of schooling on IQ, but populations of children before schooling have shown gains comparable to populations of adults after schooling. Also, groups of subjects at different levels of education showed about the same gains. Finally, schooling affects tests of content more than of reasoning, but that wasn't reflected in rising test scores.
Modern children increasingly have exposure to things explicitly designed to stimulate their intelligence, e.g. Sesame Street and preschool. Early childhood intervention programs have been shown to have no lasting effect on IQ. The most intensive environmental enrichment programs have been shown to have some lasting effect on IQ, but nowhere near comparable to the Flynn effect.
Neisser proposes that changes in the cultural environment have caused the rise. Modern industrial culture produces vastly more of complex visual media. He thinks our increasing practice in analyzing complex imagery has caused the gains in performance on visual reasoning tests.
Link to the study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
It's not mentioned in the article, but this could also be a sampling issue. Samples from previous decades might've been more limited or self-selected. The internet may mean that a broader, more representative sample of the population is being tested, and you're just seeing regression to the mean.
As a young kid I scored ok for my age, very high for 2 years older. Now I don't think I'm better at simple pattern tests then my peers.Im sure it means something, but especially with kids I've seen wildly different scores for the same kids on different moments and different kind of tests.
Statistics might average that out, but I've also seen it uses often to use as a tool to decide where young kids go. It's not accurate enough.
Statistics might average that out, but I've also seen it uses often to use as a tool to decide where young kids go. It's not accurate enough.
[deleted]
IQ is useless: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-....
IQ will be seen in a 100 years the same way phrenology is now.
It already is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
Weird that that whole book is spent arguing against guys who worked like 120 years ago instead of confronting the voluminous modern work. "Of all the book's references, a full 27 percent precede 1900. Another 44 percent fall between 1900 and 1950 (60 percent of those are before 1925); and only 29 percent are more recent than 1950. From the total literature spanning more than a century, the few "bad apples" have been hand-picked most aptly to serve Gould's purpose." https://www.debunker.com/texts/jensen.html
The modern work is even worse than the old in many respects, which is impressive to be honest. It doesn’t stop those self assured of their own genius from picking signal from noise of course. So much ink spilled for nothing.
You are aware that this book was published in 1981, and is largely a history book on scientific racism? I brought up this book is because it justly categorizes IQ research among other pseudo-scientific practices such as phrenology.
You should also be aware the Arthur Jensen is one of the scientists which Gould is criticizing, and that his reputations hasn’t gotten any better since 1980. This source of yours is hardly an impartial one.
You should also be aware the Arthur Jensen is one of the scientists which Gould is criticizing, and that his reputations hasn’t gotten any better since 1980. This source of yours is hardly an impartial one.
Gould is right that the people he discuss were racist. But you shouldn't use his book as an argument against modern psychometrics since it doesn't deal with that much at al. In actuality Jensen's reputation has improved while Gould's has declined.
Despite having almost twice as long of a career Jensen has only a third of the citations Gould has. Goulds work continues to be influential in the field of psychology, while Jensen remains a controversial figure at best. Jensen spent his entire career trying to prove the existence of the g-factor which to this date remains unconvincing among the rest of psychology. Jensen’s work includes collaborations with other controversial and disgraced pseudo-scientists and eugenicists like Richard Lynn, while Goulds collaborator includes other influential figures like Howard Zinn and Richard Lewontin. The Wikipedia article for Jensen cites three separate authors criticizing Jensen’s findings, while the one for Gould doesn’t even have this section.
These are some of my reasons for believing that Jensen’s reputation isn’t that great, at least compared to Gould. Now why do you believe the opposite?
These are some of my reasons for believing that Jensen’s reputation isn’t that great, at least compared to Gould. Now why do you believe the opposite?
I mean LOL at comparing citations. http://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Arthur+R.+Jensen&column=auth... This is a good start. These books engage directly with the great bulk of modern IQ research.
Sorry, I said n citations, but I meant to say, has been cited n times.
But honestly it raises no red flags that Jensen is the face of “modern IQ research”? His most influential work was from the 80s and the 90s, and was heavily criticized at the time (including by Gould).
Since than there has been a revolution in non-linear statistics, are you satisfied that “modern IQ research” is basically the same stuff they were doing in the 70s? I mean even General relativity has evolved significantly with since the 70s as new technology becomes available to measure old predictions. Do you honestly think it is a sign of a healthy scientific theory that after a revolution in machine learning, they are still using same old factor analysis to back up their constructs?
But honestly it raises no red flags that Jensen is the face of “modern IQ research”? His most influential work was from the 80s and the 90s, and was heavily criticized at the time (including by Gould).
Since than there has been a revolution in non-linear statistics, are you satisfied that “modern IQ research” is basically the same stuff they were doing in the 70s? I mean even General relativity has evolved significantly with since the 70s as new technology becomes available to measure old predictions. Do you honestly think it is a sign of a healthy scientific theory that after a revolution in machine learning, they are still using same old factor analysis to back up their constructs?
> Scores in verbal reasoning, matrix reasoning, and letter and number series all declined but, interestingly, scores in spatial reasoning went up.
The more popular video games require spatial reasoning far more than the others.
> The reasons for both the increase and the decline are sill very much up for debate.
Earth has entered the Vinge's Unthinking Depths, and we are struggling to notice it.
The more popular video games require spatial reasoning far more than the others.
> The reasons for both the increase and the decline are sill very much up for debate.
Earth has entered the Vinge's Unthinking Depths, and we are struggling to notice it.
There is a reason around 66% of all psychological research cannot be reproduced. Some comments here already make good points, but the biggest red flag is that psychological research involves psychologists doing statistics. And that is assuming they actually measure what they claim, which is also very often not the case at all.
IQ tests weren't designed to determine good vs better humans. It was designed to determine mentally deficient vs below-average humans.
Consider a weightlifting competition where the weight-limit were 20lbs (10-kilograms). You'd be able to determine those with severe injuries or deficiencies vs a typical human, but you wouldn't be able to determine a peak-athlete from an average person.
---------
Now sure, we can increase the reps to absurd levels, like "200 reps of 20lbs", which will start to separate out the athletes from the typical humans. And that's roughly what the upper-end of the IQ test does: you need to be more-and-more accurate / fewer mistakes to reach 115, 120, 125 IQ or above. But we've have pushed the test far beyond its intended purpose.
IQ itself partially depends on a somewhat unproven concept of "general intelligence", which IIRC no one is even sure if it applies to average (or smarter) humans.
Consider a weightlifting competition where the weight-limit were 20lbs (10-kilograms). You'd be able to determine those with severe injuries or deficiencies vs a typical human, but you wouldn't be able to determine a peak-athlete from an average person.
---------
Now sure, we can increase the reps to absurd levels, like "200 reps of 20lbs", which will start to separate out the athletes from the typical humans. And that's roughly what the upper-end of the IQ test does: you need to be more-and-more accurate / fewer mistakes to reach 115, 120, 125 IQ or above. But we've have pushed the test far beyond its intended purpose.
IQ itself partially depends on a somewhat unproven concept of "general intelligence", which IIRC no one is even sure if it applies to average (or smarter) humans.
> Leading up to the 1990s, IQ scores were consistently going up, but in recent years, that trend seems to have flipped. The reasons for both the increase and the decline are sill very much up for debate.
Interestingly, you could substitute "homicide rate" for "IQ" here and the statement would still be accurate. Ignorance is bliss?
>The study, published in the journal Intelligence, used an online, survey-style personality test called the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project to analyze nearly 400,000 Americans. The researchers recorded responses from 2006 and 2018, in order to examine if and how cognitive ability scores were changing over time within the country.
Presumably the testing scores collected between the 1930s and 1990s weren't online tests. I wonder if the drop is explainable by people not taking an online IQ test very seriously during the golden age of the buzzfeed quiz.
Interestingly, you could substitute "homicide rate" for "IQ" here and the statement would still be accurate. Ignorance is bliss?
>The study, published in the journal Intelligence, used an online, survey-style personality test called the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project to analyze nearly 400,000 Americans. The researchers recorded responses from 2006 and 2018, in order to examine if and how cognitive ability scores were changing over time within the country.
Presumably the testing scores collected between the 1930s and 1990s weren't online tests. I wonder if the drop is explainable by people not taking an online IQ test very seriously during the golden age of the buzzfeed quiz.
Drop in: 1. logic and vocabulary. 2. visual problem solving and analogies 3. computational and mathematical abilities
Increase in: 1. scores in spatial reasoning (known as 3D rotation)
"And, it should be said, there has long been debate over how accurately IQ tests are able to gauge overall intelligence and potential for success in society in the first place."
That's not what this psychologist concluded:
"Top psychologist: IQ is the No. 1 predictor of work success"
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-...
Anyway, I don't think it's bad to just admit that people intelligence is declining. The world has evolved such that you need less of it to get by.
Increase in: 1. scores in spatial reasoning (known as 3D rotation)
"And, it should be said, there has long been debate over how accurately IQ tests are able to gauge overall intelligence and potential for success in society in the first place."
That's not what this psychologist concluded:
"Top psychologist: IQ is the No. 1 predictor of work success"
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/11/does-iq-determine-success-a-...
Anyway, I don't think it's bad to just admit that people intelligence is declining. The world has evolved such that you need less of it to get by.
> Anyway, I don't think it's bad to just admit that people intelligence is declining.
I think that couldn’t be more serious or important. I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not.
I think that couldn’t be more serious or important. I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not.
> The world has evolved such that you need less of it to get by.
Not so sure about that. Do you need more intelligence for "working the fields with basic tools" or for an average job in your country?
This might change when AI becomes economically relevant and the "value of intelligence" plummets.
Not so sure about that. Do you need more intelligence for "working the fields with basic tools" or for an average job in your country?
This might change when AI becomes economically relevant and the "value of intelligence" plummets.
Maybe IQ scores fell out of fashion so people train less for them? I remember taking some test and scoring 20 points higher on the second take, so IQ tests seem to be highly trainable.
Bet it's related to income inequality and the reduction of wages wrt productivity.
Stress is known to reduce short term memory, which affects IQ.
Stress is known to reduce short term memory, which affects IQ.
The politicization of everything and the rise of ideologic overtake of universities, contaminated thinking accurately about the models of reality reducing every intelligence based and genuine debate to banal disputes of privileges and subjective preferences militarizing discourse with false accusations and mining the victimhood mindset.
PS: most of the population can't read that sentence and are blind to that trick.
PS: most of the population can't read that sentence and are blind to that trick.
If it's true that most of the population can't read that sentence, it's because it's both contrivedly complex and also syntactically incorrect.
Or ChatGTP it for you:
Me: Summarize your understanding of this sentence:
The politicization of everything and the rise of ideologic overtake of universities, contaminated thinking accurately about the models of reality reducing every intelligence based and genuine debate to banal disputes of privileges and subjective preferences militarizing discourse with false accusations and mining the victimhood mindset.
ChatGTP: This sentence appears to express concern about a trend where everything, including universities, is becoming politicized and ideologically driven, leading to a reduction in genuine debate and an increase in banal disputes over subjective preferences and privileges. It suggests that this trend is leading to a militarization of discourse, where false accusations are made and a victimhood mindset is fostered.
PS: that style of writing uses a technique to filter attention retention on interpretation. Stretches your "interpretation stack"
Me: Summarize your understanding of this sentence:
The politicization of everything and the rise of ideologic overtake of universities, contaminated thinking accurately about the models of reality reducing every intelligence based and genuine debate to banal disputes of privileges and subjective preferences militarizing discourse with false accusations and mining the victimhood mindset.
ChatGTP: This sentence appears to express concern about a trend where everything, including universities, is becoming politicized and ideologically driven, leading to a reduction in genuine debate and an increase in banal disputes over subjective preferences and privileges. It suggests that this trend is leading to a militarization of discourse, where false accusations are made and a victimhood mindset is fostered.
PS: that style of writing uses a technique to filter attention retention on interpretation. Stretches your "interpretation stack"
Put it in a text to speech software and listen to it closing your eyes. Here is one you can use:
https://www.texttovoice.online/
https://www.texttovoice.online/
I wouldn't be surprised that most of the population can't indeed understand that sentence, as it's a badly written one, IMHO.
What's the trick?
What's the trick?
Put it in a text to speech software and listen to it closing your eyes. Here is one you can use:
https://www.texttovoice.online/
https://www.texttovoice.online/
The trick is that ideologues can dispute power based on fraudulent ideas disguised as sophisticated theories that can always be reduced to banal lies (once removed how they are hidden in language complexity).
[deleted]
I have my pet theory that the Reverse Flynn effect in America, Norway or elsewhere is a direct result of widespread adoption of all kinds of safety measures: seat belts, airbags, all kinds of protective gear, traffic lights, advances in emergency medicine and so on. Whether it's true or not, I do not know.
[deleted]
Intelligence can't be generalised.
You could put the most intelligent person in the Savanna and they would just die, whilst a bushman will survive. Who was smarter in the end?
hmmm, but if you have two bushmen, one with a high IQ and one with a low IQ who will better survive. Or what if the most intelligent person in the Savanna was a bushman...So it depends on what you consider intelligence. Critical thinking is part of IQ testing and I would expect a wiley bushman to be good at critical thinking if he is going to survive.
Exactly. People that want to apply IQ see it as a general performance metric. But general performance has many different aspects. In the example of the bushman it does not matter how fast you can count the alphabet,.it won't be helping your survival.
the most intelligent person, you already answered your question
most intelligent according to your IQ metrics
> "... with many attributing the change to various environmental factors."
How 'bout social factors?
How 'bout social factors?
N?
400,000 over 12 year period
Not quite. The data was scraped from an open source database. They used Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project (SAPA) which only gives the partial test to each participant, and than interpolates for the rest of the test.
The full set of items in SAPA can be as high as 500. They supposedly found the reverse Flynn effect by only looking at results from 35 (over a 12 year period) and another set of 60 (over a 7 years period). This should be a red flag, and raise suspicions of cherry-picking and p-hacking.
This is not to mention anything about the validity of interpreting the combination of some items from SAPA as intelligence. The SAPA authors don’t do that, neither did the researchers that originally collected the data, neither did the participants, that is only done by the researches of this particular paper. And to add another red flag, this paper was published in a pretty disgraced journal Intelligence, which has been proven to publish plenty of pseudo-scientific results where they stretch the statistics with an agenda aligned with the eugenics movement.
The full set of items in SAPA can be as high as 500. They supposedly found the reverse Flynn effect by only looking at results from 35 (over a 12 year period) and another set of 60 (over a 7 years period). This should be a red flag, and raise suspicions of cherry-picking and p-hacking.
This is not to mention anything about the validity of interpreting the combination of some items from SAPA as intelligence. The SAPA authors don’t do that, neither did the researchers that originally collected the data, neither did the participants, that is only done by the researches of this particular paper. And to add another red flag, this paper was published in a pretty disgraced journal Intelligence, which has been proven to publish plenty of pseudo-scientific results where they stretch the statistics with an agenda aligned with the eugenics movement.
Devolution
This blog post asserts that IQ scores didn't drop for the population as a whole, and that the drop for each individual group is due to changing composition of that group:
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/03/new-study-didnt-really-...
For example, if the % of people who do a postgraduate degree goes doubles, it's no longer such a select group, so you'd expect the average IQ of postgraduate degree holders to go down. This doesn't mean IQ scores are going down for the population as a whole.
One more thing: why do so many papers that present charts that show how a mean or median changes over time, without also presenting charts that show how the distribution has changed over time?
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/03/new-study-didnt-really-...
For example, if the % of people who do a postgraduate degree goes doubles, it's no longer such a select group, so you'd expect the average IQ of postgraduate degree holders to go down. This doesn't mean IQ scores are going down for the population as a whole.
One more thing: why do so many papers that present charts that show how a mean or median changes over time, without also presenting charts that show how the distribution has changed over time?
The blogger is wrong. Supplementary tables S10 and S11 [1] show IQ scores dropped as a whole (stratified by gender only). The result is statistically significant.
[1] Pages 16 and 17 of the Word document under "Appendix A. Supplementary data" at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
[1] Pages 16 and 17 of the Word document under "Appendix A. Supplementary data" at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
The interesting part is the partial conclusion:
> The steepest slopes occurred for ages 18–22 and lower levels of education.
So they're blaming faulty education for people being bad at the test. Now I want to see the RCT to prove this hypothesis. (With controls for experimenter effect.)
> The steepest slopes occurred for ages 18–22 and lower levels of education.
So they're blaming faulty education for people being bad at the test. Now I want to see the RCT to prove this hypothesis. (With controls for experimenter effect.)
It's worth looking up whose blog this is before trusting any of its analysis.
I have very low trust in RationalWiki, so here's a related Wikipedia article instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPsych
This site isn’t really any above EncyclopediaDramatica in its proximity to reality. It’s a meme pit for teenagers, not really somewhere to be taken seriously.
Really? I've checked a range of topics and the Rational Wiki seemed spot on. Do you know of any topics it's completely wrong or unfair on?
It of course takes side on some issues like Atheism, Religion but nothing unexpected for a site to be unapologetically rational/empirical.
It of course takes side on some issues like Atheism, Religion but nothing unexpected for a site to be unapologetically rational/empirical.
> Tesla Motors is a car company figure-headed by Elon Musk. It is famous for being the only company with a commercially available car floating in space. It makes electric cars, which made the news for catching fire.[133][134] As it turns out, though, while Teslas caught fire, they did so at a much lower rate than the cars relying on controlled explosions of flammable material.
>Despite being a rock star of scientific progress and innovation, a busy professional with a million things to do and a good understanding of the essential importance of good communication, Elon still finds time to tweet stupid shit every now and then. He apparently loves Tweeting so much, he bought 9.2% of Twitter, making him the single largest shareholder of the company.
Is that worth defending? I donno, it's not even up to date. I'm no Musk fan at all, but I think it's a pretty good example of what kind of intellectual position the authors are acting from. Maybe we have different standards for where we get our information, but I just can't read stuff like that and pretend the authors are people operating with even on iota of good faith.
Perhaps the comparison to ED is a bit harsh. In my opinion, ED is 4chan-based satire for immature and ideologically minded teenagers. RW is a series of stale reddit dunks for immature and ideologically driven teenagers.
>Despite being a rock star of scientific progress and innovation, a busy professional with a million things to do and a good understanding of the essential importance of good communication, Elon still finds time to tweet stupid shit every now and then. He apparently loves Tweeting so much, he bought 9.2% of Twitter, making him the single largest shareholder of the company.
Is that worth defending? I donno, it's not even up to date. I'm no Musk fan at all, but I think it's a pretty good example of what kind of intellectual position the authors are acting from. Maybe we have different standards for where we get our information, but I just can't read stuff like that and pretend the authors are people operating with even on iota of good faith.
Perhaps the comparison to ED is a bit harsh. In my opinion, ED is 4chan-based satire for immature and ideologically minded teenagers. RW is a series of stale reddit dunks for immature and ideologically driven teenagers.
> RW is a series of stale reddit dunks for immature and ideologically driven teenagers.
Yea it's certainly a bit immature and yea it doesn't have the ruthless update frequency Wikipedia has but it's almost never plain wrong. I think most reasonable people would agree Elon tweets too much and it often gets him in trouble.
Yea it's certainly a bit immature and yea it doesn't have the ruthless update frequency Wikipedia has but it's almost never plain wrong. I think most reasonable people would agree Elon tweets too much and it often gets him in trouble.
I don't know how to substantiate this, so I won't try. My impression of the site is that it has a particular left-wing/pro-socialist political bias that creeps into articles, particularly about individuals. It doesn't usually have false information, but the language is often quite unfair. It's not wrong to have an opinion of course, but I assume it's opinions are an emergent property of its users and not the result of unapologetic rationality.
This websites opinion aligns pretty closely with my impression: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/rationalwiki/
This websites opinion aligns pretty closely with my impression: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/rationalwiki/
RationalWiki was created in opposition to Conservapedia, so it's not unsurprising that it would attract users of the opposite political persuasion to the latter site. The comparison to Encyclopedia Dramatica, a dead wiki that in its heyday was populated by edgy teenage trolls, is silly though.
I was just answering why I don't take it too seriously as an impartial source, I agree it's not as bad as Encyclopedia Dramatica.
With that said, if you look at a page like this: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard , it's very similar to an ED page minus all the outlandish racism.
With that said, if you look at a page like this: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard , it's very similar to an ED page minus all the outlandish racism.
> Overall, we rate RationalWiki Left-Center biased based on the use of loaded language against conservatives and High for factual reporting due to pro-science reporting coupled with proper sourcing and a clean fact check record.
Vs
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/encyclopedia-dramatica/
> SATIRE
> These sources exclusively use humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues. Primarily these sources are clear that they are satire and do not attempt to deceive. See all Satire sources.
> Update: This source is no longer online.
Vs
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/encyclopedia-dramatica/
> SATIRE
> These sources exclusively use humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues. Primarily these sources are clear that they are satire and do not attempt to deceive. See all Satire sources.
> Update: This source is no longer online.
Yes, I wasn't trying to say they're the same, just commenting on RationalWiki by itself. I suppose that wasn't clear.
The article's claims about Kirkegaard are all well cited, linking to his own comments.
does not rebut the RationalWiki page but is a poorly written smear piece. convienently, emil kirkegaard does not mention he lost the lawsuit he filed and changed his name and moved country to avoid debt collection. https://www.pdf-archive.com/2022/11/27/emil-kirkegaard-name-...
[deleted]
RationalWiki is partly written by highly biased political activists and sometimes borders on defamation, at some point they also attacked people like Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, or Eliezer Yudkowsky. Here is what Kirkegaard has to say about the main author of this page: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/inaccuracies-in-rationalwikis-o...
Does not seem to be a reliable source. The outcome of the lawsuit emil kirkegaard filed against the main author was the author winning and Kirkegaard owing him tens of thousands in legal costs.
https://www.scribd.com/document/535708866/Emil-Kirkegaard-29...
Kirkegaard does not mention the lawsuit outcome on his website because he lost and was shown to be a liar in court.
I'd never heard of this person before finding this blog post via Google. So I trust the post as much as I trust any random blog post that seems to make a reasonable argument :)
Now you have. Adjust accordingly. I'm not telling you how to adjust, only that you're likely to want to.
Yup. 100% agree :)
You trust one of these random people enough to promote it. It's not unreasonable for people to point out that the author is quite infamous for his viewpoints.
It's an ad-hominem (in the original sense of the word: an ad-hominem fallacy is one where the truth or falsity of an argument is determined by the trustworthiness of its proponent rather than by the content of the argument itself).
Is he right? The argument is plausible: the study measures online IQ tests. Certainly in my experience the average person online has gotten dumber in the 30 years I've been on the Internet, because Internet access has expanded and it's now the general population rather than just upper-middle-class academics. But we'd need to see comparisons vs. offline IQ tests, given to a randomly-sampled selection of the population, to be sure.
Is he right? The argument is plausible: the study measures online IQ tests. Certainly in my experience the average person online has gotten dumber in the 30 years I've been on the Internet, because Internet access has expanded and it's now the general population rather than just upper-middle-class academics. But we'd need to see comparisons vs. offline IQ tests, given to a randomly-sampled selection of the population, to be sure.
It's not a fallacy to attack someone's historical reliability in making arguments.
I mean, it's still precisely a fallacy. Just because someone made a stupid or wrong argument 20 times in a row doesn't make it logically follow that the 21st is also wrong, without examining that argument itself.
Of course, it's a useful heuristic to determine if it's worth your time to examine it.
Of course, it's a useful heuristic to determine if it's worth your time to examine it.
Just a meta note, this is why fallacies are limited. Just because something is a logical fallacy, meaning it does not lead to a disproof in a deductive reasoning sense, doesn't mean people often use arguments that could be considered fallacious to disregard arguments all the time as instead they use good heuristics.
Deductive reasoning is valuable but only applicable in a small number of real world arguments, as with math it generally has to do with determining consequences of an assumption. Heuristics and just plain inductive reasoning is generally what arguments are really about most of the time.
Deductive reasoning is valuable but only applicable in a small number of real world arguments, as with math it generally has to do with determining consequences of an assumption. Heuristics and just plain inductive reasoning is generally what arguments are really about most of the time.
Science, properly done, is about convincingly explaining how your propositions might be true, usually deferring to a branch of mathematics.
Being known for making leaps in this process and draw unwarranted conclusions is sufficient to make one suspicious and warrant extra scrutiny on other conclusions.
There are many ways to fail in scientific process, if even by pure luck. And yet more by systematic error.
Ad-hominem and appeal to authority is an annoying tactic one has to successfully defeat. Declaration of "it's a fallacy" is worthless at doing so. What you need to do is still to present your arguments in a solid way, at which the blog post failed anyway.
The ad-hominem does not apply to classification - you can make a classification mistake, but ad-hominem is not about that. It's about attacking the author's directly, and an argument that a source is unreliable because statistical claim is not of this nature as it relies on proposition to be shown true or false. Ad-hominem relies on a true but irrelevant fact. The argument above relies on a relevant proposition.
So by mentioning ad-hominem (which is quite specific) in a wrong context, you have made an argument from fallacy fallacy and additionally a pure mistake.
The one you might have wanted is Fundamental Attribution Error also known as correspondence bias, since the talk is about classes of authors and their trustworthiness based on publication medium. Even then, the claim on reliability of blog posts is to be shown or disproven, not offhand discarded.
Being known for making leaps in this process and draw unwarranted conclusions is sufficient to make one suspicious and warrant extra scrutiny on other conclusions.
There are many ways to fail in scientific process, if even by pure luck. And yet more by systematic error.
Ad-hominem and appeal to authority is an annoying tactic one has to successfully defeat. Declaration of "it's a fallacy" is worthless at doing so. What you need to do is still to present your arguments in a solid way, at which the blog post failed anyway.
The ad-hominem does not apply to classification - you can make a classification mistake, but ad-hominem is not about that. It's about attacking the author's directly, and an argument that a source is unreliable because statistical claim is not of this nature as it relies on proposition to be shown true or false. Ad-hominem relies on a true but irrelevant fact. The argument above relies on a relevant proposition.
So by mentioning ad-hominem (which is quite specific) in a wrong context, you have made an argument from fallacy fallacy and additionally a pure mistake.
The one you might have wanted is Fundamental Attribution Error also known as correspondence bias, since the talk is about classes of authors and their trustworthiness based on publication medium. Even then, the claim on reliability of blog posts is to be shown or disproven, not offhand discarded.
Yes, it is. It absolutely is a fallacy to use that as your reason instead of something about the argument itself being wrong.
To use an analogy, even stopped clock can be right twice a day. Nobody expects anyone to use such a thing to tell time.
But anyone who looks at a broken clock displaying 6 o'clock and declares "it can't possibly be that time because the clock is broken" is engaging in faulty reasoning, because they're still taking information from a broken clock which contains none.
To use an analogy, even stopped clock can be right twice a day. Nobody expects anyone to use such a thing to tell time.
But anyone who looks at a broken clock displaying 6 o'clock and declares "it can't possibly be that time because the clock is broken" is engaging in faulty reasoning, because they're still taking information from a broken clock which contains none.
> can't possibly
Nobody said he can't possibly be right about anything. That's an exaggeration so extreme as to be ridiculous.
Nobody said he can't possibly be right about anything. That's an exaggeration so extreme as to be ridiculous.
I exaggerated to make the point, but taking any degree of information from it is fallacious, because it contains no information about the time.
And of course you wouldn't do that for a broken clock, but you are here taking information from 'historical reliability' which is a problem because it's simply not a thing that can affect the truth or falsity of the argument made any more than the broken hands of the clock can affect the current time.
And of course you wouldn't do that for a broken clock, but you are here taking information from 'historical reliability' which is a problem because it's simply not a thing that can affect the truth or falsity of the argument made any more than the broken hands of the clock can affect the current time.
But we didn't start from a neutral point. We started with someone linking the article as a source of information. If someone tries to use a broken clock to tell the time, you can't use the clock to say what time it is, but you can say something about whether they're right or not. They are >99% likely to be wrong.
At best, the equivalent of a broken clock is "Your link fails to provide any evidence or logic at all." And that is a properly reasoned and extremely strong condemnation, not a fallacy.
At worst, we recognize that most topics have fewer different opinions than there are times in the day, and being wrong often enough on some topic might mean you anti-correlate with the truth.
Though there are much less extreme cases where it's reasonable to warn about an author. Maybe some author makes true posts 2/3 of the time and lies 1/3 of the time. Even though such an author would probably be right in any arbitrary post, it's still worth warning a potential reader about their habit of lying.
At best, the equivalent of a broken clock is "Your link fails to provide any evidence or logic at all." And that is a properly reasoned and extremely strong condemnation, not a fallacy.
At worst, we recognize that most topics have fewer different opinions than there are times in the day, and being wrong often enough on some topic might mean you anti-correlate with the truth.
Though there are much less extreme cases where it's reasonable to warn about an author. Maybe some author makes true posts 2/3 of the time and lies 1/3 of the time. Even though such an author would probably be right in any arbitrary post, it's still worth warning a potential reader about their habit of lying.
Indeed, we started with "this guy's argument is wrong, he's a bad person" which does nothing to refute the argument because it never engages with it. I truly don't know if he's right or wrong, I just know that nobody has bothered to state an actual case about why other than telling me that he believes a lot of horrible things. Sure, I'm not going to invite him over for dinner or anything, but it does nothing to inform anyone about why he is wrong about this.
> it's still worth warning a potential reader about their habit of lying.
The best way to do that will always be to point to the lie, instead of calling them a liar, because that strategy can't be copied by other liars.
> it's still worth warning a potential reader about their habit of lying.
The best way to do that will always be to point to the lie, instead of calling them a liar, because that strategy can't be copied by other liars.
> Indeed, we started with "this guy's argument is wrong, he's a bad person"
No we didn't. We started with "It's worth looking up whose blog this is before trusting any of its analysis."
And then "Adjust accordingly. I'm not telling you how to adjust, only that you're likely to want to."
And other people cited sources right up top.
Nobody made a fallacy of saying it must be wrong because he said it.
No we didn't. We started with "It's worth looking up whose blog this is before trusting any of its analysis."
And then "Adjust accordingly. I'm not telling you how to adjust, only that you're likely to want to."
And other people cited sources right up top.
Nobody made a fallacy of saying it must be wrong because he said it.
It very much is a fallacy to attack anything outside the argument.
That said while broken clock could happen to be correct, pointing out a clock is broken or someone is a nutter is still useful information.
That said while broken clock could happen to be correct, pointing out a clock is broken or someone is a nutter is still useful information.
Logical fallacies undermine the argument of the person using them.
How can it be a fallacy and useful information?
How can it be a fallacy and useful information?
You can use imperfect information. It’s the difference between heuristics and logical arguments.
Aka there’s a 1 in 500 million chance this is a winning lottery ticket is useful even if it doesn’t guarantee things one way or the other.
Aka there’s a 1 in 500 million chance this is a winning lottery ticket is useful even if it doesn’t guarantee things one way or the other.
I don't think it's a fallacy to use imperfect information.
All information is imperfect.
All information is imperfect.
Using probabilistic logic is perfectly reasonable as long as you track the stacking likelihood it’s wrong. However, making a probabilistic argument without tracking the internal probabilities is a Fallacy.
ie: Saying A which is true 90% of the time and B which is true 90% of the time so given A and B then C sounds reasonable until you continue with given C and D which is also X% true…. The individual probability that A, B, or D is wrong makes the chain of reasoning rapidly worthless.
Thus the error is using probabilistic statements without acknowledging they weaken an argument.
ie: Saying A which is true 90% of the time and B which is true 90% of the time so given A and B then C sounds reasonable until you continue with given C and D which is also X% true…. The individual probability that A, B, or D is wrong makes the chain of reasoning rapidly worthless.
Thus the error is using probabilistic statements without acknowledging they weaken an argument.
Are you saying that "You should know A is true 90% of the time." is a fallacy unless I add an explicit disclaimer about probabilistic weakening? Even if I'm not making any conclusions based on it, just suggesting people will want to use that information themselves?
If you're not saying that then I don't understand how anything you just said is relevant to the current situation. Telling people to look up a guy's writing history is probabilistic but it isn't turning that into an unjustified boolean statement.
If you're not saying that then I don't understand how anything you just said is relevant to the current situation. Telling people to look up a guy's writing history is probabilistic but it isn't turning that into an unjustified boolean statement.
It may not be, but that's not what's being attacked here. Unless I'm missing the place where tptacek discusses the reliability of this person's arguments?
There wasn't even an argument about Kirkegaard's historical reliability, so it's worse than a fallacy.
It is literally a fallacy [1] in that it's invalid logical reasoning.
There are many types of argumentation that are useful for drawing practical conclusions about the world but are not, strictly speaking, valid logic. For example, "correlation doesn't equal causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively" [2]. If you know nothing about the truth or falsity of a statement, knowing who's saying it can provide some information that might tilt your opinion one way or another. But the person saying something does not make the argument true or false, otherwise I could make myself as detestable as possible to some group of people and then kill them off by giving them common-sense advice like "go to the doctor" or "eat healthy". (Come to think of it, this is exactly what happened to Republicans during COVID, where somehow wearing masks & getting vaccines became politicized.)
Bringing it back to the topic at hand - I found the digression about who Emil O Kierkegard is to be momentarily interesting, but I'd still like to know if he's right or not. The idea that this article might be due to Simpson's Paradox is plausible, and it invalidates the central conclusion of the study if it is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
[2] https://xkcd.com/552/
There are many types of argumentation that are useful for drawing practical conclusions about the world but are not, strictly speaking, valid logic. For example, "correlation doesn't equal causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively" [2]. If you know nothing about the truth or falsity of a statement, knowing who's saying it can provide some information that might tilt your opinion one way or another. But the person saying something does not make the argument true or false, otherwise I could make myself as detestable as possible to some group of people and then kill them off by giving them common-sense advice like "go to the doctor" or "eat healthy". (Come to think of it, this is exactly what happened to Republicans during COVID, where somehow wearing masks & getting vaccines became politicized.)
Bringing it back to the topic at hand - I found the digression about who Emil O Kierkegard is to be momentarily interesting, but I'd still like to know if he's right or not. The idea that this article might be due to Simpson's Paradox is plausible, and it invalidates the central conclusion of the study if it is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
[2] https://xkcd.com/552/
Someone has now pointed to some data in the study that isn't stratified by education level:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35518556
If I'm reading table S11 correctly, ICAR scores were 0.016 standard deviations lower on 2018 than in 2011.
I don't know whether the researchers chose those years for some specific reason, or if those years were the only ones available. It would be interesting to know whether the intervening years show a steady decline, or something more like a random walk.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35518556
If I'm reading table S11 correctly, ICAR scores were 0.016 standard deviations lower on 2018 than in 2011.
I don't know whether the researchers chose those years for some specific reason, or if those years were the only ones available. It would be interesting to know whether the intervening years show a steady decline, or something more like a random walk.
Something can be a logical fallacy while still being epistemologically justified. That's because logic is not an a priori description of reality; it's just a system for making inferences that happen to often be useful models of reality. But if I change my system of logic (e.g. move from accepting to rejecting the law of the excluded middle) then one set of fallacies disappears and another appears.
> If you know nothing about the truth or falsity of a statement, knowing who's saying it can provide some information that might tilt your opinion one way or another. But the person saying something does not make the argument true or false
So... it's not a fallacy. It gives you a reasonable amount of information.
So... it's not a fallacy. It gives you a reasonable amount of information.
It's not t necessarily fallacious, but it certainly can be. A known liar stating that 2+2=4 doesn't mean that 2+2!=4.
I didn't mean to imply I didn't appreciate people telling me more about this guy. I apologise if that's how my comment came across.
You should distrust every analyst and trust their analysis iff the argument is sound and you reach the same conclusion by doing the same analysis process based on data you trust.
Faked data is a big problem as that pretty much requires at least some trust; but the analysis part of any decent paper should be something which should be convincing even to a "hostile" reader who doesn't want to believe the author.
Faked data is a big problem as that pretty much requires at least some trust; but the analysis part of any decent paper should be something which should be convincing even to a "hostile" reader who doesn't want to believe the author.
This is an ad hominem attack. The fact that you don't like his politics doesn't imply that he's wrong.
Naw!!! "trust ... analysis"??? How does it go, "trust none of what you hear and only half of what you read and still will trust twice too much??? Not entirely a joke!
Lately been trying to get some summary, intuitive understanding of a lot of Internet content and have begun to conclude that there is something can trust (also not entirely a joke): The authors of the content want readers, and their content is something the authors want those readers to believe!!!
When I wanted something I could trust, ended up as a math major. But: Can't answer enough questions with just math. So, one resulting lesson from being a math major is, need to learn to work with content can't completely trust. E.g., in part, might keep in mind the advice "(1) Always look for the hidden agenda. (2) Follow the money."
Lately been trying to get some summary, intuitive understanding of a lot of Internet content and have begun to conclude that there is something can trust (also not entirely a joke): The authors of the content want readers, and their content is something the authors want those readers to believe!!!
When I wanted something I could trust, ended up as a math major. But: Can't answer enough questions with just math. So, one resulting lesson from being a math major is, need to learn to work with content can't completely trust. E.g., in part, might keep in mind the advice "(1) Always look for the hidden agenda. (2) Follow the money."
Bravo, I was gonna post this guy's 'bio' but someone beat me to it
What "bio"? So far I have only seen far left dominated opinion pieces, who obviously hate that he engages with taboo topics like race and IQ.
Anyone who contradicts this notion that some races are better than others and ergo those other "mud" races need to be exterminated, is too far left for retards like you. Go bait someone else.
That's not the right way to think about it. It is an empirical question whether there are significant heritable IQ differences between populations with similar ancestry. If such differences exist, then this is a very important fact to know about the world. We always want to believe the truth, whatever it may be. Labelling possibly true hypotheses as racist doesn't help. Ethical questions are different from empirical ones.
[deleted]
can we stop trying to launder these arguments over and over again here?
What does it mean for a % of something to 'goes doubles' ?
It means the sentence was edited before posting. Someone tried to replace "goes up" with "doubles", but forgot to delete the "goes".
[deleted]
By just comparing TFR across income (read: IQ) groups, you can know that IQ is dropping.
ParksNet(2)
The iq test can drop its standardized at 100 meaning average person scores 100. You have to standardize it for different population groups which cases issues when you test non represented populations
exogeny(1)
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runarberg(2)
All of America or just north America?
Is there anyone surprised, really?
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One of the people interviewed made a flippant comment that the focus on STEM may have had a negative impact on abstract reasoning. Haha what? Sounds like that person is one of the people impacted by the reverse Flynn effect.
I read somewhere a couple of years ago, some scientists showed that as CO2 levels rise, IQ scores drop.
But, me, I fully believe it is due to the war on public education by the US GOP. I wish these articles broke down these scores by school type the children go/went to.
Kids sent to high end private schools by their ultra rich parents probably have seen no such decline. It is like the US is trying to move into a caste society, ruling class and serf class.
edit: spelling
But, me, I fully believe it is due to the war on public education by the US GOP. I wish these articles broke down these scores by school type the children go/went to.
Kids sent to high end private schools by their ultra rich parents probably have seen no such decline. It is like the US is trying to move into a caste society, ruling class and serf class.
edit: spelling
There's not even close to enough CO2 in the atmosphere to have that profound of an effect on our IQ. If it was then our own breath would give us all brain damage and our species would have gone extinct millions of years ago. Pollution and poor air circulation indoors is one thing, but the ambient CO2 in the atmosphere outdoors is another.
I think it would be hard to directly study the ~1/3, ~320-420ppm increase in background CO2 levels over the last ~60 years:
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
Maybe raising rats in different CO2 levels over several generations. I would be interested in the results of a study like that.
Maybe raising rats in different CO2 levels over several generations. I would be interested in the results of a study like that.
I would like to believe this, but as someone with pretty privileged kids, it's not this. It's the phones.
Agreed.
They're learning precalculus in middle/high school these days, a subject I had no exposure to until late college (and which I had to cheat my way through). I can't help them with much of their homework anymore. School is way more challenging than it used to be.
But then they go home and learn mindless consumerism, social engineering and conspiracy theory from their phones.
The kids are better-educated than myself, but they exhibit a general lack of creativity. Everything is "role playing" other people's behavior or fanfiction expanding other people's work; even their sense of humor is meme-based and monosyllabic. Where their behavior turns malicious/criminal, they're usually getting their inspiration from some counter-culture influencer encouraging it.
A test that measures ability to think outside the box is showing poor results with this generation? Color me shocked!
They're learning precalculus in middle/high school these days, a subject I had no exposure to until late college (and which I had to cheat my way through). I can't help them with much of their homework anymore. School is way more challenging than it used to be.
But then they go home and learn mindless consumerism, social engineering and conspiracy theory from their phones.
The kids are better-educated than myself, but they exhibit a general lack of creativity. Everything is "role playing" other people's behavior or fanfiction expanding other people's work; even their sense of humor is meme-based and monosyllabic. Where their behavior turns malicious/criminal, they're usually getting their inspiration from some counter-culture influencer encouraging it.
A test that measures ability to think outside the box is showing poor results with this generation? Color me shocked!
I had precalculus in 11th grade, and calculus 1 in 12th grade. This was in the early 1980s. We had calculators, but they were simple TI-30[1] type. One line digital display, no graphics. All the problem sets (and graphs) were done on paper.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-30
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-30
American white students at public schools do incredibly well on the international PISA test. Most private schools aren’t competitive and there aren’t many students in them.
The overall trend is down, sure. But… year by year variance across education groups seems to be highly correlated. Like in 2011 there’s a positive bump in performance equally in Grad students and high school students. And in 2014 everyone dropped.
Like… come on. That seems like an enormous red flag to the validity of the measurement. The year by year variance (normalized against the trend) should be random across groups unless there is something specifically different about that year. Presuming people didn’t briefly all get smarter in 2011, it’s crazy that all groups tested better.
The only plausible answer is that the test was easier in 2011 right? And if that’s true, how confident can we really be that it isn’t just testing variance?
Edit: that is to say, per the central limit theorem, the sample means of each sub group per year should be normally distributed around the mean. Let’s assume our null hypothesis is the reverse Flynn decline. We should expect that for a given year that some groups will do worse than the trend prediction and some groups will do better. Since we instead see that all groups do about the same relative to the prediction, we should infer that our data is not a random sampling of scores that are described by the mean of that trend line. In fact, the scores seem to be better described by other unseen factors that are specific to each year.