While I'm still amazed at your dogmatism reading parapsychological studies (many of which have FAR greater validity and reliability than almost anything related to IQ), I'm surprised to find myself largely in agreement with this article.
Having administered well over 1000 IQ tests as a clinical psychologist, I made it a point to keep up to date on the constantly updated research. I usually included a note in my report saying that (a) IQ, particularly from early childhood to middle adulthood, can vary by as much as 20-30 points (I administered at least 100 tests where such large variation occurred); and (b) IQ does NOT measure "general intelligence" but a set of cognitive skills that are important for functioning in much of today's world (much skilled physical labor as well as more complex mental-related tasks); except at extreme levels (below the 5th to 10th percentile, or above the 75 percentile) most people scoring within the low average to high average range will do fine at most occupations (sure, an 85IQ is going to mean enormous struggle if one wants to become a medical doctor, but then, I've never met anyone with an IQ in that range for whom that was not terribly obvious, something they didn't need an IQ test to tell them).
The most amazing things, to me, about IQ tests, are two, in terms of practicality:
(1) I regularly administered specialized IQ tests for adults with IQs from mild to profound intellectual disability. It was amazing, in terms of developing behavioral modification programs, how much it helped to know if someone was in the profound (under 20) or severe (20-40, roughly) range.
(2) I also occasionally combined administrations of IQ and various neuropsychological tests, and was regularly amazed at how much one could localize brain deficits by a combination of IQ and neuropsychological testing.
In short, if you know precisely what you're using the IQ for (just about none of the things that are popularly thought about it on the net) it can be a useful tool - particularly if one uses it in conjunction with numerous other tests, a full history, and when available, imaging and other related tests.
One thing that has always bugged me about IQ is that it isn't clear to me exactly what it measures. I'm not talking the difference between intellectual and "emotional" IQ. I'm talking about how intelligence works in practical life vs intellectual life.
My late ex husband was at the top of his very arcane field, a small subset of Applied Mathematics. As a matter of practical life, he couldn't find his way out of a paper bag. He (luckily after our divorce) simply forgot to file his tax returns for two years. He didn't think to ask basic important questions of the vet when picking up the cat (eg. has it eaten or should we feed it?). He could never remember what day garbage day was. On and on and on.
I do very well on IQ and SAT type tests and performed well academically both undergrad, grad, and lawschool. But my spatial and math skills leave something to be desired in comparison with verbal use and reasoning. I could never perform STEM tasks with any degree of facility. My math scores on the SAT were good--well above 700 under the system in use back in 1962. But my verbal skills were very close to perfect.
In law school there was a student in my class who got 800 on the LSATs. But it was clear from his class participation that he wasn't really "getting" what the professors were saying. I don't remember where he placed in the class on graduation, but it was well below me. Law is, at root, more verbal than STEM.
What I have looked at when dealing with people, particularly less educated ones (with whom I dealt a lot in my legal career) is a quality I've called "brightness." That has to do with being quick to see connections between things that are relevant to their way in the world, as well as a curiosity about all things in their world and a willingness to go beyond their immediate world if that curiosity leads them there. I have NO IDEA whether this is measured by IQ. I can't see that it is measured well by the SAT and its ilk, which are only intended to predict academic success.
Often the high-school only educated contractors I encountered so often in my practice were WAY "brighter" than their lawyers. I had the same experience in grad school teaching "educationally disadvantaged" students who didn't have the grades OR test scores to get into the state University where I taught, but were selected because of their "promise." I have no idea how that promise was measured, but it really worked, because those classes had more students in the "bright" range than any other I taught, even where they didn't know how to put a sentence together. Those classes SANG with "brightness."
ARE there standardized tests aimed at "brightness" without worrying about academic achievement or the spatial/math parts of the tests?
“But while different researchers give extremely wide estimates of the heritability of IQ, all the way from low single-digit percentages to upwards of half the variance,”
Nobody who is knowledgeable as far as I know puts IQ heritability at “low single-digits.” That link is to what one can explain from specific genes, that’s not an estimate of heredity, which needs to be derived from twin or adoption studies.
OK, but what really gets our goat up is the 'isolated demand for rigour'. How many of the IQ sceptics are consistent and will say that, if IQ is uncertain, most of psychology is literally worthless? Hell, let's not even focus on middle-level stuff like big 5 personality traits. Most IQ critics believe in absolute trash like stereotype threat.
Oh, I was in SMPY and never realized it! I entered through what I knew as the Duke (as in the university) Talent Identification Program. I took the SAT in 7th grade, did good, and spent the next 5 years getting course catalogs to go to enrichment programs we couldn’t afford. Maybe if I’d done better or been in a different location, there would have been more local or low cost options. As it is, I wonder about the feedback loop between kids who’d been able to get tutoring to know the geometry and Alg 2 on the SAT (I’d gotten neither), and the ability to pay for the interventions afterwards.
You dig in deeply on one, possibly the best, applications of IQ and similar instruments that measure intelligence: identifying young people with great potential and supporting their education. I'm glad you drew the connection to “aristocratic tutoring.” Of course, there is the obverse effect of some kid being labeled below average, taking it to heart, and never rising to their potential.
The scientific racism that drove early research into IQ still animates some of the discourse. It would be great if Mismeasure of Man and other better histories had countered nefarious uses of measures of intelligence testing, but there are still people out there lying and making up data to support white supremacy and their racist fantasies. I get that it can be hard to distinguish between legitimate scientific questions and BS when some of the scientists involved are racist cranks, but I wish journalists and editors would make the effort instead of lumping it all together.
There are genuine disagreements about using factor analysis to identify entities that are not observable except through collecting data in tests and surveys. Specific examples of intelligence are easy to observe, but testing them in situations removed from environments where humans live and breath and actually use their cognitive abilities makes concepts like general intelligence or grit or whatever tricky to apply.
Your point that the "best" measure is not necessarily a "good" measure is really important. More effort needs to be made in explaining that such measures are "a noisy and weak signal" instead of marveling at the significance of a result arrived at by pounding a data set of test scores with factor analysis.
This makes me sad because my own child has autism and an intellectual/learning disability, and I feel like she’s doomed, but I got a perfect score on my verbal SAT, so I often just sit around and wonder wtf happened and imagine how much better my life and hers would be if genetic IQ inheritance had freaking worked. 😢
This seems like bothside-ism. While it is true that both sides of the IQ debate make mistakes or draw conclusions that aren't justified by the evidence, the anti-IQ side commit much more serious mistakes while the pro-IQ side is correct on the broad facts.
I don't find your critique of the SMPY study compelling. You claim that the results of the study are contaminated because the researchers put their thumb on the scale by selectively helping those with better test scores. But it's not clear to me at all how the researchers could intervene in such a way to cause such a large disparity between the different subgroups (all of which are high potential to begin with). If such large interventions existed, we would expect to the shared environment (parents/socioeconomic background) to matter a lot more than it does empirically.
A lot of the interventions you listed are roughly akin to skipping a year of high school. Does learning algebra in 8th grade instead of 9th grade really increase the probability of being a high-impact researcher 5x?
Believing that population-level traits are close to destiny does not require believing the same of individuals.
I don't think that the taller person will win every basketball 1v1, but if you split a classroom, city, or country in half based on height the team that could be fielded by the taller half will have increasingly greater chances to win, approaching 100%.
Most "IQ truthers" would say IQ is roughly as heritable as height, which seems like an apropriate bayesian prior. Maybe you should start lower since intelligence is likely more polygenetic. I don't think it makes sense to say they are as wrong as NYT columnists.
I haven’t paid attention to any recent IQ discourse online, but I’m not surprised by any of this considering that it’s considered a “smart” thing to say dumb things like, “I like to run because it raises my endorphins!” Mostly by people who don’t have the slightest notion of biochemistry to begin with.
I never thought about IQ, I thought it was a dopey and outdated test even as a teenager, and I don’t remember any of my incredibly intelligent classmates at Harvey Mudd College ever really talking about it amidst our much more interesting and much weirder conversations, like hey Lucas, how did you get expelled from living on campus again because you decided to make thermite in your dorm room because you were interested in the chemistry of it?
I did know a bunch of people who went to CTY, and didn’t know that was the origin story, sounds about right. All this type of extreme inequality and aristocratic tutoring is really one of the biggest dark sides of America, speaking as someone who went on to work in education for many years in the country (going completely against the grain of the expected successful trajectory, speaking of such, of becoming a professor, working in aerospace, at Google, or a biotech company, like most of my classmates). The degree of excessive privilege and selective tutoring is indeed great in many communities, but as a teacher, on the whole, the most intelligent students I’ve usually encountered were not the ones locked in fierce tests and programs in a fight to the death, but the ones who were more blissfully unaware of all that and preferred to compose their own songs while learning abstract algebra on side, just for fun, with the support of loving and well intentioned (and usually well off) parents.
All in all, it’s a pretty strange dynamic, especially since I taught mostly minority students at one point who had mostly never even been to a major park 3 miles from their neighbourhood. That’s America. Now in Canada, you don’t tend to see the extremes much, and nowhere near the racial segregation inherent in them. The approaching and then going beyond aristocratic system in America seems pretty bizarre and blatantly unequal by comparison.
Interesting essay! Unusually balanced for a discussion of IQ, and I appreciate that you pointed out that kids who are identified as having "high iQs" are singled out for more opportunities and training. I never took a formal IQ test or the SAT (I'm Canadian), but I got perfect scores on the math and spatial reasoning sections of my school district's "gifted" test and 800/800 on the quantitative section of the GRE. (I scored very high on the verbal too, but I'm definitely weaker there). I'm also weirdly good at Tetris. But in so many other ways I'm unexceptional. The kind of person who doesn't notice her dress is inside out and backwards for hours or notices halfway through the day I only shaved one of my legs. A little gullible too. I'm only fluent in one language and mispronounce words. A sociologist from the London School of Economics, Christopher Badcock, argues in one of his books that IQ tests only capture "mechanistic" cognitive abilities ... plus conformity to "Western" ways of thinking / Western culture, You might like his book, The Diametric Mind. He also argues that IQ tests give an inaccurate picture of intelligence for autistic people in particular as they capture autistic strengths but fail to capture cognitive weaknesses associated with the diagnostic label.
I did some research on the link between childhood giftedness (scoring high on an IQ test in childhood), high functioning autism (Aspergers), and rapid onset gender dysphoria (other mental health issues loosely addressed too). You might find it interesting, as I dig into some issues with childhood IQ testing in particular (e.g. precocity as a confounding factor).
I am a researcher of creative intelligence and I can tell you the other ways to study and cultivate intelligence. I went into this because my family is savants and we do not fit into the school system at all. We are destroyed by it. Generation after generation.
My children are all prodigies. I have a math and a science prodigy, an acting prodigy and my youngest is rolling her to prodigious giftedness now. Everything we think about intelligence is half wrong. You are missing the somatic intelligence and that eliminates the savants the ones who lean on their own. Our system's hyper focus on competition also eliminates the savants. The most gifted must create their own thing or go insane.
Right now we are driving the most gifted into insanity. I hate our systems and am glad they are failing. They destroy people just all other natural resources.. I will build new ones rather than try to change the old ones. There is nothing in them worth saving. They are set up to exploit instead of cultivate. Everyone working on them is too average and lack the sensitivity to really see and serve anyone that is a true brilliant outlier.
As far as I can tell, the genetics of IQ and height are pretty similar from a layman’s perspective. Obviously, environment can affect things downwards, but genes set potential — outside of things like stretching devices or training for an IQ test enough to raise a score. (Though my understanding is that for standardized testing there is good evidence that training/tutoring has limited impact on raising scores).
But height is much easier to measure and harder to deny, and has many fewer political controversies associated with it.
Leaving aside the genetics of it all, IQ and its proxies so reliably correlate with real-world outcomes that it’s unavoidable. You can nitpick any particular test or conception of G, but obviously there is something there, and inasmuch as intelligence has utility it should positively correlate with positive outcomes.
The blank slate position is so ridiculously wrong on so many issues that you’re going to get accused of bothsidesism for pointing out that the IQ science isn’t always perfect. There is massive social desirability bias against IQ such that people have been fired for even pointing out the “achievement gap,” which has been long recognized and used as a justification for policies to reduce it!
Recently, this research paper was withdrawn for being controversial because if you look at penises and IQ, you will also find racial correlations.
I was a gifted student, until an accident at thirteen, which changed my cognitive life in ways I am now starting to understand at age 69. My fall from grace was profound and I never understood why, nor did “they” ever bother to explain.
IQ stuff is bullshit. Give kids a privileged upbringing and a gradual amount of training with proper reinforcement, and they will all do well on IQ tests; keep training them and treating them well in a considerate and contextual way ("at their will or desire"), and they will do well on IQ tests as adults. The whole thing is silly. What I do not understand is why the bouncer in the posted link would want to be a bouncer (the position is the lowest rank in the security industry) with such an IQ. I am also a "high IQ" person who graduated from high school two months after turning 15 (with all the challenges of growing up with boys 2 to 3 years older), and I could sort of relate to the bouncer in the sense that I also got promoted to third grade after doing kindergarten-second grade in the same year, the need to exercise to be able to defend myself, and I sort of disliked school until I found some passion for it after my freshman year of college. There is much more to intelligence than stupid IQ tests, and much more to life than intelligence measures. The only thing I can relate to is a feeling of loneliness (sometimes, not always) and the constant desire to find my squad (Silicon Valley may be that place), I guess.
While I'm still amazed at your dogmatism reading parapsychological studies (many of which have FAR greater validity and reliability than almost anything related to IQ), I'm surprised to find myself largely in agreement with this article.
Having administered well over 1000 IQ tests as a clinical psychologist, I made it a point to keep up to date on the constantly updated research. I usually included a note in my report saying that (a) IQ, particularly from early childhood to middle adulthood, can vary by as much as 20-30 points (I administered at least 100 tests where such large variation occurred); and (b) IQ does NOT measure "general intelligence" but a set of cognitive skills that are important for functioning in much of today's world (much skilled physical labor as well as more complex mental-related tasks); except at extreme levels (below the 5th to 10th percentile, or above the 75 percentile) most people scoring within the low average to high average range will do fine at most occupations (sure, an 85IQ is going to mean enormous struggle if one wants to become a medical doctor, but then, I've never met anyone with an IQ in that range for whom that was not terribly obvious, something they didn't need an IQ test to tell them).
The most amazing things, to me, about IQ tests, are two, in terms of practicality:
(1) I regularly administered specialized IQ tests for adults with IQs from mild to profound intellectual disability. It was amazing, in terms of developing behavioral modification programs, how much it helped to know if someone was in the profound (under 20) or severe (20-40, roughly) range.
(2) I also occasionally combined administrations of IQ and various neuropsychological tests, and was regularly amazed at how much one could localize brain deficits by a combination of IQ and neuropsychological testing.
In short, if you know precisely what you're using the IQ for (just about none of the things that are popularly thought about it on the net) it can be a useful tool - particularly if one uses it in conjunction with numerous other tests, a full history, and when available, imaging and other related tests.
One thing that has always bugged me about IQ is that it isn't clear to me exactly what it measures. I'm not talking the difference between intellectual and "emotional" IQ. I'm talking about how intelligence works in practical life vs intellectual life.
My late ex husband was at the top of his very arcane field, a small subset of Applied Mathematics. As a matter of practical life, he couldn't find his way out of a paper bag. He (luckily after our divorce) simply forgot to file his tax returns for two years. He didn't think to ask basic important questions of the vet when picking up the cat (eg. has it eaten or should we feed it?). He could never remember what day garbage day was. On and on and on.
I do very well on IQ and SAT type tests and performed well academically both undergrad, grad, and lawschool. But my spatial and math skills leave something to be desired in comparison with verbal use and reasoning. I could never perform STEM tasks with any degree of facility. My math scores on the SAT were good--well above 700 under the system in use back in 1962. But my verbal skills were very close to perfect.
In law school there was a student in my class who got 800 on the LSATs. But it was clear from his class participation that he wasn't really "getting" what the professors were saying. I don't remember where he placed in the class on graduation, but it was well below me. Law is, at root, more verbal than STEM.
What I have looked at when dealing with people, particularly less educated ones (with whom I dealt a lot in my legal career) is a quality I've called "brightness." That has to do with being quick to see connections between things that are relevant to their way in the world, as well as a curiosity about all things in their world and a willingness to go beyond their immediate world if that curiosity leads them there. I have NO IDEA whether this is measured by IQ. I can't see that it is measured well by the SAT and its ilk, which are only intended to predict academic success.
Often the high-school only educated contractors I encountered so often in my practice were WAY "brighter" than their lawyers. I had the same experience in grad school teaching "educationally disadvantaged" students who didn't have the grades OR test scores to get into the state University where I taught, but were selected because of their "promise." I have no idea how that promise was measured, but it really worked, because those classes had more students in the "bright" range than any other I taught, even where they didn't know how to put a sentence together. Those classes SANG with "brightness."
ARE there standardized tests aimed at "brightness" without worrying about academic achievement or the spatial/math parts of the tests?
“But while different researchers give extremely wide estimates of the heritability of IQ, all the way from low single-digit percentages to upwards of half the variance,”
Nobody who is knowledgeable as far as I know puts IQ heritability at “low single-digits.” That link is to what one can explain from specific genes, that’s not an estimate of heredity, which needs to be derived from twin or adoption studies.
OK, but what really gets our goat up is the 'isolated demand for rigour'. How many of the IQ sceptics are consistent and will say that, if IQ is uncertain, most of psychology is literally worthless? Hell, let's not even focus on middle-level stuff like big 5 personality traits. Most IQ critics believe in absolute trash like stereotype threat.
Oh, I was in SMPY and never realized it! I entered through what I knew as the Duke (as in the university) Talent Identification Program. I took the SAT in 7th grade, did good, and spent the next 5 years getting course catalogs to go to enrichment programs we couldn’t afford. Maybe if I’d done better or been in a different location, there would have been more local or low cost options. As it is, I wonder about the feedback loop between kids who’d been able to get tutoring to know the geometry and Alg 2 on the SAT (I’d gotten neither), and the ability to pay for the interventions afterwards.
You dig in deeply on one, possibly the best, applications of IQ and similar instruments that measure intelligence: identifying young people with great potential and supporting their education. I'm glad you drew the connection to “aristocratic tutoring.” Of course, there is the obverse effect of some kid being labeled below average, taking it to heart, and never rising to their potential.
The scientific racism that drove early research into IQ still animates some of the discourse. It would be great if Mismeasure of Man and other better histories had countered nefarious uses of measures of intelligence testing, but there are still people out there lying and making up data to support white supremacy and their racist fantasies. I get that it can be hard to distinguish between legitimate scientific questions and BS when some of the scientists involved are racist cranks, but I wish journalists and editors would make the effort instead of lumping it all together.
There are genuine disagreements about using factor analysis to identify entities that are not observable except through collecting data in tests and surveys. Specific examples of intelligence are easy to observe, but testing them in situations removed from environments where humans live and breath and actually use their cognitive abilities makes concepts like general intelligence or grit or whatever tricky to apply.
Your point that the "best" measure is not necessarily a "good" measure is really important. More effort needs to be made in explaining that such measures are "a noisy and weak signal" instead of marveling at the significance of a result arrived at by pounding a data set of test scores with factor analysis.
This makes me sad because my own child has autism and an intellectual/learning disability, and I feel like she’s doomed, but I got a perfect score on my verbal SAT, so I often just sit around and wonder wtf happened and imagine how much better my life and hers would be if genetic IQ inheritance had freaking worked. 😢
This seems like bothside-ism. While it is true that both sides of the IQ debate make mistakes or draw conclusions that aren't justified by the evidence, the anti-IQ side commit much more serious mistakes while the pro-IQ side is correct on the broad facts.
I don't find your critique of the SMPY study compelling. You claim that the results of the study are contaminated because the researchers put their thumb on the scale by selectively helping those with better test scores. But it's not clear to me at all how the researchers could intervene in such a way to cause such a large disparity between the different subgroups (all of which are high potential to begin with). If such large interventions existed, we would expect to the shared environment (parents/socioeconomic background) to matter a lot more than it does empirically.
A lot of the interventions you listed are roughly akin to skipping a year of high school. Does learning algebra in 8th grade instead of 9th grade really increase the probability of being a high-impact researcher 5x?
Believing that population-level traits are close to destiny does not require believing the same of individuals.
I don't think that the taller person will win every basketball 1v1, but if you split a classroom, city, or country in half based on height the team that could be fielded by the taller half will have increasingly greater chances to win, approaching 100%.
Most "IQ truthers" would say IQ is roughly as heritable as height, which seems like an apropriate bayesian prior. Maybe you should start lower since intelligence is likely more polygenetic. I don't think it makes sense to say they are as wrong as NYT columnists.
I haven’t paid attention to any recent IQ discourse online, but I’m not surprised by any of this considering that it’s considered a “smart” thing to say dumb things like, “I like to run because it raises my endorphins!” Mostly by people who don’t have the slightest notion of biochemistry to begin with.
I never thought about IQ, I thought it was a dopey and outdated test even as a teenager, and I don’t remember any of my incredibly intelligent classmates at Harvey Mudd College ever really talking about it amidst our much more interesting and much weirder conversations, like hey Lucas, how did you get expelled from living on campus again because you decided to make thermite in your dorm room because you were interested in the chemistry of it?
I did know a bunch of people who went to CTY, and didn’t know that was the origin story, sounds about right. All this type of extreme inequality and aristocratic tutoring is really one of the biggest dark sides of America, speaking as someone who went on to work in education for many years in the country (going completely against the grain of the expected successful trajectory, speaking of such, of becoming a professor, working in aerospace, at Google, or a biotech company, like most of my classmates). The degree of excessive privilege and selective tutoring is indeed great in many communities, but as a teacher, on the whole, the most intelligent students I’ve usually encountered were not the ones locked in fierce tests and programs in a fight to the death, but the ones who were more blissfully unaware of all that and preferred to compose their own songs while learning abstract algebra on side, just for fun, with the support of loving and well intentioned (and usually well off) parents.
All in all, it’s a pretty strange dynamic, especially since I taught mostly minority students at one point who had mostly never even been to a major park 3 miles from their neighbourhood. That’s America. Now in Canada, you don’t tend to see the extremes much, and nowhere near the racial segregation inherent in them. The approaching and then going beyond aristocratic system in America seems pretty bizarre and blatantly unequal by comparison.
Interesting essay! Unusually balanced for a discussion of IQ, and I appreciate that you pointed out that kids who are identified as having "high iQs" are singled out for more opportunities and training. I never took a formal IQ test or the SAT (I'm Canadian), but I got perfect scores on the math and spatial reasoning sections of my school district's "gifted" test and 800/800 on the quantitative section of the GRE. (I scored very high on the verbal too, but I'm definitely weaker there). I'm also weirdly good at Tetris. But in so many other ways I'm unexceptional. The kind of person who doesn't notice her dress is inside out and backwards for hours or notices halfway through the day I only shaved one of my legs. A little gullible too. I'm only fluent in one language and mispronounce words. A sociologist from the London School of Economics, Christopher Badcock, argues in one of his books that IQ tests only capture "mechanistic" cognitive abilities ... plus conformity to "Western" ways of thinking / Western culture, You might like his book, The Diametric Mind. He also argues that IQ tests give an inaccurate picture of intelligence for autistic people in particular as they capture autistic strengths but fail to capture cognitive weaknesses associated with the diagnostic label.
I did some research on the link between childhood giftedness (scoring high on an IQ test in childhood), high functioning autism (Aspergers), and rapid onset gender dysphoria (other mental health issues loosely addressed too). You might find it interesting, as I dig into some issues with childhood IQ testing in particular (e.g. precocity as a confounding factor).
Link: https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-drama-of-the-gifted-children
Glad this popped up on my feed!
I am a researcher of creative intelligence and I can tell you the other ways to study and cultivate intelligence. I went into this because my family is savants and we do not fit into the school system at all. We are destroyed by it. Generation after generation.
My children are all prodigies. I have a math and a science prodigy, an acting prodigy and my youngest is rolling her to prodigious giftedness now. Everything we think about intelligence is half wrong. You are missing the somatic intelligence and that eliminates the savants the ones who lean on their own. Our system's hyper focus on competition also eliminates the savants. The most gifted must create their own thing or go insane.
Right now we are driving the most gifted into insanity. I hate our systems and am glad they are failing. They destroy people just all other natural resources.. I will build new ones rather than try to change the old ones. There is nothing in them worth saving. They are set up to exploit instead of cultivate. Everyone working on them is too average and lack the sensitivity to really see and serve anyone that is a true brilliant outlier.
As far as I can tell, the genetics of IQ and height are pretty similar from a layman’s perspective. Obviously, environment can affect things downwards, but genes set potential — outside of things like stretching devices or training for an IQ test enough to raise a score. (Though my understanding is that for standardized testing there is good evidence that training/tutoring has limited impact on raising scores).
But height is much easier to measure and harder to deny, and has many fewer political controversies associated with it.
Leaving aside the genetics of it all, IQ and its proxies so reliably correlate with real-world outcomes that it’s unavoidable. You can nitpick any particular test or conception of G, but obviously there is something there, and inasmuch as intelligence has utility it should positively correlate with positive outcomes.
The blank slate position is so ridiculously wrong on so many issues that you’re going to get accused of bothsidesism for pointing out that the IQ science isn’t always perfect. There is massive social desirability bias against IQ such that people have been fired for even pointing out the “achievement gap,” which has been long recognized and used as a justification for policies to reduce it!
Recently, this research paper was withdrawn for being controversial because if you look at penises and IQ, you will also find racial correlations.
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3816362/v1
Reality does not have a progressive bias.
Super interesting article, thanks! But why the “even” on Lady Gaga?
I was a gifted student, until an accident at thirteen, which changed my cognitive life in ways I am now starting to understand at age 69. My fall from grace was profound and I never understood why, nor did “they” ever bother to explain.
IQ stuff is bullshit. Give kids a privileged upbringing and a gradual amount of training with proper reinforcement, and they will all do well on IQ tests; keep training them and treating them well in a considerate and contextual way ("at their will or desire"), and they will do well on IQ tests as adults. The whole thing is silly. What I do not understand is why the bouncer in the posted link would want to be a bouncer (the position is the lowest rank in the security industry) with such an IQ. I am also a "high IQ" person who graduated from high school two months after turning 15 (with all the challenges of growing up with boys 2 to 3 years older), and I could sort of relate to the bouncer in the sense that I also got promoted to third grade after doing kindergarten-second grade in the same year, the need to exercise to be able to defend myself, and I sort of disliked school until I found some passion for it after my freshman year of college. There is much more to intelligence than stupid IQ tests, and much more to life than intelligence measures. The only thing I can relate to is a feeling of loneliness (sometimes, not always) and the constant desire to find my squad (Silicon Valley may be that place), I guess.