IQ is a real thing. It's just not the thing racists (and fetishistic nerds) understand it to be. It's a diagnostic tool that is useful (in a battery of diagnostics) in detecting problems in individual patients. It's not a reliable or meaningful "ranking" of intelligence across populations.
I know BS in psychology is not a high degree, but I did learn at least that... IQ is pretty much a bogus thing. At least when it comes to population IQ.
The theory of general intelligence is now 100 years old and has produced nothing of value. It holds no predictive power which is not better explained with better metrics (such as SES). The only thing which population IQ has done is attempting to push (or otherwise popularize) racist pseudo-science into the field of psychology. We have no deeper understanding, no new models, no new predictions, as a result of describing intelligence as a set of covarying factors which are measurable and distributes normally among the population.
Now, assessing an individual IQ is a different matter, but even then it holds no scientific value. Developmental psychologists may use IQ tests to detect disabilities, but there are other and better tests which do the same thing. IQ tests have the benefit of being extremely well standardized and available so many developmental psychologists use them, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the underlying theory, especially since you can detect the same disability with other tools which do not claim to measure a general intelligence.
What is more popular though (at least in the literature the last I checked) is to use only the most relevant subtests and never actually assess the full IQ. But even if IQ is useful to diagnose disabilities among individuals, that tells us nothing about how to describe intelligence, just like how breathalyzers might tell whether a driver is dangerous on the road, but cannot tell you anything about how alcohol impairs driving abilities in the population.
IQ is actually rather easy to debunk on its own merit, and it doesn’t even pass the sniff test. We can tell from experience that intelligence is not evenly distributed, even if you assume that intelligence can be measured as a set of covarying factors (of which there is no proof), our own experience shows that an IQ of 70 is much more mentally impaired than an IQ of 130 is mentally superior. The difference between a 70 and a 100 is much much much greater than the difference between 100 and a 130. This suggests that IQ (if such a thing exits) is negatively skewed, which contradicts one of the fundamental assumptions of psychometricians.
To summarize. The theory of general intelligence (i.e. IQ) is at best an old theory which never amounted to anything (a scientific dead end if you will; I have my suspicion string theory might be on the same track) and at worst it is a racist pseudo-science, used to push racist believes in the field of Psychology.
You think IQ is a real thing because people administer IQ tests to find disabilities. I beg to differ. I think that IQ is indeed a made up construct, and whether or not a test which claims to measure it is used or not has no bearing on whether or not that thing exists or not.
Note that your argument is a whole another argument from what your grandparent made (and what your parent was arguing against), which is why I went ahead and explained the pseudo-scientific nature of population IQ (which your grandparent is arguing against my in a nibling thread).
One should never dismiss the link between IQ and the eugenics movement. IQ is not a good theory, nor is it good science, we can (and should) do without it.
I'm obviously not dismissing the link between IQ and the eugenics movement.
I get why you want to write all these paragraphs; I feel the same way whenever IQ comes up on HN. But you picked the wrong person to write them to. I recommend you check the search bar to see why.
You seem to have a similar view as Eric Turkheimer. Believe in IQ without all the racist stuff (and obviously don‘t believe it is inherited). I want to go even further. I think I remember Kareem Carr had a nice debate with Turkheimer on Twitter, where Carr said:
> In my opinion, I think we would all be better off if we thought of IQ not as "intelligence" but as a measure of "standardized test taking ability".
In my opinion we need to sunset the term IQ. It has a troubled history and is just bad science. I also think the whole field of psychometrics has a lot to answer for. I’m not sure that field has a future (at least not as a science).
No, I'm a Gusev person (like, reading within-families papers grade Gusevian), and I'm deeply skeptical of psychometrics. I was radicalized by Shalizi. But lots of tools that don't produce coherent metrics or have valid axiomatic derivations are nonetheless useful in clinical settings, and by denying that you concede to your opponents --- the "race scientists" --- the idea that you're dismissive of science that serious practitioners still deem valid. Don't surrender that card so easily.
(btw: if you're not up with Sasha Gusev yet, run don't walk --- midwit race scientists are constantly bouncing off him and it drives people crazy. curtis yarvin threatened to have imprisoned. i love him so much.)
No you just assumed I did because there is a certain element of self-aggrandizing 'anti-racists' that have groomed themelves to believe anytime someone brings up the IQ test score gap based on skin color, that it's being used to present there is an intelligence difference. I wholly reject making that assertion, but anti-racist zealots lock on and have nothing of subsistence to offer beyond their pre-canned 'IQ is not intelligence' speech to the point they have deluded themselves into arguing it against people not even making the claim.
It's a nice attempt at smug moral superiority, but a total straw man attack. And that's why nowhere has anyone been able to quote me as saying IQ score indicates intelligence, so like you they just smugly and ignorantly declare I have out of pure ether.
