IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle - eviltoast

Taleb dunking on IQ “research” at length. Technically a seriouspost I guess.

    • maol@awful.systems
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      1 year ago

      it hasn’t but it has been promoted as a predictor of success in education, work and life. The Bell Curve famously claimed that higher IQ people were more likely to finish education, stay in work, stay out of prison and stay married.

        • YouKnowWhoTheFuckIAM@awful.systems
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          1 year ago

          Importantly, even where a very spare analysis which gets to pick and choose its terms and data (i.e. any analysis which begins by frontloading (1) measured - actually etimated - IQ and the traditional and (2) unanalysed markers by which success is judged) finds that there is a crude regularity whereby IQ and success are correlated, in practical terms nobody will ever - and I mean EVER - use this data to support conclusions which follow from the discovery of a crude regularity. This is partly a human cognition thing and mostly an ideology thing, but the human cognition thing is an important cause. It’s very difficult, practically impossible, for people not to move from a continuous result (the crude regularity) to a categorical conclusion (one which parses between individuals) - and fortunately, for the bigot, this already plays into the bigoted attitude.