Handsome Creepy Eel said:
That's actually my point - we frequently mention how an IQ 150 person just can't relate to and get along with an IQ 115 "midwit" because let's face it - the IQ 150 person is a genius in comparison and their brain works in a radically different way. As soon as there is a large enough gap, communication between them becomes impossible.
In the same way, we compare the mean 100 IQ Brit and a mean 70 IQ Rwandese and declare: yes, the typical Rwandese is a drooling idiot compared to the Brit. Just look at that 30 IQ gap! The poor Rwandese just can't compare.
Yet if both of them are just as capable and of holding and acting on absolutely retarded beliefs as I have
illustrated, what difference does it make in the end? If you can be a
relative genius yet still relatively retarded, then what's the point of endlessly pontificating about superior IQ? If IQ really extends further than juggling triangles on paper, it should be able to make you
smart - but in real life we just don't see it happening.
IQ isn't a test of wokeness, or how redpilled someone is, it's an intelligence test. It tests their ability to process new information, acquire knowledge, make deductions from that information, reason their way through problems. I think the biggest problem with these arguments is that the anti-IQ folks usually don't know what an IQ test even entails, and think it just consists of a non-verbal reasoning puzzle page.
As for silly beliefs, well beliefs are rarely a product of intellect to begin with, they're predominantly socialised—that goes for most individuals of
all levels of intelligence. The greatest socialisation pressure to adopt ridiculous beliefs today is coming from the institutions most captured by insane ideologues: universities and the media. People who are most plugged into either or both of these will have been indoctrinated more thoroughly. This is largely orthogonal to intelligence.
Note that you could just as easily use your own argument to claim intelligence as a feature doesn't exist at all, because people who have it in abundance still do stupid things sometimes. It's not a metric-dependent argument.
Handsome Creepy Eel said:
That's a strawman. I never disputed that juggling triangles strongly related to a very abstract task such as coding or that the IQ 80 children would be harder to teach coding. Absolutely they will. I just argued that being good at coding doesn't in any way prevent you from being retarded, delusional, violent and generally an utter failure at life.
It doesn't
prevent you, it just strongly correlates. At least until you get to the extraordinarily high 150+ range, when it starts to create alienation problems, which feed into a variety of other negatives. This isn't a fault in IQ tests' ability to correctly measure intelligence: it's simply that there are many problems attendant with high intelligence. Go ask Isaac Newton.
Again, to use height as an analogy, substantial deviation from the median has poorer average results than slight deviation (unless you want to play basketball). Being 7 foot tall has far more disadvantages than advantages. But being 6'1-6'4 is all advantages. That doesn't mean a ruler that clocks 7 foot as 'really fucking tall' is broken: it's working precisely as intended. And certain activities, like basketball, are going to be filled almost exclusively with people from the
extreme right tail of the bell curve. Likewise, men like Galileo, Newton, or Mozart don't come from the mid-upper quartile of human intelligence.
Handsome Creepy Eel said:
Consider
Eric Clanton, the communist who tried to murder someone with a bike lock. He's a college professor of philosophy. Can you really see yourself saying
"yes, but at least this waste of life has an IQ of 110 and is a genius relative to Africans so that makes him superior"? What does it matter? If someone is inferior scum, they're inferior scum regardless of their IQ, and the same is valid on a national or racial level too.
It's not self-delusional to say that there's much more to life than intelligence.
This is immense goalpost shifting. IQ tests are not "life tests", otherwise it would be called your LQ. They are intelligence tests. I don't know what this "inferior scum" business is about. Retards are retards, that doesn't make them bad people. An IQ test is also not a morality test.
You're damn right intelligence isn't everything, note even close, but the question is whether IQ is a reliable and meaningful way to measure it. The answer is you betcha.
When I was a kid I was helped by a charity that used to operate in the UK that offered aid to gifted children who weren't being catered for by the school system, and I ran some classes for them some years later. All the children had been properly IQ tested by psychs and had to be over 130 to be eligible for support. At the lower end of the spectrum, there were a few kids that I'll grant you were probably just "bright", and from privileged backgrounds with parents who were education-oriented and who put a lot into their kids.
But there was not a single child in the 150+ range who wasn't
profoundly gifted—we're talking ready for university at 12 years old. And most of these kids were
not privileged in any way. They were from working class families, they weren't all white/asian/jewish, but they
were all male (standard deviation, the bane of feminists). And a commonality is that they were usually extremely precocious even as babies. They learned to talk 6 months early. They skipped crawling altogether and were walking several months early. They could read and write fluently as toddlers. Same story every time. Their parents were often uneducated, but without exception highly intelligent too.
There was no one similarly gifted getting scored a mere 130. The test does its job.
Oberrheiner said:
Also what I should add is that you don't actually see that many high IQ people endlessly pontificating about it.
Those who do are usually social failures trying to compensate that by displaying their number.
But then wouldn't Taleb be guilty of doing the exact opposite of that ?
Namely trying to compensate a not so high IQ* by displaying his social skills** instead ?
* no judgement here, he admits himself in this twitter thread that he was surrounded by people with higher IQ than him during his career.
** "survival street smarts" or however he defined that in the same twitter thread.
Disagree on this one, there is no way Taleb scores below 140, he's likely in the 150+ range, so at the very least I wouldn't dismiss his argument as him having "skin in the game" (i.e. REEE I scored low, the test must be bad).
Sp5 said:
I agree with Taleb on IQ. I was a clerk in the US Army. Over time, I learned the IQs (GT score) of everyone in my unit of about 200 men.
The IQ had little to do with how I had independently judged a soldier's competence, conversational ability, wittiness, or game. Some sharp guys were well below 100, and some dullards were well above it.
The range of GT scores (in those days tracked IQ exactly) in the unit was 78 to 160.
None of these things except competence are related to IQ, and that one's only by proxy. A low-conscientiousness 120 IQ individual will of course be outperformed by a hard working 90 IQ guy,
particularly when the parameters of the work are already familiar.
