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.
> IQ may not be real but IQ tests are and black expressing genotypes
"Black expressing genotypes" is the kind of phrase you'd expect someone to come up with if they wanted to mean "phenotype" but had a political motive for wanting something that sounded like "gene" to be in it.
> reliably score lower on them on average.
No, they don't. In the US there has been a significant—but inconsistent over time, racial IQ gap—but both the variability over time in that gap and all the studies that explore more details besides just broad racial contours show that that gap is at least largely and likely entirely due to socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental factors correlated with race, and not genetic.
tptacek|9 months ago
runarberg|9 months ago
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.
ty6853|9 months ago
[deleted]
dragonwriter|8 months ago
"Black expressing genotypes" is the kind of phrase you'd expect someone to come up with if they wanted to mean "phenotype" but had a political motive for wanting something that sounded like "gene" to be in it.
> reliably score lower on them on average.
No, they don't. In the US there has been a significant—but inconsistent over time, racial IQ gap—but both the variability over time in that gap and all the studies that explore more details besides just broad racial contours show that that gap is at least largely and likely entirely due to socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental factors correlated with race, and not genetic.
runarberg|9 months ago
Just because you throw a bunch of statistics behind a nonsence theory, that doesn’t make your nonsence theory any better.