Is there any source of scrutiny you’d accept as valid criticism? Seriously though, the burden of proof shouldn’t be on the anti-IQ crowd. IQ is a new construct, that proponents have been trying to justify for over half a century. At some point, repeated failures to convince a broader field of its utility should be evidence enough that it might not be worth investigating. Yes, sometimes there are worthy theories which receive unfair treatment, like e.g. continental drift, however even Wegener’s theory took less than 50 years to be accepted, and I bet IQ research has received orders of…
Thankfully I believe this is changing. Stephen Jay Gould is among the top cited authors within psychology despite not being a psychologist. The psychologists Gould criticized are slowly dying of (e.g. Arthur Jensen) or being fired in disgrace (e.g. Richard Lynn). A new generation of psychologist aren’t picking up their theories, and a new generation of policy makers are distancing them self from IQ science (e.g. the SAT was renamed for this purpose). I think psychologists have spent enough ink on this non-sense and correctly moved on. It is now up to historians to talk about how damaging…
> "the mismeasure of man" is a garbage book by the noted fraud and liar steven jay gould. When you post like this, do you ever stop to think how you're making psychology and its supporters look? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man#Awards Quote: "The first edition of The Mismeasure of Man won the non-fiction award from the National Book Critics Circle; the Outstanding Book Award for 1983 from the American Educational Research Association; the Italian translation was awarded the Iglesias prize in 1991; and in 1998, the Modern Library ranked it as the 24th-best non-fiction book…
> I attribute this to: 1) IQ 3 standard deviations above. (...) A person with an IQ at or above 145, who is also fully conversant with reality, would know that IQ testing has a reputation nearly as bad the field of psychology that popularized the activity in the first place. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man > 2) I've been practicing hard, 25 years. A person of your age should know better than to use IQ as a point of argument -- assuming the IQ score is real and has created a tangible intellectual outcome. With all respect.
For anybody reading this in the future, "truthteller" isn't the voice of reason in this thread, he/she is a troll. The link above by defens is a legitimate criticism of The Mismeasure of Man and is well worth reading. It doesn't speak to the overarching theme of the book, which is it's attack on the goals and the content of intelligence testing, but to a mischaracterization that Gould made of the conclusions of someone else's research, turning them into a bit of a straw man representing subconscious testing bias. It definitely weakens Gould's case in that regard. The book is still an…
OK. A few off the cuff objections: 1. It seems fairly widely reported that you can practice at IQ tests and get better. Are there any studies confirming or denying this? I presume you'd agree that if true it rather kills the validity of IQ tests dead. 2. I have ADHD and I'm acutely aware of how environmental factors affect my performance in many tasks. How do you square this with the idea that they measure an objective innate quality? 3. How do you account for the Flynn Effect? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect - are people getting smarter? 4. What's your thoughts on the argument…
A gentle reminder that g is a measure of correlation without any causative explanatory power (factor analysis aims to identify correlations between observed and hypothesissed, hidden variables). The idea was subject to criticsm, though not directly from inside the field of psychometrics itself (which is usually a big red flag): Other criticisms Perhaps the most famous critique of the construct of g is that of the paleontologist and biologist Stephen Jay Gould, presented in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man. He argued that psychometricians have fallaciously reified the g factor as a…
Even a suite of numbers for human brains sounds more social scientific than scientific, but it makes more sense than one number. Let's take visuo-spatial ability. Men do better in testing than women generally. So for arguments sake let's say they are correctly measuring a deficiency. So now the question is, is this for cultural reasons or genetic reasons? Laszlo Polgar was a psychologist who raised his daughter to train on visuo-spatial thinking, mostly with chess. She became the youngest grandmaster ever, the youngest person to break into the FIDE 100. She became the 8th best chess…
Stephen Jay Gould was actually fairly innumerate. It’s clear he didn’t understand even the rather simple math behind the PCA, which underpins IQ measurement. You might find this instructive: https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/06/high-v-low-m.html?m=1 “ Boiling brains down to one number and ranking them, and saying it comes from genes, nutty.” Yeah, except that the number correlates with many things we care about in the real world (educational attainment even at the highest levels, crime), even after controlling for many other things we care about in the real world (conscientiousness, SEC).
This is very true. Systematic bias in observational data collection (astronomy etc.) as well as systematic bias in experimental data collection (particle physics etc.) isn't accounted for in statistical analysis of that data. A classic example I recall is a Feynmann story, where a group of researchers were getting very statistically sound and repeatable results of very unusual and unexplained particle track behavior in a cloud chamber. Feynmann looked at the data and said "you probably have a tiny piece of metal in the cloud chamber somewhere" and that turned out to be the…