DISQUS

Brent Buckner · 2 years ago

You may want to consider APA Task Force on Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns before moving your priors very far.

Eric Crampton · 2 years ago

Will: Even if the book gives you some worries about the Binet test, don't all the different IQ tests correlate with each other pretty strongly? If IQ is nonsense, why is it a better predictor of success than is GPA?

My prior on intelligence being primarily heritable (with the remainder mostly being random noise) is about 0.8. Will read the Gil-White chapter though.

Eric Crampton · 2 years ago

Ok, reading Gil-White.

1. Even if Binet is not cross-culturally comparable, there are intelligence tests that are culturally neutral: Raven's progressive matrices, for example. I don't think that we see big differences in results when looking at IQ as measured by those tests, and results from all tests correlate strongly with one another.

2. The article is almost libelous in its description of Jensen

3. There are many, many other studies of heredity and IQ -- see the APA task force report noted by Brent, above. IQ really looks to be highly hereditary.

I'm really rather surprised that you so revised your estimates on the basis of the Gil-White paper. If anything, the weakness of the critique would make me revise my prior upwards rather than down.

QuantumTaco · 2 years ago

What of the possibility that these "clusters of achievement" are largely a construction of us looking back in history, and were not in reality as impressive as we remember them. It is after all very difficult to view intellectual/cultural history as a mass of interconnected ever slowly creeping transformations and strains of thought, and instead view history as a bunch of "this is doctrine X, it was invented by miraculous genius people in location G! things were the same for a while and then successor doctine Z was invented 200 years by later super awesome genius H!".

Because thats how we learn the intellectual history only to find out later that all of these ideas had close antecedents in various texts written by authors we've never heard of in places we thought nothing was going. (Take as an example the Wealth of Nations in your Scottish Enlightenment case - I seem to be constantly reading that was Smith wrote was said earlier and better.)

I ain't saying that these clusters are all imagination. There after all only a finite number of historical instances where societies have enough resources, access to prior materials, dumb historical luck in having their work preserved/appreciated. But maybe beyond those obvious factors most of the complications owes to stuff that happened after not during these historical moments

Jo Esperanto · 2 years ago

I also didn’t know that Sir Cyril Burt was a huge fraud.

Heritability of IQ according to Cyril Burt ~70%

Heritability of IQ according to the Minnesota Twins study ~70%

For a fraud, Burt's findings were remarkably accurate.

Matt McIntosh · 2 years ago

Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ. This post proves that even the brightest bulbs flicker a bit sometimes. Will, just paying attention to Gil-White's tone should set off alarm bells that he has a strong ideological bias on this subject. Tread very, very carefully.

Straight-up: Gil-White's comprehension of modern psychometrics is just barely above the level of an ignoramus, he's sometimes downright dishonest (e.g. in his treatement of Jensen), and his observations on the history of intelligence testing and behavioral genetics are noteworthy but do not speak to the current state of the science. Yes, Cyril Burt disgraced himself by making some shit up. But this is neither here nor there with regard to the genetics of intelligence except as a historical note. Gregor Mendel massaged his data pretty seriously, but this doesn't falsify Mendelian genetics.

Jo Esperanto · 2 years ago

Gil-White's clumsy hatchet job also fails to mention that Liam Hudson, a professor of educational psychology at Edinburgh University and one of Burt's most ardent opponents, had Burt's housekeeper destroy Burt's papers almost immediately after Burt's death, and that the "missing" research assistants have been found.

For more details, consult Ronald Fletcher's _Science, Ideology, and the Media_ (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991), a book that concludes the case against Burt is "not proven".

Matt McIntosh · 2 years ago

Jo, that depends on your standard of proof. Frankly the sheer improbability of it is enough for me to convict him of at least some fabrication. See David Burbridge's recent paper for what I think is a pretty level-headed analysis from a guy who doesn't have a horse in this particular race.

Matt McIntosh · 2 years ago

Oops, screwed that one up. Here's the actual link.

Jo Esperanto · 2 years ago

Burt's good name has been raked through the mire for the good part of a half a century now. Smearing the good name of a dead man has all been good fun but enough is enough. The "missing" researchers have been found. And other exculpatory evidence was destroyed under the guidance of one of Burt's staunchest academic critics almost before the body was cold, an act that should strike even the most ardent Burt critic as ... irregular.

I invite anyone who is tempted to join the hate Burt bandwagon to first read Fletcher's book, along with a similar independent work by Robert Joynson.

Fletcher addresses the Arguments From Statistical Improbability in his book. And since Burt's findings are consistent with the findings of other independent researchers with more robust data sets, the character assassination campaign that evidently continues to this day is moot anyway.

Tex · 2 years ago

Variation in IQ is largely the result of either heredity or environment. If variation in IQ is largely the result of environment then we would expect to see a lower average IQ among the blind than among the sighted, after all the blind are deprived of an entire category of exposure to the environment. But in fact, this is not the case. The blind and the sighted have the same average IQ.

TGGP · 2 years ago

I only looked at the last chapter, but I don't see how you can take this guy seriously. It seemed to be all conspiracy theory and moral outrage.

Muriakida · 2 years ago

"Philosophy mostly just coasts along on these efflorescence’s of genius. What’s going on? Why aren’t we having having one of these NOW, in the US?"

They're all studying neuroscience. Did you get the memo?

I really enjoy that word, efflorescence, but I don't know if it's a good way to visualize some of the history's most successful ideas, for example Islam, Freudianism and Marxism (all of which have pretty winning but dubious track records at the start of the 20th century and are by no means squeezed today).

I'm only dropping these particular Ideas because, like neuroscience, they're good at answering questions and they address man's misery. Neuroscience will do that. And prove that we're smarter than other people. And help us build robots that use guns responsibly.

Ian Random · 2 years ago

I fail to see the controversy. You can take any test, get a bunch of people to take it. Hopefully, it will generate a nice bell curve. Then you can say how far you deviate from the average. It could be controversial, if you think it measures more than someone's ability to take a test and do good on it. I remember in college totally freezing up on a quiz and forgetting everything. Now if that were an IQ test, I'd be thrown in remedial education. Or if I was wealthy I'd attend a private college that allows one to have oral exams in addition to written ones and passed.

Matt · 2 years ago

You could have learned those things about IQ tests from reading Gould's _The Mismeasure of Man_ many years ago. (There's good reason to think the Minnisota Twins studies have more than a bit of book-cooking in them too. At the very least they seriously mis-describe the cases.) Gil-White is a funny guy, and by funny I mean crazy, as in serious conspiracy theory, the jews are out to get me type crazy. I think this was the sourse of his tenure problems at Penn, a place where it's very hard to get tenure anyway. (One grant of tenure in 10+ years in the philosophy dept., for example.) He's crazy, but right in this case.

Jo Esteranto · 2 years ago

(There’s good reason to think the Minnisota Twins studies have more than a bit of book-cooking in them too. At the very least they seriously mis-describe the cases.)

No there isn't, and no they don't.

Steve Sailer · 2 years ago

Will,

You really need to study up more on IQ ... especially from more level-headed sources than the conspiracy theorist Francisco Gil-White. IQ is a very important topic that sheds light on all the subjects you are interested in. You should be reading experts like Jensen and Flynn, not crackpots like Gil-White.

Steve