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MixedNuts comments on A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies - Less Wrong
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Okay, I was three when I got an IQ test, so I can't give a detailed account, but I clearly remember thinking at the time that the test mostly measured my parents' ability and willingness to teach me math and reading.
I'm not sure how much I would trust a 3 year old's understanding of psychometrics and population dynamics.
A child's IQ test at very early ages like 3 is a very poor indicator of later life performance on IQ tests and has even poorer predictive power (once controlled for parents) for other things IQ is generally good at predicting. The correlation is just around 0.4 or perhaps 0.5. Some kids develop faster than others, peaking early, some are prodigys and mediocre adults, others get hit on the head.
I'm not really sure why anyone would give their 3 year old an IQ test.
Bragging rights?
Let alone an adult's recollections of when he was 3... I barely remember anything about when I was that young, and as for those few memories I have, I'm not 100% sure they are genuine (as opposed to me having reconstructed them from stories my parents told me/videos and photos they showed me/etc.).
A persistent problem with investigating childhood amnesia.
Back then I thought prodigies were so rare that this was an acceptable heuristic, and if I needed to prove my competence to an adult I could just talk to them for five minutes. Then I read about signalling.
I find this interesting-seeming but confusing. Could you elaborate?
You thought it was acceptable to not trust the young, but that if you talked to the old you could get them to trust you?
How does signaling enter in?
Trust their competence in a given domain, yeah. To take a non-IQ-related field, I would have said "It's fair to assume a six-year-old, or even an adult, doesn't understand much about economics and therefore their opinion of it is worthless. Most don't. And that's okay, because if I need to prove I can explain it, I'll just do. And then they'll trust my understanding of it and listen to the opinions I base on it.".
And that's true to an extent. But an adult can pick up so much cheap credit condescending to children that they just don't start trusting them. If a kid demonstrates their understanding of economics to an adult, the adult will praise the child, but not even think that the child's opinions on economic policy (as opposed to, say, a pundit's) should carry any weight.
Among other things it can make the old not trust the young even after they have been given sufficient evidence of their expertise.