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army1987 comments on Why Are Individual IQ Differences OK? - Less Wrong
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Very well then, let us discuss the cases of people recorded to be hundreds of years old by less than modern documentation, like Methuselah as verified by the Book of Genesis. Wait, you don't think people actually live to thousands of years? But you just said we can use datapoints from any kind of test we please!
Whatever cutoff you choose to exclude things like Genesis or scientific results from hundreds of years ago while still including largely obsolete ratio tests, I will shift it slightly to include only better IQ tests. I think this is perfectly legitimate, as one should strive to use the best available data, and regard your 'but old obsolete scores!' as quibbling.
And it's also consistent with IQs over 9000!!! <monocle shatters>
Occam's razor. Use it, love it. The base rate of IQs like 140 are by definition higher than >220.
"But I was so impressed, don't you understand?" You'll pardon me if I ignore some rubbish anecdotes about them seeming like shining special snowflakes.
My argument was perfectly clear: brilliant conversation is far from a flawless indicator of intelligence. That you don't understand why I would bring up an example of how this indicator can fail catastrophically or interpret it as implying that...
More fun base-rate reasoning: psychopaths make up 1-2% of the population, and most are great manipulators; the top 1% of the population IQ-wise is sometimes taken as being the genius fragment; even if we assume the 1% IQ are all gifted conversationalists, if all we know about someone is their gifted conversation, we wind up inferring that they are equally or more likely to be a psychopath than a genius!
Maybe, but if someone talks to me about quantum field theory and actually makes sense, my posterior probability that their IQ is < 80 suddenly goes down to epsilon.
But how do you know that? Plenty of nutters sound convincing on quantum matters (as judging by the sales into millions of such folk as Deepak Chopra and abominations like The Dancing Wu-li Masters), so I assume you have some expertise in the matter - and now you're just judging based on that. (And what if they sound convincing on a topic you have no expertise in...)
I think one of the main reason they “sound“ convincing (though the readers' ignorance is also a necessary condition) is motivated cognition: the kind of people who read such books would like to believe what they say. Lose that, and your strength as a rationalist kicks in. (And anyway, I don't think Chopra et al. are idiots; they are either misguided or bullshitting the readers for fun and profit.)
I'd have to test that. Anyone willing to give me a few paragraphs of either something “serious” or crackpottery (or a spoof à la Sokal), without telling me which it is, about a topic other than physics?