Vaniver comments on Rationality Quotes Thread January 2016 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: elharo 01 January 2016 04:00PM

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Comment author: Lumifer 26 January 2016 05:00:45PM *  3 points [-]

Got a link?

It's in his explanation of NRx piece. To quote from there ("biological hypothesis" is the one which says biology strongly affects IQ):

I don’t want to dwell on the biological hypothesis too much, because it sort of creeps me out even in a “let me clearly explain a hypothesis I disagree with” way. I will mention that it leaves a lot unexplained ... For a sympathetic and extraordinarily impressive defense of the biological hypothesis I recommend this unpublished (and unpublishable) review article. I will add that I am extremely interested in comprehensive takedowns of that article (preferably a full fisking) and that if you have any counterevidence to it at all you should post it in the comments and I will be eternally grateful.

Getting to The Bell Curve,

Whose reliability is pretty controversial.

Since we're quoting Yvain, let's continue:

Meanwhile, The Bell Curve was lambasted in the popular press and by many academics. But it also got fifty of the top researchers in its field to sign a consensus statement saying it was pretty much right about everything and the people attacking it were biased and confused. Three years later, they re-issued their statement saying nothing had changed and more recent findings had only confirmed their opinion. The American Psychological Association launched a task force to settle the issue which stopped short of complete agreement but which given the circumstances was pretty darned supportive. There are certainly a lot of smart people with very strong negative opinions, but each one is still usually met by an equally ardent and credentialed proponent.

As to

Alas, I have none and must make do with hands.

I recommend acquiring some. They are highly useful :-)

Comment author: TimS 26 January 2016 05:45:11PM 0 points [-]

Pardon my ignorance, but all the "intellect realism" theories seem like they can be charitably paraphrased as group X:
- has a different mean IQ than the general population and/or
- has a different standard deviation for IQ and/or
- has a significantly skewed distribution from the normal curve

I've seen claimed IQ means in the 80s for black Americans. Observationally, American public life includes many black people for whom I find it implausible that they aren't pretty smart - eg Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condeleeza Rice.

If I assume no difference in std dev or skew in intelligence distribution, it seems to me that I observe too many intelligent black folks for the mean to be in the 80s. Moreover, adding an assumption that std dev is lower doesn't help - now the successful black folk are explained, but I don't observe enough extreme low IQ folk.

That's why I conclude some error exists in the assumption of an 80s mean IQ.

Comment author: Vaniver 26 January 2016 06:29:21PM *  3 points [-]

That's why I conclude some error exists in the assumption of an 80s mean IQ.

Why would we have to assume the IQs for groups, when we could just go out and give people tests?

Comment author: TimS 26 January 2016 06:33:56PM -1 points [-]

More technically, the assumption that IQ is a good measure of intelligence across different sub-cultures.

Comment author: Vaniver 26 January 2016 06:35:50PM 2 points [-]

Why would we have to assume that IQ is a good measure of intelligence across different sub-cultures? Aren't there experiments we could perform to measure the validity?

Comment author: TimS 26 January 2016 08:03:00PM 0 points [-]

It seems like a core assumption of the "intellectual" realists. I'm conceding it to strong-man the opposing argument. If we don't assume IQ is culturally independent, the correlation between IQ and life outcome looks like a hidden-variable measure of social acceptability - i.e. an expected status quo bias if people prefer those they perceive as in-group. That just weakens the realist argument.

Comment author: Lumifer 26 January 2016 08:49:46PM *  2 points [-]

the correlation between IQ and life outcome looks like a hidden-variable measure of social acceptability

This would mean the IQ scores are meaningless for cross-country comparison. And that just aint' so.

Comment author: TimS 26 January 2016 10:57:28PM 0 points [-]

That's not what that link says - best I can tell, the book summarized states living in a high-IQ country is more predictive of good life outcomes than your own IQ.

Getting down to brass tacks, we are assuming a lot when we compare IQ numbers from different tests. WIAS-IV is not necessarily comparable to other tests in English. Assuming that the French language test measures the same thing as the WIAS-IV assumes the very conclusion that I'm not agreeing with. (Although I'm not arguing this point in our other discussion).

Comment author: Lumifer 27 January 2016 12:31:37AM *  3 points [-]

Getting down to brass tacks, we are assuming a lot when we compare IQ numbers from different tests.

You keep on saying "assuming" and Vaniver keeps on telling you that there is no need for assumptions: we have data. It's not hard to give the same people different tests and then look at how do the scores correlate.

In fact, that's how the whole concept of IQ came into being -- IQ is an estimate of the general intelligence component (g) that is common to performance on a variety of intelligence-measuring tests.

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