Please don't believe that IQ related studies are mainstream in social and psychological literature: they are very contested. That said, citizens and policy makers should decide if trusting them or not.
Contested yes, it seems they are downright detested. No one wants to talk about this. In the west because of how political anything related to IQ is, I doubt much will happen here. It's more likely China will take the lead in the area of research.
Go to Stormfront. They discuss IQ to death.
If we wanna talk about education we should talk about stuff we CAN change like fast-tracking talent, project based education and smashing the absurd social structures we allow to fester due to age-segregation. There's tons we can do as opposed to wasting time on stuff we cant like change genetics.
But one day, in the not too distant future, we will be able to change genetics. And when that day comes, if we have taken the time to understand the relationship between intelligence and genetics, then we can finally take permanent measures to equalize humanity by giving everybody as much intelligence as possible.
I think the problem is, you can't really quantify something that isn't clearly defined. Intelligence is very badly defined. So IQ is the kind of fundamentally flawed science that lends itself very easily to politicization - just like eugenics before it. Leading this area of research is really just a waste of everybody's time - just like leading the 'area' of phrenology.
There's lots of interesting scientific work about definable attributes of thinking beings - like problem-solving ability, or memory, or spatial sense. These don't suffer the same 'politics' problem, since their topics are clear and possible to concisely express.
But it can be useful. I think of it like BMI. Lots of flaws, but the most effective way of measuring healthy weight in populations.
IQ is similar. Lots of flaws, but how else do you measure intelligence? There are lots of correlations with IQ. Not using intelligence as a measure is silly.
I think it’s just something that uncomfortable, so I like to pretend it doesn’t matter.
If I’m starting a software company, it is useful to have a measure of raw intelligent. Not to he exclusion of other characteristics, and maybe not even the most important. But certainly useful data for planning.
I do think it’s silly to say the totality of intelligence is represented in a single number. But it can be useful. Like credit score. Lots of flaws, but what is a better measure?
all of its multi faceted glory with a single number
Think of this number as the first principal component, generated from all these different things. Talking about it doesn't imply that other directions don't exist. But it's not so strange to work on the leading effect before worrying about sub-leading ones.
As a sort of reductio-ad-absurdum, imagine if somebody came up with 'GQ', or 'goodness quotient'. It's absolutely the case you could use a battery of tests to check how likely somebody is to do anti-social behaviour. 'Goodness' is about as conceptually well-defined as intelligence.
But more seriously, yes, to figure out how useful the first component is, you want to know something about how much bigger the first eigenvalue is than the second.
For the case of IQ, my understanding is that the answer is "quite a lot". The best studies are from the army testing people and assigning them to roles (and seeing how they do). And it seems pretty hard to come up with tests which are better predictors than IQ. I think the one perpendicular component worth measuring for some jobs is manual dexterity? And eyesight, which is a rare thing anti-correlated with IQ, because of teenage bookworms we think. (That said, note that this isn't the whole population, they set a floor by only accepting reasonably healthy young men etc.)
The chinese government is working on it - but they are, at the very least, not convinced it is science. Not to mention, most people are horrified.
I don't doubt that IQ, like Social Credit, is a useful administrative tool. However, something being useful from an administrative standpoint does not make it scientific. It also doesn't make it desirable. There are very many things that are absolute inconveniences from an administrative standpoint, that are absolutely necessary from a human one. Rights, basic freedoms, and so on.
It doesn't have to be junk science to be morally repugnant. Lots of things would be administratively useful, and aligned with everything we know scientifically, yet evil.
This is a great idea, morally: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights".
But as you know if you've ever watched the Olympics on TV, "created equal" here isn't a scientific fact.
Absolutely. But equally, something being useful does not make it scientific. The thing about running is, it's very easy to explain what we mean by 'good at running'. It's very hard to describe what we mean by 'intelligence'. When you see a very large number of people convinced of the objectivity of something they can't describe, you normally call it a religion. Being convinced of the objectivity of IQ has many of the same flaws.
No it's not religion. It's statistical knowledge, in a way that people seem to struggle to grasp. (And there are thorns! What use it is put to is another issue.)
If you look at all sports you'll find the same thing. We call the common factor physical fitness, or athleticism, or let's say "AQ". It's exactly the same idea. AQ predicts running speed, although not nearly as well as getting the kids out on the track. Ditto weightlifting. People know this: the kids in the chess club won't agree to arm-wrestle the kids on the track team, because despite having no direct information of their biceps strength, they can guess based on overall impressions. This strategy for keeping their lunch money is scientifically valid. And their profiling of the jocks is a safe distance from being morally repugnant.
The problem with statistics is, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. Especially in the case of garbage categories, and garbage questions. Before you do any statistical work, you have to ascertain whether or not the groups you are considering, or the questions you are asking, are actually existing groups and scientific questions. IQ fails this test. Race fails this test. Running does not.
If make statistics about ill-defined, politicized questions, at best, you get nonsense. At worst, you get a reinforcement of your muddy, politicized thinking.
The problem with science is, if you're not very careful, it can become a wrapper around stuff that isn't scientific. The only way to avoid this is to be absolutely allergic to any concepts that are unclear, uncertain imports from the normal world. And, while I'd love it if intelligence wasn't like that - let's face it, it is. If it wasn't, and we had a clear image of it, we'd probably be capable of doing stuff like building general AI.
Well, I think the politicized muddle might be on the other side of this fence here. This reads to me like you perceive political implications, and work backwards to cast doubt on the data.
Do you think we understand muscles at the level of detail we'd need to understand neurons to build AI? They are much simpler, but there's a lot of crazy stuff about how myosin works we don't understand. And it doesn't matter, Victorians with stopwatches could correctly gather data about runners & swimmers & wrestlers, and notice what predicts what. Science at this level can be valid too.
And what I'm trying to tell you is that intelligence research is not all bunk as you imagine. There is lots of data. Lots of people have tried to shoot holes in it, for a century, and we keep the bits which survived that. Yes we use words which had everyday meanings before, because we always do that... I mean "energy" and "power" still have wooly everyday meanings, but are used precisely on your electricity bill.
What I'm trying to say is you can't research something you can't define. So any research on an ill-defined subject is a priori bunk.
It's like if a medieval scientist set out to study the cosmic spheres. He could amass as much data as he liked, but it doesn't matter - since he's fundamentally using the wrong concepts to understand what he's seeing.
Not to mention, I think your analogy works against your point. If you think about energy or power in any other way than the specific electrical sense, you're making a mistake. Just because they use the same words doesn't mean they are the same concept.
We talk about political power all the time. And energy drinks. And force of personality. Time. These words didn't have the precise scientific meaning they have acquired until someone got the science working. Their older less precise meaning are not mistakes.
Temperature is another good example. Most of the objections you are raising were raised against this single number when it was being invented. How can the many-faceted feelings of weather become a single number, etc. Your number doesn't fit my pre-existing idea, you're studying the wrong concept, etc. All the same squirming. Lots of messy back and forth. But what survived all that was a number which turned out to be scientifically useful for predicting stuff, like how well your steam engine would work. So it got accepted. (Much later we learned what was going on microscopically, but this wasn't necessary.)
What we're talking about here is essentially epistemology. What is science, and what is its epistemic status?
My feeling is that to the extent that scientists are capable of coming up with good questions, they have cast off the baggage of unscientific and pre-scientific thought systems.
The problem is, it is not the case that a hypothesis is either good, or bad. Mendel proved that even with a very bad hypothesis, you can do very good science (he was a monk). A society of scientists who were incapable of coming up with good hypothesis, whose experiments always proved the null hypothesis - would not be too bad at science.
A society of scientists who were very bad at formulating, identifying, and outlining problems, on the other hand, would be very bad at science. They could devise experiments where neither the null, nor the alternative hypothesis, were of any value in regards to the world.
You can come up with any number of questions like this. The most famous one is probably, 'when did you stop beating your wife?' The most scientifically relevant one is the search for the philosophers stone. You can look through the history of science and see a ton of these questions - areas where vast amounts of effort were essentially wasted, where the only useful results were side effects.
They are universally marked by one trait: they attempt to solve questions that are obvious and important to a non-scientist, and, in terms that have a root outside of the sciences.
Really Interesting science problems are, on the other hand, almost invariably about topics that non-scientists wouldn't find interesting. Feymann spent years working on wobbling plates - and won a Nobel prize for the application of this research to particle physics!
So, if you find yourself trying to answer non-scientific questions in non-scientific terms, the question is, can your answer be scientific? You're essentially saying yes: enough research into the philosopher's stone would make the philosopher's stone science. I'm saying no: the only science that could come about from searching for the philosopher's stone would be an accident. The philosophers stone, unless it divested itself entirely from its non-scientific content (as in the case of energy, temperature, etc), will never be science.
PS: I think there's fairly obviously a conceptual distinction between the concept of power, as in, watts, and the concept of power, as in, Donald Trump. A similar distinction would be between 'vectors' and 'arrows'. I think such conflations are actually a major and frequently encountered obstacle to teaching. But you're welcome to disagree.
In general I agree. For any gene, you'd expect those alleles which give their holder an advantage in the environment they inhabit to be passed on to their descendants, including those which influence brain development. But if their environment ever changes, or they're put into a different environment, they might find themselves at a disadvantage compared with those native to their new environment. Environment is important as it determines which traits and which genetic variants are selected for, and genetics is important as it determines which environment people will flourish in. So if you only use a single number to measure intelligence, it it will only be a good predictor for a single environment.
I've always felt uneasy about the whole concept of IQ but never really been able to put it into words. I think you've hit the nail square on the head here wrt my thoughts on the subject. Thanks!
Actually, the measurement of IQ and it’s predictive ability for things like job performance and life outcomes are some of the best replicated research in all of psychology and the social sciences.
Please don't believe that IQ related studies are mainstream in social and psychological literature: they are very contested. That said, citizens and policy makers should decide if trusting them or not.