In Paul Fussell’s book on class (I think), he says that people are really worried about differentiating themselves from the class immediately below them, but largely ignorant of the customs and sometimes even existence of the classes above them. When I found SSC, and then The Motte, and stuff like TLP, I was astonished to find a tier of the internet I had had no idea even existed. The quality of discourse here is . . . usually . . . of the kind that “high brow” (by internet standards) websites THINK they are having, but when you see the best stuff here you realize that those clowns are just flattering themselves. My question is, who is rightly saying the same thing about us? Of what intellectual internet class am I ignorant now? Or does onlineness impose some kind of ceiling on things, and the real galaxy brains are at the equivalent of Davos somewhere?
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Notes -
People who write a lot on the internet for strangers have way too much time on their hands. I used to write longer comments and even some that made it into the contributions thread but now I don't feel like I have to do that anymore.
People smarter than us hang out with their friends and might pop in once in a while to write a comment about a topic that personally interests them. Successful people should confide with those that they trust and those that are useful to them, not strangers who happen to be on the same intellectual level.
It depends. Tyler Cowen has been blogging forever, and it seems to work for him. If you can turn it into a job, I don't see it as being a problem.
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You have the whole thing backwards. I can't speak for all motte users, but I would wager, myself and most of them write effort posts because they want to, not because they have to.
See: Bus Ticket Theory of Genius. Tldr; People with weird obsessions obsess over weird things because they like doing that, for nothing else. That obsession is a necessary component to be truly great at anything (among many other components).
Not saying TM motte users are geniuses but they obsess weirdly over the CW because they like it.
This is a naive sentiment about "people smarter than us". You are probably packing in a whole load of things into the definition of smart other than its only true definition... high IQ. "Smart people" come in all shapes and flavors. Some hang out with friends, some are CEO's, some don't have any friends because they are CEOs or spend all their lives in the server room or the lab, some are military dictators, some are stay-at-home moms, etc.
???
Who is exactly confiding in the motte? Some are but they are a minority.
I use the motte because there are certain things I want to talk about at a certain level that I can't do anywhere else, not because I am looking for a community of people to confide in or whatever. What is there to even confide about in the motte?
I would be surprised if most users are not here for the exact same reason as me.
yep. evidence from https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/
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I would say that the amount of dopamin rush that a human receive while digging/hyperfocusing on an obsessive niche topic is the #1 most potent predictor of how "genius" that persons is.
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I don't see how IQ tests can test your smartness when they are relatively easy to do well on, and even if you don't do well on them initially you can basically get a perfect score by reviewing the patterns/ concepts that people are unfamiliar with. It's unseemly when you try to condense the beauty and potential of the human spirit down to a test metric.
I think that he meant that you were confiding in the people on this forum to test your ideas.
If you can train a randomly selected 100IQ person to score 140+ on IQ tests, with even some consistent rate of success, a lot of people would be interested in that! You can't though, and many have tried and failed at that and similar.
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You can't. At least not to a great extent. Hard IQ test questions stress your working memory. You need to process information to solve them; you could memorize exact same patterns, but make it slightly different and it won't help you.
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Not sure if you know this but IQ and its validity has a very deep history as a widely held belief in this very forum we are on. Im not being sarcastic. In fact one can make an argument that the discussions of IQ and its intersections with HBD being a very contentious CW topic is what partially led to the creation of The Motte.
Anyways. IQ is ultimately a metric. But its the best metric of among all others as a proxy for g, the thing we are really trying to measure. Im not gonna reiterate the literature.
But, in a discussion about intelligence it would be rather obtuse to not mention the best proxy of it would it not? Its not a value judgement.
I had no idea. What does HBD mean though? Is this another kind of IQ test?
In my opinion I still don't think that an IQ test or any proxy of it would be a good idea. To me it seems like all an IQ test does is check if a student is thinking about things in a certain way - if they can quickly recognize patterns, and if they can really break apart a problem - in short, are they thinking in a particular way that would be useful to the needs of the institution? Are they thinking like an engineer or a mathematician? If a student does badly on an IQ test I don't think that it means they're stupid. Rather, I think that what this really means is a student has spent their time doing other things which don't necessitate the kind of thinking an IQ test checks for. They may consequently lack development in certain subsets of their minds relegated to do these very specific kinds of thinking, because our minds are constantly changing and adapting to the stressors we place on them like any other part of our bodies. This student may have spent their time cooking, painting landscapes, or just doing stupid kid things.
Of course, there's probably going to be outliers who are predisposed to this kind of thinking at an early age, maybe as a result of their upbringing, and/or the predisposition of their parents. But what if these outliers don't even want to pursue the avenues they'd do well in according to an IQ test? Wouldn't this test just give them and their parents a flawed conception of who they really are? On the other hand, wouldn't the effect be much worse on those students who do really badly on an IQ test? They'll go through their whole lives believing that they're stupid, and that there's something terribly insufficient in them which prevents them from doing what they want to do with their lives. I'd argue that we already instilled this sense of inferiority in kids with standardized tests. I've seen too many students who think that they're innately stupid or incompetent because they can't readily understand arithmetic, memorize historical trivia or whatever else the curriculum throws at them.
Somebody else will hopefully respond with a more detailed breakdown of the actual studies but IQ:
Is very predictive of success in things people care about
Cannot be trained
Is a very well studied and consistent measure
Varies a lot person to person and has at least a large genetic component
To the degree that some tests meant to measure IQ can be studied for is a flaw in those tests but the ones we have are pretty good at not being gamed.
HBD stands for "Human Bio Diversity" and is the recognition that populations of people vary genetically. Uncontroversially in situations like the Dutch being taller on average than the Spanish. Incredibly controversially in situations like American Jews having a higher IQ on average to American Natives. People here disagree wildly on whether it is true and what it would imply if it were. But we do allow its discussion which brings quite a bit of heat from the sort of people who find the idea dangerous. We originally started out as a weekly thread on slatestarcodex.com run by Scott who now blogs on astralcodexten.substack.com, but he was harassed by people who didn't like the discussion so he asked us to got to his subreddit, then our own subreddit and finally this shiny new offsite. Although it's not just HBD that got us targeted, it's the willingness to entertain dangerous ideas with HBD being the most usually cited example.
Incredibly annoying nitpick: IQ tests absolutely can be trained, and I'm confident if I or someone else smart took an IQ test now, and then took another after a dozen hours of practice, there'd be a measurable increase.
Of course this doesn't mean the measure doesn't work, there's a reason people here or ssc readers got 130+ despite being selected based on liking blogs, IQ 'working' as a measure is incredibly obvious and impossible to avoid.
And that was ofc the other guy's first response - pick the weakest link and use that to disbelieve the rest
I didn't factcheck this; I'll quote it in case someone could spot any issues [bolds mine]:
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I tend to think of IQ tests like BMI tests, at least for what I find them useful for. Not a perfect individual measure but averaged over populations is fine.
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Could you cite the studies that corroborate the things you're saying about IQ tests and HBD? I'd have a difficult time believing that you can't do better on IQ tests just because the questions on them are neither infallible nor interesting enough to even come close to doing what they mean to do. I especially don't see how the ones we have right now are good at not being gamed when one glance at any IQ test reveals a bunch of problems that become trivial once you make someone understand a specific pattern or concept. After all they're only made by people, so wouldn't they be susceptible to the issues arising from their inherent biases and ways of thinking?
How could you say that certain races of people are dumber than other races of people when there are innumerable cultural, geographical and economic differences between each race which would complicate any relevant study?
Assuming that IQ does what this forum says it does for instance, at what period did you get these races of people to take their IQ tests? Were economic differences between Jews and Natives accounted for? Wouldn't it be irrational to compare the IQ of a Native raised in poverty on a reservation to an affluent Jew from the suburbs? And even if you did somehow account for this difference and only selected Jews and Natives from identical socioeconomic backgrounds how would you take into account their cultural differences? How the average Native is raised compared to the average Jew? What Natives eat throughout their childhood compared to whatever Jewish children eat? I'm sure that there's a lot more things that I haven't thought of that would make this entire thing far fetched.
Also, wouldn't saying this also present an evolutionary inconsistency? While I see how differences in geography and climate could select for traits like increased height or lighter pigmentation in certain races compared to others, what evolutionary advantage would present itself in the relative diminishing of cognition in a race? I'd assume that intelligence is some consistently increasing factor across the evolutionary context in every race driven by technological advancements, with few exceptions and outliers.
Lastly, don't you think that it's futile to discuss things like this to such an extent because you can't really do anything with what you learn? I hardly ever see interesting people think about things like whether or not their IQ exceeds 130 or how intelligent their race is. In my experience these people almost always focus only on doing whatever they like to do, and they wouldn't let something like a standardized test determine the probability of their success in a field they truly care about. If you would let a piece of paper tell you you're not good enough to become an engineer - would you ever have done anything interesting in the first place?
It is somewhat difficult, yes! But humanity has climbed steeper cliffs than that. Dropping down to intuition why are there so many jewish Nobel Prize winners in math, physics? If it was really purely cultural, that means we're leaving hundreds of billions of dollars and staggering human achievement off the table by not spreading said culture. Which we are in plenty of other ways, we can't be perfect. but that seems too obvious and easy. (and there aren't that many jewish convert or adoptee winners). And - consider genetic drift, the founder effect, or the ubiquitous physical differences between population groups (no, they aren't fixed races) - skin color, hair, facial shape, height, eyes are obvious, but little things too - native americans have less facial hair, there's earwax, eyes, disease susceptibility, all sorts of subtle differences in body shape, different baseline blood levels, etc. Why wouldn't the pressures that produced those lead to intelligence differences too? Intelligence is so critical for human survival, it's depended on at all levels of human life, its effects on survival and reproduction are innumerable. What if - because it's selected so heavily, there isn't any room for "noise", and all human populations are so heavily pushed to be intelligent they stay at the same level, even while reproductively isolated? Well, do we see that in any other trait? In separate populations of wild species, one sees divergence and difference, even along axes with selection pressure in the same direction. This is the most stark among separate species, where pressures to be fast, get nutritious, not be eaten pushes them into entirely different niches - that isn't at all true of humans, but the same principle works.
But intelligence causes affluence too, richer people tend to have higher IQs than same-race middle class people, and you need intelligence to be a FAANG coder, and a bit less but still quite a bit to be a top lawyer or even actor. If that sounds too weasely the gap doesn't go away when we compare suburban african-americans or natives and suburban jews.
... and why is that, exactly?
I won't let that goddamn cancer diagnosis stop me from living my life. It's just a piece of paper!!!! You're right that IQ isn't an ultimate measure of intelligence, and it's much less interesting than "how intelligent and competent" someone is. But, as in the nobel example - or every single other area of human accomplishment - the same pattern persists. Why are there so many great jewish çomposers, conductors, musicians? Why are there so many of them in hollywood - even if they were evil subverters, that doesn't magically make them better at marketing or acting? Why are SA and Yud jewish?
Evolution doesn't merely proceed by advantages. It's not advantageous to have sickle-cell anemia, but it is to avoid malaria, so ... And it sure was advantageous to have light skin in europe, but tens of thousands of years passed between humans settling there and its development. And said development is contingent on random mutations, populations moving, and many other things - there's no reason lighter skin would develop at the same time or rate in separate populations. Same for intelligence!
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Apologies for the delayed response, I'm not sure why but I'm not getting notifications on your posts, and I swear I've rechecked this thread since the post date on this so not sure what's going on there. Although having read your responses to others doesn't seem to bode well for a discussion.
Anyways I'm a glutton for pain so troll or not lets roll in the mud, I enjoy it.
I'm not totally sure what you mean by this. IQ distribution gaps between the races are not scientifically controversial. Pretty much any study on it finds around one standard deviation between white and black American IQ. Here's one but feel free do a basic google search
I'm not really sure what interesting has to do with anything. Rulers are quite bland objects but are able to measure length very accurately. As for their accuracy I think the measure you're interested in is the test-retest reliability which checks how well a test resists things like training or other factors. IQ tests do quite well on this. Although this is not of the utmost importance when it comes to the HBD angle because much like BMI being a measure of population not really being meaningfully thrown off by bodybuilders to get a population obesity the vast majority of these cross race studies are not giving people multiple tests to study on and very few people are studying recreationally for IQ tests.
I'm afraid I'll need you to be more specific. Shape rotation and the like is still cognitively taxing to people irrespective of any "trick", and even if it were a well designed tests either teaches the test taker the "trick" or is designed in such a way to avoid this kind of thing.
It's a rigorously studied field that is very concerned with making sure their metrics align with outcome data. This is a very general type of criticism, I'd be happy to address something more specific but I'm just not really sure how recognizing patterns in repeating numbers is supposed to be influenced by biases.
I very specifically did not say this. We are talking about population scale averages.
The tests simply don't include culturally relevant data.
Continuously since the 50s iirc.
That's a bit of a strange question, part of how IQ test are anchored to the real world is giving them to similarly situated people and seeing how well it predicts things we care about like educational attainment. Thus the validity of the measure does do things like attempt to hold economic birth status constant, so comparing all the poor natives given the same test and seeing how the scores predict how they do versus eachother. The test is very predictive in this way with the higher scores being correlated with reduced all cause mortality, twitch reflexes, lifetime income, educational attainment, ect. So in the design of the tests these things are held constant. And the effects remain when these things are not held constant within group, a high IQ but poor native compensates for the advantage of a lower IQ but richer native. But as the tests are obviously correlated with economic differences it is kind of nonsensical to account for it when comparing groups, the raw number is what you actually want.
There is positive pressure for intelligence for sure and studies have shown IQ is rising generation by generation(referred to as the Flynn effect). Speculation into why this is happening is somewhat out of scope here but worth investigating in its own right. As for whether it's somehow inconsistent evolutionarily it isn't for the same reason we haven't also evolved giant muscles and other minor adaptions that seem useful, evolution just isn't that fast and intelligence trades off against things like calorie consumption and birth canal size so there is at least some theoretical downward pressure.
I can only speak for myself although I think I'm not alone in being generally not that interested in HBD in itself so much as in how it can be used to answer certain questions that without HBD tend to flare out into the conspiracy realm. When asked why Jews are so overrepresented in highly competitive institutions of power instead of appealing to Jewish conspiracy I can note that a small advantage in the center of a normal distribution can yield disproportionately large amounts on the wings. Likewise I don't need to reach for systemic racism to explain why costly educational interventions meant to close the black-white educational attainment gap have failed with every attempt.
I was convinced that I had aphantasia in the past, so I didn't even bother to try actually "shape rotating" on these sorts of tasks; I tried to somehow determine "logically" if shape could be rotated some way around.
Now I sorta can do it by visualizing*, but I'm not sure if performance is any better. Definitely cognitively taxing. I hate these tests.
* there's still no actual qualia, I think. But I could will myself to imagine e.g. "an apple", and then examine details. Ofc they're probably generated the moment I look for them, and certainly unstable. Also works for moving visuals - e.g. I could 'see' gameplay of a game I played for hundreds of hours (years ago).
On one LSD trip, I couldn't really think verbally at some point. Possibly that's when I learned this; I'm not sure through.
But I almost never think like this spontaneously. I wonder if it's useful and/or trainable.
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again incredibly minor nitpick: IQ is rank-ordered to be normal, and e.g. if multiplicative instead of additive effects are important at the tails IQ might be fatter. So absent evidence that it's normal at the tails, assuming that subpopulations have normally distributed IQ isn't exactly justified. iirc a study measured it somehow and found it was fatter than normal but cant find it
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For introduction into HBDIQ science, this could be useful starter.
In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths About Human Intelligence.
Author's blog here
Book summarizing the scientific evidence, showing how ironclad it is and debunking the usual anti HBDIQ talking points.
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Not who you are asking but I will provide a response to your last paragraph. And all your other concerns will probably be responded to by others anyways because the validity of IQ is an extremely popular opinion here on the Motte. Whilst blankslatism is extremely unpopular. I am surprised you posted here for so long without noticing as much.
No. Because.
If we want to make people smarter. We would need a working definition of smartness and a solid way to measure it to know if our interventions are working. This absolutely cannot be ignored. We would also need to know the mechanisms behind it let that be environmental, genetic or whatever to actually address the problem. In short, we can't just look away from it.
You can do things with what you learn. If what you learn is true, then you have a better predictive model of the world than someone who thinks otherwise. The purpose of discussing things is not only to improve something but to understand it as well. You can't understand something and its nth-order effects by.. ignoring it. Just knowing that IQ is group stratified has made my personal model of the World orders of magnitude better are being able to predict things.
So what? "Interesting people" is a very subjective term and it's best kept out of supposedly objective discussions.
That's literally what a probability is for. Some things are likely, some things are not.
If you are 5'7" tall. You might dream of playing in the NBA but it wouldn't be a lie to tell you that you are overwhelmingly not likely to achieve that dream and that your time and effort is better spent elsewhere.
Why shouldn't we apply the same level of sober pragmatism to matters of intellectual interest? It is exceedingly unlikely that someone with an 85 IQ can obtain a Ph.D. in Physics. If someone with 85 IQ tells me about his theoretical physics dreams, I would be feeding into his delusions if I told him anything other than it's unlikely.
Yes, it sucks for them. It sucks for everyone. But the truth sometimes sucks.
Thousands of people do this every day. As they get rejected from their programs of choice or get an F grade in calculus. They get told they are not good enough and that's the end of it. 50% of engineering students drop out.
The truth is worth whatever it is worth regardless of how much it hurts to accept it. The fact that it is hard to accept it isn't a very good reason to not seek it out.
Why not respond to the whole thing? Surely if you are adamant that what you say is true, shouldn't you be able to explain these things with your own independent thinking rather than through relying on the surrounding hive mind? And if it is a popular sentiment, shouldn't it be easy for you to articulate the validity of IQ or HBD such that anyone could understand it, given you've talked about these things enough times already?
When I asked you about the futility of discussing things like IQ I meant you and the forum specifically rather than society as a whole, since you seem to have put a lot of thought into something that seemingly has no direct effect on you. But I will still read what you wrote because I truly am interested in why you think IQ is so important.
I think that while your heart is in the right place, you're effectively making up a problem that doesn't exist. We already have a working definition of smartness - if your work is great, everyone sooner or later will agree that you're smart. Nobody is frantically searching for a way to quantify smartness or even define it because it is and always has been self-evident. There's probably environmental factors that predispose people for even greater smartness but I doubt they would diverge much from the very same recommendations that have persisted since the very beginning of recorded history: ample exercise, excellent nutrition, peer bonding and carefully considered, intellectually stimulating leisure. Perhaps you can try desperately to have children with someone who has also demonstrated their abnormal intelligence, but I think that this would be a very silly and likely vain effort.
Could you elaborate on this? And if you don't mind me asking, how has your personal model of the world been made better by your knowledge of IQ and specifically HBD?
I was being a little disingenuous here since I really meant to put successful people. I haven't met any successful people who think about IQ or are aware of something like HBD. While I'll concede that this was inappropriate, wouldn't you agree that subjectivity is important when discussing this? I think that you're missing the bigger picture when you refrain from discussing the sentimental aspects of this or how it effects people on an individual basis rather than through what you consider an objective perspective.
Evidently some things are unlikely. What I meant to say is that if you're willing to let the initial unlikelihood of your success deter you from obtaining success, you are probably never going to do anything worthwhile anyways because you lack the courage to put in the work and take risks.
If Muggsy Bogues took what you're saying to heart he would've never joined the NBA to become a 5'3" champion because he would've considered his stature a disability. And if someone with an IQ of 85 told me about his theoretical physics dreams I would tell him he's a liar - if he really liked it that much then he would have a higher IQ, just because he would have spent his childhood doing complicated arithmetic to work towards his vision (early specialization) and his youthful mind would've risen to meet the occasion. But what good would it do either of us if I put him down without knowing his potential? If he really likes what he does more than everyone else, why shouldn't he succeed? Keeping this in mind, I'd instead wish him good luck on his endeavors and I'd pray for his imminent success.
Even if the odds of me succeeding were near impossible I would still do what I do and die trying. I can't possibly be bogged down by the esoteric, probabilistic nonsense that burdens people day in and day out - the only direction I can possibly go in is up. So I don't mean to be rude, but I think that what you call sober pragmatism is really just your attempt to rationalize your own feelings.
I very much want what you say about IQ and HBD to be true. I want to believe that I'm special because of a test, and I want to believe that I'm smarter than other people because of my race. These fantasies sound fun to entertain, but I'm not going to go believing something unless I'm shown proof.
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You kind of give the impression that you're playing at ignorance, but to address the "but IQ test must be easily learnable", I'll point you towards various standardized tests (SATs, GREs, MCAT, LSAT). They are incredibly important for getting into various schools, and people fight very hard to get to those schools. While training courses exist, they generally don't do much, and if it were as easy as you seem to think, everyone would have 100% anyway.
Seriously, have you ever taken a standardized test? Did you ace it? If not, do you think it's only because you couldn't be bothered?
These are not IQ tests. Note that I said like standardized tests. Although irrelevant to the discussion, the tests you specifically mention are things you need to study for. The top performers on these tests are people from supportive family structures who apply themselves rigorously and consistently.
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Even if IQ was trainable, that too would also be predictive of IQ. The result is harder IQ tests in which the ability to study just becomes another proxy for IQ
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I'd argue it is trivial to implement a test significantly superior to the IQ tests.
E.g. Obviously test for the ability to detect cognitive biases and logical fallacies.
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