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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32785 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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I catch a lot of flak from HBDers on this sub when I argue that IQ doesn't measure intelligence per-se so much as it measures something like "Academic Aptitude" and that to the degree that any correlation between IQ and life outcomes exists it is mostly due to modern secular society using academics as a means of sorting "winners" from "losers" and enforcing social stratification.

Yet here you are seemingly making what is effectively the same argument.

any correlation between IQ and life outcomes exists it is mostly due to modern secular society using academics as a means of sorting "winners" from "losers"

Do you think tests like reaction time, or reverse digit span fall into this category? Reaction time is correlated with IQ:

Correlations of simple RT means with AH4 scores were − 0.27, − 0.30 and − 0.32, for age 30, 50 and 69, respectively; and − 0.44, − 0.47 and − 0.53 for 4-choice RT.

0.53 is quite high as these things go.

Reverse Digit Span is 0.45 correlated with WISC-R IQs, according to Jensen.

I agree that tests like WORDSUM (whose correlation with IQ is 0.71) are very culturally loaded and surely are mediated by academics, but I can't see how reaction time, or the backward digit span are similarly affected.

g has a lot of correlation with IQ tests and a whole bunch of other measures, and to say that it's irrelevant is just not true. Intelligence is useful. There are other relevant factors in life success, of course.

There are other relevant factors in life success, of course.

What would you say are the genetic factors that are relevant? I can think of a bunch of social factors, like being wise enough to choose parents who are rich and live in a free society. The ones that come to my mind are being good-looking, being musical, and being tall. For women, being blonde is a huge win, as are the other obvious things, so long as you don't approximate the Willendorf Venus (and even then?).

There have been great efforts to find other factors that are independent of g, but it seems quite hard to isolate any. Even being good-looking is correlated with having less genetic mutations, and this also weakly correlates with g. In the US:

It shows that physical attractiveness is significantly correlated with general intelligence (r = .126),

Musicality correlates as well.

A remarkable direct correlation between IQ and musical scores in both the control (r≥0.38) and experimental (r≥0.37) groups was observed.

Alas, among non-Hispanic whites, even being blonde correlates with IQ. Brown haired men (104.4) and blonde women (103.2) are on the top of the heap, though blonde women have the smallest standard deviation (12.2) and black haired men (mean IQ 100.1) the largest (15.2).

The conclusions come from a survey of 10,878 white Americans asked about their natural hair colour (Hispanics and African Americans were excluded to eliminate bias). The results showed the average IQ of blonde-haired women was 103.2, 102.7 for brown hair, 101.2 for red hair and 100.5 for black hair.

The results showed the average IQ of blonde-haired women was 103.2, 102.7 for brown hair, 101.2 for red hair

Scottish and Irish people BTFO? In all likelihood dark hair probably has the highest standard deviation because it includes some white America’s highest and lowest populations, while blondes are more uniformly from Northern Europe.

Red heads are also more uniformly from Northern Europe.

Redheads are highly disproportionately from specific sub-regions of Northern Europe, though.

Some personality traits is one, I think. The big 5, for example, have some correlations with intelligence, but they don't correlate perfectly, and do impact life.

For most of your answers, yes they might correlate, but that's not the same as causation. (or, at least, there will be more than one factor involved in the causation, which complicates the picture beyond IQ being the only factor that matters)

Hlynka, to put it bluntly, your claims on that matter were conclusively debunked by multiple posters, yet your approach, instead of engaging, was to stick your fingers in your ears and not respond.

IQ is a good measure of g and also immensely predictive for almost all life outcomes we really care about.

I've seen several posters catch bans for expressing their frustration with your obtuseness, so I'll leave it here before it annoys the mods.

Hlynka, to put it bluntly, your claims on that matter were conclusively debunked by multiple posters

No they weren't. What happened is that same half dozen or so posters linked the same tired unreliable sources and then got mad and accused me of being "obtuse" when I questioned their sources and methodology rather than play the role of a straw-man who "gets destroyed by facts and logic"

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