I wouldn’t cite that Duckworth article —there has been a lot of criticism of her methods, which is partly discussed in this Scientific American piece here: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-politics-of-the-null-hypothesis/. Unfortunately, that is the problem with academic work at times—you can’t rely…

Sure it can, Trump says he has a 205 IQ.
The scale only goes to 161 for adults.
It proves he is a idiot who makes shit up just to sound smart, and if I may use a quote here “a fucking moron”.

It is definitely a decent indicator, but it does have limits, especially if you hope to use it to determine competence. I have a 145 IQ, but I don’t find myself competent in any shape, way or form to run a country. It is a great basis, and combined with the proper education and experience, that would go a long way.…

Intelligence tests work. That’s why they are used. They aren’t perfect. They can be gamed, they have biases. But they can be very instructive if used properly.

I mean, you’re wrong though? IQ tests, are generally used to be a predictor of levels of intelligence as pretty much everyone defines it. You are trying to poke holes in IQ tests, and perhaps IQ in general, by questioning how we define it and cherry picking some quotes. When you say intelligence, we all think of how…

That’s simply not true. You act as if no other cultures have their own IQ/standardized tests that are highly correlated with later-life success. Additionally, success on an IQ test taken by cohorts of rich white males/poor hispanic females/middle-income African Americans etc is highly correlated with a wide variety of…

Criticizing intelligence for being “subjective” is as meaningless as criticizing a meter or a parsec for being “subjective”. Like many things in science, intelligence is what scientists define it to be. Scientists create definitions to be useful. IQ is defined as an indirect measurement of intelligence because it is a…

It’s hard to say what someone’s IQ is without examining them. I think Trump is probably smarter than a lot of liberals give him credit for, but I doubt he has a high IQ.

If correlation is not a valid basis for concluding causation, then you have to throw out pretty much all science, because pretty much everything in modern science is established through statistical correlation tests of some sort.

IQ is not actually a measure of intelligence, at least not directly. Rather it is a comparative measure of performance at tasks that are thought to be highly correlative of intelligence. Often in science we cannot measure something directly, so we measure a correlative factor. Intelligence is even trickier because the…

Well, we all know that any attempt at a quantitative expression of intelligence is simply an exercise in privilege.

I agree that correlation does not equal causation. Except the fact that one of the links that I posted (the Nature piece) features a longitudinal study of gifted kids measured at age 12-13 and have been followed up over their lives. We use psychological assessment to see if we can predict future outcomes—and it turns…

A lot of your evidence is cherry-picked to prove your point here, with more attention to people with developmental delays than people who are on the other extreme. Intelligence is a huge—and understandably controversial—area in psychology. The terms that are terrible terms today were just ways to classify people into…

Pssssssh, c’mon Beth, you’re better than that.

My cynical take is that non-academic writing about some of the biases found in IQ tests tends to come from a pretty dishonest set of motivations and tends to consist mostly of setting up and knocking down a few different straw men.

Agreed. I find the experts’ words to be a more compelling argument that an IQ test, while not perfect, does in fact have some value as long as it’s considered carefully with other factors that may be at play.

I don’t know if I agree that the experts quoted in this article support the article’s headline. To me, they seem to be saying, “well, yeah, they are a measure, just one you have to be aware of the limitations of.” We make practical use of many things like this in everyday life where the thing being approximated with…

Ugh. Hobbes is a jerkoff. All of the institutions he claims that man “needs” to keep society from total chaos i.e. the church, the state, are themselves responsible for the depravity he wants to eradicate. In other words, I wouldn’t shield even my own family members from being prosecuted for being a pedophile. The…

But it’s not being good that matters, it’s why you do it. [...] But what if you only did those things for fame and glory?