Meme - Lo-fi Republican @LoFiRepublican: "I'd bet good money that you have a sub-70 IQ"
juan @juangrciajr: "IQ is fake"
Bass Pro Pharoah @RogueRetard: "Only someone mad about their score says this"
juan @juangrciajr: "i don't even know what my score is *clown* but how are you gonna let a number tell you what you are"
Loser @HeartFungus: "How would you feel if you hadn't eaten breakfast this morning?"
juan: "i did eat breakfast"
Geoffrey Miller on X - "The real way to 'make college more affordable', insofar as college degrees function mostly as proxies for general intelligence for employment purposes, is for the Supreme Court to overturn Griggs v. Duke Power Co (1971) & allow employers to use cheap, fast, reliable, valid IQ tests for hiring, instead of college degrees."
Griggs v. Duke Power Co (1971) would seem to ban requiring a college degree too
Emil O W Kirkegaard on X - "Smarter soldiers are just better. r = 0.65 correlation between intelligence and general soldiering proficiency. Data from a large US military study. IQ data obtained at recruitment prior to performance measures. For core job performance measures, measuring personality doesn't add much. Compare first vs. last column. E.g., general soldiering proficiency from intelligence alone 0.69 vs. 0.70 with personality added. But personality is a good addition for predicting physical fitness: 0.23 to 0.42. Personality is especially important for matters of self-discipline. Intelligence has a weak prediction of 0.16, but adding personality, it is 0.35. In general, though, intelligence is king. Adding more and more detailed cognitive measures can give some additional validity, but not much. Might be worth if the time if you have a big organization. E.g., all of their extra tests here yielded an increase of 0.04 for general soldiering proficiency from 0.65 to 0.69. Why bring this up? A study from 1990. The important point here is that recent concerns about the validity of intelligence based on meta-analytic results can be safely ignored because large-study examples with high quality data already show that strong validity is not due to meta-analytic methods choices."
PROJECT A VALIDITY RESULTS: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PREDICTOR AND CRITERION DOMAINS - MCHENRY - 1990
i/o on X - "The US Navy announced in 2022 that it was considering lowering the cut-off score for the cognitive ability test it administers to new recruits. There had been complaints about the fact that only 30% of blacks were passing, while the pass rate for whites was 70% — which is roughly what one would predict from established racial IQ distributions. Meanwhile, recent recruitment data are showing that the share of white males entering the military is in rapid decline."
Clearly, demonising white men isn't why the share of white males entering the military is going down, and the solution is even more wokeness and lowering standards even more
Hitchslap on X - "There’s an important reason it’s illegal to induct anyone into the U.S. Army with an IQ below 83 and it’s not because IQ is fake."
Hitchslap on X - "The reason the U.S. Army requires a minimum IQ of 83 is perfectly captured in the book "McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War." The cohort routinely struggled to point and aim a rifle, throw a grenade and tie their boots to basic standards."
🌴 Josh Lekach 🌴 on X - "Elon Musk made me a racist"
"I noticed the associate professor didn’t refute the facts being shared but rather gave this convoluted response that validated the data but that it’s being shared for (as he views it) the wrong reasons."
"I've never understood why raw data is considered "racist""
"They didn't refute anything, they just said, "It's bad!""
"In this video geneticist doesn’t think genes are important. Lol"
"Will Stancil: “Correlation =\= Causation” That’s makes no sense in when you’re talking about an IQ chart"
Psikey on X - "“We settled this debate generations ago” nope. “The concept of race has no biological basis” nope, continuum fallacy. Nothing makes me more certain hereditarianism is correct than the shocking weakness of the arguments against it. Sasha is probably the smartest anti-hereditarian, and his best argument is just deliberately misunderstanding what GWAS can and cannot establish. GWAS can be informative for looking at population differences, but it cannot produce heritability estimates. This is because it’s based on linear regressions... Rather than clumsily regressing over the genome, we directly examine relationships. We can look at correlations between identical twins raised separately on the one hand, and non-related children raised together on the other. If hered is correct, the first group will correlate much more strongly than the second group, which we in fact see. Africans adopted by Swedish parents severely underperform native Swedes, while Korean adoptees overperform them. There are countless such studies. There is also physiological evidence in terms of brain size, and the relative size of different brain regions like the prefrontal cortex. These gaps survive income controls. The environmentalist hypothesis implies that racism, *independent of economic conditions*, changes the shape of the human skull and the distribution of matter between various brain regions. This seems unlikely. We know intelligence is highly heritable. We know racial groups are defined by distinct genetic heritage. We know racial gaps seem resistant to any form of subsidy or dislocation from the parent culture. Denying the hereditarian conclusion requires willful, ideologically-driven blindness."
IQ and the Association with Myopia in Children - "After controlling for age, gender, school, parental myopia, father’s education, and books read per week, myopia (spherical equivalent [SE]) of at least −0.5 D was associated with high nonverbal IQ (highest quartile) versus low IQ (lowest quartile) (odds ratio = 2.4; 95% confidence interval, 1.7–3.4). Controlling for the same factors, children with higher nonverbal IQ scores had significantly more myopic refractions (−1.86 D for children with nonverbal IQ in the highest quartile compared with −1.24 D for children with nonverbal IQ in the lowest quartile; P = 0.002) and longer axial lengths (24.06 mm versus 23.80 mm; P = 0.022). Nonverbal IQ accounted for a greater proportion of the variance in refraction compared with books read per week.
Nonverbal IQ may be an independent risk factor of myopia, and this relationship may not be explained merely by increased reading (books per week) among myopes. An interesting observation is that nonverbal IQ may be a stronger risk factor for myopia compared with books read per week"
Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "Here it is, America's most explanatory table with regard to racial disparities in outcomes associated with intelligence, such as income and socioeconomic status, academic achievement, job performance and occupational level, and financial success and stability.
Higher IQ is associated with stronger performance on the items just mentioned, while lower IQ is associated with things like criminality, poor impulse control, and antisocial behavior."
The Wonder of International Adoption: Adult IQ in Sweden - "In the First World, children adopted by smarter parents get somewhat higher IQ scores. Unfortunately, these benefits fade-out by adulthood... measuring the IQs of Third World adoptees when they’re children isn’t very informative. Even if they show large gains, the gains could easily be fleeting. Instead, we should wait and measure those kids’ IQs when they’re adults. I had to read a pile of papers, but in the end, I found what I was looking for. Dalen et al.’s “Educational Attainment and Cognitive Competence in Adopted Men” (Children and Youth Services Review, 2008) looks at Swedish conscripts’ cognitive test results for (a) 342,526 non-adopted Swedes, 780 adoptees from South Korea, and 1558 adoptees from other non-Western countries. Subjects were roughly 18 years old when they took the test. At my request, Bo Vinnerljung, one of the authors, shared the nationality breakdown for the “other non-Western” countries: India (21%), Thailand (19%), Chile (13%), Sri Lanka (9%), Colombia (9%), Ethiopia (8%), Ecuador (7%), with the remainder from “a wide mix of small groups, e.g., Poland, Peru, Bolivia, a few from other sub-Saharan Africa countries, and a small group from Mid-East countries including Iran.” Suppose you plug in the most commonly-used estimates of IQ by country, assign each of Vinnerjung’s “small groups” equal shares of the remainder, and assume international adoptees are average for their home country. Then if they’d stayed in their birth countries, the other non-Western adoptees would have a mean IQ of only 84... Let’s normalize the scores so overall Swedish IQ is 99 (a typical estimate), with a standard deviation of 15.* Then other non-Western adoptees’ average score was 88. Four IQs points may sound modest, but it’s one of the biggest environmental effects on adult IQ in the literature... International adoption doesn’t make international IQ gaps vanish, but it plausibly cuts them in half. And remember – unlike classic childhood interventions like Head Start, the gains last into adulthood instead of fading away. What other viable, lasting treatment for low IQ is even remotely as effective?"
Richard Hanania on X - "Study from Sweden shows that children adopted from non-Western countries ended up having lower IQs than native Swedes. The one exception was South Koreans, who actually had higher IQs than Swedes. I guess babies take "Confucian culture" with them when they are adopted?"
Since the only thing IQ tests measure is how good you are at taking IQ tests, South Koreans must be born knowing how to do IQ tests. Which means...
The left wing cope is that Asians don't face discrimination. But that doesn't explain why Swedish adoptees from South Korea have slightly higher IQ than native Swedes
Armand Domalewski on X - "“Intelligence is partially heritable” and “people with different skin colors have consistent genetic group differences of intelligence” are very much not the same idea"
Richard Hanania on X - "Nobody believes that sub-Saharan Africans and Adaman Islanders have cognitive traits in common because their skin tones are similar. This focus on skin color just creates a strawman."
disentangling race from intelligence and genetics, or how to rescue behavioral genetics from racists
The problem with this is that if you proclaim that there can be no link between race and IQ and claiming that is "scientific racism" all while valuing "a willingness to trust scientific evidence", if you're wrong about the former, you'll either have to suppress inconvenient facts or your whole edifice will come crashing down. But the author goes down the "social construction of race" route, with the usual strawman conception of race (claiming that if you believe in it, it means you think Hmongs and Indians are the same). Worse, he goes on to talk about emotional intelligence and other rubbish
Genetic and environmental contributions to IQ in adoptive and biological families with 30-year-old offspring - "While adoption studies have provided key insights into the influence of the familial environment on IQ scores of adolescents and children, few have followed adopted offspring long past the time spent living in the family home. To improve confidence about the extent to which shared environment exerts enduring effects on IQ, we estimated genetic and environmental effects on adulthood IQ in a unique sample of 486 biological and adoptive families. These families, tested previously on measures of IQ when offspring averaged age 15, were assessed a second time nearly two decades later (M offspring age = 32 years). We estimated the proportions of the variance in IQ attributable to environmentally mediated effects of parental IQs, sibling-specific shared environment, and gene-environment covariance to be 0.01 [95% CI 0.00, 0.02], 0.04 [95% CI 0.00, 0.15], and 0.03 [95% CI 0.00, 0.07] respectively; these components jointly accounted for 8% of the IQ variance in adulthood. The heritability was estimated to be 0.42 [95% CI 0.21, 0.64]. Together, these findings provide further evidence for the predominance of genetic influences on adult intelligence over any other systematic source of variation."
In a Representative Sample Grit Has a Negligible Effect on Educational and Economic Success Compared to Intelligence - "We compare the relative contribution of grit and intelligence to educational and job-market success in a representative sample of the American population. We find that, in terms of ΔR 2, intelligence contributes 48–90 times more than grit to educational success and 13 times more to job-market success. Conscientiousness also contributes to success more than grit but only twice as much. We show that the reason our results differ from those of previous studies which showed that grit has a stronger effect on success is that these previous studies used nonrepresentative samples that were range restricted on intelligence. Our findings suggest that although grit has some effect on success, it is negligible compared to intelligence and perhaps also to other traditional predictors of success."
Weird. We're told that IQ is useless in predicting success
Paolo Shirasi on X - "Peoples et al (1995): "Racial differences in intelligence show up by three years of age, even after controlling for maternal education and other variables –- strongly suggesting that they cannot be due to poor education since this has not yet begun to exert an effect.""
i/o on X - "The left: "Bad schools, stereotype threat, and systemic racism cause the IQ gap between whites and blacks."
Science: "The gaps already exist at age three.""
Rolf Degen on X - "The effect of the family environment on cognitive ability drops to virtually zero in early adulthood, making siblings who grew up in the same family as different as children reared in different families."
Nature, nurture and nonshared environment in cognitive development - "One of the most important findings from behavioural genetic research is that nature, not nurture, makes children in a family similar in personality and psychopathology. The same research provides the strongest available evidence for the importance of environmental influence controlling for genetics, but it shows that environmental influences are not due to nurture; they are not shared by family members. Cognitive traits such as cognitive abilities and educational achievement are thought to be an exception, with half of the environmental variance attributed to shared environmental influences. However, most of this cognitive research has involved children. A developmental perspective indicates that shared environmental influence on cognitive abilities and educational achievement declines from accounting for 20-30% of the variance in childhood to 10-20% in adolescence and to 0% by early adulthood. Educational attainment (years of schooling) is the exception with lasting shared environmental influence (30%) driven by decisions made in adolescence to go to university, which shows the greatest shared environmental influence (47%). We conclude that environmental influences on individual differences in cognitive development are, in the long run, nonshared. We discuss the far-reaching scientific and societal implications of these findings for understanding the nonshared environmental causes of individual differences in cognitive abilities in adulthood."
This is proof that spanking is child abuse and that parenting is very important
i/o on X - "Here's why I post about race and IQ: Most of wokeness is about race, and the woke position on race is that "systemic" racism — and only systemic racism — explains existing racial disparities. The problem with this is not only can wokes not identify an actual system (it's mostly just a motley assortment of residual and legacy effects), but the "proof" of this system is often the mere existence of disparities. Their reasoning: Since all groups are equal in actual ability and potential, only oppressive structures and forces (like racism) can explain these disparities. But it is plainly not true all groups are equal in ability or potential: No reputable scientist conducting research in human intelligence disputes the existence of IQ differences between racial groups, and hundreds of studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals have firmly established that IQ is associated with outcomes ranging from academic performance/achievement to educational attainment to lifetime salary/wage earnings to financial success to job performance. Did you know this? How many Americans know this? Have you ever read about this in a mainstream publication? Did you also know that, according to the most recent survey of scientists' views on human intelligence (published in the scientific journal Intelligence in 2020), 84% of experts believe genetic differences between persons of European ancestry and persons of Sub-Saharan African ancestry play a role in the US black-white IQ gap? (For the record, I'm agnostic on how much, if any, of the race IQ gaps are due to genetic differences between groups.) My point has always been this: If you want to fight wokeness and the broader progressive project — the foundation of which is the scientifically-indefensible blank slate view that individuals and groups are all born with equal potential — you have to discuss race differences in IQ. This is why I tweet about this subject."
US Public Perceptions of an Intelligence Quotient Test Score Gap Between Black Americans and White Americans - "Intelligence quotient (IQ) is a common measure of intelligence that associates with many important life outcomes. Research over several decades has indicated that the average IQ test score among Black Americans is lower than the average IQ test score among White Americans, but in weighted results from a national nonprobability survey, only about 41% of US adults indicated awareness of this IQ gap. Results from a follow-up convenience survey indicated that, in the aggregate, White participants’ rating of White Americans’ average IQ and average intelligence is higher than Blacks Americans’ average IQ test score and average intelligence and was not driven by White participants’ belief in a universal White intellectual superiority. These and other results could have implications regarding the US public’s perceptions about the reasons for Black/White inequality and implications for the use of intelligence stereotype scales as measures of racial prejudice."
The power of cognitive ability in explaining educational test performance, relative to other ostensible contenders - "The paper examines the relationship between cognitive ability at thirteen years of age and children's academic performance assessments at aged nine. Alongside cognitive ability, other variables considered predictive of academic success were assessed including personality measures, birthweight, handedness, socio-economic background, parental education, home language, and child-rearing practices such as breast-feeding and access to video-games. The final sample comprised 7525 children who participated in both wave 1 and wave 2 of the Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) longitudinal study. Participants in the study were selected through the state school system using a 2-stage sampling method producing a large sample representative of the national population of nine-year-old children. Linear multiple regression identified five variables which significantly explained both reading and mathematics test scores: two cognitive ability measures, birthweight, wealthier households, and high attendance at parent-teacher meetings. Gender, parental education, and home language also made a contribution to reading test scores, while a general factor of personality was significant for mathematics. Overall the cognitive ability measures accounted for almost all of the explained variance, and other factors, while sometimes statistically significant, were of relatively minor importance."
Clearly, the only thing IQ tests measure is how good you are at doing IQ tests. No wonder liberals hate IQ tests so much
From the Cover: What grades and achievement tests measure - "Grades and scores on achievement tests are widely used as measures of cognition. This paper examines these measures and their constituent parts. We establish that, on average, grades and achievement tests are generally better predictors of life outcomes than “pure” measures of intelligence. The reason is that they capture aspects of personality that have been shown to be predictive in their own right. All of the standard measures of “intelligence” or “cognition” are influenced by aspects of personality, albeit to varying degrees, depending on the measure. This result has important implications for the interpretation of studies using scores on achievement tests and grades to explain differences in outcomes and for the use of standard cognitive measures to evaluate the effectiveness of public policies."
The path and performance of a company leader: A historical examination of the education and cognitive ability of Fortune 500 CEOs - "The path to becoming a CEO (and performance on the job) can be viewed as a difficult cognitive challenge. One way to examine this idea is to see how highly selected CEOs are in terms of education and cognitive ability. The extent to which Fortune 500 CEOs were selected on education and cognitive ability at an earlier age was retrospectively assessed at four time points that spanned 1996 to 2014 (Total N = 1991). Across the last 19 years, between 37.5% and 41.0% of these CEOs were found to attend an elite school which likely placed them in the top 1% of cognitive ability. People in the top 1% of ability, therefore, were likely overrepresented among these CEOs, at about 37 to 41 times the base rate. Even within each of the four samples, higher CEO education and cognitive ability was associated with higher gross revenue of the CEO's company."
This IQ denier first claimed that if someone thought IQ was a thing, you were not intelligent, then when I posted the Antonakis quote, claimed that IQ just measures how well you take IQ tests, then claimed that high IQ was only good to be a worker bee
i/o on X - "People obtaining degrees in economics, physics, philosophy, and math tend to be among the very smartest students. The least bright are those obtaining degrees in social work and certain education sub-fields. The highest-IQ fields are dominated by men, the lowest by women (see right column)"
o wonder liberals hate IQ so much
How malleable are cognitive abilities? A critical perspective on popular brief interventions - "A number of popular research areas suggest that cognitive performance can be manipulated via relatively brief interventions. These findings have generated a lot of traction, given their inherent appeal to individuals and society. However, recent evidence indicates that cognitive abilities might not be as malleable as preliminary findings implied and that other more stable factors play an important role. In this article, I provide a critical outlook on these trends of research, combining findings that have mainly remained segregated despite shared characteristics. Specifically, I suggest that the purported cognitive improvements elicited by many interventions are not reliable, and that their ecological validity remains limited. I conclude with a call for constructive skepticism when evaluating claims of generalized cognitive improvements following brief interventions."
i/o on X - "The same lefty women who tell you "IQ isn't real" and "standardized tests are racist" won't hesitate to ask for the IQs of the donors at a sperm bank when they begin their voyage into single motherhood."
Paolo Shirasi on X - "Genetic analysis (GWAS) of antisocial behavior found it negatively correlates with intelligence (rg -0.40) and educational attainment (rg -0.46). The association between lower IQ and higher antisocial behavior is a consistent finding."
Meme - Bojan Tunguz @tunguz: "We are on the verge of developing superhuman intelligence, and yet so many *educated* people still subscribe to various pseudoscientific ideas about human intelligence. This is downright depressing."
Rolf Degen: "Although scientifically debunked, the theory of multiple intelligences has become a zombie concept that can no longer be banished from the minds of teachers."
"Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences (MI) is widely regarded as a neuromyth. In the past 40 years research has as shown that the brain is not organized in separate modules dedicated to specific forms of cognition. There are no standard measures of the intelligences. To date, no neural correlates of the intelligences have been found. Factor studies have not shown the intelligences to be independent. Studies of MI teaching effects have not explored alternate causes for positive effects and have not been conducted by standard scientific methods. Despite the lack of evidence, 90% of teacher trainees surveyed in the US planned to use MI teaching strategies. Teachers who knew more about the brain still believed education neuromyths. Researchers also reported that "teachers who are enthusiastic about the possible application of neuroscience findings in the classroom, often find it challenging to distinguish pseudoscience from scientific facts". MI theory is a neuromyth that should not be taught to teachers, and MI teaching strategies should not be used in the classroom"
Or that IQ is a pseudoscientific myth
(6) IQ is not the main indicator of success - "The university's findings are backed up by those of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, who discovered that 85% of success is linked to something called cognitive control, which essentially means an individual's capacity to communicate, negotiate and lead others."
Someone dissing IQ flung this at me, but The Carnegie Foundation (NOT The Carnegie Institute of Technology) reports that "These statistics were extrapolated from A Study of Engineering Education, authored by Charles Riborg Mann and published in 1918 by the Carnegie Foundation" and the claim is a gross misrepresentation of what the publication actually says
A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety
This gets cited to diss IQ for some reason, but if you dig into the results, IQ was more important than self-control for recurrent depression, SES, income. Those who diss IQ like to pretend that just because other factors may be more influential in some situations than IQ, it means that IQ is not important, which is very bizarre logic