The big problem with IQ is that it’s horribly misapplied. It’s a predictor for how you will do in education. That is all it was designed to do and all it has ever been validated for. It does that ok, not great but well enough to be statistically significant. It has some reasonable use in identifying extreme outliers (the roughly 5% of people more than 2 standard deviations from the mean) which is useful for getting the roughly 2.5% of people more than 2 standard deviations below the mean the additional resources and care they need. There are no other valid community uses for IQ and for the vast majority of people it’s a meaningless number. It unfortunately found a place in pop culture and in business and government recruitment when realistically it’s use should have always been limited to research and selective clinical/educational applications (identifying people that need extra resources). Mass testing is undisputably a waste of resources because of how little useful information it generates and the high risk of misuse of basically meaningless results of the 95% that are within the normal range.

I’ll go one further: “intelligence” as conceived by “IQ” is a mostly meaningless concept and the word, when used in everyday English, mostly just means “agrees with me”

For anyone who hasn’t watched it this video is an excellent breakdown of the racist history of both The Bell Curve and of IQ tests.

This is good:

Take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook or ask your closest Fat Tony) [Note: We can also apply here Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, which states that any of an infinite number of functions is compatible with any finite sequence. Source: Paul Bogossian]. Not only clueless, but obedient enough to want to think in a certain way.

Also this:

If, as psychologists show, MDs and academics tend to have a higher “IQ” that is slightly informative (higher, but on a noisy average), it is largely because to get into schools you need to score on a test similar to “IQ”. The mere presence of such a filter increases the visible mean and lower the visible variance. Probability and statistics confuse fools.

And:

If someone came up w/a numerical“Well Being Quotient” WBQ or “Sleep Quotient”, SQ, trying to mimic temperature or a physical quantity, you’d find it absurd. But put enough academics w/physics envy and race hatred on it and it will become an official measure.

What books(ideally books pls) would you guys recommend to anyone caught up in IQ stuff? Especially for people outside the US? Ignore if wrong place to ask this, my bad there.

IQ is a relatively recent construct.

My father (b. 1913) was one of the children chosen to calibrate the Stanford Binet IQ test after it moved from Europe to Stanford University.

Having a high IQ didn’t make much difference for an alcoholic manic depressive attorney who could insult you in English, French, German, and Arabic.

He became an embezzler who lost everything and ended up dying in my one-year-old daughter’s bedroom after his last wife threw him out.

A few days before he died, he seemed to confess to murdering his first wife.

IQ may predict other things than it was designed for.

It was disappointing to see Veritasium not applying much critical analysis to IQ testing in his video.

He really should of downplayed it’s significance more.

Smart people talk about ideas or hobbies or whatever it is they’re focused on.

Dumb people talk about their IQ and how it means whatever half baked conclusions they decide to jump to.

Side note, I know Taleb is widely appreciated, but man this is some badly written stuff. Is all his stuff like this? I realize blog post != book, but c’mon, some pride in craftmanship is in order.