Sen. McCain has brain cancer

[civver_764]

Well, certainly the environment you are brought up in plays a role, and parents should always strive to give their children the best environment, but it's also just something you are born with to a large degree.

 

[Zkribbler]

IQ and motivation (and lifetime success) are pretty closely correlated.

The biggest correlation to lifetime success is the income level of the parents.
...or do you think Yvanks and Kushner's reported net worth of $ 3/4 billion is due to their staggering intellect?

 

[Ajidica]

Well, Dingus Jrs wealth can't be due to his staggering intellect.
What sort of dimwit uses emails to arrange a meeting where the person is offering assistance from the Russian government?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Well, Dingus Jrs wealth can't be due to his staggering intellect.
What sort of dimwit uses emails to arrange a meeting where the person is offering assistance from the Russian government?

A dimwit who has been shielded against all bad consequences arising from his behavior for his entire life...in other words the exact same sort of dimwit as his dad, just not as old.

 

[El_Machinae]

Okay, that tops it!

I mean, if PUMPKINPERSON blogs it, who could possibly doubt?

I don't know why people are mocking it.

One of the things that IQ implicitly measures is the ability to defer reward. I means, it's one number. There's no doubt that there's a correlational and causal relationship between median incomes and IQ cohorts.

Annual GDP created per horsepower of vehicle would also be the wrong number, because 'horsepower' tells you too little (specifically) about a vehicle. But it would still give you a meaningful graph.

The median income is the appropriate income standard to use (compared to, say, mean). What you're critiquing is the use of IQ, because it's mostly the wrong number (in that, 'drive' isn't the only thing it measures). But this just means you need a better number.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

An IQ test is only really meaningful when used as a measure of intellectual impairment, not intellectual ability. What an IQ test really measures is the ability of the test taker to solve puzzles in a given amount of time. Many "lower" IQ rated persons are just as capable of solving said puzzle as a high IQ person is, it just takes them a little longer and they can't answer as many questions in the time allotted, resulting in a lower score.

As an example, if I give you ten questions from an IQ test, and give you an unlimited amount of time to do it, you will likely be able to answer all of the questions. If your measured IQ is over, say, 125, you might be able to answer all of the questions in ten minutes. Someone with an IQ of 170 might answer the questions in six minutes. Big deal. You both answered all of the questions accurately. No one is "more" intelligent than the other. One of you can just solve puzzles faster.

Where it really gets interesting (and meaningful) is when the IQ score gets below 80, where it is clear that the person cannot answer the questions being posed because they simply don't understand them. The IQ test then becomes a gauge of intellectual impairment rather than ability. It offers a basis of comparison between test takers that measures cognitive ability rather than intelligence. To use my example above, giving a person with an 80 IQ the same set of ten questions and unlimited time, they may not be able to work them out, no matter how much time is given to them to complete the test. This is due to an inability of the test taker to clearly understand the question being put to them. The "lower' the measured IQ, the fewer questions can be answered, if any at all. Keep in mind that with IQs less than 80 or so, some special techniques have to be used to properly judge a person's IQ.

Bottom line? A measured IQ above the median range for humans (90 to 110) is meaningless and only good for bragging rights. I tend to disbelieve the posted charts of IQ versus income. There are plenty of low wage earners with IQs higher than 135 out there, which I believe is the minimum score allowed for entry in to MENSA now. It's been a while since I checked on that, but since many of their members are nothing but snobs and blowhards, I can't really develop the interest to find out.

 

[Kozmos]

Yeah, not so: https://www.gwern.net/Embryo selection#value-of-iq

 

[MagisterCultuum]

The data I've seen in the past shows that IQ is positively correlated with wealth up to a score of about 125. Those with IQs higher than that may earn good salaries in careers like medicine or law, but are less likely to ever become millionaires or billionaires than those of average intelligence. The wealthiest 0.1% of the population mostly fall between IQs of 105 and 115.

Great wealth does not have to do with intelligence or contributions to the world so much as with the ability to network and manipulate other people. Being slightly smarter than those one is trying to manipulate is advantageous, but being significantly smarter is a big disadvantage. Those who easily see through common manipulations tend not to try the sort of tactics that would work on stupid people but would only seem insulting to themselves. Having an IQ one standard deviation above that of the audience is enough to make one seem both smart and trustworthy. An IQ two or more standard deviations higher makes one seem very unrelatable and unsympathetic to the masses.

Mathematical intelligence is not actually correlated with social skills, but those with very high verbal IQs have difficulty with those who rely less on words and more on non-verbal communication or unconscious social scripts.

 

[Cutlass]

IQ and motivation (and lifetime success) are pretty closely correlated.

But IQ is a measure of the head start a person was given in life. It has nothing to do with their native ability.

 

[Lexicus]

IQ is a measure of how well you take IQ tests

 

[El_Machinae]

Both of those are pithy statements, but false. There's an implicit motivation to make them.

The major criticism is that IQ is one number, and that 'intelligence' is a multi-faceted thing. But that's it. That's the criticism.

There's absolutely an innate component to IQ. This can be nurtured. This can be impaired. But there's absolutely an innate component.

 

[Kozmos]

Is it really multifaceted? I remember seeing a research and a graph that showed a high g means you can do pretty much anything well and learn quickly while at it. So its usefulness is not as skewed towards purely logical and math skills that people think high IQ only applies towards. While you can certainly learn how to take tests better, you can't learn g.

 

[Truthy]

IQ is a measure of how well you take IQ tests

Yeah, an iq is a score determined by how well a person performs the activity that produces the score. It's a bit of a platitude. There's the issue though as to whether the contents of these tests are not a reasonable proxy for assessing what we all know to be true, which is that some people are slower than others or worse at figuring things out than others. And maybe account for why this meaningless number has a relatively high degree of heritability and is correlated with income, educational attainment, social skills, and test results from every other test that tries to somehow assess our widely agreed upon idea of "intelligence." I'll point out the difficulty of accounting for all these correlates and the semi-validity of the iq metric has been accepted for a long time by people with better reputations than Charles Murray and MENSA.

Certainly "intelligence" can never be perfectly measurable and that labor markets, social factors, and so on don't perfectly reward intelligence with money or punish stupid people with poverty. Plenty of bright people pursue low paying careers, max out their earnings in academia, get unlucky, see competitive forces as a rat race, or things like that. But there's no disputing that the labor markets in many industries seek out people who we can identify as being faster and better at figuring things out. We've seen that this presents irreconcilable political difficulties for a lot of people, which is bizarre because a good Rawlsian solution has been around for decades.

 

[Lexicus]

Yeah, an iq is a score determined by how well a person performs the activity that produces the score. It's a nice cliche that's been wheeled out in every iq discussion that has ever taken place. But you're gonna have to show that the contents of these tests are not a reasonable proxy for assessing what we all know to be true, which is that some people are slower than others or worse at figuring things out than others. And maybe account for why this meaningless number has a relatively high degree of heritability and is correlated with income, educational attainment, social skills, and test results from every other test that tries to somehow assess our widely agreed upon idea of "intelligence." I'll point out the difficulty of accounting for all these correlates and the semi-validity of the iq metric has been accepted for a long time by people with better reputations than Charles Murray and MENSA.

The answer is because being wealthy, getting an education, "social skills" (afaik people with high IQs don't have better social skills than anyone else) and so on makes you better at taking IQ tests. That's certainly a simpler explanation than the idea that IQ tests measure something that's "objectively" significant.

 

[Kozmos]

Shulman & Bostrom 2014 note that


Studies in labor economics typically find that one IQ point corresponds to an increase in wages on the order of 1 per cent, other things equal, though higher estimates are obtained when effects of IQ on educational attainment are included (Zax and Rees, 2002; Neal and Johnson, 1996; Cawley et al., 1997; Behrman et al., 2004; Bowles et al., 2002; Grosse et al., 2002).2 The individual increase in earnings from a genetic intervention can be assessed in the same fashion as prenatal care and similar environmental interventions. One study of efforts to avert low birth weight estimated the value of a 1 per cent increase in earnings for a newborn in the US to be between $2,783 and $13,744, depending on discount rate and future wage growth (Brooks-Gunn et al., 2009)2

The given low/high range is based on 2006 data; inflation-adjusted to 2016 dollars (as appropriate due to being compared to 2015/2016 costs), that would be $3270 and $16151. There is much more that can be said on this topic, starting with various measurements of individuals from income to wealth to correlations with occupational prestige, looking at longitudinal & cross-sectional national wealth data, positive externalities & psychological differences (such as increasing cooperativeness, patience, free-market and moderate politics), verification of causality from longitudinal predictiveness, genetic overlap, within-family comparisons, & exogenous shocks positive (iodization & iron) or negative (lead), etc; an incomplete bibliography is provided as an appendix. As polygenic scores & genetically-informed designs are slowly adopted by the social sciences, we can expect more known correlations to be confirmed as causally downstream of genetic intelligence. These downstream effects likely include not just income and education, but behavioral measures as well Weiss 2000, notes in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data that a 3 point IQ increase predicts 28% less risk of highschool dropouts, 25% less risk of poverty or being jailed (men), 20% less risk of parentless children, 18% less risk of going on welfare, and 15% less risk of out-of-wedlock births. Anders Sandberg provides a descriptive table (expanded from Gottfredson 2003, itself adapted from Gottfredson 1997):

Estimating the value of an additional IQ point is difficult as there are many perspectives one could take: zero-sum, including only personal earnings or wealth and neglecting all the wealthy produced for society (eg through research), often based on correlating income with intelligence scores or education; positive-sum, attempting to include the positive externalities, perhaps through cross or longitudinal global comparisons, as intelligence predicts later wealth and the wealth of a country is closely linked to the average intelligence of its population which captures many (but not all) of the positive externalities; measures which include the greater longevity & happiness of more intelligent people, etc. Further, intelligence has intrinsic value of its own, and the genetic hits appear to be pleiotropic and improve other desirable traits (consistent with the mutation-selection balance evolutionary theory of persistent intelligence differences); the intelligence/longevity correlation has been found to be due to common genetics, and Krapohl et al 2015 examines the correlation of polygenic scores with 50 diverse traits, finding that the college/IQ polygenic scores correlate with 10+ of them in generally desirable directions3, similar to Hagenaars et al 20164 & Hill et al 2016 (graph), indicating both causation for those correlations & benefits beyond income. (For a more detailed discussion of embryo selection on multiple traits and whether genetic correlations increase or decrease selection gains, see later.) There are also pitfalls, like the fallacy of controlling for an intermediate variable, exemplified by studies which attempt to correlate intelligence with income after controlling for education, despite knowing that educational attainment is caused by intelligence and so their estimates are actually something irrelevant like the gain from greater intelligence for reasons other than through its effect on education. Estimates have come from a variety of sources, such as iodine and lead studies, using a variety of methodologies from cross-sectional surveys or administrative data up to natural experiments.

But feel free to put that down in the 'insignficant' category.

 

[danjuno]

The Tea Party clown who tried to primary him last year (Kelli Ward) is demanding that he resign immediately. Lovely.

 

[Naskra]

Of course he should resign immediately. He's 80 yrs old with a mentally debilitating illness. Other people want to play; his party is over.

 

[Truthy]

The answer is because being wealthy, getting an education, "social skills" (afaik people with high IQs don't have better social skills than anyone else) and so on makes you better at taking IQ tests. That's certainly a simpler explanation than the idea that IQ tests measure something that's "objectively" significant.

A solid majority of psychologists and intelligence researchers believe that IQ is a reasonable metric for measuring intelligence. Moreover, it is well established that intelligence is largely (perhaps mostly) genetic. This has been the consensus for quite some time. Here are a few sources in case you don't believe me (is it bad form to throw links at people? I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do besides encourage you to read up on this more ).

So what you say in this post is largely true. I'm sure education and various privileges can make people more intelligent or do better on aptitude tests. But your attitude that iq tests are meaningless and your apparent skepticism of the innateness and heritability of intelligence are wrong. See el mac's last post for a guide to validly critiquing the iq metric.

On a side note, I still think what's really in question is whether we do, in fact, have markets and institutions that fairly value smarter people, but challenging the validity of well established science isn't the way to discuss this.

 

[danjuno]

Of course he should resign immediately. He's 80 yrs old with a mentally debilitating illness. Other people want to play; his party is over.

The point being that this person obviously wants the seat for herself and doesn't give a crap about the steady functioning of the Senate.