This post feels too much like an unsubstantiated rant to belong on this site. It doesn’t give much textual evidence and feels highly emotionally charged.
That said, I do agree that SA has gone downhill in the last 5 years. I canceled my subscription last year because the science was becoming too pop-sci-ish.
From the Scientific American article, emphasis mine:
> Wilson was hardly alone in his problematic beliefs. His predecessors—mathematician Karl Pearson, anthropologist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and others—also published works and spoke of theories fraught with racist ideas about distributions of health and illness in populations without any attention to the context in which these distributions occur.
I am ignorant about the work of Karl Pearson, but I can see how certain attitudes or expressions of Galton and Darwin could be understood as morally "racist" in our modern understanding and values—not that I believe that detracts from their legacy in any way whatsoever. However, I find the mention of Gregor Mendel truly disconcerting.
As far as I am aware, Mendel's work was absolutely restricted to his research on peas and a strictly mathematical interpretation of the results, and at no point did he extrapolate to anything regarding human inheritance in any way. What's more, I would be extremely surprised if the thought of so-called human "races" was even relevant to the thoughts of a Central European friar of the 19th century who never left the area. In a translated copy of Mendel's Versuche über Plflanzenhybriden (Experiments on Plant Hybridization) [0] I find not a single use of the word "human", "mankind" or "race", and the only use of the word "man" refers to the act of cultivation. Where on Earth is the "racist idea"?
If the author of this SA article happened to be a historian of science, or even a geneticist or an evolutionary biologist, I might still be surprised but give her the benefit of the doubt and think she might know something I don't. However, to have "an associate professor in the Family Health Care Nursing Department and a clinician-scientist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health" make such an astounding clichéd name drop is clear evidence that she is speaking out of ignorance and prejudiced "guilt-by-association" of the whole area of the Modern Synthesis of evolution and genetics.
I think the big problem with Mendel is that the odds of him obtaining the results he reported are vanishingly low and, therefore, it’s reasonable to assume he forged the results.
Thank you for your reference to that link. Having now seen it I do recall that controversy albeit not in that level of detail (such work isn't my profession).
I know from practical experience that most of the points Fischer et al have made are often valid or the case including those about producing 'tailored' results for a specific target audience. Often one comes across most of them in one's own work and it's usually when one is tying to figure out whether one's actually deluding oneself given, say, that a set of results looks too good. Alternatively, one may have a dataset that's full of garbage and not yet realized it.
Then there are always those cases where most of the data fits within the expected distribution except for some wayward measurement or two, which if included, would throw the stats and make the overall experiential results look less precise. What does one do, ditch out the odd/atypical results or rerun the whole experiment again in the hope that those large wayward deviations don't reappear? Anyone who has done experiments is overly familiar with the problems of processing experiential data—as they say, they're just part of the territory.
Clearly, I've no hands-on expertise in Mendel's work so I can only make general comment which is that as Mendel is no longer around to defend himself or his work, as such we must be particularly careful about accusing him of doing something of which he may not have done. From that Wiki, despite the controversy, it seems that the passage of time has meant that Mendel's work seems to have been examined with reasonable rigor and care given that it's been re-examined and reanalyzed on multiple occasions by different personnel. In the absence of better and more accurate data there's little more we could reasonably do.
I suppose I'm overly sensitive to accusations of fraud because of an incident that happened eons ago back in my student days. This was when a chemistry tutor blatantly accused me of cheating in my write-up of an experiment and he did so in the presence of other students. What he objected to was that my experimental results (dataset) of a titration were too good to be true and that I'd worked back and substituted data from the theoretical/ideal model.
This wasn't the case at all as I had recorded the titration's dataset exactly as I'd measured it. Needless to say, I was furious at his unfounded accusation and I demanded that he say back over lunchtime and watch me whilst I reran the experiment, this he did. The results I obtained on the rerun were just marginally better than my first attempt.
I lay no claim to being an experiential genius—absolutely far from it. I'll just say this: some people are intrinsically much better at experimental work than are others and those who doubt their results are perhaps basing their doubt on their own less-than-optimal performance. That said, one's always right to doubt any claim or sets of results until they're independently verified.
I actually read the Scientific American article because I have previously read Scott Aaronson's blog and he doesn't looks to me like someone who would write anything before thinking about it.
The SA article is a complete piece of crap. I just hope this doesn't goes the same way it did when RMS asked to give Marvin Minsky the benefit of doubt.
Whether everyone agrees with you to the same degree is comparatively unimportant. However, there are several issues that arise from the SciAm article that are of key importance, these are:
1. From what the author, Monica R. McLemore, says in the article it's very clear that she has a political agenda and that by stating it in a forum such as SciAm, then she is acting in a very divisive manner.
2. McLemore is being extremely unfair by deliberately targeting a person's character. 'Shooting the messenger' for espousing or publishing information that has arisen from a person's research has to be about as low as an attack on a person's character can get. Moreover there's intellectual dishonesty in the attack: by assigning a person's character to a person's research work presupposes that one's moral philosophy always goes hand-in-hand with data that's arisen from one's research. This implies that a person's research cannot be separated from one's moral views, which, of course, is nonsense. It's about as stupid as saying that a person has to be a Republican to actually write about Republican philosophy when in fact anyone can do so.
3. An attack on a person's character by equating their moral position with the work that they do without definitive proof is woolly thinking, if this were in fact true then every defense lawyer would actually have to believe his or her client's statement in respect of their innocence.
4. The most disconcerting aspect of this story is the fact that the author is a person who holds a high and responsible position in society. To quote the SciAm article:
"Monica R. McLemore is an associate professor in the Family Health Care Nursing Department and a clinician-scientist at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco."
As such, the holder of any such a position has a duty of care to ensure that the views that he or she espouses are not only both fair and equitable in respect of all citizens but also they need to ensure that what's said adds to the cohesiveness of society and not the division thereof.
The issue with RMS is not that he wanted Minsky to be given the benefit of doubt but numerous other issues and instances where his own behaviour was reprehensible. As a figurehead of an important movement he should think of what effect his personal reputation has on the overall movement.
Those issues reported about RMS turned out to be falsehoods, miss-quotes and exaggerations (apparently, the bed he kept in his office was for pulling all-nighters at work, not for raping people.). They never survived the fact check, and Stallman is back at the FSF.
The accusation was that the bed made people uncomfortable, which is reasonable reaction when coupled with various other kinds of things he did to make people uncomfortable. As far as I know, the original allegation was not that he was raping anyone, though given the overall idiocy of mankind I'm not surprised it mutated this way.
And not everyone was aware that he was living in that office, apparently.
Personally, I think cleaning up one's act in ways that in no way compromise one's (public) stances would have been a low cost for keeping the most cushy academic job I ever heard of.
"And not everyone was aware that he was living in that office, apparently."
I never met him and yet I knew. He is notorious for doing that.
I lived in my office for a few months, too, and the fact that you live there is pretty hard to hide from visitors. Starting with various small objects that do not fit into a normal office, ending with the fact that even with reasonable levels of hygiene the room tends to acquire a certain "human" smell, especially in the winter months when you can't just have the window open for most of the time.
RMS is a worldwide known weirdo. I can understand that his behavior in general might make people uncomfortable, but trying to label him as a rapist was way off.
> I never met him and yet I knew. He is notorious for doing that.
Met him once and that wouldn’t surprise me at all. He made a huge number of mistakes over his career and those eventually came back to haunt him. I’m not judging whether it’s fair or not, just acknowledging such things happen when you are a public figure.
"Came back to haunt him" is probably a good summary.
It's also much easier to believe bad things about someone if one has a foundation of lesser issues to build upon, and undeniably a lot of people had negative stories to say (and I'm not even going about the infamous foot episode)
The privileged (finally I can use that word!) set of people having access to Stallman's office in MIT does not represent the free software movement in any way. The people who complained have most likely not contributed anything to free software.
Stallman's five stupid statements haven't impeded the free software movement in any way for decades. What actually harms the movement is corporate involvement by parasites and hypocrites, who are using social justice as a wedge to either take credit for projects they didn't write or to destroy the movement.
The complaints involving the office were mostly related to his job at MIT, which I referred to as the most cushy academic job I ever heard of for a good reason.
It was not really connected to his position in FSF (which I consider problematic on completely different, and irrelevant to this discussion, reasons), but for foundations PR is an important tool.
Yeah, people that have a problem with that make me more uncomfortable than a bed. I know RMS is a character, but if we have to exclude anyone, it has to be the person that made the complaint. I don't advocate for that, but it would be just as reasonable.
It astounds me that such arbitrary expectations are even considered. Should we invade Africa because some people don't cover up to our demands of decency?
I don't think doing something for others is a justification to behave badly, but this is out of line.
"...though given the overall idiocy of mankind I'm not surprised it mutated this way."
It seems to me that one of the most negative outcomes of modern communications is the leveling of the ability to be heard. These days, a person who would have normally earned respect through work and ability doesn't necessarily get heard or listened to, or commands more respect than any of the many empty vessels that frequent the internet and contribute to its cacophony of noise, and it's been especially so since the advent of social media.
It's this inability of many to differentiate between quality and junk that's largely at the heart of the Internet's problems. From my observation, it seems that rational logical thought has fallen to an all-time low and that misinformation, deliberate or otherwise, has reached such proportions in the online world that we're now seeing actual disruption to society in ways that we once would have thought impossible.
I'm of the opinion that one of the most important and central issues of recent times is the loss of factual accuracy along with the widespread lack of concern among many over integrity of information and that the consequential increase in entropy and disorder it's brought has been such that it has disrupted the normal discourse between humans to the extent that much of it has now become dysfunctional. We're now witnessing its effects: society has become so increasingly polarized over so many issues that we're starting to see the beginnings of societal breakdown and that this ought to be of great concern and thus a wakeup call.
What's at stake is nothing less than the cohesiveness of our society and that we humans need to tackle these undermining negative forces much more seriously than we have done previously by devoting considerably more time and effort into addressing them. Moreover, that will necessitate us doing so in smart and nuanced ways with degrees of sophistication that we've never previously applied to the problem.
The core issue is that modern communications and the internet have given many millions a voice that they would otherwise never have had - and that's a good thing, but unlike the media of yesteryear, that voice is largely unmoderated. Whilst the historical situation was far from perfect, at least in the past editors, et al, usually filtered out much of the dross.
Now that we've lost that first-line ability to filter we're left with the serious and difficult problem of having to filter out the 'idiocy' factor without disrupting or stopping the citizenry at large from having its say. Citizens still need to be able to put forward their ideas and points of view even if many are inaccurate or wacky. Any system that fails to let populace do so will be derided and marked with 'elitist' and 'censorship' flags, and thus it's ultimately doomed to failure.
Two key issues arise and need to be addressed:
1. We somwhow need to hold people responsible for statements they make online in that they need to be able to justify what they have said. Furthermore, the degree of accountability to which they should be subject should be commensurate with the scale and importance of their statements.
For example, someone who has made statements that defy all logic and sense or that are inconsistent with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and if widely believed could cause social disruption, would have to justify his/her position with solid evidence to the effect, and if unable to do so then he/she should be subject to sanctions. In essence, we need to foster a culture of accuracy and truthfulness and we need ways of enforcing them. For instance, someone who denies the holocaust would need overwhelmingly evidence to the effect and when [obviously] it wasn't forthcoming then he/she would be sanctioned accordingly.
That said, implementing any such scheme would be far from being simple and straightforward. For a myriad of reasons, many people genuinely hold whacky way-out ideas that are easily proven wrong by any reasonable analysis and simply sanctioning them from holding those beliefs isn't necessarily the best solution. Moreover, how we would go about differentiating between, say, a political activist who doesn't believe what he's saying but says it for political motives poses very significant problems.Thus, I'm under no illusion that by far the most difficult part of implementing any of these ideas will be in dealing with the fine minutiae.
2. You have a very relevant point about the 'idiocy of mankind'. Whilst I'd suggest some would use a milder description, we've very real problems whenever people launch wayward, inaccurate and or dangerous memes in that counteracting or neutralizing them once they're on the loose and in the wild usually proves nigh on impossible - witness the many problems experienced counteracting wacky ideas re vaccines/COVID, faked moon landings, etc., etc.
I'm not a behavioral scientist but it's clear to me that there's a very undesirable aspect of human nature which is that it's very easy for rumors and false ideas to take hold and spread like wildfire even when there's little or no justification or foundation for them, and when they do then it's essentially impossible to extinguish them. We see similar behavior in crowds going wild and with the decisions of lynch mobs who collectively, like lemmings, make terrible decisions that, upon reflection, very few individuals would ever make in isolation.
It seems that when certain ideas get on the loose that the crowd - that is the herd's collective IQ drops to well below that of individual cognition and it begins to act irrationality. Perhaps such behavior once conveyed an evolutionary advantage in say the way wildebeest are spooked and flee on mass upon seeing a lion. Clearly, nowadays such behavior in humans is very counterproductive. Given that we're not going to change human behavior anytime soon then this has to be factored into any solution. No doubt, how we'd go about 'engineering' such a solution to this human behavioral problem would be open to much debate and argument. For starters, the very notion that behavioral change is necessary would immediately raise the ire of many.
Quo vadis! The current laissez faire situation where fake news, false and dangerous ideas are spreading like wildfire across the internet is now so out of control that it has so polarized and endangered society that we've no longer the luxury of sitting back doing nothing and just accepting the status quo. Like it or not, unfortunate events and circumstances have forced us to act.
By now, you're probably thinking that my suggestions of trying to achieve behavioral change are so unrealistic that I must be living in cloud cuckoo land. Perhaps so, but let me finish. Granted, this would be no easy task but given that the most common medium for most people is social media then this is the place where we should begin, and we should attempt to use a carrot-and-stick approach to achieve it.
It's obvious that those running social media would never introduce the many extensive changes necessary to effectively implement such policies as there's little doubt that they would have a negative impact on the financial bottom line. This means that if we're ever to achieve any worthwhile change then governments would have to intervene and mandate them. Getting this to happen is also likely to be a very major challenge.
Finally, if you think my views are authoritarian, radically paternalistic, elitist or even Orwellian then I tend to agree, but I've certainly no intrinsic desire to hold such views. In essence, they've been forced on me though circumstance. The fact is I'm most uneasy about having arrived at such views as my natural worldview tends to fall into the libertarian camp albeit the libertarian left (which is very different to the libertarian right). Thus it's with reluctance I've adopted such radical views but as I've said they are born out of the need to act. And I believe that it's only when we actually achieve a cultural consensus - one wherein people feel embarrassed and ashamed after they've been caught and exposed spreading misinformation - that we'll then have regained any semblance order.
These are my first-pass ideas and I claim no monopoly on them. I only wish that many more of those who are worried would - to use that now antiquated phrase - commit pen to paper and contribute towards developing a solution. However, let's not fool ourselves in that none of these solutions will come easy, and it's likely they will be a longtime coming.
The issue was that RMS did not conform to some ideology and so he was bullied. The fact that he is wrong or right about his opinions it's not even relevant. We have normalized ad hominem attacks, amplified through social networks. Reputation was everything in medieval science and we are moving in that direction.
Ad hominem would be using his misbehavior to attack, say, the FSF. Noting the fact he regularly made his female coworkers (and not only coworkers) uncomfortable is not an ad hominem - it's a direct criticism of his attitudes.
Scott Aaronson is featured quite frequently on Hackernews. I feel like many will trust him even if he speaks in an emotionally charged way. But that being said, the article contains one concrete example in the foreword by Scott and another Post by someone who was fired from SA.
The decline of Scientific American into pop science started much earlier than that. I'd peg it around 2000, when they changed the cover design and stopped running classic columns like "Mathematical Games" and "Amateur Scientist". The pop-science articles started ramping up around the same time.
Same thing with Popular Science and Popular Mechanics, science reporting was the first to go in the death of journalism. They were terrible 15 years ago, maybe people didn't notice until recently when they started bizarrely endorsing politicians like Biden and running CRT articles.
While I agree that the shared text is more on the "angry rant" side of things, the offending article does a more than sufficient job at discrediting itself without any external help.
With wonderfully absurd sentences like "the notion that differences among humans could be explained by genetics, inheritance *and other biological mechanisms* [emphasis added]", this article should not need any explaining as to why it should never have been published.
Hmm..I didn't find it eloquent or better in any way than Scott's post. The only difference is quotations of the original article followed by "No, that's wrong" or "Are you serious!?".
I initially mis(?)read this post with SA = Scott Aaronson—I was mildly surprised at the implication that SA had a subscription service now, but it didn't seem too outlandish.
It's emotionally charged because the author is Ashutosh Jogalekar, who in the mid 2010's got himself fired from Scientific American as a blogger by praising the theories of a scientific-racism book:
> Jogalekar praised the book, saying it confirms the need to “recognize a strong genetic component to [social and cognitive] differences” among racial groups.
It should be noted that Jogalekar is a chemist.
What did the people whose work Wade cited for his book say?
> "Wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in I.Q. test results, political institutions and economic development. We reject Wade's implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork. They do not. We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade's conjectures."
Instead of keeping his head down, Ashutosh followed up shortly thereafter with a blog falling over himself to find reasons to excuse or explain Feynman's rampant history of womanizing and general asshole-ism:
...and then we have Jogalekar defending EO Wilson, whose book Sociology, proposed (in 1975) that human behavior was determined by genetics, was widely criticized as sympathetic to eugenics. Sound familiar?
Ask yourself this: why does Jogalekar keep defending authors of works that tread around scientific racism and eugenics?
It absolutely is wrong and untrue, though, in addition to being racist. There being significant IQ differences between ethnicities/"races" that are caused by genetics is a long debunked theory; just look at the scientific discourse around something like "The Bell Curve".
It's very politicized, that makes it hard to judge who is doing real science and who is advancing a political agenda.
One thing I wonder is what makes intelligence "special" so that there are no differences, as compared to other physical traits where you do see differences between ethnicities?
> It's very politicized, that makes it hard to judge who is doing real science and who is advancing a political agenda.
The science is clear on this question, and has been for decades; there never has been any scientifically well-supported theory showing genetic causes for observable differences of IQ between ethnicities.
> One thing I wonder is what makes intelligence "special" so that there are no differences, as compared to other physical traits where you do see differences between ethnicities?
The position isn't even that there are no differences in IQ between populations; the well-supported scientific consensus is
a) IQ differences between individuals of a population are larger than between populations in the first place, and
b) IQ differences between populations are largely not caused by genetics.
Note that neither of these statements contradict the heritability of IQ, which a statistical effect.
> a) IQ differences between individuals of a population are larger than between populations in the first place, and
What does this mean? I assume I am interpreting it wrong, because it just seems like nonsense.
The fact that IQ differences between individuals in a population is larger than the alleged IQ differences between populations seems totally obvious. Any given population probably contains some disabled people and also some geniuses, for, let's say, a 50-point spread. But it would be a meaningful population-level difference if the average Finn was 100 but the average Swede was 110. Or are there people out there seriously arguing that there are peoples out there totally consisting of super geniuses or extremely disabled people?
If you mean that there’s no evidence of a difference in iq distribution in different populations, I think it’s clearer just to say that.
One particular (I think well founded) worry about the hereditarian position is that if genetic differences between ethnicities are admitted, people start thinking about stuff like, say, an active "blackness" that drags people down, and that they'd start insisting that every black person has to be dumb or something like that. That people would stop really meeting people as individuals (woke blank slatism, of course, has that exact effect already, which is partly why it sucks).
It's somewhat hard to get people to dispassionatedly understand that all the hereditarian position being true would mean that what differed between populations would be the counts of people with a certain levels of ability, and that's it. Dunk a smart black man, a smart white man, a smart East Asian and a smart Ashkenazi in green paint and you have four smart green men unburdened with any mystical force acting on their mental faculties.
Another possibility would be fears of things like "eh, they're dumb anyway" to justify giving up on people with a certain skin color because they won't achieve highly anyway, which would be heinous.
"Well-supported scientific consensus" and "scientifically well-supported theory" are doing a lot of work when the loudest enforcers of the "consensus" consistently operate in dishonesty for strategic reasons, see e.g. the 2019 Cofnas paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09515089.2019.16...
> there never has been any scientifically well-supported theory showing genetic causes for observable differences of IQ between ethnicities
I feel like this is the key to your argument, but I'm having a hard time understanding what you're trying to say. Theories don't show causes, they attempt to fit data into a mental model that can then be falsified or fail to be falsified.
Are you saying we should reject data because a satisfying theory hasn't been found yet? I don't agree with that principle. In my view, that seems analogous to rejecting the idea of gravity because we don't have a good theory of how it works, or that the data leading to the string theory hypothesis should be discarded because we can't test and falsify string theory.
And yet a recent study showed at least some is heritable.
And this whole “between” populations nonsense doesn’t mean different populations have the same mean.
- differences between individuals of a population are larger than between populations in the first place
- differences between populations are largely not caused by *sexism*
It makes no sense to posit that IQ differences between population have a different cause than IQ differences between individuals. Adoption raises the IQ by at most 5 points ! What environmental difference could have a much more dramatic effect than that (between population IQ difference are up to 15 pts) ?
> One thing I wonder is what makes intelligence "special" so that there are no differences, as compared to other physical traits where you do see differences between ethnicities?
IQ theory has the following problems:
1. Intelligence is not the same as height, as one of these is low-dimensional and mechanical, and the other is high-dimensional and very complex.
2. There are problems defining what intelligence is.
3. The "intelligence" as measured by IQ is problematic because it's engineered to follow a normal distribution. This then contradicts claims by IQ-ists that IQ predicts things which are very much non-normally distributed.
4. Many of the apparent successes of IQ theory can be explained by saying that low IQ relative to a surrounding population is indicative of a learning disability. This doesn't make higher-than-average IQ useful though.
5. People who score highly in IQ tests are interested in puzzles and seeing patterns in things. This is not necessarily a useful skill in real life, and may even be detrimental sometimes.
6. IQ-ists claim to be dispassionately following what the science says, but are generally incompetent at the fundamentals of science. For instance, they use measures of statistical association like Pearson Correlation Coefficient, which have been abandoned in all the hard sciences. These old-fashioned methods of statistical association are very brittle, and are easy to misuse. They appear to be ignorant of more modern and robust statistics. When their data has been checked using more modern methodology, their conclusions don't hold up.
7. IQ-ists claim to be dispassionately following what the science says, but their mistakes have serious consequences for people's lives. It can be used to justify racism and eugenics.
> People who score highly in IQ tests are interested in puzzles and seeing patterns in things. This is not necessarily a useful skill in real life, and may even be detrimental sometimes.
Have you been outside in the last thirty years? "Real life" has been completely designed by people who are good at puzzles and patterns! Grocery store checkout machines, venture capital, social media, automobiles, the internet--all of these are puzzles and patterns. The better you are at puzzles and patterns, the better you'll be at "real life".
There is a difference between discussing the weaknesses of IQ theory and completely ignoring reality in favor of making sure you can't be accused of "racism or eugenics". You sound like someone in an authoritarian religious state making fervent declarations of whatever the parish is telling people to say. I agree that IQ does not exist, it is an abstract metric invented a while ago--but on the whole, people who score highly on IQ tests are going to have a much, much easier time succeeding in the modern puzzle-and-pattern reality.
I think you have their point a bit backwards: they're not saying the causes of height are simple, but rather that the output is simple to measure. If you measure 5 groups and one is 20% taller than the rest, that's pretty clear evidence of something. You get one simple number, one dimension.
Intelligence is much squishier because IQ is a suspect measure at best. If a group scores 20% higher on some intelligence test, is that because of genetics? Cultural focus on learning the specific skills measured by this test? A biased test? Completely different methods of testing being falsely compared? There's no real meterstick for intelligence like there (literally) is for height, so trying to extract a number you can throw into a statistical analysis is a lot more fraught, if it's possible at all.
Intelligence is absolutely trivial to measure. You just make a huge pile of tests of mental ability, the more the merrier. It won't be very sophisticated, but you have an intelligence test. Intelligence is so easy to measure in a rough way that people have accidentally built intelligence tests when they were trying not to.
A lot of the other critiques are at least somewhat suspect: Modern intelligence tests explicitly try to use tasks that you won't train yourself that much in in daily life and that try to eg. stress working memory capacity directly without testing for other skills. There's also evidence that training for some kind of skill like strategies for n-back numbers doesn't improve performance on similar tasks using letters, for example.
Yes, it is not as good of a measure as a tape measure is, everyone knows that. But saying it's suspect and not useful is kind of like saying computer benchmarking is worthless and won't tell a crap machine from a powerful one.
> they're not saying the causes of height are simple, but rather that the output is simple to measure.
By talking about the dimensionality, they are saying both.
I agree that measuring height is easier, but I disagree that it’s causally simpler, and that is frankly what matters.
Is someone taller because of genetics or nutrition? Is there a nutrition difference because of culture, or because of racism, or because of wealth or because of IQ? Etc. Etc.
> … if it's possible at all.
It sounds like you are someone who doesn’t believe intelligence can be measured.
That's fair. I think I actually remember reading somewhere that worldwide height is catching up with European height, and what was posited to be genetic differences was actually due to nutrition. Don't have a source at hand, though.
> It sounds like you are someone who doesn’t believe intelligence can be measured.
I'm certainly skeptical about the utility of IQ or any other test as a general measure of "intelligence", when what intelligence even means is an active matter of debate.
> I'm certainly skeptical about the utility of IQ or any other test as a general measure of "intelligence", when what intelligence even means is an active matter of debate.
That's partly because it's mythologized to hell and back, and people often turn to the lack of a definition given concisely in words as proof that we don't really know it.
But, g exists, we know its nature rather well, and being able to do hang on to that measure has enabled considerable detective work as to the physical underpinnings of it.
Most simply, I think treating it as a brain performance benchmark, just like you would for a computer, doesn't go very far wrong. It's variation in the general monkey brain blueprint we're all built from, and has physical correlates that imply it as a rather general measure of the brain's performance (it's eg. linked to faster average reaction times, which would make no sense for a measure of book-learning aptitude). So, more IQ = monkey with more CPU cycles and RAM, done. Zero mythology, zero romanticism, simple.
As one analogy, you could liken it to gravity: For the longest time we knew things fell down, we could measure that speed, etc. but we didn't know why things fell down. Then we made some theories, and then new ones, and then new ones. But we don't actually know the cause and the mechanism completely. We know mechanisms of how it acts and measures of how strongly, but stuff like a quantum mechanical theory of gravity is anyone's guess at this point.
All along that journey of discovery, we still knew a fundamental fact: Somehow things fell down. That observation is the anchor. In intelligence research, that observation is g.
1 & 2 are very intertwined I think. Height just happens to be easily measured.
3. You mean because IQ is assumed to be normally distributed in a population? What are you thinking of when you say "This then contradicts claims by IQ-ists that IQ predicts things which are very much non-normally distributed."? I don't think IQ distributed normally means that you can't have non-normally distributed consequences in other areas?
Not sure which events specifically that you're referring to, but usually when somebody refers abstractly to "events in the last century", they mean the nazis. It's worth noting that the nazis themselves rejected IQ testing and theories as justifying "Jewish supremacy".
Actually I rewrote that comment to not refer to any specific events because I figured whichever one I chose someone would find a way to use it to invalidate the entire concern.
Anyway! The world isn't neatly divided into "pure Truth, delivered to us by Science" and "other things, which can be used to do harm."
This doesn't make potentially dangerous research subjects verboten or banned! But the people doing that research should have a solid understanding of who has an interest in their work, why, and what it may be used for. Having that understanding isn't "advancing a political agenda" I don't think.
> Having that understanding isn't "advancing a political agenda" I don't think.
You're reading a bit too much between the lines here. I didn't mean any specific side, I assume both sides engage in this so it's meant in a general sense.
Do you actually thing that the anti-IQ crowd is mad that the nazis (notoriously anti-IQ) lost WWII and that is the reason they are so touchy about this ?
As a Jew, I will tell you that the Nazis didn’t care about our IQ. Many Jews proudly used their brains to help Germany in WWI (Fritz Haber comes to mind) and yet arguably Germany lost because of the brain drain which led directly to our atomic bomb, among other things, that might have helped them.
They didn’t care about whether we could run a mile or win at athletics. It was ancient ethnic hatred only many centuries earlier based on religion.
Saying that different populations have different IQs could surely be a post how justification for that kind of hatred, but it could also be justification for amelioration of the non-genetic effects through social programs.
Right, and this is exactly my concern. Not that this sort of research will uncover new information that will make people form new prejudices. But that they will use this research to justify acting on the prejudices they already have.
I didn't mention nazis and they are just one example. If you pare away the context then sure, this could go either way, it could be used to reduce these divisions. But the history of scientific racism clearly shows another pattern.
That said, I do agree that SA has gone downhill in the last 5 years. I canceled my subscription last year because the science was becoming too pop-sci-ish.
Here’s the offending article the author was referring to: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-l...