Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Qualified praise of arrogance, couched in terms of dissidence, from John Derbyshire here.

Expand full comment
Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Ah no. Using intuition to justify intuition, superclicker or otherwise is circular reasoning. You can look at entrails to justify looking at entrails too, that doesn't make looking at entrails valid.

There is no such thing as “g”. That is a myth.

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crsh...

Look especially at footnote 2.

Trying to calculate g from n tests is invalid. You have n individual test weighting factors and the overall g to calculate n+1 variables but you only have n equations. The system is indeterminate and so can have infinitely many solutions. IQ researchers simply pick the solutions that give them the answers that they want.

I appreciate that many researchers in the IQ field are unable to appreciate this because in their heart of hearts they know that IQ is real, they can measure it, and some people have more of it than others, and that it highly correlates with race, and is lower in those that are the race that the IQ measurers are not. It is no more valid than the idea that the Earth is 6,000 year old and that Noah had all the animals in a boat for a year.

If you can't “show your work”, then you can't know if it is correct or not. You might believe it to be correct, but if you have any intellectual integrity you will acknowledge that beliefs (even your own) can be mistaken.

Expand full comment
19 more comments...

No posts