You still might be, unintentionally. This "praising kids for effort" is based on "mindset" research by Carol Dweck. Her Wikipedia page highlights a few criticisms of her work, in particular that the research isn't replicable and the interventions (in schools) don't produce results.

Outright telling them that "you like this" made them like the thing. Opposite made them dislike it. Including food and activities.

I think it's useful to substitute athletic talent for intellectual talent when thinking about this stuff. Does anybody discount the value of getting an athletically talented kid into a school with a good athletics program where they can be around peers and coaches who will enable them to be the best athlete they can be? Would anybody argue in favor of letting some kid with the athletic talent to try for the NBA flounder at whatever high school they happen to naturally feed into?

I think the answers to those questions are obvious. And yet we regularly have people arguing that somehow the same principles don't apply to intellectual talent. It's ridiculous. Let the mental prodigies be with their peers. It hurts no one and does them lots of good.

It's true that I was better at school than my peers, the pace of teaching was too slow for me and I got bored easily. But it was also true that in other aspects, especially social aspects, I wasn't more mature than my peers. And being smart and having different interests (say, computers, space or philosophy instead of football, etc.) doesn't exactly help socializing at school. I was always relatively unpopular (not marginalized, fortunately, as I did have my group of friends, but I did get my dose of demeaning from many others) and not very good in my advances with the opposite sex (when the age came to be interested in that).

Altogether, I think my school years could be called rather OK (taking into account that, as mentioned, people with "nerd" interests tend to not be too well-liked). But if I had skipped a year, and I had been in class with people one year older, with more social maturity, with everyone knowing that I skipped course, the girls seeing me as too young to even think about considering... I think it would have been hell.

I'm aware it's not exactly what you're talking about. You imply a specific school for gifted kids. Still, I think it wouldn't have been a good idea. When you finish school, or university, there's a point where you have to interact socially with "normal" people. Both at work and social life. I learned those interaction skills at school. I learned, for example, to fake interest when people talked about what I deemed to be trivial maters, like football, TV shows and the likes (or later, even to have some genuine interest and get off my high horse sometimes). I learned when I should switch off nerd mode (for example when trying to interact with the opposite sex, especially at the beginning) and when I could actually benefit from it. I think those skills were vital for my well-being. And I doubt I could have learned them equally well at a school where I weren't able to socialize with "normal" people.

You might find this study interesting. https://www.davidsongifted.org/search-database/entry/a10489

Second, non-athletic education and interests get lost in the process. And again, most kids wont end with that career as there are only few slots and many competing kids.

Which is one of the reasons I studied the board game Go for almost 4 years after I lost all hope of ever being good at it. At the time it was one of the few things I did despite being just good enough to teach complete beginners, but never any better.

The guy I was learning from was a really good teacher and was charitably amused by my lack of progress. I knew I was never going to find a gentler way to fail and be okay with it.

This is a surprisingly insightful blog post, which I wasn't expecting, considering the click-baity title. But I think I see now where my parents went wrong in raising me - the self-esteem movement, which the Gen Xers inherited, played too much a role in my rearing, methinks.

And why would anyone believe it should be? Do you really think a test with a relatively small set of questions, written by a biased group of individuals is going to be representative of human intelligence?

It baffles me that IQ is used as any kind of meaningful measurement beyond showing whether someone is mentally retarded or a prodigy.

First we should understand that IQs and life outcomes follow normal distributions and there's plenty of exceptions to the rule...but as a general trend, the relationship is indisputable. This has been studied for over a century. This suggests that IQ tests are fairly good at gaging mental faculties.

Height gives an advantage in many ways across human society. This is a physical attribute that we have little control over, yet it influences outcomes in jobs, social interactions, sports, dating, etc. Height also follows a normal distribution across populations. There is no reason to believe that mental faculties do not have similar physical mechanisms and that a normal distribution does not exist across populations.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120329142035.h...

Your IQ is correlated with your parents' IQ. But so is your social status, physical appearance and wealth.

IQ is not independently responsible, and it's covariant with other heritable traits.

'One study on nine groups of soldiers differing in job and reading ability found a correlation of .96 between the AFQT and reading achievement (Sticht, Caylor, Kern, & Fox, 1972)... Another study obtained reading scores for 17-year olds for those same ethnic groups and dates (Campbell et al., 2000) and found a correlation of .997 between reading scores and AFQT scores.' [1]

'Cognitive ability tests taken at age 11 correlate 0.81 with national school examinations taken at age 16.' [2]

Note that .96 and .81 are huge correlations. These results have been replicated across 100+ years of psychological research across cultural boundaries and across multiple disciplines.

Can you make up for lower IQ with higher work ethic? Yes, but like a shorter than average NBA player, you're going to be at a disadvantage. By no means does the existence of shorter than average NBA players suggest that you should expect shorter than average men to be just as likely to succeed as taller than average men.

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[1] https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED101297.pdf [2] https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intelligence...

While I don't dispute that IQ tests correlate with smarts, the argument that "The WW1 military was very motivated, therefore their decisions must have been rational" isn't a particularly good one IMHO - because there are a great many counter-examples.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fund...

“It has always seemed to be odd that we like to call the human brain the most complex known object in the Universe, yet many of us are still prepared to accept that we can measure brain function by doing a few so-called IQ tests,” Dr Highfield said.

I wonder, what is your opinion on Murray's and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve?

But not really. You pulled those numbers out of the air, and they aren't very descriptive.

Will someone with a 140 IQ fair better academically and economically than someone with 130 90% of the time?

140 vs 100, sure. But as the # of standard deviations converges, it's less meaningful. And there are still other covariant factors you are failing to consider, as mentioned before.

On average, people raised in poor environments who have higher IQ do better than people raised in poor environments with lower IQ. More likely to be more upwardly mobile, more likely to be more whatever.

And on average, people raised in good environments who have higher IQ do better than people raised in good environments who have lower IQ.

If you're a person of color, on average, you're going to do better if you have a higher IQ than if you have a lower IQ.

Same if you're a woman.

And 140 vs 130 is a bit unfair. You're talking about looking for meaningful differences between less than 2% of the population as compared to less than 0.1% of the population.

And just because there are diminishing returns with something like IQ, doesn't make it useless.

That wasn't the point. I would say the same for 100 and 110.

Some MENSA members in this thread seem very attached to their scores.

That's the other thing, you do have to look at the whole. Because there is likely overlap. But the trend of note is that IQ tracks through it.

If you sort people by earning potential, you'll find that as average income goes up, so does average IQ.

When you sort by health outcomes. As average healthiness goes up, so does average IQ.

Even the outcomes that are colloquially contrasted with intelligence actually correlate well. In other words, if you sorted people by EQ, you'll find that better average EQ means better average IQ.

IQ is the aspartame of psychology. So maligned that it's been probably studied more than other things. And just like aspartame is perfectly fine, IQ does what it says on the tin.

100 vs 140 will be a very strong indicator. 100 vs 110 will not; I would not trust 110 to yield a better outcome 80-90% of the time, as GP claimed.

Which is why the comparison of IQ scores at that coarseness is plain silly.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3248886/

"Childhood IQ and achieved education level were significantly and independently associated with upward mobility between the ages of 5 and 49-51 years. Only education was significantly associated (positively) with upward social mobility between 5 and 25 years, and only childhood IQ (again positively) with upward social mobility between 25 and 49-51 years. Childhood IQ was significantly negatively associated with downward social mobility. Adult height, childhood housing conditions, adverse events in childhood and sex were not significant determinants of upward or downward social mobility in this cohort."

I can tell you exactly how to refute those studies. Perform a controlled scientific study that disproves those results. Let me tell you, if you really believe in it, you could be a superstar academic and you sell a lot of books. Disproving such a large body of research would be a big achievement, especially one as unpopular as IQ.

So let's consider it psychometrically:

1. Does it measure something? Yes it does. This something is consistent across time as people's IQs do not vary dramatically. It is "stable". So whatever it measures is not spurious.

2. Ok so we measure an actual thing. Is the thing it measures distinct? Yes it is. It's been controlled for against every conceivable variable like education, socioeconomic background, and family health. Whatever it is measuring, it is definitely an independent thing, not a representation of something else.

3. Is the real independent thing we're measuring even important? Maybe it's just like fingerprints, real but essentially random and inconsequential. It turns out it correlates with all kinds of things. It acts as a predictor in all kinds of outcomes. It is the strongest predictor available in psychometry. If you could only administer one test to a subject, testing this thing is the most revealing test.

So, regardless of what IQ is, we know what it isn't. We know it isn't fake, unimportant, random, or a combination of other factors.

This is deeply unpopular and goes against many people's core beliefs about society and education, but the science is well-founded.

It can be refuted but it has to be refuted with science, not quotes, metaphors, and anecdotes.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fund...

The reviewers shared a 20-point critique of the paper prior to publication that was ignored by the publisher and researchers. In fact, their results clearly showed the existence of a general intelligence until they performed an unnecessary rotation which is mentioned in Appendix B point 7.

Whether or not IQ has human meaning, social value, or is the "end-all" are subjective arguments that are not within the scope of IQ study. Statistically we know that so far out of all the psychometric scores that have been invented it is the strongest one. Better measurements will most definitely be invented, but they haven't so far.

This is the point in the discussion where you should be rolling out some supporting evidence.