So was astrology at one point.

Your argument applies equally strongly to every scientific finding.

I think this means that either science is poor or the argument is.

The argument is that the amount of attention paid by scholars does not make a field of inquiry more or less valid. It does apply to all science. Do you think science does not suffer from fads and community bias? When did we move past that? Even a very rigorous field like mathematics suffers from these problems. Cf. Mochizuki getting published in Nature or the controversies about the foundations of symplectic geometry.

What is your relation to science? Have you done any yourself?

Science is poor in the sense that it can be arbitrarily wrong and for arbitrarily long as humans can be. Yea, it's true. Does that trouble you?

If you are just trying to make the argument that science has made mistakes, there is no argument, I agree. So theoretically relativity and Newtonian physics could be untrue. But it's highly unlikely.

I would argue that a combination of the simplicity of study of a phenomenon, the amount it's been studied, and the consistency of the results of that study correlate with the likelihood of it being true.

IQ is very simple to study, it's been studied exhaustively, and results of that study have been consistent. Outside of physics and some very basic biology there are few if any scientific phenomenon as likely to be true as IQ. Can you name a single phenomenon that has been as well studied in the modern era with the same consistency of results that has been untrue?

Btw you still haven't made a single argument against IQ. You've only been arguing against the totality of science and my credentials.

It is my understanding that all of the evidence we have for IQ is statistical in nature: it's a robust correlate. I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that it is strong correlation with an innate, biological, causative metric that closely corresponds to a general, popular notion of "intelligence"--which is of course the use that pop psychology immediately attaches to it.

IMHO, the most biting criticism of IQ is that we (that is the psychology community at large) expect such a thing to exist, and so we treat anything that looks like it might fit that glove, no matter how poorly, as evidence of its existence. Our scientific methods aren't really capable of forcibly rebutting such a theory--see the existence of parapsychology, where psi is statistically known to exist (unless you're a skeptic). See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-o... for a discussion of this phenomenon.

I'm not sure what non statistical evidence of IQ would be? Would you mind elaborating on this.

> I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that it is strong correlation with an innate, biological, causative metric that closely corresponds to a general, popular notion of "intelligence"--which is of course the use that pop psychology immediately attaches to it.

I don't think you need to correlate IQ with anything physical for it to exist. But it's been correlated with genes, amount of white matter, size of different regions in the brain etc...

Maybe we have a different idea of what IQ means.

I would say the IQ "theory" could be broken down into a couple of distinct hypotheses.

1. Problem solving is a skill/ability - People who are good at solving some types of problems, will be better than average as solving other types of problems.

2. We can test this ability - We can write down problems and ask them to solve them. Because of 1 this tells us how good they will be at solving other problems.

3. This ability helps with some real world tasks - The real world has lots of problems that benefit from problem solving ability.

When we put together this means we can predict a portion of someone's ability at a real world task we care about (like physics or software development) by estimating their problem solving ability through a test. Based on the evidence we currently have I don't know how this couldn't be true.

I actually think it is a very insightful point, just not for proving either sides of this argument, for this purpose it is useless.

In the case of astrology, I find interesting how a few millennia of human culture, stories, and epics have been projected on celestial bodies and carried along our history through this shared medium.

I would say that (if you really want to find a strong point) astrology can be seen as trying to distill human knowledge from our cultural substrata.

Whether we should do it or not is another topic.

That is an article about eugenics. No one is arguing for eugenics. Eugenics was awful, but just because something was used as a tool for evil does not make it untrue.

If I light someone on fire with gasoline this makes it no less useful for fueling a car.

IQ is more like lead additive in gasoline. Unnecessary to the main purpose, created with very dubious motivations, yet for decades people took it for granted that you can’t do without.

The first real IQ test (the Binet iq test) was created to help identify special ed kids so they could receive special tutoring.

The question about IQ is does it measure anything? Is it predictive? And can that be useful? And the answer all three of those questions is obviously yes.

And if you actually read Binet, you’d know that he explicitly warned against its usage beyond what he designed it for.

FYI most avgas is still leaded, to this day. This is because many airplane engines are designed to operate at very high compression ratios, requiring high octane fuel. The lead additive boosts the octane rating of the fuel.

That's in the spirit of the analogy. Lead additive has a special niche purpose. Similarly IQ could be useful for measuring a specific narrow combination of skills and cultural background. (The first step towards rehabilitating "IQ" should be to rename it, though.)

Lead everywhere is as toxic as assuming IQ measures some kind of general intelligence.

Read it. Learn history. Learn how sociology works.

Nah don’t bother. It’s HN.

I would say that this was not the purpose of the link. A comment said "X is something studied scientifically" with X = IQ, and the reply was the same as proposing also X = eugenics. It did not look particularly constuctive.

I read it, and besides one paragraph (which presents a straw man) it has nothing to do with whether IQ is a psuedoscientific swindle and everything to do with whether eugenicists used IQ.

Sure you did buddy. Sure you did. The whole idea of the SAT was an expansive control of capital when the USA grew too large for word-of-mouth recommendation systems.

But you knew that too right? You also knew that it was basically designed to keep undesirables out of the capital class too, right? Guess who those people were.

Clearly this argument is spiraling away from the original premise of whether IQ pseudoscientific into what feels like a flamewar. There are a couple of HN guidelines that try to keep that from happening that I think would have helped prevent this.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article

Science is political. Get over yourself.