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A comment on Higher math proficiency test: An extended-problem-solving skill evaluation tool. Parent comment

Re:Higher math proficiency test: An extended-problem-solving... by est31 on Friday July 24, 2020 @11:25AM (#23940604)
The "not much more than g" era in research has ended. TLDR: cognitive ability is not just a single scalar value.

> For several decades, the question of whether measures of specific cognitive ability contributed anything meaningful to the prediction of performance on the job or performance in training once measures of general mental ability were taken into account appeared to be settled, and a consensus developed that there was little value in using specific ability measures in contexts where more general measures were available. It now appears that this consensus was premature, and that measures of specific abilities can make important contributions even if general measures are taken into account.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6526477/

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Re:Higher math proficiency test: An extended-problem-solving... by thaumasiotes on Friday July 24, 2020 @01:32PM (#23942199)
You'll note that the paper you cite observes that g consistently predicts performance well, and that assessing "more than g" consistently fails to improve the quality of predictions.

And then it goes on to conclude that "If the goal is to do a good job in prediction... it makes sense to use the most general measures available" and "If predictive efficiency is the goal, it will be hard to consistently beat g."

It's an opinion piece arguing that, because the concept of g provides no mechanistic insight into how people solve problems, studies that seek to explain how problems get solved (as opposed to whether problems will get solved) should try to explain that process in terms of factors at the second-highest level of abstraction, rather than the highest level.

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Re:Higher math proficiency test: An extended-problem-solving... by ogogmad on Friday July 24, 2020 @11:44AM (#23940842)
The "g" hypothesis itself was built upon an abuse of factor analysis. An abuse that had a high chance of producing something spurious.
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Re:Higher math proficiency test: An extended-problem-solving... by barry-cotter on Friday July 24, 2020 @07:36PM (#23945575)
For a much, much longer treatment of the argument ogomad gestures towards, read Cosma Shalizi[1] g, A Statistical Myth. Note that most of the criticism applies as well to temperature or pressure as to g. For a detailed response to Shalizi, see Human Varieties[2].

[1] http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html

[2] https://humanvarieties.org/2013/04/03/is-psychometric-g-a-my...

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