Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in early childhood

Re:Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in e... by wpietri on Saturday March 19, 2022 @04:26PM (#30737296)

If you're looking for a sports analogy, I think it's sort of like "change in total seconds it takes the players to run the 100-yard dash". Not directly tied to success, and in some sense a pretty arbitrary measure, but a number that's nonetheless concerning to see get worse.

I agree IQ is a pretty bad measure. And if you would like to go back and redo this study with a better one, I'm sure we (and this study's authors) would be grateful for the result. But since it's the measure we have, I'd say it's better than nothing, and this factoid is a good way to spark interest in the scale of the phenomenon.

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Re:Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in e... by mortehu on Saturday March 19, 2022 @04:36PM (#30737380)

I think they're talking about measures in the mathematical sense. It measures something real, but a difference of one IQ point doesn't mean the same thing across the entire scale, so you can't just sum IQ point differences.

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Re:Half of US population exposed to adverse lead levels in e... by throwaway1777 on Saturday March 19, 2022 @04:35PM (#30737370)

Actually an amazing sports analogy. IQ is basically a metric same as any other startup metric. You can’t expect it to tell the whole story but it’s one useful thing that can be measured.

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