Im Ernst, ich wäre sehr vorsichtig mit solchen Sachen. Suchen Sie auf jeden Fall einen sachkundigen Arzt (nicht nur Ihren örtlichen Hausarzt), vielleicht sogar einen Endokrinologen, bevor Sie etwas einnehmen. Eine Testosteron-Supplementierung kann dazu führen, dass Ihr Körper aufhört, Testosteron zu produzieren, was bedeutet, dass Sie lebenslang darauf bleiben müssen.
Dieser Typ ist sehr gut zum Thema Nahrungsergänzung anzuhören. Lassen Sie sich nicht von dem albernen Namen abschrecken, er ist der wahre Deal: http://www.st4all.net
- Men are attracted to youth, because that maximizes the number of possible kids before menopause, and to thin waists as proof she's not already pregnant.
I'm more mystified by the beauty of sunsets, flowers, open fields, wildlife, art, music...
We can spot predators in open fields. Maybe sunsets are similarly reassuring--we can see to the horizon. After we descended from the trees we needed savannas where we could see our predators and prey from a distance and exploit our ability to run. Art and music are variations of patterns and symmetry. Perhaps for reasons touched on by magic9 above, and maybe there's something deeper too--our bodies are symmetrical, to one degree or another, so are our brains. Perceiving patterns has high survival value, e.g., to keep track of when animals feed and approach the waterhole, to know when to hide and when to hunt, and to judge the likelihood of bad/good weather, and so on. Hence we create and play with patterns in art and music?
I would say why not try it. It seems to work for some people, not others. I tried it for aches after skiiing, and it had no effect whatever even after I doubled, tripled and quadrupled the dose.
Today on Twitter he claims that post is "still unchallenged" and that "In fact IQ as a metric was invented to sift out those who believe in it and classify them as incompetent; hence limit them to jobs as psychology professors."
Saying IQ is “pseudoscientific” is like saying “paper job applications are pseudoscientific”.
Are they perfect for their intended use? No.
Does that matter if they more or less work? No. Ditto say standardized tests.
Yes it might be better for each kid to have a 4 weeks multiphasic intellectual inventory instead an IQ test. But when you don’t have time/resources for that.
The way I understand things (very much not an expert):
IQ scores positively correlate with performance in both school and work at every level, from janitor to physicist. People with very high IQs tend to do very well in all kinds of intellectually demanding things.
IQ is a score which is correlated with intelligence--it's not intelligence itself. (To make an obvious point, if I let you copy down the answer key and then gave you an IQ test, this wouldn't make you any smarter.) So there are people who have high IQ scores on a test but aren't as smart as you'd expect from the score, and people who have low IQ scores on a test but are smarter than you'd expect from the score. This is just like any other test. There are clearly brilliant people whose IQ score wasn't that impressive, and their mental accomplishments are evidence of how smart they are and demonstrate that the IQ test wasn't so accurate in their case. There are also people who get high IQ scores and never do much impressive with their brains--that can happen for many reasons, but one is that they're really not as brilliant as their IQ score would normally suggest.
Also, IQ scores are normed against a sample population. If you give 1000 people tests and then base your scores on their performance, the scores at the high end won't be as meaningful--you probably can't use a normal IQ test to distinguish a Teller from a von Neumann, as both will be at the top of the range of scores on your test. A score that indicates that you're +5 sigmas from the mean is not very meaningful if it's based on the scores of 1000 test subjects.
>So there are people who have high IQ scores on a test but aren't as smart as you'd expect from the score, and people who have low IQ scores on a test but are smarter than you'd expect from the score. This is just like any other test. There are clearly brilliant people whose IQ score wasn't that impressive, and their mental accomplishments are evidence of how smart they are and demonstrate that the IQ test wasn't so accurate in their case.
This is kind of a pointless thing to say without data. Okay, "some people" are like this....how many? If we don't know what proportion of the population this applies to, then this point is not useful.
>so, IQ scores are normed against a sample population. If you give 1000 people tests and then base your scores on their performance, the scores at the high end won't be as meaningful--you probably can't use a normal IQ test to distinguish a Teller from a von Neumann, as both will be at the top of the range of scores on your test. A score that indicates that you're +5 sigmas from the mean is not very meaningful if it's based on the scores of 1000 test subjects.
Okay, and why does this matter? The problem that people, especially on the political left, have with IQ is most emphatically *not* that it is not useful for distinguishing geniuses from hyper-geniuses. The problem is precisely that it measures the intelligence and predicts the life outcomes of a majority of the population, and given the heritability of intelligence, this is potentially devasting for left-wing narratives around inequality and "privilege".
IIRC different kinds of IQ tests have a bit over 90% correlation with each other, which gives a rough measure of how well each correlates with the 'true intelligence' that they're trying to measure.
In short, it's not a perfect test of intelligence simply because perfect tests are impossible to devise - suppose you test 100 meter sprint speed by asking people to sprint 100 meters; you're literally testing the thing you want to measure, but some people will still have unusually bad days and get unrepresentative scores
I'm not trying to argue with NNT's flat-earth-level critique of IQ scores, nor with people whose whole knowledge of IQ is that it's somehow got intellectual cooties and must be avoided. What would be the point?
But the two points I made are places a lot of people who try to intelligently engage with IQ scores and related statistics get mixed up. They start thinking about IQ as what we care about, rather than as an imperfect measure of what we care about, and they don't realize that IQ scores at the high and low end of the range are probably less accurate representations of where the people who got them really fall in the distribution.
It is complete and unadulterated nonsense. It's embarassingly bad.
And this level of claim is warranted on my part given the fact that Taleb does not argue in good faith. He smears his opponents and blocks and curses out people on twitter who disagree with him. He invites much worse than what I've said by saying his post is "still unchallenged". He will say this no matter what happens, no matter what people say, no matter how much research contradicts his views. He's an arrogant ideologue interested only in pushing a narrative which he feels makes him look enlightened and virtuous (and sells more of his books).
Taleb is a dishonest debater. I remember reading a few good point-by-point refutations shortly after he published this rant about IQ being a swindle. It's just, if you disagree with him, he blocks you on Twitter and pretends that you do not exist. This is how he remains "unchallenged" in the eyes of his fans. Taleb is a smart guy and has a few good insights, but ultimately, he is in a book-selling business, not truth-finding business. It is better for book sales when his crackpot theories remain "unchallenged" no matter how wrong they are.
OK, I guess this sound too ad hominem. Sorry, I am not an expert and I do not want to spend my entire day fact-checking all citations and verifying all complex claims. I am only going to spend like 15 minutes writing this comment, please keep this limitation in mind if you are dissatisfied with the result. But other people have already written much better responses.
So, Taleb starts with repeating the popular myths: (1) IQ is just an ability to do IQ tests, or maybe tests in general, but definitely unrelated to anything that matters in actual life; (2) yes, low IQ is a thing, but high IQ is definitely not, a person with IQ 80 might be less smart than a person with IQ 100, but a person with IQ 180 is indistinguishable from a person with IQ 100... except for the ability to do IQ tests much better, I suppose. Also, don't forget the mandatory: (3) some racists talk about IQ, therefore everyone who talks about IQ is a racist.
My response to (1) is that this is an "all or nothing" fallacy. As an analogy, consider this argument: "There are people who are tall, but suck at basketball. Therefore, height is irrelevant for playing basketball. No, let me say it openly: the very concept of height is a pseudoscientific swindle!" Okay, slow down, dude. Yes, it is true that some tall people suck at basketball. But that only proves that height is not the only thing that matters at basketball. You also have to practice playing. Or maybe you are tall but also blind, so you are out of luck, even if you tried to practice. It can be simultaneously true that in general being taller is helpful at basketball, and that being tall is only a part (perhaps a very small part) of the entire package. Also, the accusation of pseudoscientific swindle is completely undeserved. Even in a hypothetical reality where height is 100% irrelevant to basketball (which is not the reality we are living in), height could still be useful for other things, for example easily reaching the objects on the top shelf.
The same is true for intelligence. It is just a part of a larger package necessary to succeed in life. Like, maybe you have a high IQ, but you also have ADHD so you actually can't focus on doing the smart things, or maybe you were born in a poor family so the idea of studying hard and getting a prestigious job simply never crossed your mind. Yes, you can point at some Mensa guys and laugh at them. The fact is that Mensa is mostly a selection of people with high IQ who failed to achieve anything spectacular, because those who did are typically too busy to attend Mensa meetings. Why is it so surprising that "the top 25% of janitors have higher IQ than the bottom 25% of college professors"? Looking at the graph, it simply means that a person with IQ 110 could have an either job. Sounds plausible to me, considering that some colleges suck.
My response to (2) is that I have no time to check how cherry-picked / edited / taken out of context are the few graphs in the article (I vaguely remember reading that the graph was edited to make the point), but the very idea that above IQ 100 everyone is the same, is quite absurd. I think most people underestimate how diverse people are, because we typically live in "bubbles", surrounded by people similar to us. Thus e.g. a person with IQ 130 mostly keeps friends with IQ 130, and then concludes "yes, all humans are intellectually about the same". Then they step outside the bubble, and are shocked by the sheer incompetence of other people, who have e.g. IQ 100, i.e. not retarded, just... not smart either.
I have a repeated experience (a few years ago when I was a Mensa member) that when a person who seemed smart to me considered themselves intellectually average, I told them "nope, you are smart, and you should take a Mensa test to confirm this". About half of them actually accepted my challenge, and all of them passed the test. Some of them were quite shocked by that. If only 2% of population can pass the test, and they supposedly do not differ from the rest of the population at anything meaningful, how could my predictions be so accurate?
My response to (3) is that intelligence is an exciting topic many people have an opinion on, so of course the racists do, too. It would be suspicious if they did not. And by the way, many racists also take positions quite similar to Taleb's. There were probably historical Nazis who said things like: yeah, maybe the Jews have a high IQ, but who cares, that's just some academic nonsense, in real life they are still inferior to an Aryan Fat Tony who is street smart and has the will to power, or something like that.
I also notice that all graphs used in the article are cut at IQ 130. I find that suspicious. Perhaps there is a good reason for that: many IQ tests stop at some relatively low value, because people with higher IQ are rare, so calibrating the tests for them is more expensive. But I strongly suspect that adding e.g. the incomes of people with IQ 160 to the graph would make a visible difference. (I suspect than on a typical ACX meetup, IQ 130 would be the average, or even below the average. In Taleb's graphs, it is the highest intelligence considered.) Similarly, the categories of occupations are just too wide. Perhaps the lowest-quartile "college professor" is completely unimpressive, intellectually. What about a lowest-quartile quantum physics professor, though? Is he also indistinguishable from a smart janitor?
Oops, took me more than the originally planned 15 minutes. Still didn't check the article that Taleb was taking his graph from. Anyway, nothing I wrote here is new or particularly insightful. Remember that the next time Taleb calls himself "unchallenged". The counter arguments are obvious, he just doesn't listen.
Does it matter that Taleb is coming out on the *anti*-group differences side? It seems weird that the claim that IQ tests don't measure anything important is handy for Nazis and for racial egalitarians. I'm going to have to think about how that works.
Nazis and the woke would agree that the important thing about you is your ethnic background (although the woke would also add gender, sexual orientation, etc.), and that your individual traits or skills are irrelevant. IQ tests measure your individual trait, i.e. an unimportant thing.
IQ tests measure the individual; both Nazis and the woke are collectivists (although in different ways).
> Does it matter that Taleb is coming out on the *anti*-group differences side?
In the linked article he says that "Different populations have different variances, even different skewness and these comparisons require richer models."
(In other words, it's complicated, and Taleb is the only person smart enough to understand it. And no, he is not going to tell us.)
No, no, he's not smart and has no good "insights", mostly because "good insight" is an oxymoron. Think about what "insight" means. Does it mean scholarship? Knowledge? No, it means something consumers can easily easily consume. It's intellectual candy, intellectual crack. Real knowledge is hard, cheap and easy "insights" are never good, and insight merchants are a cancer.
I guess Taleb's response to the first table would be that all those correlations are produced by the lower half of the IQ distribution. (The rest of the article, I agree with.)
Here is my attempt to "steelman" Taleb:
There are various reasons to study IQ. We want to understand those below the average. We want to understand the average. And we want to understand those above the average. Different people care about different parts of the intelligence spectrum.
Specifically for the purpose of studying people with high IQ, the usual research is often not helpful. First, many IQ tests are capped at IQ 130, which for some people is actually where the interesting part *begins*.
Second, calculating the correlation between IQ and some measure X for the entire population conflates "people with low IQ suck at X" with "people with high IQ excel at X". Even if both are true, the correlation measured for the entire population does not *prove* it. To make a claim specifically about high IQ, we should calculate the correlation for the part of population with IQ greater than 100. And then maybe again for the part with IQ greater than 130, to check for the hypothesis "...but *too much* IQ is harmful".
Some people believe in significance of low IQ but insignificance of high IQ, for both good and bad reasons. The bad reasons are, of course, ideological. A good reason would be the law of diminishing returns.
For example, if you have an IQ 70 and can't get a good job, it is quite obvious what is your problem. If you have an IQ 130 and a relatively good job, but you would like to have a better one, it is not equally obvious that magically changing your IQ to 150 would solve the problem. Chances are, your greatest problem is something else (such as low conscientiousness, lack of social skills, etc.), which might still prevent you from getting the desired job even if your IQ magically changed to 150. Perhaps not... but that needs to be shown by a research that compares IQ 130 and IQ 150 directly, and not just says "comparing IQ 50, 70, 90, 110, 130, and 150, greater values correlate with greater success".
To be honest, I don't think the post even warrants a response from intelligence researchers - half of it is just crying about racism, the other half is "High school student who just finished AP stats"-level objections like the average not being the same as the entire population or that error bars somehow invalidate the mean difference between professions.
He also claims the IQ-income correlation is ~0.01, which is shockingly wrong. The Mind-Killer really can infect anyone, I guess.
When I first saw that article I had never heard of the guy. It's an incoherent article on Medium with myriad spelling mistakes, I literally assumed it was written by a mentally ill nutcase. I have continued to be profoundly shocked that anyone takes him seriously on anything.
"Forget everything you heard in college statistics or probability theory. If
you never took such a class, even better. Let us start from the very beginning.
THE GAUSSIAN AND THE MANDELBROTIAN
I was transiting through the Frankfurt airport in December 2001 , on my
way from Oslo to Zurich.
I had time to kill at the airport and it was a great opportunity for me
to buy dark European chocolate, especially since I have managed to successfully convince myself that airport calories don't count. The cashier
handed me, among other things, a ten deutschmark bill, an (illegal) scan
of which can be seen on the next page. The deutschmark banknotes were
going to be put out of circulation in a matter of days, since Europe was..."
Where is the math? Who takes this seriously?
He then argues against Gaussians with ... wealth distributions. This guy is a fraudster btw, he claims to be a statistician but he only has business degrees. Something is really off about this guy. He basically argues for "fat tails" and talks about how Gaussians can't model stuff but Pareto et al were on this years ago. He seems to fail to understand that the Gaussian is the distribution with the most entropy of any distribution with finite mean and variance on the real line. The Pareto Distribution has finite mean and variance, models wealth, and has less entropy than the Gaussian. It would be stupid given this, additive genetics, and the CLT to "reject Gaussians" or whatever weird English-major thing he wants us to do. Gaussians are a specific thing, he has literally no point other than that some phenomena are not Gaussian.
Grey Enlightenment starts with noticing the same thing, Taleb's really creepy, skeezy nature:
"I’m guessing he chose 35 because that is when he became rich writing mediocre books, trading (he claims to have gotten rich with trading even though no records or second-hand anecdotal evidence exists of any actual trading prowess on his part), or kinda being a thin-skinned blowhard online."
Basically it seems like he wrote this stupid business book NYT best seller fluff and has been making up lies about himself ever since. He is probably a compulsive liar or something. Ironically it seems like he won the lottery with his book -- funny enough this can be modeled with Bernoullis, making the number of winners a quite small tailed distribution that looks like a bell curve. I wonder if he knows what it's called? Probably not.
2) It is amazing to read the reactions of Taleb's fans on Reddit.
"You cite your own blog?" -- yes, of course, because Taleb's fans will keep saying the same things over and over again across the entire internet, no matter how many times it was debunked, so it is much smarter to just write a response once and keep linking it.
"He's probably angry because he realized that Mensa is a club of idiots after paying for their expensive tests and memberships." -- uhm, in my country that is €10 for testing and €25 for yearly membership. I don't think it is a money well spent, but I wouldn't call it expensive either.
"Lmao wtf is this sir ??? what are your credentials??" -- haha, so Taleb keeps talking about how Fat Tony can outsmart all intellectuals-yet-idiots, and accuses scientists of fraud, but hey, if you point out on your blog a mistake he made, you suddenly need a PhD to be taken seriously.
(All these comments are upvoted. All comments critical of Taleb are downvoted.)
The point I find interesting is that IQ was conceived originally as a metric to measure sub-par intelligence and that it might work well for that, but it's accuracy isn't particularly good in the direction of measuring above-par intelligence. The scatterplot on the post shows how much noise there is in correlating IQ with lifetime income results, something it has been purported to be meaningful for.
The original formula was literally "mental age ÷ physical age × 100", which meant like "if you are 5 years old, but your reasoning abilities are on the level of a typical 6 years old, your IQ is 120".
Only later, when the concept was generalized for all ages, the formula was refactored, because it doesn't make sense for older people to assume that intelligence is always increasing with age... and you also can't find such N that Einstein's reasoning abilities are "on the level of a typical N years old".
As you see, Taleb is wrong (yet "unchallenged") even about things that are quite simple to check.
I think every sect out there right now, even the far right, ignores genetic class inequality. I'm convinced this is a huge mistake and understanding how people vary within a racial group is super enlightening when it comes to someone's understanding of politics.
To begin to understand class inequality, let's stretch what Jordan Peterson calls psychology's most secure and significant accomplishment: IQ. We want to map IQ ranging onto concrete, politically relevant abilities.
I want to start with HBD. How many people can actually understand it?
In 2006 the breakdown on what people thought on the question "How much to genes determine race differences in drive to succeed. math ability, criminality, and IQ?" was 50% not at all, 24% very little, 20% some, 6% a lot, 1% just about all. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3832063/
To understand the arguments in this field you should be able to get a 5, maybe less, on the AP Statistics exam, an extremely easy exam which is very light on dense theory like what you might find in Wasserman's textbook All of Statistics. It is generally considered to be equivalent to a 200 level business statistics course, not even a first introduction to math stat. In 2021 only 16 percent of the people who took the test got a 5. 42% failed. https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/about-ap-scores/score-distributions
Somewhere in between 58% and 16% (or less because of selection bias) of people can understand HBD themselves. The rest have to trust The Experts. That's at least 42% of people and potentially more than 84%. A large minority at the least. The IQ cutoff for understanding basic statistics and by extension HBD is somewhere between 97 and 115 or greater.
If we use this number and increase our standards for failure to where half of the 3s are given 2s we are looking for the 53rd percentile of an IQ distribution with a mean of 108. This is 72nd percentile overall.
The reading SAT is pretty easy, I get perfect scores on it, but getting 80% of the questions right is 95th percentile. I get all of the questions right. The average basically can't read and gets maybe half of the questions right https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/understanding-sat-scores.pdf
The bottom half of the population basically can't make an informed vote, and the bottom 85-95% are seriously disabled compared to the top 5%. People under the top 85% exhibit serious reading comprehension and mathematical deficits and this is in a society that wants to pass as many of those people as possible. You probably need to be at least in the top 5% to be a professor or a serious Substack pundit with a book and all of that. People the top 10% under that level might be able to sort through information they are given if they want to put in the effort, but they won't generate new culture or ideas. Under the 85 percentile people begin to struggle to understand even information that is given to them. It is likely that people under that level would not fully understand this post.
Now departing from IQ, there's some data on temeperament. There is this concept called conventional morality where what you think is righteous is just whatever the law happens to be at your place in time, you don't have the capacity to think normatively using your own moral principles. You are a follower. The majority of college students are like this and this is mostly independent from IQ https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746042.pdf .
So if 15% of people are smart enough to properly understand politics, and 25% of them can think using their own moral principles (very charitable assumptions), 3.75% of the population is politically autonomous.
This is skewed though. 27% read more than 11 per year, so 73% will not be very informed beyond The News. Also most of this is not nonfiction. Numbers are hard to come by but based on sales a good estimate is that 40% of this reading is nonfiction.
The average American therefore reads only 4 or 5 nonfiction books per year. This is skewed, like I said above, and assuming people tend to read either nonfiction or fiction, only 10% read 11 or more nonfiction books per year.
But what do they read? Are they reading Carl Schmitt? Tacitus? Public Choice Theory textbooks? Arthur Jensen?
This fabulous list includes top sellers like "Pain: A Love Story" by Serena Sterling, a book by Sam from iCarly, If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Atomic Habits, Token Black Girl, etc, etc.
It would be charitable to assume that 30% of that 3.75% have a good reading habit. That gives us 1.125%, an imprecise upper bound on the fraction of informed, agentic voters in the US.
"You see, the word idiot is etymologically derived from the Attic Greek word ἰδιώτης (idiṓtēs), which literally means 'a private person,' or 'a person who does not take part in the affairs of the polis.' It is derived from the word ἴδιος (ídios), meaning 'of one’s own,” which is also the root of our English word idiosyncratic. The word ἰδιώτης originally had no bearing whatsoever on how intelligent the person it was being used to refer to was. It merely indicated that the person did not take part in public affairs." https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2016/11/07/the-bizarre-origins-of-the-word-idiot/
We don't live in a democracy, where the majority of people think about politics independently and then vote to decide who wins the fight for power. We live in a world where the very few who are functionally literate and can understand politics fight over the votes of distracted, conventional, and uninformed ἰδιώτης.
I think this is a good post overall, but using HBD as your stats example is needlessly polarising - none of the rest of your post cares one whit about racial anything.
As to object level critique - I tend to think of intelligence as "potential", and while (assuming for argument that your numbers are correct) you convincingly paint a picture of how many Americans are *currently* functional independent thinkers, the data you've presented doesn't in any way rule distinguish between lack of natural aptitude and a horrific failure of the education system and societal norms - eg. there's definitely no ability barrier to all "3.75%" of your 'sufficiently literate and numerate' group having a "good reading habit", that's purely social.
If you want to flesh this out into a standalone post elsewhere, I suggest elaborating on why you've picked the AP stats exam as your test of mathematical numeracy (I believe I get it but it's worth spelling out), why you've picked the grade you've picked as your threshold (because a 5(/5?) is equivalent to only 70%? % marks don't necessarily translate well across systems, American undergrad courses are unusually easy to get high % marks in), and similarly it's worth elaborating on the literacy measure you've used - quoting a definition and/or example of a "dense" text would be nice.
Finally, I'd be fascinated by cross-country comparisons if you can get them - those would help shed light on if the primary problem is the education system and/or local culture. Eg. French people have a much greater social expectation of being politically informed and opinionated.
I'm trying to get into this "conventional morality" thing but the Defining Issues Test is pretty opaque. Are you sure it shows what you claim it shows? Can you go into more detail on the data you claim shows that much of the population have "conventional morality"?
Great post, if this forum had decent people on it they would be hailing you as better than Scott Alexander. He's never posted anything even half as intelligent. Goes to show that their attention and compliments are totally performative, political, and cynical. Sadly, your data proves why spectacle merchants receive so much attention and why this kind of thing is sneered at and ignored by people who probably don't have the reading skills or mathematical literacy to understand it.
Arestovych seems to be mostly known in these circles as the guy who predicted the Russian invasion of Ukraine with uncanny accuracy back in 2019, but he actually has a fascinating and original-minded political philosophy combining conservatism and futurism with a strong focus on individual freedom, and as a presidential advisor with friends in high places, one of the most popular people in a country in flux with the focus of the world on it, and someone who's built a lot of connections with the Russian opposition, he has some genuine ability to push for his ideas. I'm surprised he doesn't get more attention in these circles, between his positions and his extremely colorful character.
Someone just posted an overview essay about him and his political philosophy. Any thoughts?
Thank you for this. I hadn't heard of him but I find this philosophy/outlook to largely align with my own (though i am in the US so the slavic specific parts are bit foreign to me). “freedom moderated by a vision of eternity” really connects with me. I will seek out more of his writing/speaking.
In my view, Arestovych is a psychiatrist more than a philosopher. His nebulous and utopian "fifth project", in which he tries to combine all the good features of liberalism, socialism, progressivism and pan-Slavic nationalism, doesn't strike me as particularly thought-over or coherent (to the extent I can extract it from the occasional interview with Latynina), but I have seen him use it to bottle up some common sense sorely needed at certain moments, and deliver it to the right places at the right time, and I am immensely grateful to him for that. (Among other things, he spoke out against the cancelations of Russian culture in the West during the first months of the 2022 war; against Zelensky's push to stop giving Schengen visas to Russians; against an idiotic project by the UA military to restrict freedom of movement inside Ukraine for mobilization purposes. At least in the latter case, the project was quickly scuttled.) He is also fun to listen to to a certain point (and gets annoying beyond that point). All in all, he strikes me as a Jordan-Peterson-like "applied thinker" (some of the similarity is explained by both being Jungians) doing an important job. If you're looking for a political philosophy that stands on its own, however, you'll be disappointed.
Is development economics bogus? Are there any meaningful examples of development economic interventions resulting in both significant and lasting examples of growth in developing countries?
Has there ever even been an example of an officially designated developing country becoming 'developed'? Obviously all wealthy countries started poor, but as long as 'developing' countries have been an official designation, has this 'development' ever actually occurred? Perhaps in Asia, but it seems that most people interested in development economics neither accept any role of genetics in differences in economic development, nor do they seem especially interested in promoting the type of policies that have accompanies economic growth in these Asian countries.
They of course have an endless list of narratives to explain why the latest and greatest idea of theirs has failed to produce anything of value, but I'm certain that if a counterfactual Singapore or South Korea had identical policies as the real Singapore/South Korea but were still "developing", this would not be a cause of extreme confusion for these economists. They would have a bunch of reasons to say "Of COURSE those countries aren't developed". Which is to say, their model of reality is hopelessly wrong and they update their narratives instead of their model when they are wrong yet again.
One of George Stigler's humorous essays imagines product liability law being applied to universities. One line — by memory so not verbatim:
"The branch of economics that dealt with how to enrich poor nations, I think it was called 'economic development,' was enjoined by the courts on the grounds that no university could afford to pay for the amount of damage its professors did."
You might need a bit more specificity, because I'm not entirely sure what you're asking.
So, as a factual matter, yes, a lot of countries have developed significantly, no, there has not been any replicable model to bring their per capita income to Western levels. There's a lot of countries where per capita income is between $1000-$3000/month. Which is not a "Western" lifestyle but is a significant and radical jump from being a "developing" economy.
So, hopefully without getting too technical, just take a look at a list of countries by gdp per capita (PPP) (1). There's plenty of countries like Chile or Thailand or Serbia or even Ukraine where people are making $12-$30k year which, ya know, isn't great but it's far from where they were 30-40 years ago or where still developing countries, like most of Africa, are. And it's not like their growth rates are bad; I certainly wouldn't say Chile is growing as fast as China but they don't compare too unfavorably. (2)
As for development economics, while I'm no expert, I thought the field was generally a mess and hasn't had a persistent message since the Washington Consensus, which has been dead for decades now. And Chile/Thailand/Serbia all certainly pursued different economic development plans.
Soooo... it feels like you're trying to argue against someone who's not really there, pointing to a lack of economic progress which....kind of exists, like "developing" economies haven't closed the gap with developed economies but they're certainly much better off than they were 30-40 years ago. What exactly are you getting at here?
There are some methods that have shown consistency in results like land reform/redistribution. From the "How Asia Works" book review:
"'Klaus Deininger, one of the world’s leading authorities on land policy and development, has spent decades assembling data that show how the nature of land distribution in poor countries predicts future economic performance. Using global land surveys done by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), he has worked out that only one significant developing country has managed a long-term growth rate of over 2.5 per cent with a very unequal distribution of land. That country is Brazil, the false prophet of fast growth which collapsed in a debt crisis in the 1980s in large part because of its failure to increase agricultural output. Deininger’s two big conclusions are that land inequality leads to low long-term growth and that low growth reduces income for the poor but not for the rich. In short, if poor countries are to become rich, then the equitable division of land at the outset of development is a huge help. Japan, Korea and Taiwan put this in place.'
Unfortunately, it's not on the table anymore, which means we might not see many more East Asian - style economic miracles:
'Will we witness an economic transformation like Japan, Korea, Taiwan or China’s again? The answer is quite possibly not, for one simple reason. Without effective land reform it is difficult to see how sustained growth of 7-10 per cent a year - without fatal debt crises - can be achieved in poor countries. And radical land reform, combined with agronomic and marketing support for farmers, is off the political agenda. Since the 1980s, the World Bank has instead promoted microfinance, encouraging the rural poor to set up street stalls selling each other goods for which they have almost no money to pay. It is classic sticking-plaster development policy. The leading NGO promoting land reform, US-based Landesa, is today so pessimistic about the prospects for further radical reforms in the world’s poor states that it concentrates its lobbying efforts on the creation of micro plots of a few square metres. These plots supplement the diets and incomes of rural dwellers who work in otherwise unreformed agricultural sectors. From micro interventions, however, economic miracles will not spring'"
In general though, I agree with your sentiment. This doesn't just apply to economics, it's everywhere; people start with their pre-concieved conclusions and work backwards to a model that makes it make sense. Just goes to show that the scientific method is not a natural way of human thinking.
I do city planning in Greenland and I'm curious if anyone here is curious to read and critique a project that I'm about to finish. My work is influenced heavily by James C Scott (Seeing like a State) and David Graeber (The Dawn of Everything). I waltz patiently with Moloch on a daily basis.
The project is called "Catalogue of Potentials in Qaqortoq"; Qaqortoq is a city of 3k people in southern Greenland. The project has a word count of 50k. It has 4 parts that each indicate a step in the double diamond method. English is not my vernacular. I've a bachelor's in arctic civil engineering, but my writign style or the genre of the project is weird; I've hardly used statistics at all. There's a lot of pictures. There might be an overfocus on semi-private spaces and other ideas from Jan Gehl. I have taken care to explore and convey the knowledge and visions of the people I've talked with. I've put care into talking with people. That's a teaser. Write me if you're interested.
You'd be right. I can't say too much about what city planners learn in universities in Denmark because that's not what I studied, but I know from some city planner friends that Jan Gehl is a superstar in the field, and Jan Gehl does take notes not from theme parks, but from holiday resorts (especially the maze-like slow down and have a spa experience kinds of places), which I feel like is pretty much the same thing in this respect?
Does anyone know if there's been more rigorous research on Scott's observation from "A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows" about how these these text-to-image generation models seem to get stuck in basins of attraction when a prompt is too reminiscent of a well-known archetype?
I've seen a quote that 97% of people enjoy being around other people similar to themselves, and only 3% enjoy being around those who are different. I have not been able to find the source of the quote, or published research supporting this. Does anyone recognize it?
A great deal of basic human flourishing has come from improved sanitation...simple things like cooking foods before eating, bathing, proper waste disposal, and so on. Even if no one knows all the mechanisms behind, say, the Gillian Flynn Effect or life expectancy increase, this is surely a large factor.
Have we* exhausted all the low-hanging $20 bills in this arena, such that there's not gonna be, like, a modern one-upping of hand washing? With diminishing returns or even negative second-order consequences (e.g. antibacterial soaps contributing to "superbugs"), is the world "clean enough"?
There are surely huge gains to be made outside of the western world. Especially around child birth where poor sanitation has a very large negative effect. But hard to say if there are easy solution in more developed countries. Some things that come close would be if everyone got a flu shot and/or wore n95 masks a lot more effect like in Asian countries (not something i do or really want to do). That would save lives by reducing disease transmission. Also resolving all the lead in water issues that have been popping up in the US recently. Might not save lives but should increase quality of life.
I seem to recall that on balance, a properly-used N95 reduces covid transmission by roughly...10%. Dunno how that compares to flu...probably unfavourably, given Omicron's pretty high infectiousness. The whole sick-pay thing matters here too, even if it's not a direct intervention...although there's definitely people on the margins who literally can't afford to miss a day out sick, many more opt to go to work anyway. Incentives matter, and theoretical diffuse harms are way less salient than immediate paycheck hits. The same plays out in school attendance...there just isn't always Slack in the syllabus to accommodate proper lengths of staying home. (I remember some classmates in highschool who were held back entire years due to catching mononucleosis...that was pretty scary. Like, yeah, obviously better not to attend...but that's an incredible humiliation, and disruption of social network + educational progress...being sick already sucks enough!)
Lead, asbestos, etc. removal: diminishing returns, although I'm still surprised how common lead paint is.
Hmm, it was my understanding that allergy prevalence is more tied to kids not getting outside often enough young enough, or otherwise exposed to a variety of potential triggers (such as pe dander)...with some degree of heritability as well. Although it might well be the case that safetyism attitudes towards not letting kids get """dirty""" contribute to keeping them confined indoors, safely glued to hypoallergenic screens.
Food allergies: I sure do miss peanuts in public. Amazing cooking oil, great snack. Other "nut butters" really don't compare, imo.
I wonder about that. Presumably baths and showers disrupt our skin microbiome. We know from experience that too much washing dries out the skin. Do or did stone age tribes suffer from chronic skin conditions? Analogizing from the gut microbiome, eradicating pathogens is not a feasible goal. It seems the healthiest guts have a diversity of bacteria, which presumably keeps the pathogens in check.
Food irradiation, maybe. A lot of reduction in food-borne illness, less waste, and reduced need for refrigeration and preservation is being left on the table because of consumer distaste for the word "radiation."
That was one of my favourite "alt-history" scenarios as a kid...atomic development going somewhat differently, certain nuclear failures not happening. Steaks that last for months? Wow, that sounds amazing. A world we could have had...still could, I guess. All it'd take is a norms shift. "Gentlemen, we have the capability"...
There's been some talk about installing UV lights all over the place to reduce the incidence of respiratory diseases. I'm not sure if that meets the criteria though.
A great new pop-science book is out about long-lived species: Steven Austad's "Methuselah's Zoo"!
I think it'll be good and important for longevity research, because species differences are way bigger than what currently-heavily-studied interventions can do. (E.g. a calorically restricted mouse lives 3-5 years instead of 2-4; but naked mole-rats can live >30, bowhead whales >200, ocean quahogs >500.) Comparative biogerontology isn't the biggest field right now, but this book will help popularize it; and since we now have comparative genomics to generate hypotheses, and e.g. gene-editing to test them (on top of studying long-lived species' cells in culture), I bet it'll be able to get somewhere.
My book review of it, submitted to BioEssays, has been accepted! e-article version should be out in a couple weeks, final version should be out in November [it'll be at: doi.org/10.1002/bies.202200144].
To newcomers to aging/longevity bio, I'd recommend reading it second or third. First read Andrew Steele's "Ageless" [my goodreads review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4112868997], and/or Austad's earlier "Why We Age." If you're interested in the currently-heavily-studied stuff like caloric restriction mimetics, David Stipp's "The Youth Pill" is good. Aubrey de Grey's "Ending Aging" is more detailed but older than Steele's book, in its coverage of the directly-repair-damage approach.
Great resources, many thanks! I've read David Sinclair's book, and a recent book not on your list, Eat Like the Animal, by Raubenheimer and Simpson. The latter's thesis was a new one to me, that our bodies want a target amount of protein and we overeat if our food is low in protein. Do you have any thoughts on that thesis? Not a longevity theme per se, but an interesting explanation for the obesity epidemic.
Been interested in this field for awhile but so much of what comes out about it seems based on shoddy or overstated experiments.
Also it's quite hard to separate the wheat from the chaff if you don't know the field that well. Will look at your recommendations and hopefully they will clear some things up :)
The current hardcover edition of Methuselah's Zoo has a couple minor errata that I brought to Austad's attention from the advance proof, too late to be able to change before it printed. Maybe he'll edit them for the paperback. They mostly don't affect the scientific content, just a typo here, getting slightly wrong an old cultural reference there.*
The main scientifically-relevant one iirc was that the comparison of cancer resistance in naked mole-rats vs blind mole-rats wasn't clear. For a good review of comparative cancer resistance in mammals including those, see Seluanov et al. 2018 [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41568-018-0004-9].
*Aldous Huxley's "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" is about searching for life extension and finding it by eating carp guts. It also plays with the idea that humans are neotenous apes, similar to axolotls being neotenous salamanders [this juvenile chimp looks more human than does the adult chimp: https://images.wtmfiles.com/NeotonyChimpsProfile_Crp_TxtCa_WEB_1122x449.jpg]. Aldous Huxley was familiar with his brother Julian Huxley's experiments de-neotenizing axolotls so they finally anatomically "mature". In the book, life extension results in the long-lived humans also finally anatomically "maturing", to look more apeish! But the current version of Methuselah's Zoo got it backwards, and said that the carp guts made the humans look like "fetal apes."
I remember reading that book years ago, and its satirical ending. Spoilers ahead:
“What’s that?” he whispered.
“A foetal ape,” Dr. Obispo began; but was cut short by another explosion of hilarity, that doubled him up as though with a blow in the solar plexus.
…Beyond the bars, the light of the lanterns had scooped out of the darkness a narrow world of forms and colours. On the edge of a low bed, at the centre of this world, a man was sitting, staring, as though fascinated, into the light. His legs, thickly covered with coarse reddish hair, were bare. The shirt, which was his only garment, was torn and filthy. Knotted diagonally across the powerful chest was a broad silk ribbon that had evidently once been blue. From a piece of string tied round his neck was suspended a little image of St. George and the Dragon in gold and enamel. He sat hunched up, his head thrust forward and at the same time sunk between his shoulders. With one of his huge and strangely clumsy hands, he was scratching a sore place that showed red between the hairs of his left calf.
“A foetal ape that’s had time to grow up,” Dr. Obispo managed at last to say. “It’s too good!” Laughter overtook him again. “Just look at his face!” he gasped, and pointed through the bars. Above the matted hair that concealed the jaws and cheeks, blue eyes stared out of cavernous sockets. There were no eyebrows; but under the dirty, wrinkled skin of the forehead, a great ridge of bone projected like a shelf.
…Mr. Stoyte seized him by the shoulder and violently shook him. “Who are they?” he demanded.
…“The one with the Order of the Garter,” said Dr. Obispo, raising his voice against the tumult, “he’s the Fifth Earl of Gonister. The other’s his housekeeper.”
“But what’s happened to them?”
“Just time,” said Dr. Obispo airily.
“Time?”
…. “But the Earl there — let me see, he was two hundred and one last January.”
Dr. Obispo went on talking. Slowing up of development rates . . . one of the mechanisms of evolution . . the older an anthropoid, the stupider . . . senility and sterol poisoning , , . the intestinal flora of the carp . . . the Fifth Earl had anticipated his own discovery ... no sterol poisoning, no senility ... no death, perhaps, except through an accident . . . but meanwhile the foetal anthropoid was able to come to maturity . . . It was the finest joke he had ever known.
Without moving from where he was sitting, the Fifth Earl urinated on the floor.
…“No need of any further experiment,” Dr. Obispo was saying. “We know it works. You can start taking the stuff at once. At once,” he repeated with sarcastic emphasis.
…Mr. Stoyte broke his silence. “How long do you figure it would take before a person went like that?” he said in a slow hesitating voice. “I mean, it wouldn’t happen at once . . . there’d be a long time while a person . . . well, you know; while he wouldn’t change any. And once you get over the first shock — well, they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course. Don’t you think so, Obispo?” he Insisted.
Dr. Obispo went on looking at him in silence; then threw back his head and started to laugh again."
I read this essay about the hard limits of human intelligence with interest. I'm still thinking about the implications of Wolpert's theses, but, yes, I think there's an upper limit for what human intelligence can comprehend and the problems that human intelligence can solve. Nor do I expect AI to move us forward much, because AI will still have the observational limitations our augmented wetware minds have. Part of the problem, which Wolpert doesn't seem to acknowledge (or perhaps he didn't think about it) is the physical constraints on what we can observe. For instance, there's a limit on how far back we can look into the history of the universe. And the majority of the universe (beyond 48 billion light years) will always be unobservable. Likewise, there are limits on how far into the high-energy states of matter we can observe. Wolpert spends a lot of time focused on new types of mathematics, but mathematics isn't very good when you can't create ways to apply them and test in reality.
Donals Hoffman argues that the current scientific paradigm is at a dead end, citing leading physicists like Arkani-Hamed, who says "space-time is doomed". Hoffman uses the analogy of video-games. While we wear the headset it "looks like" e.g., a car (or whatever") is speeding past us on our left, but that (obviously) is an illusion in the virtual world. We can't understand the principles underlying the game by examining the world inside the game not matter how thoroughly we study the virtual world within the game. The reality has to too with transistors and diodes and software and whatnot in the computer generating the virtual world of the game. Physics has reached its limits, he argues, because we're analyzing the world inside the headsets, convinced that if we can enlarge the pixels sufficiently, we'll understand everything. In other words, w're at a dead-end not just because of limited intelligence but because we haven't figured out that we're studying the virtual reality within the game revealed to us by the headset. We have to figure out what's outside the headset.
For any ridiculously smart people with access to standardised test scores to prove it, did you have any idea about how smart you were before access to test scores?
I ask because my girlfriend has struggled with school her entire life despite working really hard. She scraped through university, really struggles with her job as an insurance broker, and her favourite thing to do in her spare time is watch YouTube clips of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders (those women are incredible by the way). She recently took 2 IQ tests under controlled conditions and received a genius score (>98th percentile) on both tests.
I love her to bits, genius or not, but I feel like all the people I know with these kinds of scores find school really easy and normally have a need for cognition to do a lot of active thinking about something that interests them in their spare time- my girlfriend definitely does not fit this description. Is my girlfriend just really weird? Or is this more normal than I think?
To your girlfriend: she might have processing issues, where she's quite bright but unable to deal well with certain sorts of situations or tasks. There are evaluators for this sort of thing, but they tend to be spendy.
My middle kid is like this, with an IQ in the mid 130s but some trouble applying it. There are drug and non-drug interventions. We're currently working through the non-drug coping techniques. The assessment ran us 2000+, and wasn't covered by insurance.
What? No, of course not. IQ correlates with educational outcomes to some degree, but there's so many not-strictly-smarts things that go into Doing Well At School. For example, I'm not quite at the super-cynic level of Bryan Caplan where the entire edifice comes off as a costly signalling trap...but it's absolutely true that formal education rewards obedience, conformity, and putting up with *a lot* of dreadfully boring arbitrary crap. Temperament matters so much. This can be just as hard for those with +SDs on IQ, as for those with -SDs...just in different ways.
I was a Precocious Prodigal Child growing up, always able to ace schoolwork and do reading/writing/math way above my "grade level". (Like doing 10th-grade math in 4th grade, or setting historic school records for Most Library Books Read In A Year, that sort of thing.) But the actual process of school was lonely, tedious, and cruel, and so many times my grades suffered because I'd consider doing the work "beneath me". You can't do no work for an entire semester, then bust out every assignment perfectly on the last day for full credit - since Being On Time is more important than the actual quality of the work. (Okay, that's not true, I actually did manage to pull that stunt off several times. Boy, those professors hated me.) By college, I'd fallen pretty well behind my definitely-less-smart peers...not for lack of ability, but because the education system was Just Not For Me.
They graduated and went on to degree-premium jobs. I didn't, and now bag groceries in my 30s. Constantly catch myself making "intellectual class" mistakes, like trying to explain to my bosses how X process would be so much more efficient with a simple spreadsheet...then I remember they can barely wrangle Microsoft Word. (You do not want to see our internal memos and emails...my God, so painful to read.) Good folks, love them, fight in the trenches back-to-back every shift...and yet. There's a reason I don't ever mention places like ACX at work. Just Not For Them.
I'm pretty sure I responded to a previous thread you had posted, several OTs ago, but: on the old scoring system, 2230/2400 SAT (perfect reading/writing, worse on math), ~130 WAIS-IV (again >99th percentile reading/writing, worse on math/shape rotator stuff). [ETA: took these tests *after* flunking out of three colleges three times, was feeling really stupid then and wondering what happened to that whiz kid...more fool me, she never left.] But school was a hellish nightmare that almost broke my intellectual curiosity for good, even given those proclivities. Many Such Cases, including most of my friends (borked minds think alike!). Your girlfriend isn't an outlier. Says a lot more about the school system than her.
I kind of thought of you when posting and was wondering what you'd say.
But the big difference between you and her is that your cognitive surplus, even if it hasn't dramatically improved your income, it still manifests in ways that make it obvious that you are likely smart. For instance, you voluntarily read a blog by a pseudonymous psychiatrist who writes short fiction, comments on Effective Altruism, and posts long speculative essays on the implications of a Carthaginian demon mentioned in a poem.
You also frequently like to ask and answer questions on complex topics written on threads like this one.
It does, though, make me consider that almost all the smart people I know of are quintessentially male. Not in that they are all men, but all have male interests and reasoning styles (the kinds of people attracted to this blog). So I could imagine that a really smart person that has more feminine interests would be more difficult to notice. Can you speak to that at all?
It's nice to know I've made a memorable impression on someone!
Feels like a "Categories Made For Man, Not Man For Categories" thing to do (sex- ?) gender-essentialism with interests and reasoning. There are definitely __trends__ with some predictive power (wordcels vs. shape rotators[1] really hit some nerves, I found it hilarious how like 99% of commenters here always claim to be shape rotators), but a lot of it just seems really context-dependent. Is a female computer[2] quintessentially male, for example? Less feminine than Rosie the Riveter, or more? It's easy to delineate broad distributional trends, but the exercise quickly gets absurd in the particulars. And totally-external social conditions (e.g. labour market dynamics) can shift such Timeless Trends surprisingly quickly. Incentives, ah, find a way.
That being said, I'm not sure what proportion of my traits are quintessentially male (QM) vs. quintessentially female (QF). I like to joke that being a Gemini means it's easier to get away with being both male and female at the same time. (This was a lot more ironic after I came out as trans.)
QM: working with hands/physical labour, tomboyish behaviour, stereotypical nerd interests like D&D, metalhead, aggressive/direct, appreciation of fine tools (knives are cool!), empathy-deficient, economic-thinking
QF: total wordcel (awful at ~all math and spatials), feminine fashions, submissive/accommodating, small talk and gossip, homebody, Lots Of Feelings Always (lol, hormones), conscientious neuroticism, shoe collection[3]
Basically, I guess I don't feel like intellect pays no dividends in QF areas? I'd much rather read Jia Tolentino than Terry Grossman; or gab with my geeky female friends about pan-coronavirus vaccines, rather than my female coworkers about who's sleeping with who (okay, I lied, that can actually get really fascinating). Smart is smart, no matter how it's channeled. Not __better__ - life isn't a morality play - but it's easier and more comfortable to be around intellectually-similar people. As with so many other traits.
What you might be gesturing at is QM things being more *legible*...computer science, academia, research, Nobel Prizes, even stupid shit like Jeopardy! championships or chess mastery. Men Being Really Smart is, like, a whole industry of respect-generation and -redistribution that tries really hard to pretend it's not. School definitely falls under this category, although I'd expect some shifts as the sex ratio in education achievement continues to distort further. (Didn't Andrew Yang say earlier this year that women graduate college like 35% more, or something? Crazy...)
I really don't like fuzzy wokeisms like "the invisiblization of women" or whatever, but there is some kernel of truth in that direction. A really smart person with feminine interests will mostly be recognized *within* that niche, not outside of it; I'm thinking of how even highly-successful female politicians/CEOs/whatever tend to get treated with the same paparazzi-Gawker vibe as celebrities, instead of the focus being on actual achievements. Conversely, channeling that intellect into perhaps-less-authentically-felt QM interests is likely to be more noticeable. This really seems unfortunate, cause incredibly-important QF things like parenting[4] sure do benefit bigly from applied smarts. We ought to incentivize this more!
I guess I'm sorta just rambling on with no clear closing, though. So I'll end by saying that one can chase __being noticed__ or __being smart__, but doing both at once is like serving two masters. Not impossible, but better check real carefully about that moonlighting clause. Additional terms and conditions may apply.
[3] I think it's really precious how guys have tried to reclaim this QF interest under the "sneakerhead" rebranding. Makes for a great co-ed icebreaker, at least. Guys really ought to care more about teh fashuns, it's a strong comparative advantage...
[4] Who would you rather turn to for evidence-based parenting advice: Emily Oster, or Amy Chua? (Assume Scott is indisposed.)
Literally wrote a long, thoughtful, reply then my phone deleted it when I accidentally swiped away.
But to make long story short, I think your points about the "wordcel" thing and respect-generation get to the crux of my oversight.
Think our culture teaches us to instinctively value literary brilliance less than scientific smarts, hence why everyone wants to be a shape-rotator.
Also, appearing smart is a huge status game for men, who are more status-seeking by nature. For those reasons obviously the more conspicuous displays of what most people would deem smart are going to disproportionately come from men.
Was recently reading American Prometheus and was amused at how hard Oppenheimer tried to appear even more smart than he was.
Depends on the tests and what they are measuring. She may be spatially gifted/good at pattern matching, or she might be making up for poor/average maths scores with really good verbal abilities.
What course did she do at university? Maybe it didn't suit her talents, and insurance broker may be difficult because (to me) that's a sales job. High scoring on an IQ test doesn't mean you'll be good at sales, that's a whole other set of skills (including being able to manipulate people so that they happily sign up to buy the product you're selling).
1. The tests were the Cattell B and the Culture Fair. The latter is purely pattern matching, similar to Raven's. The former leans much more on verbal reasoning and working memory.
2. To answer your question from the other thread, she's never been assessed for dyslexia or dyscalculia, but her vision isn't great generally due to an eye condition. Also, anything beyond basic mental arithmetic is something she struggles with in particular (3x13 is fine but 14x24 isn't). Even something like differentiating a basic term she would need to write out in order to solve, but her working memory appears to be otherwise fine when it comes to other things.
3. She studied econ, and despite struggling a lot with the mathier parts of the course (game theory was not fun for her) she still got a first-class degree. Oh and we grade things differently in the UK so I think her percentage works out at around a 3.8 GPA. Also, a lot of variability in her marks by subject. Like she either completely crushed it or did really bad. Little in-between.
4. That's the funny thing, because she's not very senior at the moment most of her job involves doing menial data entry tasks on Excel, preparing PowerPoints, and occasionally using Power BI to visualise some stuff. She's generally A LOT better at the client-facing stuff, despite having a fair bit of social anxiety.
"most of her job involves doing menial data entry tasks on Excel"
That makes me laugh, because I am atrocious at maths, yet somehow the office jobs I ended up in have me handling accounting, payroll, and creating spreadsheets in Excel to keep tracks of money etc.
We are not being assessed on our strengths!
I have the same problems with mental arithmetic and needing to write things down to work them out. I don't understand the magic words, I just do it all by rote memorisation.
My cousin tested out 4 standard deviations above the mean. She always knew she was smarter than other people, and she had fun showing off. I don't think this helped her get along with people, though. My cousin never did anything with her genius, though. She went into the Army instead of college. Developed some post-Iraq health syndromes which VA couldn't really help her with. Now she's an alcoholic living on disability. I had my IQ tested four times, and I test out in the middle of the two standard deviations above the mean range—but my cousin, who is 20 years younger than I am, when she was just a kid would leave me in the dust with how quickly she could figure out a problem. And she had fun proving she was smarter than I was! But the thing I noticed about her was she was tremendously incurious. I wonder if I high IQ is particularly useful if one has little or no curiosity? As for me, I'm a sub-genius, but I've always known I was smarter than most people, but I've always known that there were people who were smarter than I am. Kept me humble, but I'm always shocked how *focused* many geniuses seem to be.
Yeah definitely don't get that vibe from her that you got from your cousin. Like, I've taken Wechsler and scored pretty much the same as you, but my girlfriend generally struggles with things more than me despite trying harder. Her parents made her study like hell in high school, while I was coasting but she still scored worse than me in Math and English.
Definitely think the curiosity component has something to do with it. In many ways, it's hard to tell in every day life that she's smart simply because she's not really curious about stuff. In fact, she actively loathes me engaging her in theoretical about economics (what she majored in) or philosophy, and doesn't have many hobbies.
Think it's possible I was just under the illusion that smart people generally find life easier and maybe that isn't the case.
Here's a stupid question about the bleedin' obvious: is she dyslexic or has trouble with dyscalculia or something of that kind? If she tests as smart but has always struggled despite studying hard, something might be amiss in that department, and if nobody ever consisted testing for it, it can go undiagnosed for years.
"I wonder if I high IQ is particularly useful if one has little or no curiosity?"
I can confirm that no, not so much. I was 115 IQ when I was young and 130 when I was older, and am currently doing seasonal cashier work with no idea what to do for the winter. IQ tests for ability to understand existing information, not for the much more important ability to fill a void in the absence of direction.
Not usually, I mostly hover at the same strength. Harder ones just make me think about the meaninglessness of spending time on puzzles. They've got to be solvable quickly enough to outrun ennui.
My older relative tells stories of getting D's in all his classes before getting a 97 Aptitude score in the military. He's both very smart and extremely hyperactive, so school was misery for him.
That is an interesting one. Sounds like a possibility of a learning disability to me. Dyslexia making reading difficult? ADHD making concentrating difficult?
I don't think you should automatically assume ADHD. Terman's study of geniuses showed that, although most did OK financially (most became professionals who earned better money than the average population), many geniuses didn't do anything with their "gifts". There were geniuses who became janitors and bus drivers. None of the Terman study geniuses earned any major prizes or made any significant advances to human knowledge. While one of the people's whose IQ wasn't high enough to qualify for the Terman study went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
She has an eye condition, but it doesn't effect her ability to read as far as I know. That being said it's hard to know because she really doesn't like reading at all! ADHD might be something to do with it, as she gets bored of everything apart from football (soccer) really quickly. Only other thing to note is that she's always had a lot of sensory troubles- textures, smells, tastes, and sounds REALLY bother her.
The fact that it turned out that way in two tests makes me think it's highly unlikely to be a fluke (and she's not lying, i've seen the results). Also her younger brother is at Oxford, so maybe something genetic there?
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I wonder why, from an evolutionary perspective, beauty exists?
What survival value was gained by all of us finding certain things beautiful and others ugly?
We mostly see the same things as beautiful/ugly, so I think it has to be partly inherited.
Human beauty:
Avoid mate with high mutational load because your children will have less children.
(For men) de-prioritise mate that is not well-fed/unmaimed, because she may die in pregnancy.
Natural beauty:
Avoid hanging out on lava flows because there is no food there. Hang out in woodland because there is food there.
Prefer clean stuff over dirty stuff because it is less likely to infect you with diseases.
Those are the ones I can spot offhand. If you have some specific sense you want explained that I didn't free-recall, ask.
I have a bit more on Human beauty:
- Men are attracted to youth, because that maximizes the number of possible kids before menopause, and to thin waists as proof she's not already pregnant.
I'm more mystified by the beauty of sunsets, flowers, open fields, wildlife, art, music...
We can spot predators in open fields. Maybe sunsets are similarly reassuring--we can see to the horizon. After we descended from the trees we needed savannas where we could see our predators and prey from a distance and exploit our ability to run. Art and music are variations of patterns and symmetry. Perhaps for reasons touched on by magic9 above, and maybe there's something deeper too--our bodies are symmetrical, to one degree or another, so are our brains. Perceiving patterns has high survival value, e.g., to keep track of when animals feed and approach the waterhole, to know when to hide and when to hunt, and to judge the likelihood of bad/good weather, and so on. Hence we create and play with patterns in art and music?
Does anyone have experience using CBD for lower back pain? If so, what worked for you?
I would say why not try it. It seems to work for some people, not others. I tried it for aches after skiiing, and it had no effect whatever even after I doubled, tripled and quadrupled the dose.
Not exactly the same, but my wife has arthritis in her hips. She uses a CBD ointment, which she finds to be very helpful.
Any opinions on Nassim Taleb's 2019 post "IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle"? https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39
Today on Twitter he claims that post is "still unchallenged" and that "In fact IQ as a metric was invented to sift out those who believe in it and classify them as incompetent; hence limit them to jobs as psychology professors."
Saying IQ is “pseudoscientific” is like saying “paper job applications are pseudoscientific”.
Are they perfect for their intended use? No.
Does that matter if they more or less work? No. Ditto say standardized tests.
Yes it might be better for each kid to have a 4 weeks multiphasic intellectual inventory instead an IQ test. But when you don’t have time/resources for that.
The way I understand things (very much not an expert):
IQ scores positively correlate with performance in both school and work at every level, from janitor to physicist. People with very high IQs tend to do very well in all kinds of intellectually demanding things.
IQ is a score which is correlated with intelligence--it's not intelligence itself. (To make an obvious point, if I let you copy down the answer key and then gave you an IQ test, this wouldn't make you any smarter.) So there are people who have high IQ scores on a test but aren't as smart as you'd expect from the score, and people who have low IQ scores on a test but are smarter than you'd expect from the score. This is just like any other test. There are clearly brilliant people whose IQ score wasn't that impressive, and their mental accomplishments are evidence of how smart they are and demonstrate that the IQ test wasn't so accurate in their case. There are also people who get high IQ scores and never do much impressive with their brains--that can happen for many reasons, but one is that they're really not as brilliant as their IQ score would normally suggest.
Also, IQ scores are normed against a sample population. If you give 1000 people tests and then base your scores on their performance, the scores at the high end won't be as meaningful--you probably can't use a normal IQ test to distinguish a Teller from a von Neumann, as both will be at the top of the range of scores on your test. A score that indicates that you're +5 sigmas from the mean is not very meaningful if it's based on the scores of 1000 test subjects.
>So there are people who have high IQ scores on a test but aren't as smart as you'd expect from the score, and people who have low IQ scores on a test but are smarter than you'd expect from the score. This is just like any other test. There are clearly brilliant people whose IQ score wasn't that impressive, and their mental accomplishments are evidence of how smart they are and demonstrate that the IQ test wasn't so accurate in their case.
This is kind of a pointless thing to say without data. Okay, "some people" are like this....how many? If we don't know what proportion of the population this applies to, then this point is not useful.
>so, IQ scores are normed against a sample population. If you give 1000 people tests and then base your scores on their performance, the scores at the high end won't be as meaningful--you probably can't use a normal IQ test to distinguish a Teller from a von Neumann, as both will be at the top of the range of scores on your test. A score that indicates that you're +5 sigmas from the mean is not very meaningful if it's based on the scores of 1000 test subjects.
Okay, and why does this matter? The problem that people, especially on the political left, have with IQ is most emphatically *not* that it is not useful for distinguishing geniuses from hyper-geniuses. The problem is precisely that it measures the intelligence and predicts the life outcomes of a majority of the population, and given the heritability of intelligence, this is potentially devasting for left-wing narratives around inequality and "privilege".
IIRC different kinds of IQ tests have a bit over 90% correlation with each other, which gives a rough measure of how well each correlates with the 'true intelligence' that they're trying to measure.
In short, it's not a perfect test of intelligence simply because perfect tests are impossible to devise - suppose you test 100 meter sprint speed by asking people to sprint 100 meters; you're literally testing the thing you want to measure, but some people will still have unusually bad days and get unrepresentative scores
I'm not trying to argue with NNT's flat-earth-level critique of IQ scores, nor with people whose whole knowledge of IQ is that it's somehow got intellectual cooties and must be avoided. What would be the point?
But the two points I made are places a lot of people who try to intelligently engage with IQ scores and related statistics get mixed up. They start thinking about IQ as what we care about, rather than as an imperfect measure of what we care about, and they don't realize that IQ scores at the high and low end of the range are probably less accurate representations of where the people who got them really fall in the distribution.
It is complete and unadulterated nonsense. It's embarassingly bad.
And this level of claim is warranted on my part given the fact that Taleb does not argue in good faith. He smears his opponents and blocks and curses out people on twitter who disagree with him. He invites much worse than what I've said by saying his post is "still unchallenged". He will say this no matter what happens, no matter what people say, no matter how much research contradicts his views. He's an arrogant ideologue interested only in pushing a narrative which he feels makes him look enlightened and virtuous (and sells more of his books).
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/nassim-taleb-on-iq/
Taleb is a dishonest debater. I remember reading a few good point-by-point refutations shortly after he published this rant about IQ being a swindle. It's just, if you disagree with him, he blocks you on Twitter and pretends that you do not exist. This is how he remains "unchallenged" in the eyes of his fans. Taleb is a smart guy and has a few good insights, but ultimately, he is in a book-selling business, not truth-finding business. It is better for book sales when his crackpot theories remain "unchallenged" no matter how wrong they are.
OK, I guess this sound too ad hominem. Sorry, I am not an expert and I do not want to spend my entire day fact-checking all citations and verifying all complex claims. I am only going to spend like 15 minutes writing this comment, please keep this limitation in mind if you are dissatisfied with the result. But other people have already written much better responses.
So, Taleb starts with repeating the popular myths: (1) IQ is just an ability to do IQ tests, or maybe tests in general, but definitely unrelated to anything that matters in actual life; (2) yes, low IQ is a thing, but high IQ is definitely not, a person with IQ 80 might be less smart than a person with IQ 100, but a person with IQ 180 is indistinguishable from a person with IQ 100... except for the ability to do IQ tests much better, I suppose. Also, don't forget the mandatory: (3) some racists talk about IQ, therefore everyone who talks about IQ is a racist.
My response to (1) is that this is an "all or nothing" fallacy. As an analogy, consider this argument: "There are people who are tall, but suck at basketball. Therefore, height is irrelevant for playing basketball. No, let me say it openly: the very concept of height is a pseudoscientific swindle!" Okay, slow down, dude. Yes, it is true that some tall people suck at basketball. But that only proves that height is not the only thing that matters at basketball. You also have to practice playing. Or maybe you are tall but also blind, so you are out of luck, even if you tried to practice. It can be simultaneously true that in general being taller is helpful at basketball, and that being tall is only a part (perhaps a very small part) of the entire package. Also, the accusation of pseudoscientific swindle is completely undeserved. Even in a hypothetical reality where height is 100% irrelevant to basketball (which is not the reality we are living in), height could still be useful for other things, for example easily reaching the objects on the top shelf.
The same is true for intelligence. It is just a part of a larger package necessary to succeed in life. Like, maybe you have a high IQ, but you also have ADHD so you actually can't focus on doing the smart things, or maybe you were born in a poor family so the idea of studying hard and getting a prestigious job simply never crossed your mind. Yes, you can point at some Mensa guys and laugh at them. The fact is that Mensa is mostly a selection of people with high IQ who failed to achieve anything spectacular, because those who did are typically too busy to attend Mensa meetings. Why is it so surprising that "the top 25% of janitors have higher IQ than the bottom 25% of college professors"? Looking at the graph, it simply means that a person with IQ 110 could have an either job. Sounds plausible to me, considering that some colleges suck.
My response to (2) is that I have no time to check how cherry-picked / edited / taken out of context are the few graphs in the article (I vaguely remember reading that the graph was edited to make the point), but the very idea that above IQ 100 everyone is the same, is quite absurd. I think most people underestimate how diverse people are, because we typically live in "bubbles", surrounded by people similar to us. Thus e.g. a person with IQ 130 mostly keeps friends with IQ 130, and then concludes "yes, all humans are intellectually about the same". Then they step outside the bubble, and are shocked by the sheer incompetence of other people, who have e.g. IQ 100, i.e. not retarded, just... not smart either.
I have a repeated experience (a few years ago when I was a Mensa member) that when a person who seemed smart to me considered themselves intellectually average, I told them "nope, you are smart, and you should take a Mensa test to confirm this". About half of them actually accepted my challenge, and all of them passed the test. Some of them were quite shocked by that. If only 2% of population can pass the test, and they supposedly do not differ from the rest of the population at anything meaningful, how could my predictions be so accurate?
My response to (3) is that intelligence is an exciting topic many people have an opinion on, so of course the racists do, too. It would be suspicious if they did not. And by the way, many racists also take positions quite similar to Taleb's. There were probably historical Nazis who said things like: yeah, maybe the Jews have a high IQ, but who cares, that's just some academic nonsense, in real life they are still inferior to an Aryan Fat Tony who is street smart and has the will to power, or something like that.
I also notice that all graphs used in the article are cut at IQ 130. I find that suspicious. Perhaps there is a good reason for that: many IQ tests stop at some relatively low value, because people with higher IQ are rare, so calibrating the tests for them is more expensive. But I strongly suspect that adding e.g. the incomes of people with IQ 160 to the graph would make a visible difference. (I suspect than on a typical ACX meetup, IQ 130 would be the average, or even below the average. In Taleb's graphs, it is the highest intelligence considered.) Similarly, the categories of occupations are just too wide. Perhaps the lowest-quartile "college professor" is completely unimpressive, intellectually. What about a lowest-quartile quantum physics professor, though? Is he also indistinguishable from a smart janitor?
Oops, took me more than the originally planned 15 minutes. Still didn't check the article that Taleb was taking his graph from. Anyway, nothing I wrote here is new or particularly insightful. Remember that the next time Taleb calls himself "unchallenged". The counter arguments are obvious, he just doesn't listen.
Does it matter that Taleb is coming out on the *anti*-group differences side? It seems weird that the claim that IQ tests don't measure anything important is handy for Nazis and for racial egalitarians. I'm going to have to think about how that works.
> It seems weird that the claim that IQ tests don't measure anything important is handy for Nazis and for racial egalitarians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
Nazis and the woke would agree that the important thing about you is your ethnic background (although the woke would also add gender, sexual orientation, etc.), and that your individual traits or skills are irrelevant. IQ tests measure your individual trait, i.e. an unimportant thing.
IQ tests measure the individual; both Nazis and the woke are collectivists (although in different ways).
Interesting point, though I don't think all racial egalitarians are woke.
> Does it matter that Taleb is coming out on the *anti*-group differences side?
In the linked article he says that "Different populations have different variances, even different skewness and these comparisons require richer models."
(In other words, it's complicated, and Taleb is the only person smart enough to understand it. And no, he is not going to tell us.)
>Taleb is a smart guy and has a few good insights
No, no, he's not smart and has no good "insights", mostly because "good insight" is an oxymoron. Think about what "insight" means. Does it mean scholarship? Knowledge? No, it means something consumers can easily easily consume. It's intellectual candy, intellectual crack. Real knowledge is hard, cheap and easy "insights" are never good, and insight merchants are a cancer.
https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/nassim-taleb-on-iq/
I guess Taleb's response to the first table would be that all those correlations are produced by the lower half of the IQ distribution. (The rest of the article, I agree with.)
Here is my attempt to "steelman" Taleb:
There are various reasons to study IQ. We want to understand those below the average. We want to understand the average. And we want to understand those above the average. Different people care about different parts of the intelligence spectrum.
Specifically for the purpose of studying people with high IQ, the usual research is often not helpful. First, many IQ tests are capped at IQ 130, which for some people is actually where the interesting part *begins*.
Second, calculating the correlation between IQ and some measure X for the entire population conflates "people with low IQ suck at X" with "people with high IQ excel at X". Even if both are true, the correlation measured for the entire population does not *prove* it. To make a claim specifically about high IQ, we should calculate the correlation for the part of population with IQ greater than 100. And then maybe again for the part with IQ greater than 130, to check for the hypothesis "...but *too much* IQ is harmful".
Some people believe in significance of low IQ but insignificance of high IQ, for both good and bad reasons. The bad reasons are, of course, ideological. A good reason would be the law of diminishing returns.
For example, if you have an IQ 70 and can't get a good job, it is quite obvious what is your problem. If you have an IQ 130 and a relatively good job, but you would like to have a better one, it is not equally obvious that magically changing your IQ to 150 would solve the problem. Chances are, your greatest problem is something else (such as low conscientiousness, lack of social skills, etc.), which might still prevent you from getting the desired job even if your IQ magically changed to 150. Perhaps not... but that needs to be shown by a research that compares IQ 130 and IQ 150 directly, and not just says "comparing IQ 50, 70, 90, 110, 130, and 150, greater values correlate with greater success".
Makes sense. Thanks.
To be honest, I don't think the post even warrants a response from intelligence researchers - half of it is just crying about racism, the other half is "High school student who just finished AP stats"-level objections like the average not being the same as the entire population or that error bars somehow invalidate the mean difference between professions.
He also claims the IQ-income correlation is ~0.01, which is shockingly wrong. The Mind-Killer really can infect anyone, I guess.
When I first saw that article I had never heard of the guy. It's an incoherent article on Medium with myriad spelling mistakes, I literally assumed it was written by a mentally ill nutcase. I have continued to be profoundly shocked that anyone takes him seriously on anything.
His apparently astroturfed, mediocre "book" The Black Swan is devoid of math. His case against "The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud" is: https://dl.abcbourse.ir/dl/Library/book/Taleb_The-Black-Swan.pdf
"Forget everything you heard in college statistics or probability theory. If
you never took such a class, even better. Let us start from the very beginning.
THE GAUSSIAN AND THE MANDELBROTIAN
I was transiting through the Frankfurt airport in December 2001 , on my
way from Oslo to Zurich.
I had time to kill at the airport and it was a great opportunity for me
to buy dark European chocolate, especially since I have managed to successfully convince myself that airport calories don't count. The cashier
handed me, among other things, a ten deutschmark bill, an (illegal) scan
of which can be seen on the next page. The deutschmark banknotes were
going to be put out of circulation in a matter of days, since Europe was..."
Where is the math? Who takes this seriously?
He then argues against Gaussians with ... wealth distributions. This guy is a fraudster btw, he claims to be a statistician but he only has business degrees. Something is really off about this guy. He basically argues for "fat tails" and talks about how Gaussians can't model stuff but Pareto et al were on this years ago. He seems to fail to understand that the Gaussian is the distribution with the most entropy of any distribution with finite mean and variance on the real line. The Pareto Distribution has finite mean and variance, models wealth, and has less entropy than the Gaussian. It would be stupid given this, additive genetics, and the CLT to "reject Gaussians" or whatever weird English-major thing he wants us to do. Gaussians are a specific thing, he has literally no point other than that some phenomena are not Gaussian.
As for the post itself, https://www.reddit.com/r/nassimtaleb/comments/x8a7rz/taleb_on_iq_he_claims_his_medium_article_has_not/
Grey Enlightenment starts with noticing the same thing, Taleb's really creepy, skeezy nature:
"I’m guessing he chose 35 because that is when he became rich writing mediocre books, trading (he claims to have gotten rich with trading even though no records or second-hand anecdotal evidence exists of any actual trading prowess on his part), or kinda being a thin-skinned blowhard online."
Basically it seems like he wrote this stupid business book NYT best seller fluff and has been making up lies about himself ever since. He is probably a compulsive liar or something. Ironically it seems like he won the lottery with his book -- funny enough this can be modeled with Bernoullis, making the number of winners a quite small tailed distribution that looks like a bell curve. I wonder if he knows what it's called? Probably not.
Thanks for the Reddit link.
1) This is the link I wanted to post as a reply: http://jsmp.dk/posts/2019-06-16-talebiq/
2) It is amazing to read the reactions of Taleb's fans on Reddit.
"You cite your own blog?" -- yes, of course, because Taleb's fans will keep saying the same things over and over again across the entire internet, no matter how many times it was debunked, so it is much smarter to just write a response once and keep linking it.
"He's probably angry because he realized that Mensa is a club of idiots after paying for their expensive tests and memberships." -- uhm, in my country that is €10 for testing and €25 for yearly membership. I don't think it is a money well spent, but I wouldn't call it expensive either.
"Lmao wtf is this sir ??? what are your credentials??" -- haha, so Taleb keeps talking about how Fat Tony can outsmart all intellectuals-yet-idiots, and accuses scientists of fraud, but hey, if you point out on your blog a mistake he made, you suddenly need a PhD to be taken seriously.
(All these comments are upvoted. All comments critical of Taleb are downvoted.)
i think thats just humor, not an actual belief
The point I find interesting is that IQ was conceived originally as a metric to measure sub-par intelligence and that it might work well for that, but it's accuracy isn't particularly good in the direction of measuring above-par intelligence. The scatterplot on the post shows how much noise there is in correlating IQ with lifetime income results, something it has been purported to be meaningful for.
Incorrect - stop taking Taleb's word for things: https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/nassim-taleb-on-iq/
Terman's work on highly mathematically gifted kids and how their lives turned out (impressively, as you'd expect) seems to contradict this claim.
> IQ was conceived originally as a metric to measure sub-par intelligence
The original purpose of IQ was to measure whether small kids were intellectually ready for school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Binet
The original formula was literally "mental age ÷ physical age × 100", which meant like "if you are 5 years old, but your reasoning abilities are on the level of a typical 6 years old, your IQ is 120".
Only later, when the concept was generalized for all ages, the formula was refactored, because it doesn't make sense for older people to assume that intelligence is always increasing with age... and you also can't find such N that Einstein's reasoning abilities are "on the level of a typical N years old".
As you see, Taleb is wrong (yet "unchallenged") even about things that are quite simple to check.
Right, the latter is humor, but he does seem to believe that IQ is largely pseudoscientific.
**Stuff on Class Inequality**
I think every sect out there right now, even the far right, ignores genetic class inequality. I'm convinced this is a huge mistake and understanding how people vary within a racial group is super enlightening when it comes to someone's understanding of politics.
To begin to understand class inequality, let's stretch what Jordan Peterson calls psychology's most secure and significant accomplishment: IQ. We want to map IQ ranging onto concrete, politically relevant abilities.
I want to start with HBD. How many people can actually understand it?
In 2006 the breakdown on what people thought on the question "How much to genes determine race differences in drive to succeed. math ability, criminality, and IQ?" was 50% not at all, 24% very little, 20% some, 6% a lot, 1% just about all. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3832063/
To understand the arguments in this field you should be able to get a 5, maybe less, on the AP Statistics exam, an extremely easy exam which is very light on dense theory like what you might find in Wasserman's textbook All of Statistics. It is generally considered to be equivalent to a 200 level business statistics course, not even a first introduction to math stat. In 2021 only 16 percent of the people who took the test got a 5. 42% failed. https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/about-ap-scores/score-distributions
An AP statistics practice test from 2012 gives a curve; a 70% is a 5 so under a 5 is a typical failure in a college class. a 3 is a 44%. https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap-statistics-practice-exam-2012.pdf?course=ap-statistics
Somewhere in between 58% and 16% (or less because of selection bias) of people can understand HBD themselves. The rest have to trust The Experts. That's at least 42% of people and potentially more than 84%. A large minority at the least. The IQ cutoff for understanding basic statistics and by extension HBD is somewhere between 97 and 115 or greater.
The average IQ of a college graduate is about 108. https://pumpkinperson.com/2017/01/17/iq-academic-success/
If we use this number and increase our standards for failure to where half of the 3s are given 2s we are looking for the 53rd percentile of an IQ distribution with a mean of 108. This is 72nd percentile overall.
Now for some reading. In 2003 NCES estimated that only 57% of adults are functionally literate. https://archive.ph/o/NZicZ/https://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp
That's charitable, only 13% were in their top category where texts could be "dense."
Robin Hanson gives us a classic post with similar figures: https://archive.ph/MGAja
The reading SAT is pretty easy, I get perfect scores on it, but getting 80% of the questions right is 95th percentile. I get all of the questions right. The average basically can't read and gets maybe half of the questions right https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/understanding-sat-scores.pdf
Anatoly Karlin also gives some numbers like this: https://archive.ph/vxN69
The bottom half of the population basically can't make an informed vote, and the bottom 85-95% are seriously disabled compared to the top 5%. People under the top 85% exhibit serious reading comprehension and mathematical deficits and this is in a society that wants to pass as many of those people as possible. You probably need to be at least in the top 5% to be a professor or a serious Substack pundit with a book and all of that. People the top 10% under that level might be able to sort through information they are given if they want to put in the effort, but they won't generate new culture or ideas. Under the 85 percentile people begin to struggle to understand even information that is given to them. It is likely that people under that level would not fully understand this post.
Now departing from IQ, there's some data on temeperament. There is this concept called conventional morality where what you think is righteous is just whatever the law happens to be at your place in time, you don't have the capacity to think normatively using your own moral principles. You are a follower. The majority of college students are like this and this is mostly independent from IQ https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746042.pdf .
Lawrence Kohlberg found that about 85% of the population is like this. This correlates with IQ but not by much, it's about .3 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/016235329301600304
So if 15% of people are smart enough to properly understand politics, and 25% of them can think using their own moral principles (very charitable assumptions), 3.75% of the population is politically autonomous.
A final thing is intellectual habits. That 3.75% might not care for politics even if they aren't conventionalists. The average American reads 12 books per year https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-books-past.aspx
This is skewed though. 27% read more than 11 per year, so 73% will not be very informed beyond The News. Also most of this is not nonfiction. Numbers are hard to come by but based on sales a good estimate is that 40% of this reading is nonfiction.
The average American therefore reads only 4 or 5 nonfiction books per year. This is skewed, like I said above, and assuming people tend to read either nonfiction or fiction, only 10% read 11 or more nonfiction books per year.
But what do they read? Are they reading Carl Schmitt? Tacitus? Public Choice Theory textbooks? Arthur Jensen?
No, of course not, they're reading this: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Nonfiction/zgbs/digital-text/157325011
This fabulous list includes top sellers like "Pain: A Love Story" by Serena Sterling, a book by Sam from iCarly, If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Atomic Habits, Token Black Girl, etc, etc.
It would be charitable to assume that 30% of that 3.75% have a good reading habit. That gives us 1.125%, an imprecise upper bound on the fraction of informed, agentic voters in the US.
"You see, the word idiot is etymologically derived from the Attic Greek word ἰδιώτης (idiṓtēs), which literally means 'a private person,' or 'a person who does not take part in the affairs of the polis.' It is derived from the word ἴδιος (ídios), meaning 'of one’s own,” which is also the root of our English word idiosyncratic. The word ἰδιώτης originally had no bearing whatsoever on how intelligent the person it was being used to refer to was. It merely indicated that the person did not take part in public affairs." https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2016/11/07/the-bizarre-origins-of-the-word-idiot/
We don't live in a democracy, where the majority of people think about politics independently and then vote to decide who wins the fight for power. We live in a world where the very few who are functionally literate and can understand politics fight over the votes of distracted, conventional, and uninformed ἰδιώτης.
I think this is a good post overall, but using HBD as your stats example is needlessly polarising - none of the rest of your post cares one whit about racial anything.
As to object level critique - I tend to think of intelligence as "potential", and while (assuming for argument that your numbers are correct) you convincingly paint a picture of how many Americans are *currently* functional independent thinkers, the data you've presented doesn't in any way rule distinguish between lack of natural aptitude and a horrific failure of the education system and societal norms - eg. there's definitely no ability barrier to all "3.75%" of your 'sufficiently literate and numerate' group having a "good reading habit", that's purely social.
If you want to flesh this out into a standalone post elsewhere, I suggest elaborating on why you've picked the AP stats exam as your test of mathematical numeracy (I believe I get it but it's worth spelling out), why you've picked the grade you've picked as your threshold (because a 5(/5?) is equivalent to only 70%? % marks don't necessarily translate well across systems, American undergrad courses are unusually easy to get high % marks in), and similarly it's worth elaborating on the literacy measure you've used - quoting a definition and/or example of a "dense" text would be nice.
Finally, I'd be fascinated by cross-country comparisons if you can get them - those would help shed light on if the primary problem is the education system and/or local culture. Eg. French people have a much greater social expectation of being politically informed and opinionated.
Since I do not know what HBD stands for, and 5 minutes googling didn't help, I'm going to ignore this thread.
I'm trying to get into this "conventional morality" thing but the Defining Issues Test is pretty opaque. Are you sure it shows what you claim it shows? Can you go into more detail on the data you claim shows that much of the population have "conventional morality"?
Great post, if this forum had decent people on it they would be hailing you as better than Scott Alexander. He's never posted anything even half as intelligent. Goes to show that their attention and compliments are totally performative, political, and cynical. Sadly, your data proves why spectacle merchants receive so much attention and why this kind of thing is sneered at and ignored by people who probably don't have the reading skills or mathematical literacy to understand it.
VERY good comment. Thanks for posting.
Banned for this comment.
I wish your new blog still had tags. It was super useful to have a list of all AI-related posts on the old SSC at the click of a button.
The fiction tag was really great as well
So I just put down Faulkner’s “Go Down Moses” and picked up Erik Hoel’s The Revelations”.
Am I going to have to draw a crazy family tree with a bunch of ‘?’s in it for this one too?
Just checking. Getting low on scratch paper here. :)
Arestovych seems to be mostly known in these circles as the guy who predicted the Russian invasion of Ukraine with uncanny accuracy back in 2019, but he actually has a fascinating and original-minded political philosophy combining conservatism and futurism with a strong focus on individual freedom, and as a presidential advisor with friends in high places, one of the most popular people in a country in flux with the focus of the world on it, and someone who's built a lot of connections with the Russian opposition, he has some genuine ability to push for his ideas. I'm surprised he doesn't get more attention in these circles, between his positions and his extremely colorful character.
Someone just posted an overview essay about him and his political philosophy. Any thoughts?
https://justpaste.it/7h3q6
Thank you for this. I hadn't heard of him but I find this philosophy/outlook to largely align with my own (though i am in the US so the slavic specific parts are bit foreign to me). “freedom moderated by a vision of eternity” really connects with me. I will seek out more of his writing/speaking.
In my view, Arestovych is a psychiatrist more than a philosopher. His nebulous and utopian "fifth project", in which he tries to combine all the good features of liberalism, socialism, progressivism and pan-Slavic nationalism, doesn't strike me as particularly thought-over or coherent (to the extent I can extract it from the occasional interview with Latynina), but I have seen him use it to bottle up some common sense sorely needed at certain moments, and deliver it to the right places at the right time, and I am immensely grateful to him for that. (Among other things, he spoke out against the cancelations of Russian culture in the West during the first months of the 2022 war; against Zelensky's push to stop giving Schengen visas to Russians; against an idiotic project by the UA military to restrict freedom of movement inside Ukraine for mobilization purposes. At least in the latter case, the project was quickly scuttled.) He is also fun to listen to to a certain point (and gets annoying beyond that point). All in all, he strikes me as a Jordan-Peterson-like "applied thinker" (some of the similarity is explained by both being Jungians) doing an important job. If you're looking for a political philosophy that stands on its own, however, you'll be disappointed.
Is development economics bogus? Are there any meaningful examples of development economic interventions resulting in both significant and lasting examples of growth in developing countries?
Has there ever even been an example of an officially designated developing country becoming 'developed'? Obviously all wealthy countries started poor, but as long as 'developing' countries have been an official designation, has this 'development' ever actually occurred? Perhaps in Asia, but it seems that most people interested in development economics neither accept any role of genetics in differences in economic development, nor do they seem especially interested in promoting the type of policies that have accompanies economic growth in these Asian countries.
They of course have an endless list of narratives to explain why the latest and greatest idea of theirs has failed to produce anything of value, but I'm certain that if a counterfactual Singapore or South Korea had identical policies as the real Singapore/South Korea but were still "developing", this would not be a cause of extreme confusion for these economists. They would have a bunch of reasons to say "Of COURSE those countries aren't developed". Which is to say, their model of reality is hopelessly wrong and they update their narratives instead of their model when they are wrong yet again.
One of George Stigler's humorous essays imagines product liability law being applied to universities. One line — by memory so not verbatim:
"The branch of economics that dealt with how to enrich poor nations, I think it was called 'economic development,' was enjoined by the courts on the grounds that no university could afford to pay for the amount of damage its professors did."
You might need a bit more specificity, because I'm not entirely sure what you're asking.
So, as a factual matter, yes, a lot of countries have developed significantly, no, there has not been any replicable model to bring their per capita income to Western levels. There's a lot of countries where per capita income is between $1000-$3000/month. Which is not a "Western" lifestyle but is a significant and radical jump from being a "developing" economy.
So, hopefully without getting too technical, just take a look at a list of countries by gdp per capita (PPP) (1). There's plenty of countries like Chile or Thailand or Serbia or even Ukraine where people are making $12-$30k year which, ya know, isn't great but it's far from where they were 30-40 years ago or where still developing countries, like most of Africa, are. And it's not like their growth rates are bad; I certainly wouldn't say Chile is growing as fast as China but they don't compare too unfavorably. (2)
As for development economics, while I'm no expert, I thought the field was generally a mess and hasn't had a persistent message since the Washington Consensus, which has been dead for decades now. And Chile/Thailand/Serbia all certainly pursued different economic development plans.
Soooo... it feels like you're trying to argue against someone who's not really there, pointing to a lack of economic progress which....kind of exists, like "developing" economies haven't closed the gap with developed economies but they're certainly much better off than they were 30-40 years ago. What exactly are you getting at here?
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
(2) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?locations=CL-CN&view=chart
There are some methods that have shown consistency in results like land reform/redistribution. From the "How Asia Works" book review:
"'Klaus Deininger, one of the world’s leading authorities on land policy and development, has spent decades assembling data that show how the nature of land distribution in poor countries predicts future economic performance. Using global land surveys done by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), he has worked out that only one significant developing country has managed a long-term growth rate of over 2.5 per cent with a very unequal distribution of land. That country is Brazil, the false prophet of fast growth which collapsed in a debt crisis in the 1980s in large part because of its failure to increase agricultural output. Deininger’s two big conclusions are that land inequality leads to low long-term growth and that low growth reduces income for the poor but not for the rich. In short, if poor countries are to become rich, then the equitable division of land at the outset of development is a huge help. Japan, Korea and Taiwan put this in place.'
Unfortunately, it's not on the table anymore, which means we might not see many more East Asian - style economic miracles:
'Will we witness an economic transformation like Japan, Korea, Taiwan or China’s again? The answer is quite possibly not, for one simple reason. Without effective land reform it is difficult to see how sustained growth of 7-10 per cent a year - without fatal debt crises - can be achieved in poor countries. And radical land reform, combined with agronomic and marketing support for farmers, is off the political agenda. Since the 1980s, the World Bank has instead promoted microfinance, encouraging the rural poor to set up street stalls selling each other goods for which they have almost no money to pay. It is classic sticking-plaster development policy. The leading NGO promoting land reform, US-based Landesa, is today so pessimistic about the prospects for further radical reforms in the world’s poor states that it concentrates its lobbying efforts on the creation of micro plots of a few square metres. These plots supplement the diets and incomes of rural dwellers who work in otherwise unreformed agricultural sectors. From micro interventions, however, economic miracles will not spring'"
In general though, I agree with your sentiment. This doesn't just apply to economics, it's everywhere; people start with their pre-concieved conclusions and work backwards to a model that makes it make sense. Just goes to show that the scientific method is not a natural way of human thinking.
I do city planning in Greenland and I'm curious if anyone here is curious to read and critique a project that I'm about to finish. My work is influenced heavily by James C Scott (Seeing like a State) and David Graeber (The Dawn of Everything). I waltz patiently with Moloch on a daily basis.
The project is called "Catalogue of Potentials in Qaqortoq"; Qaqortoq is a city of 3k people in southern Greenland. The project has a word count of 50k. It has 4 parts that each indicate a step in the double diamond method. English is not my vernacular. I've a bachelor's in arctic civil engineering, but my writign style or the genre of the project is weird; I've hardly used statistics at all. There's a lot of pictures. There might be an overfocus on semi-private spaces and other ideas from Jan Gehl. I have taken care to explore and convey the knowledge and visions of the people I've talked with. I've put care into talking with people. That's a teaser. Write me if you're interested.
Arctic civil engineering. That’s a a pretty interesting major. I was going to say a cool major but didn’t want to make anyone groan. :)
You'd be right. I can't say too much about what city planners learn in universities in Denmark because that's not what I studied, but I know from some city planner friends that Jan Gehl is a superstar in the field, and Jan Gehl does take notes not from theme parks, but from holiday resorts (especially the maze-like slow down and have a spa experience kinds of places), which I feel like is pretty much the same thing in this respect?
Does anyone know if there's been more rigorous research on Scott's observation from "A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows" about how these these text-to-image generation models seem to get stuck in basins of attraction when a prompt is too reminiscent of a well-known archetype?
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-asking-robots-to-design
I've seen a quote that 97% of people enjoy being around other people similar to themselves, and only 3% enjoy being around those who are different. I have not been able to find the source of the quote, or published research supporting this. Does anyone recognize it?
There are quite a few traits where opposites attract and likes repel.
Stubbornness and desired level of responsibility are the obvious ones.
How similar? How different?
I would probably say "similar" because it is a safer answer, if I am not allowed to specify which differences are okay and which are not.
Also, because the people I have met so far seem different from me, so meeting a clone would be a new experience.
A great deal of basic human flourishing has come from improved sanitation...simple things like cooking foods before eating, bathing, proper waste disposal, and so on. Even if no one knows all the mechanisms behind, say, the Gillian Flynn Effect or life expectancy increase, this is surely a large factor.
Have we* exhausted all the low-hanging $20 bills in this arena, such that there's not gonna be, like, a modern one-upping of hand washing? With diminishing returns or even negative second-order consequences (e.g. antibacterial soaps contributing to "superbugs"), is the world "clean enough"?
*royal We, local conditions may differ
There are surely huge gains to be made outside of the western world. Especially around child birth where poor sanitation has a very large negative effect. But hard to say if there are easy solution in more developed countries. Some things that come close would be if everyone got a flu shot and/or wore n95 masks a lot more effect like in Asian countries (not something i do or really want to do). That would save lives by reducing disease transmission. Also resolving all the lead in water issues that have been popping up in the US recently. Might not save lives but should increase quality of life.
I seem to recall that on balance, a properly-used N95 reduces covid transmission by roughly...10%. Dunno how that compares to flu...probably unfavourably, given Omicron's pretty high infectiousness. The whole sick-pay thing matters here too, even if it's not a direct intervention...although there's definitely people on the margins who literally can't afford to miss a day out sick, many more opt to go to work anyway. Incentives matter, and theoretical diffuse harms are way less salient than immediate paycheck hits. The same plays out in school attendance...there just isn't always Slack in the syllabus to accommodate proper lengths of staying home. (I remember some classmates in highschool who were held back entire years due to catching mononucleosis...that was pretty scary. Like, yeah, obviously better not to attend...but that's an incredible humiliation, and disruption of social network + educational progress...being sick already sucks enough!)
Lead, asbestos, etc. removal: diminishing returns, although I'm still surprised how common lead paint is.
Given the increasing number of allergy/auto immune disorders, yes, we are clean enough.
Hmm, it was my understanding that allergy prevalence is more tied to kids not getting outside often enough young enough, or otherwise exposed to a variety of potential triggers (such as pe dander)...with some degree of heritability as well. Although it might well be the case that safetyism attitudes towards not letting kids get """dirty""" contribute to keeping them confined indoors, safely glued to hypoallergenic screens.
Food allergies: I sure do miss peanuts in public. Amazing cooking oil, great snack. Other "nut butters" really don't compare, imo.
Does bathing really help much?
I wonder about that. Presumably baths and showers disrupt our skin microbiome. We know from experience that too much washing dries out the skin. Do or did stone age tribes suffer from chronic skin conditions? Analogizing from the gut microbiome, eradicating pathogens is not a feasible goal. It seems the healthiest guts have a diversity of bacteria, which presumably keeps the pathogens in check.
Yes. Reduces pathogens and promotes healing and food preservation.
Granted, most of the world solved this at least in part, but in a costly, time consuming fashion.
Food irradiation, maybe. A lot of reduction in food-borne illness, less waste, and reduced need for refrigeration and preservation is being left on the table because of consumer distaste for the word "radiation."
That was one of my favourite "alt-history" scenarios as a kid...atomic development going somewhat differently, certain nuclear failures not happening. Steaks that last for months? Wow, that sounds amazing. A world we could have had...still could, I guess. All it'd take is a norms shift. "Gentlemen, we have the capability"...
There's been some talk about installing UV lights all over the place to reduce the incidence of respiratory diseases. I'm not sure if that meets the criteria though.
Murderous UV lights in ventilation ducts is one thing that was discussed during Covid, which could possibly reduce airborne disease a *lot*.
A great new pop-science book is out about long-lived species: Steven Austad's "Methuselah's Zoo"!
I think it'll be good and important for longevity research, because species differences are way bigger than what currently-heavily-studied interventions can do. (E.g. a calorically restricted mouse lives 3-5 years instead of 2-4; but naked mole-rats can live >30, bowhead whales >200, ocean quahogs >500.) Comparative biogerontology isn't the biggest field right now, but this book will help popularize it; and since we now have comparative genomics to generate hypotheses, and e.g. gene-editing to test them (on top of studying long-lived species' cells in culture), I bet it'll be able to get somewhere.
My book review of it, submitted to BioEssays, has been accepted! e-article version should be out in a couple weeks, final version should be out in November [it'll be at: doi.org/10.1002/bies.202200144].
To newcomers to aging/longevity bio, I'd recommend reading it second or third. First read Andrew Steele's "Ageless" [my goodreads review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4112868997], and/or Austad's earlier "Why We Age." If you're interested in the currently-heavily-studied stuff like caloric restriction mimetics, David Stipp's "The Youth Pill" is good. Aubrey de Grey's "Ending Aging" is more detailed but older than Steele's book, in its coverage of the directly-repair-damage approach.
Great resources, many thanks! I've read David Sinclair's book, and a recent book not on your list, Eat Like the Animal, by Raubenheimer and Simpson. The latter's thesis was a new one to me, that our bodies want a target amount of protein and we overeat if our food is low in protein. Do you have any thoughts on that thesis? Not a longevity theme per se, but an interesting explanation for the obesity epidemic.
I don't know much about that; basically all I know about nutrition and hunger I know from Scott's review of "The Hungry Brain": https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-brain/
Thank you for this!
Been interested in this field for awhile but so much of what comes out about it seems based on shoddy or overstated experiments.
Also it's quite hard to separate the wheat from the chaff if you don't know the field that well. Will look at your recommendations and hopefully they will clear some things up :)
The current hardcover edition of Methuselah's Zoo has a couple minor errata that I brought to Austad's attention from the advance proof, too late to be able to change before it printed. Maybe he'll edit them for the paperback. They mostly don't affect the scientific content, just a typo here, getting slightly wrong an old cultural reference there.*
The main scientifically-relevant one iirc was that the comparison of cancer resistance in naked mole-rats vs blind mole-rats wasn't clear. For a good review of comparative cancer resistance in mammals including those, see Seluanov et al. 2018 [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41568-018-0004-9].
*Aldous Huxley's "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan" is about searching for life extension and finding it by eating carp guts. It also plays with the idea that humans are neotenous apes, similar to axolotls being neotenous salamanders [this juvenile chimp looks more human than does the adult chimp: https://images.wtmfiles.com/NeotonyChimpsProfile_Crp_TxtCa_WEB_1122x449.jpg]. Aldous Huxley was familiar with his brother Julian Huxley's experiments de-neotenizing axolotls so they finally anatomically "mature". In the book, life extension results in the long-lived humans also finally anatomically "maturing", to look more apeish! But the current version of Methuselah's Zoo got it backwards, and said that the carp guts made the humans look like "fetal apes."
I remember reading that book years ago, and its satirical ending. Spoilers ahead:
“What’s that?” he whispered.
“A foetal ape,” Dr. Obispo began; but was cut short by another explosion of hilarity, that doubled him up as though with a blow in the solar plexus.
…Beyond the bars, the light of the lanterns had scooped out of the darkness a narrow world of forms and colours. On the edge of a low bed, at the centre of this world, a man was sitting, staring, as though fascinated, into the light. His legs, thickly covered with coarse reddish hair, were bare. The shirt, which was his only garment, was torn and filthy. Knotted diagonally across the powerful chest was a broad silk ribbon that had evidently once been blue. From a piece of string tied round his neck was suspended a little image of St. George and the Dragon in gold and enamel. He sat hunched up, his head thrust forward and at the same time sunk between his shoulders. With one of his huge and strangely clumsy hands, he was scratching a sore place that showed red between the hairs of his left calf.
“A foetal ape that’s had time to grow up,” Dr. Obispo managed at last to say. “It’s too good!” Laughter overtook him again. “Just look at his face!” he gasped, and pointed through the bars. Above the matted hair that concealed the jaws and cheeks, blue eyes stared out of cavernous sockets. There were no eyebrows; but under the dirty, wrinkled skin of the forehead, a great ridge of bone projected like a shelf.
…Mr. Stoyte seized him by the shoulder and violently shook him. “Who are they?” he demanded.
…“The one with the Order of the Garter,” said Dr. Obispo, raising his voice against the tumult, “he’s the Fifth Earl of Gonister. The other’s his housekeeper.”
“But what’s happened to them?”
“Just time,” said Dr. Obispo airily.
“Time?”
…. “But the Earl there — let me see, he was two hundred and one last January.”
Dr. Obispo went on talking. Slowing up of development rates . . . one of the mechanisms of evolution . . the older an anthropoid, the stupider . . . senility and sterol poisoning , , . the intestinal flora of the carp . . . the Fifth Earl had anticipated his own discovery ... no sterol poisoning, no senility ... no death, perhaps, except through an accident . . . but meanwhile the foetal anthropoid was able to come to maturity . . . It was the finest joke he had ever known.
Without moving from where he was sitting, the Fifth Earl urinated on the floor.
…“No need of any further experiment,” Dr. Obispo was saying. “We know it works. You can start taking the stuff at once. At once,” he repeated with sarcastic emphasis.
…Mr. Stoyte broke his silence. “How long do you figure it would take before a person went like that?” he said in a slow hesitating voice. “I mean, it wouldn’t happen at once . . . there’d be a long time while a person . . . well, you know; while he wouldn’t change any. And once you get over the first shock — well, they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course. Don’t you think so, Obispo?” he Insisted.
Dr. Obispo went on looking at him in silence; then threw back his head and started to laugh again."
I read this essay about the hard limits of human intelligence with interest. I'm still thinking about the implications of Wolpert's theses, but, yes, I think there's an upper limit for what human intelligence can comprehend and the problems that human intelligence can solve. Nor do I expect AI to move us forward much, because AI will still have the observational limitations our augmented wetware minds have. Part of the problem, which Wolpert doesn't seem to acknowledge (or perhaps he didn't think about it) is the physical constraints on what we can observe. For instance, there's a limit on how far back we can look into the history of the universe. And the majority of the universe (beyond 48 billion light years) will always be unobservable. Likewise, there are limits on how far into the high-energy states of matter we can observe. Wolpert spends a lot of time focused on new types of mathematics, but mathematics isn't very good when you can't create ways to apply them and test in reality.
https://aeon.co/essays/ten-questions-about-the-hard-limits-of-human-intelligence
Donals Hoffman argues that the current scientific paradigm is at a dead end, citing leading physicists like Arkani-Hamed, who says "space-time is doomed". Hoffman uses the analogy of video-games. While we wear the headset it "looks like" e.g., a car (or whatever") is speeding past us on our left, but that (obviously) is an illusion in the virtual world. We can't understand the principles underlying the game by examining the world inside the game not matter how thoroughly we study the virtual world within the game. The reality has to too with transistors and diodes and software and whatnot in the computer generating the virtual world of the game. Physics has reached its limits, he argues, because we're analyzing the world inside the headsets, convinced that if we can enlarge the pixels sufficiently, we'll understand everything. In other words, w're at a dead-end not just because of limited intelligence but because we haven't figured out that we're studying the virtual reality within the game revealed to us by the headset. We have to figure out what's outside the headset.
I'll have to look up Hoffman. But I'd agree with his analysis.
For any ridiculously smart people with access to standardised test scores to prove it, did you have any idea about how smart you were before access to test scores?
I ask because my girlfriend has struggled with school her entire life despite working really hard. She scraped through university, really struggles with her job as an insurance broker, and her favourite thing to do in her spare time is watch YouTube clips of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders (those women are incredible by the way). She recently took 2 IQ tests under controlled conditions and received a genius score (>98th percentile) on both tests.
I love her to bits, genius or not, but I feel like all the people I know with these kinds of scores find school really easy and normally have a need for cognition to do a lot of active thinking about something that interests them in their spare time- my girlfriend definitely does not fit this description. Is my girlfriend just really weird? Or is this more normal than I think?
To the first question: yes.
To your girlfriend: she might have processing issues, where she's quite bright but unable to deal well with certain sorts of situations or tasks. There are evaluators for this sort of thing, but they tend to be spendy.
My middle kid is like this, with an IQ in the mid 130s but some trouble applying it. There are drug and non-drug interventions. We're currently working through the non-drug coping techniques. The assessment ran us 2000+, and wasn't covered by insurance.
Good luck.
What? No, of course not. IQ correlates with educational outcomes to some degree, but there's so many not-strictly-smarts things that go into Doing Well At School. For example, I'm not quite at the super-cynic level of Bryan Caplan where the entire edifice comes off as a costly signalling trap...but it's absolutely true that formal education rewards obedience, conformity, and putting up with *a lot* of dreadfully boring arbitrary crap. Temperament matters so much. This can be just as hard for those with +SDs on IQ, as for those with -SDs...just in different ways.
I was a Precocious Prodigal Child growing up, always able to ace schoolwork and do reading/writing/math way above my "grade level". (Like doing 10th-grade math in 4th grade, or setting historic school records for Most Library Books Read In A Year, that sort of thing.) But the actual process of school was lonely, tedious, and cruel, and so many times my grades suffered because I'd consider doing the work "beneath me". You can't do no work for an entire semester, then bust out every assignment perfectly on the last day for full credit - since Being On Time is more important than the actual quality of the work. (Okay, that's not true, I actually did manage to pull that stunt off several times. Boy, those professors hated me.) By college, I'd fallen pretty well behind my definitely-less-smart peers...not for lack of ability, but because the education system was Just Not For Me.
They graduated and went on to degree-premium jobs. I didn't, and now bag groceries in my 30s. Constantly catch myself making "intellectual class" mistakes, like trying to explain to my bosses how X process would be so much more efficient with a simple spreadsheet...then I remember they can barely wrangle Microsoft Word. (You do not want to see our internal memos and emails...my God, so painful to read.) Good folks, love them, fight in the trenches back-to-back every shift...and yet. There's a reason I don't ever mention places like ACX at work. Just Not For Them.
I'm pretty sure I responded to a previous thread you had posted, several OTs ago, but: on the old scoring system, 2230/2400 SAT (perfect reading/writing, worse on math), ~130 WAIS-IV (again >99th percentile reading/writing, worse on math/shape rotator stuff). [ETA: took these tests *after* flunking out of three colleges three times, was feeling really stupid then and wondering what happened to that whiz kid...more fool me, she never left.] But school was a hellish nightmare that almost broke my intellectual curiosity for good, even given those proclivities. Many Such Cases, including most of my friends (borked minds think alike!). Your girlfriend isn't an outlier. Says a lot more about the school system than her.
I kind of thought of you when posting and was wondering what you'd say.
But the big difference between you and her is that your cognitive surplus, even if it hasn't dramatically improved your income, it still manifests in ways that make it obvious that you are likely smart. For instance, you voluntarily read a blog by a pseudonymous psychiatrist who writes short fiction, comments on Effective Altruism, and posts long speculative essays on the implications of a Carthaginian demon mentioned in a poem.
You also frequently like to ask and answer questions on complex topics written on threads like this one.
It does, though, make me consider that almost all the smart people I know of are quintessentially male. Not in that they are all men, but all have male interests and reasoning styles (the kinds of people attracted to this blog). So I could imagine that a really smart person that has more feminine interests would be more difficult to notice. Can you speak to that at all?
It's nice to know I've made a memorable impression on someone!
Feels like a "Categories Made For Man, Not Man For Categories" thing to do (sex- ?) gender-essentialism with interests and reasoning. There are definitely __trends__ with some predictive power (wordcels vs. shape rotators[1] really hit some nerves, I found it hilarious how like 99% of commenters here always claim to be shape rotators), but a lot of it just seems really context-dependent. Is a female computer[2] quintessentially male, for example? Less feminine than Rosie the Riveter, or more? It's easy to delineate broad distributional trends, but the exercise quickly gets absurd in the particulars. And totally-external social conditions (e.g. labour market dynamics) can shift such Timeless Trends surprisingly quickly. Incentives, ah, find a way.
That being said, I'm not sure what proportion of my traits are quintessentially male (QM) vs. quintessentially female (QF). I like to joke that being a Gemini means it's easier to get away with being both male and female at the same time. (This was a lot more ironic after I came out as trans.)
QM: working with hands/physical labour, tomboyish behaviour, stereotypical nerd interests like D&D, metalhead, aggressive/direct, appreciation of fine tools (knives are cool!), empathy-deficient, economic-thinking
QF: total wordcel (awful at ~all math and spatials), feminine fashions, submissive/accommodating, small talk and gossip, homebody, Lots Of Feelings Always (lol, hormones), conscientious neuroticism, shoe collection[3]
Basically, I guess I don't feel like intellect pays no dividends in QF areas? I'd much rather read Jia Tolentino than Terry Grossman; or gab with my geeky female friends about pan-coronavirus vaccines, rather than my female coworkers about who's sleeping with who (okay, I lied, that can actually get really fascinating). Smart is smart, no matter how it's channeled. Not __better__ - life isn't a morality play - but it's easier and more comfortable to be around intellectually-similar people. As with so many other traits.
What you might be gesturing at is QM things being more *legible*...computer science, academia, research, Nobel Prizes, even stupid shit like Jeopardy! championships or chess mastery. Men Being Really Smart is, like, a whole industry of respect-generation and -redistribution that tries really hard to pretend it's not. School definitely falls under this category, although I'd expect some shifts as the sex ratio in education achievement continues to distort further. (Didn't Andrew Yang say earlier this year that women graduate college like 35% more, or something? Crazy...)
I really don't like fuzzy wokeisms like "the invisiblization of women" or whatever, but there is some kernel of truth in that direction. A really smart person with feminine interests will mostly be recognized *within* that niche, not outside of it; I'm thinking of how even highly-successful female politicians/CEOs/whatever tend to get treated with the same paparazzi-Gawker vibe as celebrities, instead of the focus being on actual achievements. Conversely, channeling that intellect into perhaps-less-authentically-felt QM interests is likely to be more noticeable. This really seems unfortunate, cause incredibly-important QF things like parenting[4] sure do benefit bigly from applied smarts. We ought to incentivize this more!
I guess I'm sorta just rambling on with no clear closing, though. So I'll end by saying that one can chase __being noticed__ or __being smart__, but doing both at once is like serving two masters. Not impossible, but better check real carefully about that moonlighting clause. Additional terms and conditions may apply.
[1] https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)#Wartime_computing_and_electronics
[3] I think it's really precious how guys have tried to reclaim this QF interest under the "sneakerhead" rebranding. Makes for a great co-ed icebreaker, at least. Guys really ought to care more about teh fashuns, it's a strong comparative advantage...
[4] Who would you rather turn to for evidence-based parenting advice: Emily Oster, or Amy Chua? (Assume Scott is indisposed.)
Literally wrote a long, thoughtful, reply then my phone deleted it when I accidentally swiped away.
But to make long story short, I think your points about the "wordcel" thing and respect-generation get to the crux of my oversight.
Think our culture teaches us to instinctively value literary brilliance less than scientific smarts, hence why everyone wants to be a shape-rotator.
Also, appearing smart is a huge status game for men, who are more status-seeking by nature. For those reasons obviously the more conspicuous displays of what most people would deem smart are going to disproportionately come from men.
Was recently reading American Prometheus and was amused at how hard Oppenheimer tried to appear even more smart than he was.
You might be in a bubble. It seems more like everybody wants to be a Twitter or Youtube influencer, or maybe just make it to the next paycheck.
Maybe she needs to find a passion that fits her talents.
I had a shitty attitude in school, and didn't do very well until I encountered computer programming, and got swept away in productive passion.
Depends on the tests and what they are measuring. She may be spatially gifted/good at pattern matching, or she might be making up for poor/average maths scores with really good verbal abilities.
What course did she do at university? Maybe it didn't suit her talents, and insurance broker may be difficult because (to me) that's a sales job. High scoring on an IQ test doesn't mean you'll be good at sales, that's a whole other set of skills (including being able to manipulate people so that they happily sign up to buy the product you're selling).
To answer everything in order:
1. The tests were the Cattell B and the Culture Fair. The latter is purely pattern matching, similar to Raven's. The former leans much more on verbal reasoning and working memory.
2. To answer your question from the other thread, she's never been assessed for dyslexia or dyscalculia, but her vision isn't great generally due to an eye condition. Also, anything beyond basic mental arithmetic is something she struggles with in particular (3x13 is fine but 14x24 isn't). Even something like differentiating a basic term she would need to write out in order to solve, but her working memory appears to be otherwise fine when it comes to other things.
3. She studied econ, and despite struggling a lot with the mathier parts of the course (game theory was not fun for her) she still got a first-class degree. Oh and we grade things differently in the UK so I think her percentage works out at around a 3.8 GPA. Also, a lot of variability in her marks by subject. Like she either completely crushed it or did really bad. Little in-between.
4. That's the funny thing, because she's not very senior at the moment most of her job involves doing menial data entry tasks on Excel, preparing PowerPoints, and occasionally using Power BI to visualise some stuff. She's generally A LOT better at the client-facing stuff, despite having a fair bit of social anxiety.
"most of her job involves doing menial data entry tasks on Excel"
That makes me laugh, because I am atrocious at maths, yet somehow the office jobs I ended up in have me handling accounting, payroll, and creating spreadsheets in Excel to keep tracks of money etc.
We are not being assessed on our strengths!
I have the same problems with mental arithmetic and needing to write things down to work them out. I don't understand the magic words, I just do it all by rote memorisation.
I think she is a bit weird (not in a bad way!) Some of that 98 percentile IQ ought to show through in day to day life.
My cousin tested out 4 standard deviations above the mean. She always knew she was smarter than other people, and she had fun showing off. I don't think this helped her get along with people, though. My cousin never did anything with her genius, though. She went into the Army instead of college. Developed some post-Iraq health syndromes which VA couldn't really help her with. Now she's an alcoholic living on disability. I had my IQ tested four times, and I test out in the middle of the two standard deviations above the mean range—but my cousin, who is 20 years younger than I am, when she was just a kid would leave me in the dust with how quickly she could figure out a problem. And she had fun proving she was smarter than I was! But the thing I noticed about her was she was tremendously incurious. I wonder if I high IQ is particularly useful if one has little or no curiosity? As for me, I'm a sub-genius, but I've always known I was smarter than most people, but I've always known that there were people who were smarter than I am. Kept me humble, but I'm always shocked how *focused* many geniuses seem to be.
Yeah definitely don't get that vibe from her that you got from your cousin. Like, I've taken Wechsler and scored pretty much the same as you, but my girlfriend generally struggles with things more than me despite trying harder. Her parents made her study like hell in high school, while I was coasting but she still scored worse than me in Math and English.
Definitely think the curiosity component has something to do with it. In many ways, it's hard to tell in every day life that she's smart simply because she's not really curious about stuff. In fact, she actively loathes me engaging her in theoretical about economics (what she majored in) or philosophy, and doesn't have many hobbies.
Think it's possible I was just under the illusion that smart people generally find life easier and maybe that isn't the case.
Here's a stupid question about the bleedin' obvious: is she dyslexic or has trouble with dyscalculia or something of that kind? If she tests as smart but has always struggled despite studying hard, something might be amiss in that department, and if nobody ever consisted testing for it, it can go undiagnosed for years.
"I wonder if I high IQ is particularly useful if one has little or no curiosity?"
I can confirm that no, not so much. I was 115 IQ when I was young and 130 when I was older, and am currently doing seasonal cashier work with no idea what to do for the winter. IQ tests for ability to understand existing information, not for the much more important ability to fill a void in the absence of direction.
You can solve puzzles, at least. Do you try to solve harder and harder ones?
Not usually, I mostly hover at the same strength. Harder ones just make me think about the meaninglessness of spending time on puzzles. They've got to be solvable quickly enough to outrun ennui.
>IQ tests for ability to understand existing information, not for the much more important ability to fill a void in the absence of direction.
Citation needed
My older relative tells stories of getting D's in all his classes before getting a 97 Aptitude score in the military. He's both very smart and extremely hyperactive, so school was misery for him.
Spill some matchsticks and see how fast she counts them.
That is an interesting one. Sounds like a possibility of a learning disability to me. Dyslexia making reading difficult? ADHD making concentrating difficult?
I don't think you should automatically assume ADHD. Terman's study of geniuses showed that, although most did OK financially (most became professionals who earned better money than the average population), many geniuses didn't do anything with their "gifts". There were geniuses who became janitors and bus drivers. None of the Terman study geniuses earned any major prizes or made any significant advances to human knowledge. While one of the people's whose IQ wasn't high enough to qualify for the Terman study went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
She has an eye condition, but it doesn't effect her ability to read as far as I know. That being said it's hard to know because she really doesn't like reading at all! ADHD might be something to do with it, as she gets bored of everything apart from football (soccer) really quickly. Only other thing to note is that she's always had a lot of sensory troubles- textures, smells, tastes, and sounds REALLY bother her.
The fact that it turned out that way in two tests makes me think it's highly unlikely to be a fluke (and she's not lying, i've seen the results). Also her younger brother is at Oxford, so maybe something genetic there?