Quote:
Originally Posted by Alawen
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Do you have one in particular in mind? Most people who talk about IQ tests with any knowledge refer to either Stanford-Binet or WAIS/WISC. Both are very comprehensive. If you've never taken a real IQ test or researched this, what you think you know lacks substance.
There are a lot of theories about intelligence and testing intelligence. The most generally accept (in a sense of plurality, it's pretty far from consensus) is Cattell's concept of generalized intelligence (g), split into both fluid intelligence (Gf, roughly the ability to learn) and crystallized intelligence (Gc, sort of accumulated knowledge and thinking skills). Gardner's theories of multiple intelligences are also quite interesting.
Your dismissal of IQ is popular with people who don't score well on IQ tests, but not among people who are actually involved in psychometrics. Modern IQ tests are sophisticated and they hold up well from the perspectives of standardization, validity, and reliability. Results are consistent with Cattell's theories. I'm sure you learned all this if you took an introductory psychology class. I think you're trying to have a twenty-year-old argument that has been discredited for almost that long.
There is the caveat, however, that IQ tests have difficulty accounting for abilities like creativity. They can also distort at the upper range. It's very hard to test someone like Marilyn vos Savant.
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I don't really believe in IQ, because I don't believe the brain works that way. I believe the brain is much more specialized. Machine learning methods in general don't transfer: you can't take a classifier built for one task and reuse it for another. There is such a thing as working memory I guess, but in general I just don't like IQ.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanfor...low_experiment
I much prefer this explanation for IQ: high IQ people more than anything have high future time preference. What else can explain sitting inside reading books while the sun is out and everyone else is playing ball? And so we repeatedly expose ourselves to technical/abstract material until we eventually get better at it.
Now here is where the story takes an interesting racial turn. I believe that on average Blacks have lower future time preference. It's an easy argument to motivate on environmental grounds: Europeans had to store for the future, Africans did not. Africans lived in an extremely dangerous environment (elephants, tigers, tropical diseases) compared to Europeans. So Africans became more likely to value now over a tomorrow which might not happen and if it did would probably be OK, while Europeans became more likely to be cautious about the future.
I recently read about how California three-strikes laws are retarded. People are going to jail for life for stealing socks and pizza slices and so on. However, think about what an incredible lack of impulse control it takes to steal a piece of pizza knowing that if you are caught you will go to jail for life? Well criminals have low future time preference. And yes, the people hit by three strikes laws are inordinately Black.
And before anyone goes off pointing the racism cannon, I think low future time preference is (within reason) a great way to be happy. Some of the most miserable people I used to work with were the guys working 70 hours a week and working on night time MBAs and never seeing their kids in the hope of retiring at 40 and dragging their burned out bodies to the beach. Personally I say fuck the future. Unfortunately when everyone does this, society collapses
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