Delayed Reflex,I have asked the following question earlier in threads on this topic:
Why is there no push to develop an aq (athleticism quotient) the way that people wish to invest time and resources in IQ?
Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, or Arnold Palmer (picking an evaluation for each of them at the same age), were among the best players in their respective sports. Yet Michael Jordan was not even successful getting into the baseball minor leagues when competing against minor league players many of whom were his same age.
We recognize that athleticism tends to be focused on particular skills. We do not rate the “athleticism” of a sprinter or a marathon runner against the “athleticism” of a weight lifter (or even each other), yet some folks seem to want to act as though intelligence, (which appears, to me, to be a whole lot more complex than athleticism), can be boiled down to a single number.
I want serious evidence before I accept that claim and the weak correlations I have seen do not provide it.
If we’re defining intelligence that way then of course at any given task there is a big difference in intelligence of different people, as clearly performance varies a lot.
And those differences, like I’m saying, are not persistent from task to task: I’m good at IQ tests, if nothing else, but in coding I can recall how slow I was to get used to lambda expressions compared to my peers.
If you gave your group of data structures students a task like learning a particular foreign vocabulary or the rudiments of playing some musical instrument, do you think that their performance will match their ability to learn data structures? Because the whole world is basically an illustration that that’s not the case.
I’m not sure about this one. Hurdlers probably don’t have that much upper body strength. Kind of like how a race horse would really suck at pulling a carriage.
In terms of general athleticism, I think a decathlon winner might be better. But even then not much of an indication of how someone would do as a football player or basketball player.
Just like IQ does not correlate, I suspect, with emotional intelligence of motivation.
You’re not getting it. It isn’t if they learn particular data structures (not that hard for most in CS classes) but if they get the next level up, of the fundamental difference between a variable and a data structure. That’s probably more important to a language designer than a language user, so it is not like people who don’t get this are going to be awful programmers.
I learned lambda calculus my freshman year. It was a struggle - until one day when I was studying for finals it all finally made sense, and I was able to do the whole term’s worth of problem sets in like an hour and a half. If I were smarter I would have gotten it right away. Lots of people did.
Nobody is proposing that anyone hires based on IQ scores. But for some reason one day in gym class they gave us the folders containing our PE records. In it was something like an AQ (not numeric, of course.) Mine was low. Natch. We can estimate rough AQs just by looking at people. Not so for IQs. Despite what Hollywood seems to think.
I’m not sure what your scores established beyond your ability to perform specific tasks in set times that someone in the academic world chose to test. Someone decided that the students at your school needed to display certain levels of speed, coordination, and stamina and designed evaluations based on their concern. Someone looking for different results might have designed different tests.
It is probably just as easy to estimate “rough AQs” as it is to estimate “rough IQs”, but society has simply not chosen to invest energy pretending that a test will actually provide some single number that will correctly indicate athleticism. (More likely, they recognize that such a number would be meaningless, while people chasing IQ refuse to recognize that fact.)
And in contrast to your opening sentence, Murray and Herrnstein and Lynn and Vanhanen and Rushton and Jensen and others have attempted to influence social and political policy based on conclusions they drew from a belief in the efficacy of IQ.
Maybe we’re talking past each other here so let me summarize what I’m saying.
You said among your students some pick up certain concepts much faster, or more effectively, than other students. Fine; I believe you and agree.
What I’m saying is that I doubt that that simple observation of intelligence would be consistent across different kinds of task. I see countless examples of people who are quick at learning *this *but slow to learn that.
When I have coffee with my friend who studies physics at cambridge, there are higher maths concepts that he’s stunned I can’t get, no matter how long he spends trying to explain them to me.
And I’m surprised he can’t seem to grok evolution – like he has all the common misconceptions about it, that he can’t shake. Also he’s one of those who doesn’t get what the hard problem of consciousness is. I don’t mean he believes the concept of qualia is flawed and has a good argument for supporting that; I mean he hasn’t had the penny drop moment of understanding what the problem even is.
So drop me and my friend into various classrooms and who appears intelligent may well change.
Sure. Only the Professor on Gilligan’s Island is good at everything. But I’ve seen that smart people know what they are not smart at better than not so smart people. (All bets are off if you win a Nobel Prize, though.) Really knowing one field helps you to understand that you do not really know another one - and that helps you shut up about it.
But I’m talking about the ability to get the meta-knowledge of a field.
The reason I am not a professor is that I realized I wasn’t quite as good at teaching those who can’t make intuitive leaps as I should be. This isn’t just the rate of learning something the teacher teaches, but going past that to understand how the patterns fit together. As for evolution, many people knew what Darwin knew, but he was the person who could structure those facts into a framework where they made sense.
To blow our own horn, during my sabbatical I lurked on a few message boards and Twitter. The level of discourse was way below what we have here on the Dope.
it is hard to describe if you haven’t had the chance to exist in this kind of community.
Athletic ability develops more slowly than intelligence. The decision to put kids in gifted programs is made in 3rd grade in our district - pretty much no one puts a kid in athletic training that early. In my very large high school the gym teachers did not have the resources to give attention to all the kids, so those of us with low AQs got ignored, which made my high school gym classes quite pleasant, actually.
They didn’t need a single number, but I bet they could rank order the 200 kids in the average gym class quite easily. And perhaps accurately.
Now, I’m not an expert on the theory of intelligence, (though I intend to work on learning about this) but I’m pretty sure those who write IQ tests have a model of intelligence and the test is based on this model. I’m also sure the model isn’t perfect and can be refined - for instance to remove questions which assume a certain culture.
If an IQ score were totally meaningless, then you would not be able to correlate it with any outcome such as level of education attained. Do you think that is true?
It is not determinative of anything, but I’ve been saying that for a while.
That crowd are total morons, as I said above. However I don’t think even they are stupid enough to propose basing hiring decisions on IQ alone. Which is what I said.
OK, here’s a thought exercise. Someone has invented a brand new sport, called Smurglewurgle. It has absolutely no element in common with any existing sport (and they invented it purely to play and enjoy, not with any agenda). There are no balls, no racquets, no hoops, no nets. Nothing that anyone on earth would ever possibly have already learned or mastered. That said, it is inarguably a “sport”, on the sport-vs-game continuum. If you play a half hour of Smurglewurgle, you are exhausted and sweating at the end. It’s not even golf or darts, which are kinda borderline. It is a SPORT.
Now, you and I have both heard of the existence of Smurglewurgle, but have not gotten even a hint as to what the rules might be, other than there are 8-person teams. And we each get to pick teams, from all human beings currently alive. Then our two teams will play each other and the winner will receive a jillion dollars.
I’m going to pick something like…
LeBron James, Neymar, Drew Dreschel (one of the current top American Ninja Warrior competitors), etc…
Do you want to face me with a team of 8 random people? Even 8 random men between the ages of 18 and 30? Even 8 random men between the ages of 18 and 30 who are in excellent cardiovascular shape?
Now, I agree, there is a chance that the particular rules of Smurglewurgle will totally work against me… maybe it involves fitting into super-narrow spaces, or something else oddball like that. But, if it’s just a random unknown sport, do you really think that there’s no advantage to having absolute peak athletes?
Now, that’s just a silly thought exercise, obviously. But I think the analogy with IQ is a good one, in that (many others have made this point) I think there’s a correlation, and only a correlation, not a perfect correlation, between IQ and a wide variety of brain-oriented skills. Now, I don’t think there’s often much of a practical POINT to it… it would be silly to hire programmers based purely on an IQ score, or really, based on an IQ score at all (instead, give them actual tests and questions that test programming skill, not to mention meeting them and seeing if they have reasonable personalities you’d enjoy working with, etc). But if, for some bizarre reason, you and I each had to staff an intellectual company, and there were a pool of 10,000 randomly chosen people for us to hire, and the ONLY thing we could know about those people was their IQ, would you NOT pick the people with higher IQs?
(And yes, you could argue that maybe the best approach isn’t to get the STRICTLY the highest available IQs… maybe you want a mixture of 120 through 150+, instead of all 150+… but that’s fine, in that case you’re still acknowledging some correlation between IQ and effective work.)
(I think this is one of those cases where people are super-hesitant to agree to even the most comically unrealistic hypothetical… it’s like, you’re afraid that if you say “yes, in that truly bizarre could-never-be-real impractical hypothetical, I would hire people with higher IQs” you’re afraid I’m going to say “GOTCHA!!! It wasn’t a hypothetical, and all the higher IQ people are Asian, and NOW YOU SUPPORT RACISM HAHAHAHAHA” or something like that.)
When I was 19 (back in 1962) I spent a few days in The National Hospital For Nervous Diseases, Queen’s Square, London because it was suspected that I had some form of neurological disorder. I was told that my IQ was in the top 2000 in the UK (160+) … but because I suffered from a “profound psychological disorder” I would probably not succeed in making use of my intelligence. I didn’t succeed in making a career for myself, despite having a number of opportunities. My eccentricities are such that I come across to most people as being more than a little crazy. I’m in no way psychotic … I just have a habit of reacting in unconventional ways to situations I find myself in that distress me.
Yes, if a given person is good at this intellectual activity I’d expect them to be more likely to be good at that similar activity.
What I’m saying is that there may be other things correlated too, that may even show a stronger correlation. And that when we look at very different activities, all bets are off.
I think the sporting analogy is misleading because it implicitly tries to make us imagine very similar activities since sports tend to be based on similar structures. Yes I’d expect LeBron James to be better than average at another activity that involves jumping, short sprints and/or quick hand dexterity. But move far enough away, to say, archery, and who knows?
There are countless posts in this thread like this one, from you yourself:
It’s certainly not obvious, on a surface-level reading, whether you’re saying “there is no correlation AT ALL between ability in different intellectual pursuits” or simply “there is not a PERFECT correlation between ability in different intellectual pursuits”.
There are tons of such examples. Like I said, I feel like people are bending over backward to discount IQ/intelligence as much as they possibly can, to a slightly ridiculous degree. Which is odd, because no one (or almost no one) is making the absolute “IQ means everything, everyone with a high IQ is better at everything brain-related than everyone with a lower IQ” argument.
My opinion is this: lots and lots of intellectual skills across a wide range of topics correlate. People who are good at math are more likely to be good at board games are more likely to be good at philosophy are more likely to be good at logistical organization are more likely to be good at multitasking are more likely to be good at writing. None of those are perfect correlations, and for every pair of them, you can find someone who is good at one and bad at the other. Some of them are probably more closely correlated than others. But they are all correlated, and they are also all correlated with IQ. And, ideally, IQ would in some sense represent the sum total of all of them, as best it could with a single number. (There’s certainly reasonable debate about how far we can stretch the idea of an intellectual skill. Making friends? Writing poetry? Music?)
Does anyone disagree with that? If so, is your disagreement “I honestly believe that is false, there is in fact NO correlation between x and y” or simply “correlation between x and y has not been proven”?
I would take LeBron James over average person on the street to learn archery, 100%, any day of the week. Part of athleticism is dexterity and body control. It’s hard to come up with a remotely physical activity short of being a jockey where I wouldn’t expect LeBron to be better than an average person who has as much experience in that activity as LeBron does. Same for any elite athlete. (Plus of course LeBron is an expert in all the mental aspects of athleticism… performance under pressure, yada yada yada.)
Let’s lay out what I’m saying and what the difference is perhaps between our positions.
I think IQ is very much overrated in the Western world.
I think that while it’s correlated with success in a range of pursuits, the same is true of other factors, like self discipline, and I would expect those other factors are likely more important, not less.
Yes self discipline is partly a learned skill but I never suggested otherwise. But it’s relevant when we’re talking about “Ashkenazi Jews” or whatever regardless.
Furthermore, I think “range of pursuits” is more narrow in scope than some assume. I do believe that there are different flavors of intelligence and that you can be smart in one way but weak in another.
Right, but it seems clear to me IQ tests fall far short of that ideal, if that ideal is even possible. As well as multiple forms of intelligence, IQ test performance is increasing across most of the world. It’s difficult to square that vs what IQ tests are claiming to measure.
Well FWIW I disagree.
Yes versus the average I might be prepared to wager a tiny sum that he would beat it, but I wouldn’t have any degree of confidence.
And the point about performance under pressure etc is analogous to what I’m saying; there are other factors that will correlate, and may correlate better than IQ.
Sorry to bump this, but in other forums, I keep running into Lynn’s “IQ and the wealth of nations”. Which, to me, seems patently absurd. Like, “If you understand IQ, understand what it means, and believe the tests imply something real, these results are laughably impossible”. Is there any serious scholarship that supports Lynn’s research? Or does that belong in the same rough category as “Intelligent Design” research?
There is no serious economics research that even bothers to even refute such silly extrapolations that have to assume their conclusion to even begin.
The serious research in the national economic performance is attempting to examine the productive factors and in the behavioral area the impact of the systems and the institutions - and why or how these impact GDP formation.
Since it remains a substantial question the impact of the institutions - such as the civil code form and legal formation for the companies in comparison with the anglo saxon common law form - and the other institutional frameworks that impact for example the investment in the basic infrastructure - the idea one can jump over understanding these impacts to draw a line directly to some average national intelligence (which has to be invented by the extrapoloation from data which are not at all coherent or actually intended for such examination) without in any way understanding productive capacity formation (that clearly does not really require ‘genuis’) - it is nothing more than bigotry looking for quick and simple arguments.
So no - in the realm of economics this is like the Creation Science - it assumes what it wants and tries to self justify backwards.
Sorry for the slow reply, somehow missed all of this until the thread got bumped.
And… I don’t think we really disagree. I’m certainly not endorsing making any decision about anyone based purely or primarily on IQ. I’m just objecting to what I perceive as arguments that are too absolute in the other direction.
Interesting question. I see no reason that good early childhood education, and more basic things like nutrition, wouldn’t affect measured IQ as an adult. I can certainly imagine that that continues to improve around the world. But that’s just a wild guess.
You are completely missing the point of the sports analogy. Wrestling is a sport, horse racing is a sport, rowing is a sport, basketball is a sport, cycling is a sport, weightlifting is a sport. Many sports are similar, but some are very different and someone being pretty good at several sports may mean that they actually lack the qualities necessary to compete at the highest level in any one particular sport, and by the same token attributes that allow one to excel at one sport or offer an advantage in one sport may be the cause of a disadvantage in another. For example, the tallness that allows one to be a good basketball player would be a detriment to a jockey. The body mass needs required to be a champion weightlifter would be a huge hindrance to a cyclist. Now, if the weightlifter and cyclist were given a leg strength test, they would both be well above the norm; but that tells you little about the specific attributes necessary for high level success in their respective fields. This analogy can be manipulated in many ways, but I won’t interate all the relative iterations at the moment, I’m not really in the mood. I might be in the mood tomorrow, but I can’t predict the future.
If that’s what you think the sports analogy shows, then you’re certainly using it 100% backwards from the way I am. I think that in general, if you pick any two sports at random, someone who excels at one of them will at least be better than average at the other. In fact, I think the cases where that is not the case are where the analogy falls down. Yes, it’s borderline impossible to imagine anyone excelling both as a jockey and as a sumo. But are there any two intellectual pursuits with that characteristic?
To answer your first question we would have to have an agreed upon, measurable definition of intellectual pursuit. And to compound problems, you have to tie it into the IQ measurement. As you can see in this thread, IQ means many things to many people and is constantly conflated with other things and states of being and then some people want to sterilize other people because their score isn’t high enough, and other people think they’re better than the unwashed low IQ masses and others just want to take the damn thing and throw it into a sewage filled lake. Now I’m just getting depressed, I think I’ll sit here a while and meditate on the subject.
Have you ever seen the champion wrestler that had no legs?