Comment by ralfn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ralfn | Hacker News Reader

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A gossip magazine will make statements that are often false but falsifiable. Hence strictly more scientific than statements about EQ. Right now there is no consensus of what the claims behind the phrase EQ even mean -- which gives society free game to just speculate or assume that their assumptions are correct.

The reason for this is actually obvious: an IQ test will ask questions of which there is a strong consensus as to what the correct answer should be (like math questions). If you have different teams make different IQ tests with this rule, the rankings of test subjects will prove to be uniform. Different test, same test subjects: similar ranking. It is a reproducible metric. Although none of this proves it measures 'intelligence' as used in everyday conversation. The name is unfortunate, the metric is quite useful.

People have not succeeded in making a reproducible metric of emotional intelligence -- it is currently not even well defined. Unlike the statements in a gossip magazine, which although may not always be factual, they are at least well qualified and defined statements.

"Celebrity X slept with celebrity Y". There is no ambiguity about what that statement means and what would be considered supporting evidence to convince you that the statement is true. Therefore, the gossip magazine is closer to science than the pop-literature about EQ.

What confuses me, is that to take offense to this, one has to be or know a scientist that has or is trying to get funding or work published that hinges on the EQ pop culture buzz, which would be unfortunate, but not damning. One can do real research and move it away from the magical world of speculation and anecdotes. But to explain to a person in that position the value of and importance of the scientific method, is like explaining to a catholic priest that children shouldn't be raped according to the bible. How is this perspective on science at all surprising to you? Is this how far academica has deformed itself? That the core values of science are vague historic details in a mist of career planning?

> A gossip magazine will make statements that are often false but falsifiable. Hence strictly more scientific than statements about EQ

So, are you arguing that people not following scientific method AT ALL are more "scientific" than people who are at least trying to produce scientific research in this area?

I have a hard time taking that position seriously; I assume I must have misunderstood. Are you talking about researchers or someone else?

>So, are you arguing that people not following scientific method AT ALL are more "scientific" than people who are at least trying to produce scientific research in this area?

No, that wasn't at all what i was arguing. For politeness sake, i'll assume its a misunderstanding, although that is a bit hard to imagine at this point, since i'm being extremely explicit. I wasn't attacking the scientific field, but people using the phrase EQ in a conversion as if it in any way similar to IQ. It is you taking offense that suggests there may be overlap between these two groups, which is extremely worrying.

"Trying to produce scientific research" means actively applying the scientific method. I'm arguing that hasn't successfully happened with the phrase EQ. Do you have a counter example? And yes I'm arguing that falsifiable statements about celebrities' sexlives is closer to science than current pop culture notions about EQ, because at least the statements can be disproven.

HOW TO SCIENCE

Step 1: discard any statement that is not well defined enough that an experiment could dismiss it

Step 2: test the remaining statements by experiment, and dismiss them if they fail

Step 3: until new knowledge appears, the remaining statements are considered reliable scientific facts

Every statement i've ever read about EQ is discarded in step 1. Most statements in a gossip magazine are discarded in step 2. Hence, a gossip magazine is strictly more scientific than a book about EQ. As for if this an attack on researchers in this area: what the hell are you talking about? what research?

>Are you talking about researchers or someone else?

I'm referring to people who pretend EQ is established science. Those people would either be misinformed or intentionally fraudulent. I hope this group does not contain any actual researchers. That would be disturbing.

The phrase IQ is already very unfortunate, considering the common literal interpretation that it is the definite score of intelligence. To have any new research refer to EQ, to appropriate both the success -as-well-as the distorted nature of how IQ is interpreted by the general public, could be described anywhere from 'pseudo-science' to 'completely fraudulent'.

Things might be different if there was a single example of research establishing some EQ metric that was reproducible and i'm not the most up to date person. So, maybe you have an example of scientific research that backs up the notion that EQ could even exist by having some kind of reproducible metric? A single example would do. But without that example, the usage of the phrase EQ in ordinary conversation needs to be consistently corrected so nobody falsely assumes there are any reliable facts or any consensus even about what this term means, the way there are with the phrase 'IQ'. It it was called differently, this misconception wouldn't happen.

This is actually what made the OP on Quora so angry. The question raised suggested strong misconceptions in the general public. The watering down of the general trust of people in science because too much unproven soft science is appropriating the reputation of the hard science. EQ hasn't been proven to exist any more than it has been proven that water has memory (homeopathy) or that souls exists. Its quackery.

> For politeness sake, i'll assume its a misunderstanding, although that is a bit hard to imagine at this point, since i'm being extremely explicit.

By all means do things for politeness sake; I'm fine with that.

It seems you've assumed my discussion of "serious people working in this field" to mean something other than scientific researchers... and I've assumed your disrespectful remarks to include researchers, rather than just "people using the phrase EQ".

> It is you taking offense that suggests there may be overlap between these two groups, which is extremely worrying.

This fresh accusation relies on the assumption that I've misunderstood you but you understood me perfectly, which is clearly not the case. Slow down; I'll do the same.

..and FYI, telling you that you're being disrepectful is not the same as "taking offense".

I've understood what he's said just fine, richmarr, and you're definitely coming across in the way he's interpreting. You _seem_ to have a problem that you're struggling to define, other than a nebulous issue of "respect" which, as he's pointed out, should have absolutely no bearing on how scientifically legitimate something is. (Indeed, objections such as that are often an alarm bell.)

So: he hasn't assumed that you mean people other than researchers. If there is actual research happening then cite one example (as he already asked). He's also explained that any serious researcher wouldn't give two hoots about respect, and would only want to discover the truth, whatever it may be. Do you agree with that?

Goleman, Petrides (2001), and Salovey/Mayer (2004) all "make statements about EQ" so would all fall into ralfn's defined group "people making statements about EQ" that he accuses of being "less scientific than a gossip magazine".

But, as ralfn already clarified, he did not intend to draw actual researchers into his dragnet, so the point of dragging out that misunderstanding is what?

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