Hacker News Reader

Comment by vivekd | Hacker News Reader

reading the Wikipedia article, it says that scientific consensus among surveyed psychologists and educational researchers is that IQ is a valid and accurate mesaure of the important components of intelligence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Reliabil...

If you're going to challenge that scientific consensus you better have something better to bring to the table than "it's being used by racists" and anecdotal tidbits suggesting a causation correlation fallacy between academic performance and IQ.

View on HN

Wikipedia is not a totally reliable reference when researching non-quantitative information, especially in area with active stakeholders that likely edit wikipedia. And I would not trust "scientific consensus" in this instance given psychology's recent well documented reproducibility crisis.

This article doesn't even seem contrary to scientific consensus as far as what factual information is presented. It's just about how it's packaged in order to form his argument. It's sort of a lawyer-y manipulation of terms with some added hyperbole and even appeals to fashion sense that are misrepresenting what IQ is and what the consensus actually is.

IQ research is not part of the reproducibility crisis.

Psychometry and IQ is the single most replicated field of psychology. There is no reproducibility crisis in psychometry.

Individual anonymous comments on HN are even less reliable.

Do you really need a better argument than that? Or do you just need to repeat that it's racist until a substantial part of the population both believes that and would also treat challenging that belief as racist?

Consensus is a fundamentally social mechanism, and while scientific consensus ought to be as close to factual as possible, the people forming the consensus are potentially prone to exploitation via outside social forces.

> reading the Wikipedia article, it says that scientific consensus among surveyed psychologists and educational researchers is that IQ is a valid and accurate mesaure of the important components of intelligence

That statement doesn't contradict or refute the original assertion. In fact, the original assertion was that the IQ concept is effective at identifying those who fall in the lower spectrum of intelligence.

However, IQ fails as an indicator of higher intelligence because it fails to correctly identify who is more gifted among their peers.

The basketball example used often in this discussion is very good at illustrating the difference. Just because some individuals feature higher in a specific ranking (i.e., height) that doesn't mean they are or will be better basketball players.

> However, IQ fails as an indicator of higher intelligence because it fails to correctly identify who is more gifted among their peers.

Regardless of whether this is true, it still fairly reliably predicts the fact that they are gifted. Conversely, IQ tests aren't precise enough to predict who is less gifted among a set of peers on the lower end either (for small enough score differences).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com