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Comment by JamesBarney | Hacker News Reader

That is an article about eugenics. No one is arguing for eugenics. Eugenics was awful, but just because something was used as a tool for evil does not make it untrue.

If I light someone on fire with gasoline this makes it no less useful for fueling a car.

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IQ is more like lead additive in gasoline. Unnecessary to the main purpose, created with very dubious motivations, yet for decades people took it for granted that you can’t do without.

FYI most avgas is still leaded, to this day. This is because many airplane engines are designed to operate at very high compression ratios, requiring high octane fuel. The lead additive boosts the octane rating of the fuel.

That's in the spirit of the analogy. Lead additive has a special niche purpose. Similarly IQ could be useful for measuring a specific narrow combination of skills and cultural background. (The first step towards rehabilitating "IQ" should be to rename it, though.)

Lead everywhere is as toxic as assuming IQ measures some kind of general intelligence.

The first real IQ test (the Binet iq test) was created to help identify special ed kids so they could receive special tutoring.

The question about IQ is does it measure anything? Is it predictive? And can that be useful? And the answer all three of those questions is obviously yes.

And if you actually read Binet, you’d know that he explicitly warned against its usage beyond what he designed it for.

Read it. Learn history. Learn how sociology works.

Nah don’t bother. It’s HN.

I would say that this was not the purpose of the link. A comment said "X is something studied scientifically" with X = IQ, and the reply was the same as proposing also X = eugenics. It did not look particularly constuctive.

I read it, and besides one paragraph (which presents a straw man) it has nothing to do with whether IQ is a psuedoscientific swindle and everything to do with whether eugenicists used IQ.

Sure you did buddy. Sure you did. The whole idea of the SAT was an expansive control of capital when the USA grew too large for word-of-mouth recommendation systems.

But you knew that too right? You also knew that it was basically designed to keep undesirables out of the capital class too, right? Guess who those people were.

Clearly this argument is spiraling away from the original premise of whether IQ pseudoscientific into what feels like a flamewar. There are a couple of HN guidelines that try to keep that from happening that I think would have helped prevent this.