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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

It would be more accurate to say "Performance on an IQ test" as opposed to "IQ". That's the main criticism I have of IQ.

So if you do well on tests, then you probably would do well on the IQ test as well as tests in school, which means you are more likely to have attained a higher level of educations, which is associated with a higher income.

To actually prove to me that IQ is a thing, you would have to show me that what you call IQ is innate. Meaning that you can't do better on an IQ test if you study, which I don't believe is true. All written tests I have ever taken have tricks or patterns that you can exploit after some practice. And then you'd have to show me that IQ is a better predictor than some other rote test to tease out general test taking ability or ability to sit still.

A lot of people just work off the basis that IQ is a thing that we can measure, which I don't believe to be true, hence the pseudoscientific swindle

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To actually prove to me that IQ is a thing, you would have to show me that what you call IQ is innate

This does not follow. IQ is a thing because they test children on it without warning and without any prep and their performance on these tasks they’ve never seen before in their lives predicts their performance in school better than many other tests.

You can’t say the same thing about, say, a language test for a child unfamiliar with the language because the kid won’t understand it at all. The IQ test is designed to be as unrelated to experience as possible in order to measure the capacity for abstract thinking and the ability to solve novel problems when you first encounter them.

Since you’re undermining a test of your ability to solve something novel, studying for an IQ test is cheating.

There are a number of skills that are based on experience (as opposed to innate) that would greatly help you on an IQ test. The most obvious one is being able to sit still, try hard and follow directions. This may be what you're testing for, which is Taleb's claim about "IQ" being associated with obedience and success in a typical office job

Those are necessary but not sufficient to scoring well on an IQ test. Just as proper nutrition is necessary but not sufficient to growing very tall.

> “IQ is a thing because they test children on it without warning and without any prep and their performance on these tasks they’ve never seen before in their lives”

I believe this is a myth. There are many ways to prep children for this kind of test, and the wealthy in America have access to an early education system that trains children for standardized tests.

I have anecdotal evidence because I have two children who were raised in different countries. My older child did daycare and preschool in Finland, before we moved to USA. My younger child is now three and in private daycare in Manhattan.

In Finnish daycare, three-year-olds spent their days playing. In affluent New York, they are clearly being trained to perform on tests. I’m not exactly happy about that because I believe the Finnish system creates more balanced individuals on average. But I guess I’ll see the results of this experiment firsthand in 5-10 years.

Twin studies bear it out quite strongly. Identical twins perform far more similarly on IQ tests then do fraternal twins or non-twin siblings. Identical twins raised in separate households perform extremely similarly to twins raised in the same household. It’s not a myth, it’s just controversial because our society values these abilities so highly.

That doesn’t strike me as anywhere near sufficient evidence that children can’t be trained for IQ tests.

I suspect the test-oriented early education available to wealthy Americans is such a large confounder that it overwhelms innate ability at this point.

Children can be trained for IQ tests. Your original claim seems to be much stronger than that. It was my impression that you were asserting that children are trained for IQ tests accidentally, merely by living in an enriched home and school environment.

There is no evidence for that and twin and adoption studies show evidence to the contrary: that adopted children and especially twins raised separately over/underperform their adoptive families and perform similarly to their biological relatives.

The only thing we know that can overwhelm innate ability is crushing poverty and the malnutrition and other extreme stresses that come with it. Otherwise, the effect of home environment on IQ is minimal.

It’s different, of course, with language acquisition. Kids learn more vocabulary the more you speak to them and read to them. Kids with wealthy upbringings can have much more opportunity to acquire language than otherwise. The extent to which that helps with abstract pattern recognition, mental rotation, etc is limited. And we have plenty of examples of kids with logical and spatial reasoning that far exceeds their language skills. It’s such a common phenomenon that we have a name for these kids: nerd.

> To actually prove to me that IQ is a thing, you would have to show me that what you call IQ is innate.

"Twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73% with the most recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

I wasn't talking about innate in the context of heredity. I meant produced by the mind as opposed to experience. I am not convinced that someone can't learn to score better on IQ tests through practice

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