Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

as an MIT alum, a wealthy one who thought he would leave his fortune to MIT, I applaud this move, but it doesn't get me back to giving.

MIT shouldn't have stopped requiring the tests in the first place, shouldn't have participated in that anti-intellectual "shut down tech" day or whatever that was, and shouldn't have done a dozen other things like cancel speakers to bow to a woke mob.

MIT needs to sign up to the Chicago principles on free speech https://provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/documents/r...

and MIT needs to stop writing stuff like this (from TFA):

Our research can’t explain why these tests are so predictive of academic preparedness for MIT, but we believe it is likely related to the centrality of mathematics — and mathematics examinations — in our education.

IQ science is well established, and it is well known that the SAT is an IQ test, plain and simple. To pretend otherwise is to dissemble, to be anti-science. Hopefully, MIT will save itself, but I'm sadly not expecting miracles.

> IQ science is well established, and it is well known that the SAT is an IQ test, plain and simple. To pretend otherwise is to dissemble, to be anti-science. Hopefully, MIT will save itself, but I'm sadly not expecting miracles.

The "woke mob" you called is also well established, and people in academia have been fired before for recognizing aspects of IQ tests (e.g. Ronald Sullivan, a dean at Harvard). I agree with your sentiment, but also want to recognize that it takes time for the policy makers at MIT to fight against this trend.

Using IQ as the sole metric for intelligence is bogus though, in my opinion. Hard working "low IQ" slow learners beat mentally fragile or lazy "high IQ" quick learners 9 times out of 10 in my book. Low(er) IQ people can still master advanced sciences, it just takes them longer to do so. Standardized tests filter for the quickest learners who can think the fastest but they don't do as well filtering for mental fortitude or work ethic. Completely anecdotal, but it seems like a lot of the smartest people I've ever known ("high IQ") turned out to be mentally fragile (paralyzed with nihilism, depression, purposelessness). But most of the hardest workers I know who required a few extra years of work to master their fields ("low IQ") are extremely dependable and have high mental resilience by contrast. Of course, you can't beat hard working, high IQ people, but they are very rare in my experience, at least in the fields I've worked in.

I didn't base what I wrote on my opinion or my personal experience, it's published peer reviewed science. The notion that many psychologists over many decades who have devoted their careers attempting together to understand/explain/theorize about the cleverness that sets us apart from the other apes would have somehow failed to stumble upon your insights seems fanciful.

I always take social science studies with a huge grain of salt because they are highly susceptible to emotional and political bias, even with safeguards such as peer reviews. It sounds like you are upset that MIT doesn't do enough IQ-based gatekeeping, which is fine. I'm just saying IQ alone doesn't measure a person's work ethic, mental resilience, or even ability to master a topic, and that in my experience, I've noticed my Mensa obsessed friends have other shortcomings that are worth factoring into their profile - shortcomings that friends with lower IQs (but still smart) tend not to have.

I read that sentence as they think SAT scores are correlated with but not causal for MIT student success. You would need to do a randomised controlled trial or a mendelian randomisation analysis (requires a lot of genotyping of students) to establish any kind of causality. Those experiments have not been done, so the relationship is correlated.

there are other factors that are correlated with success beyond IQ, but IQ is also very highly correlated with success, that's part of what's been established by IQ science.

Yes, regression models do shows that IQ correlates with socioeconomic status. But remember that our statistical techniques often tell us about what factors matter on average. In something as messy as human IQ there are going to be people with low status and high SATs. MIT can find those people by filtering for high SAT and low socioeconomic status, however MIT measures it.

I would consider the problem of socioeconomic status correlating with IQ to be a different problem. Maybe a bit more equality in society would help.

> a wealthy one who thought he would leave his fortune to MIT

A tangential question, so I apologize in advance but how did you build your fortune? I am curious if it was not through entrepreneurship.

for privacy reasons I remain non-specific and/or obfuscated about true facts of my life. However, after MIT and some entrepreneurship I did also study finance and that--along with lucky timing and my attraction to my own outside the box radical ideas and/or perhaps more luck--grew a modest nest egg into a large number of eggs in one basket.

That's so obfuscated that one needs an MIT degree to decode it :D

Anyway, I am happy for you my man! You have achieved something that most of us just dream of at this point :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com