IQ was initially developed as a bureaucratic tool to help institutions at scale to screen and sort out potential employees at scale. One of the reasons why it became popular was because the scores remained relatively constant independent on what age that you provide the tests. In the United States, they were especially important in the great projects of World War I and World War II, but the advance also spilled over to corporations.
Now, managers wouldn’t discriminate based on cultural factors, their personal familiarity with the candidates, and social class. They would use science to select only the ‘best’ candidate for the job, as judged by their objectively determinable intelligence quotient. In the new scientific order, everyone would have equality of opportunity — which even today is something that the slow-progressive movement (AKA conservatives) get warm fuzzies about whenever they hear the term.
Until recently, Silicon Valley was the last corporate outpost of the use of IQ-like tests (fittingly, because the test was developed at Stanford). The SAT is fading in importance as a selection mechanism for universities.
Today, because of the widespread opposition to the idea of innate and heritable intelligence, it seems like a rebellion to say that IQ and similar concepts like ‘g’ are important. It’s a profound mistake, however, to act like it’s the only thing that matters, to say that grouping people into a country or institution based on their innate intelligence alone is the way to make the Tower of Babel political construct work properly.
In a similar way that the reductionist view of race is stupid, the reductionist view of intelligence and its importance is also misguided. If we follow this reductionist view, we would have to ignore the fact that there are far many more smart liberals who deny that intelligence is innate than there are smart people of any political persuasion who say that it isn’t.
One reason why not to treat intelligence as the be-all-and-end-all is that intelligence of a person says nothing about their character, values, religion, or aesthetic sensibility. When you stuff the smartest people from all around the world into a classroom, you get a graduate student lecturing in an unintelligible accent to an alienated student body which has no sense of working towards a single common purpose.
The same people who will complain about not being able to understand their foreign TA are the same people who will attend a diversity rally the weekend after are the same people who will make maudlin Facebook posts about how much they hate all those ‘racists’ preventing the final realization of Babel, in which we’re all one people, carefully graded by how well we perform on test problems.
It’s the institutions that need to proclaim the value of multiculturalism the loudest that tend to suffer the most from this sort of blind faith in meritocratic values. It also makes these institutions vulnerable to simple hacks around testing systems — such as cheating and the use of dummy testers.
Further, a society that selects its leaders based on how good they are at filling in bubbles will eventually become a society fascinated by bureaucratic bubble and spreadsheet filling incapable of dealing with the other important aspects of reality and rich details of the human experience. If it can’t be bubbled in on a sheet, the bubble-people want to make it stop existing.
In the end, the same system created by people selected for excellence in bubble-filling wound up being dominated by people who felt intolerably guilty about the results of that system — so guilty that they no longer wanted to keep it alive.
One reason that they felt guilty about it was because the results of that system showed that ‘equality of opportunity’ was nonsense. There is no equality of opportunity, and there can be no equality of opportunity. Most people are born with limited opportunities owing to their station in life. In order to keep the lie of equality of opportunity alive, the people had to make anything that revealed innate inequality illegal — as part of the general program of censorship against dangerous ideas.
So now, it’s in transition to a system in which the capable compete with one another in public flagellation sessions, and the incapable receive honors and prizes based on how loud and pathetic their sob stories are.
Part of the worldview implicit in the IQ test is that virtue is irrelevant compared to an abstract quantification of a person’s ability to solve puzzles — as if even business can be reduced to a series of difficult puzzles to be solved by someone of sufficient cleverness. What someone does with their capacity is much more important than what that capacity is.
Attempting to replace civilization as it existed with a rationalized, scientific society wound up creating something so enervating that few were motivated to preserve it. So now, we sense the chasm opening up beneath us.
IQ tests were made illegal in most cases, presumably because they are racist, but more likely because the white elites in charge don’t want their children having to compete.
I think these folks generally range from 110-130, but are subject to the same dysgenic factors (in some cases more so, since they have more money and can purchase more products). So, intergenerationally, their IQs are probably dropping fast, as you go from whichever tycoon who made his money, to his few remaining female descendants who now have prestigious credentials and careers pushing progressivism out of various non-profits.
IQ is not the end-all be all, but it damn sure could put a few things straight.
The rationale behind Griggs vs. Duke Power was that IQ tests created segregation through the back door.
But it’s also a bit reductive to reduce IQ to “bubble-filling”, right? As with most questions, there are two extreme answers and one moderate answer: the two extreme answers are “IQ is everything” and “IQ is nothing”. The moderate position is: “IQ is something.” Same formula can be applied to race.
There are jobs where IQ and puzzle solving IS almost everything. Most jobs need some basic intelligence, some virtue, some imagination, some shame. Virtuous supervisors and product managers keep the end from becoming self-replicating evil efficiency.
We have to watch the very-intelligent carefully to keep their genius from going a bad direction, especially when they are morality-free psychopaths.
Race is people you are more-closely related to than those much-more-distantly related (but still able to inter-breed with). It’s reasonable that people would enjoy the company and culture of their family, right? This Frankfurt/Columbia/NewSchool Marxist critical-race business has been really destructive and wasteful.
Boys and girls are not the same. Not even close, in the brain, where it counts.
“If we follow this reductionist view, we would have to ignore the fact that there are far many more smart liberals who deny that intelligence is innate than there are smart people of any political persuasion who say that it isn’t.”
Pretty sure the last word here should be “is.”
IQ is something just like the scientific method is something…
…but that something is useless to trust to unless you have very strong assurances that those possessing the IQ or practicing the scientific method are in fact honest people.
These assurances can be, in descending order of importance,
Shared direct personal experience,
Shared personal experience from other people you already trust,
Shared religion,
Shared morality,
Shared national/ethnic culture,
Teaching kids about the primacy of abstract reasoning and rigorous adherence to method without teaching them to feel out the trustworthiness of those reasoning and performing those methods thus fails in all the forms described above.
I’m so happy somebody finally said this. Yes, IQ is important – but there are more dimensions than High IQ/Low IQ that go into determining human worth. Decency, honesty, loyalty, empathy – these are indispensable qualities, and ones we seem to have forgotten the value of in our technocratic society.
Part of the problem is the (understandable) lionization of Silicon Valley over the past twenty years. The Valley is run by High IQ Aspergers cases, and these are the people we’ve made national heroes out of. Without doxing anyone too badly, I know people who worked directly with Steve Jobs – not in a cubicle three buildings away, but face to face, every day – and trust me, you wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with the guy if you could avoid it. I’m glad he formed a company and made high quality computer products, but he shouldn’t be held up as a role model for anybody, and nobody like him should be put in charge of anything outside the Valley.
(As an aside, I’m fascinated by the difference in the way that the press treated Leona Helmsley on the one hand, and Steve Jobs on the other. Helmsley always defended herself by saying that the reason she was a demanding tyrant with her employees is that customers were paying her thousands of dollars a night to stay in luxury suites in her hotels, and she wasn’t going to give them an experience that was any less than perfect. She put the satisfaction of the customers who were paying her over the satisfaction of the employees who she was paying. Yet Helmsley got demonized as “The Queen of Mean” and Jobs – who, trust me, was just as big a jerk, if not worse – was and is fawned over.)
This post and the last one are connected. Think of Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory. There are six moral axes in it. The problem with leftists is that they overemphasize two of them while minimizing the other four, resulting in a lopsided view of morality. Similarly, there are multiple axes to consider when taking the measure of a man. High IQ/Low IQ is one of them. Race, which we could express as My Blood/Not My Blood is another of them. But there are others, like Moral/Immoral, Honest/Dishonest, Loyal/Disloyal, Empathetic/Non-Empathetic. In any situation like this, if you overemphasize one or two axes at the expense of others, you end up with a lopsided view of reality. Among people who overemphasize either race or IQ, this manifests itself in a lopsided view of humanity and human virtue.
But we can’t afford any more distorted pictures of reality.
Bah. IQ – g – is positively something. It is the set of characteristics that appeared to the WASP establishment of 1900 AD to describe those it thought clever. Verbal ability, eidetic memory, vocabulary, and bookishness. Many things are more important. Honesty, enterprise, imagination, and altruism are all more useful. They are not tested.
A man of IQ 140 may think lovely thoughts while sitting on a lotus and watching butterflies, but he is not useful. A person if IQ 100 who works hard and produces is.
Japanese outdo the West in what the West considers its own virtues. Therefor they have a higher average IQ. They are not more intelligent. The highest IQ ethnic group is the Ashkenazim. They have done great things in Physics, Medicine, Law…. The calamities they have suffered in Germany and Israel and their inability to live in peace with their chosen neighbors do not speak highly of their wisdom.
The greatest benefit of a high IQ is to never again have to be impressed by high IQ’s.
Sort of. The Japanese (and all East Asians) have a high average IQ, but they also have far fewer visionaries than the West does. A Steve Jobs or a Mark Zuckerberg would be much less likely to arise in Japan, for all kinds of reasons.
It is the disparity between verbal IQ and performance IQ (in favor of verbal IQ) that predisposes one to Leftism. Asians have low verbal IQ and high performance IQ, so they’re not natural Leftists. Ashkenazi Jews, in contrast, have low performance IQ and high verbal IQ, so are prdisposed to Leftism. Of course other personality traits are relevant as well, but if Jews had less of a disparity between their verbal and performance IQs, that is, if they had higher performance IQs, they’d be less Leftist.
What? Is Mao chopped liver? He has the body count world record. Pol Pot?
Mao makes Hitler look like a pussy and Stalin look like a slacker.
Top-down, authoritarian enforced Leftism is not indicative of a population with Leftist proclivities. Slavs are not Leftist by nature, yet there were Bolshevism and the Soviet Union. But Bolshevism is not an organic outgrowth of the Slavic mind, is it? In the same vein, Asians would not come up with Marxism-Leninism on their own – it had to be imported from abroad, and it was; forced upon the whole population, and it was. With Ashkenazim, you see support for Leftist causes not due to any compulsion by the authorities, but rather, they support Leftism even as it undermines authority. And Whites with a penchant for Progress tend to resemble Ashkenazim in that they usually have low performance IQ and high verbal IQ.
You can’t conflate the people and their leaders.
>Slavs are not Leftist by nature, yet there were Bolshevism and the Soviet Union.
I recommend that you read the primary sources on the Revolution and 1920s-30s, and the Chinese equivalents like the Cultural Revolution.
Huge numbers of the Russian people enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to rob, rape and kill their betters, to desecrate churches and convert them into potato storage spaces and to humiliate the priests, to write denunciations of each other for the NKVD, etc.
The Chinese got so enthusiastic about Leftist terror that they scared their own Communist Party.
That’s the point. There is NO performance IQ. IQ is recognizable and measurable but is not intelligence.
I don’t care how good the Russians are at chess – they haven’t shown intelligence as a nation.The bloody-mindedness that allowed them to kill tens of millions by government managed starvation or clear mine-fields by marching across it argues against the intelligence that would find a better way. Don’t tell me how wise and intelligent the Chinese are as a group while the Chinese expatriates I know still call Mao a Great Man.What did Mao kill? 7.9 e7 people?
DAB
The popularity of IQ is linked with the mania for quantification which has engulfed us in the last 40 years. This trend will get worse with the increased reliance on impersonal, globalised networks. Anyone who works for a corporation has seen the crazy extent of this. KPIs, quarterly targets, turnaround times, measurement, measurement, measurement.
The fact that IQ doesn’t quite = intelligence does not phase the Burnhamite managers one bit. They must have a measure of intelligence and IQ is the best thing going.
What you can’t measure you can’t manage.
And any quantitative target you optimize for will wind up corrupting the metric over time.
I was under the impression IQ tests were first used by the military. After all, the stupid will get people killed.
It was the first broad application — WW1.
IQ is not everything, but it has a very high correlation with job performance; Studies also show a negative correlation between ‘g’ and negative personality traits (neuroticism , aggression), and no correlation between IQ and agreeableness.
I have more problems with the discourse about IQ that takes place in far-right political circles than its potential application for job hiring selection (or whatever). In the former, it often turns into a value judgement and leads to silly conclusions about individuals rather than broad population categories. In the latter, it just seems like a crude but mostly effective way to figure out if you’re smart enough to do such-and-such elite activity.
One problem with discussing IQ is that no one has any idea about what to do with all the 135+ IQ people who don’t do anything significant for society at all. Once you get around that level and above, there’s no correlation between IQ and success. In fact, there might even be a negative correlation. It makes plenty of sense to me — if I’m a genius, why would I want to get some crappy paper-pushing job when I can have a blast entirely within my own mind just staring at rocks or whatever? I don’t need money or respect. Political people don’t like this ugly state of affairs, and it leads to some pretty silly conjectures about how society is systematically discriminating against the smart people. (Not naming names, but some NRx people have promoted this idea. There’s definitely some high-IQ Dindu Nuffin apologia going on.)
There are also some pretty compelling conjectures that people with high IQs are more susceptible to convincing themselves and others of some ingenious yet pernicious falsehoods that an innocent fool would never bother with. The ability to memorize and conceptually think about more stuff is no guarantee on knowing the truth.
I think psychometrics might be a subject that demonstrates the cliche, “A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing” because of how consistent and reproducible it is in comparison with other attempts to measure mental traits. That we really can’t create any other metric that examines such traits as well as intelligence leads to a sort of mythology about how closely connected it is to everything (you’ve got a hammer, now everything is a nail). As far as I know, we’re currently unable to create a reliable metric to measure someone’s motivated-ness. We can’t really come up with a metric to judge people’s political or moral ideas. Adorno and Horkheimer came up with the f-scale, and they’re justifiably ridiculed for this. So we basically have the IQ test tout court, and consequently, everyone spends a lot of time talking about how some guy with such-and-such IQ must be meant for X vocation, and more IQ must be better (and if it isn’t better, the people must be victims), and the ideal nation should have a mean IQ of a million billion, etc. etc. etc.
Many low-IQ individuals have excellent memories. They can tell you exactly what a book says, as if reading it to you. They can’t tell you what it means. Islam promotes this.
Right. IQ is a terrible proxy for merit, responsibility and creativity.
But merit, responsibility and creativity are not quantifiable (the military and corporations try, through performance evaluations, with predictable results.)
We can all smell them, but to derive systemic benefit, you have to have a system run by the fuhrerprinzip, with delegated authority, personal discretion and responsibility for outcomes at every level. This is anathema to a process-driven socialist system like those of the West.
So you end up optimizing for IQ and IQ proxies, and end up optimizing for clever, sneaky manipulative idiots in positions of consequence.
Bingo. Some smarties don’t like to hear that cleverness isn’t everything.
“So you end up optimizing for IQ and IQ proxies, and end up optimizing for clever, sneaky manipulative idiots in positions of consequence.”
+1. Also, “rule followers”.
You seem to be talking about IQ different what I know. Say you are a university. To teach youngsters seven years till they are qualified to be doctors costs lots of money and effort. The best way to select those that will complete the course and not waste your money and time is a half an hour IQ test. It has no magical or metaphysical features at all.
I don’t see societies optimizing or maximizing by IQ. People is not stupid to that extent. I see IQ applied in university entrance exams, where it has excellent predictive value. Notwithstanding IQ test, universities all over the world falsify the results adding “holistic” variable that make the IQ results almost meaningless. The final result of the supposedly IQ based selection is a demographically representative population, that is, Africans that should not be in on the basis of IQ, are represented. The same with mainstream Whites, by their IQ they should be absent but they still form the main mass. High IQ Asians and Jews are discriminated against. This is in university admissions – the fact is that IQ has some but no decisive relevance.
Now, in other fields, IQ test results are irrelevant. No one is promoted by his IQ but by their performance and likableness. Banks never investigate the IQ of their clients but loan them money on their creditworthiness. When looking for someone to marry or have sex with, IQ is ignored. In summary, IQ and IQ tests play no visible role in real life.