Right on! We're both directionally motivated by the same principle, I don't think this disagreement is that big a deal.

(Bringing it down to a single g number seems pretty dumb though; the best read on this is Shalizi's takedown at bactra.org/weblog/523.h...).

Well, just let it be said that mainstream science --- not weirdos funded by Human Diversity and the Pioneer Fund, and including a lot of people deeply invested in pushing back on "race science" --- largely disagrees with you on this.

I think this is a mistake, has the unintended effect of accepting a lot of racist framing (for instance, that IQ is immutable), leaves you in an uncomfortable spot (what if better IQ tests prove out), and ignores that IQ is used effectively as a diagnostic. The problem is population ranking by IQ.

I have opinions (that I am not qualified to have) on a lot of this stuff, but those three points are objectively verifiable. All of them are wrong, and obviously so. Don't let them slide by.

Intelligence isn't just actively studied, it's actively studied by multiple distinct disciplines, incl. behavioral genetics (twin studies), psychometrics/quantative psychology (the ISIR types), and molecular genetics (GWAS). Studies come out on the regular.

(3) The hadouken! move of the message board race/IQ person is to drop an old twin study (from the phlogiston era of behavioral genetics) and pretend that the race/IQ correlations in it are now accepted science --- it must be, because nobody is allowed to study the question anymore!

It baffles me how people latch on to the idea that there are representative IQ numbers for countries because... have you ever been IQ tested? I haven't. I've never talked to someone about being tested. Where does the intuition that global IQ testing happens come from?

Just one problem: NOBODY HAS EVER DONE THAT STUDY. In most of the world, IQ is a diagnostic measure solely used in treating people with observed deficits. Lynn takes those numbers and averages them as if they were representative of the population. It's basically fraudulent.

(2) The notion of average national IQ numbers, so you can compare (say) Tunisia and Georgia, comes from Richard Lynn, head of the eugenicist Pioneer Fund, who wrote "IQ & the Wealth of Nations", which purports to present average IQ numbers for all the countries.

The normal form the "illegal to test IQ in hiring" argument takes is a citation to Griggs v Duke Power. The people saying this stuff haven't read the case. Griggs just says cognitive testing has to have something to do with the job.

All three are easily falsified.

(1) There are well-known firms that administer general cognitive assessments for employers, and their web pages have logo scrolls of customers whose names everyone on your block knows.

IQ tests aren't widespread in hiring because they're not effective predictors.

Yes: the collapse of civilization necessitating the passing down of the intuition behind complex numbers as an oral tradition.

Paul Bertolli in my case:

www.amazon.com/Cooking-Hand...

lol yes

Yep, we knew (thanks for the ping anyways), we'll post what happened in a bit (it was just a Twitter thing).

Jim said it well!

I feel like at the height of the Google Reader blogosphere there was a lot of overlap between Twitter and blogs. And blogs had huge audiences!

I will never do anything 1/ε as good as Fox Confessor so don't let me sound like I'm being dismissive.