The Truth about IQ
There are so many bad takes about IQ going around.
The normie mind is attracted to bad IQ takes like a junkie to white powder baggies. And yet they don't even know what it actually means!
The biggest misconception about IQ is that it measures intelligence. That's not true! IQ measures only part (admittedly a large part) of one half of intelligence - the fluid component. IQ doesn't measure knowledge, wisdom, rationality, etc. You can have a high IQ on multiple good IQ tests and still be ignorant, unwise and irrational. It's much harder to have a lower IQ (much less than 100) and be wise, knowledgeable and rational but it's not impossible, especially within one or two special domains.
The second big misconception is that the numbering scale is totally made up. There aren't 100 or 150 "IQ points" out there to grab. It's a made up scale that just represents 1/15th of a standard deviation on the frequency distribution of all humans from a relevant population, which is usually taken to be a bell shaped curve with mean 100 and standard deviation 15.
85 IQ = μ - 1 σ
100 IQ = μ + 0 σ
115 IQ = μ + 1 σ
130 IQ = μ + 2 σ
145 IQ = μ + 3 σ
IQ is measured using written tests with many questions, and a large sample of scores from many test takers are used to calibrate the test. I think there's some broad appreciation that the points are "on a curve", but then people will say something like "Imagine if an AI had an IQ of 5 million!"
An IQ of 5 million is ontologically incapable of being meaningful. It would mean a score on tests equal to +300,000 standard deviations, which is simply not something that can exist because it would imply a human population vastly greater than you could fit in the entire universe to even define it.
In practice, you can't really measure IQs above 145 IQ = +3σ that reliably.
The third big big misconception is the idea that when you read or are told an IQ value it must be real. That's not true! People make it up all the time, either by flat out lying or by creatively reinterpreting a childhood IQ test which is not valid as an adult, using a low quality online IQ test which typically 'glazes' your score to make you feel good and share it or by just vibing/repeating rumors. For example, Google reports that John von Neumann has an IQ of 190, corresponding to +6σ. But when you calculate this, it's 1 in 1 billion rarity - obviously no test has been taken by a billion people so you can't know that someone is exactly 1 in 1 billion at it.
This brings us to the fourth and perhaps worst misconception: the idea that IQ is like a power level and the human with the highest number will be the best at everything. That's not true: the people who are best at something will probably have high IQ, but not the highest IQ. There's a great Less Wrong article pointing out why this: when two things are correlated (but not perfectly), the largest value of one thing will not coincide with the largest value of the other thing. This is called "the tails coming apart".
The human obsession with status makes IQ into a status hierarchy, incentivizes people to lie about their IQs to appear "better", and makes people fantasize about smart, capable people having outrageously high IQs that are impossible to even measure and statistically extremely unlikely to be true. Then in reaction to this, some people start denying that IQ even exists, talking about "multiple intelligences" which is pseudoscientific bunk, and makes people sad and angry about IQ as a subject.
Population average IQ matters a lot more than individual IQ of people in key positions.
Imagine you're trying to run a small burger joint. Would you rather hire a 135-IQ low-genius manager and a bunch of 85-IQ retards, or just a whole crew of 100-IQ normies, and appoint the slightly older and more mature one to be manager?
Of course you would want the normies.
There is nothing a smart leader can do to make retarded people not retarded. There is no magical brilliant idea he can have that will endow retards with the capacity to understand what "medium rare" looks like. He can't make them understand why smoking cannabis while working the grill is bad. He can't make them show up on time for their shift instead of calling him two hours later to ask him to come bail them out of jail.
Smart people are helpless unless they are working on their own, or with people smart enough to understand their plans, goals, and instructions.
You could airdrop a thousand a thousand Elon Musk clones into modern South Africa, and they'd just get beaten to death with sticks for using fancy words or being white. But look what America can do with only one.
Low IQ populations do have geniuses, if they are large enough, but they do not benefit from them. Not only that, they tend to damage them by teaching them to become warlords or scam artists, which is the only way to get ahead in a low-IQ society.
High-IQ, high-trust, high-cooperation societies are the only ones what can make use of their geniuses, and typically they can't import them except from societies that are also high-iq, high-trust, and high-cooperation.
But that's okay, because you don't need that many geniuses. What you really need is non-idiots.
Because geniuses don't maintain society. They move it ahead. And they can only do that if it's already well-maintained.
Here's why IQ matters.
Look at the percentage of problem causers vs problem solvers in a 100-avgIQ group vs 85-avgIQ.
Imagine MOST of your population is problem causers, a tiny sliver is problem solvers, and no geniuses? A place like that would look like, well, like somalia or india.
Then imagine a place where most people are maintainers, and you have more midwits and problems solvers than problem causers? Well, that would look like America (30 years ago before we let in india and somalia)
No comments:
Post a Comment