Tags
board games, construct validity, David Wechsler, g factor, IQ, predictive validity, test construction
IQ tests are considered valid because they have both construct validity and predictive validity. They have construct validity because a statistical technique called factor analysis proves that all mental tests are influenced by a general factor dubbed g, and that IQ tests load high in g. They have predictive validity because IQ tests better predict important life outcomes like education, income and occupational status than any other single measurable trait.
However IQ skeptics like our very own Race Realist (RR) argue that this validity is just an artifact of test construction. In other words, all IQ tests correlate with g, not because they measure a factor common to all mental abilities, but rather because only tests that are positively correlated are included in test batteries.
Similarly, he’d argue that IQ tests predict success in school and life, not because high IQ people learn faster, make wiser life choices and are more productive, but rather because only test items that good students did well on were included in the tests.
There’s some truth to RR’s view. Tests of general knowledge only became used in IQ tests after WWI testing found them to correlate highly with the total score of other subtests. In addition, David Wechsler would present potential test items to people of “known intelligence” and primarily those items that discriminated well between people with known Binet IQs of different levels were included. A question about a non-Christain religion was included in the general knowledge subtest after Wechsler found it to distinguish those Americans with superior from average IQs.
Given that IQ tests owe at least a small part of their validity to test construction, it’s interesting to ask whether IQ tests would still have the same construct and predictive validity if we remove the selective bias in picking subtests and test items.
What is needed is a random sample of mental abilities, not one pre-selected by psychologists. The closest thing we have to such a sample are board games. Thus, instead of the 10 subtests Wechsler arbitrarily chose for his original scale, we could simply pick the 10 “most popular” board games of all time:
- chess
- checkers
- Backgammon
- Scrabble
- Monopoly
- Clue
- Othello
- Trivial Pursuit
- Pictionary
- Risk
An ideal study would be to take 2000 random teenagers with very little experience playing any of these games, and send them to a summer camp where all they did was play these 10 games everyday (though no special strategies would be taught), culminating in a tournament where all 2000 were ranked on each game, and then given an overall ranking that reflected their combined performance across all ten games. This combined ranking would be converted into full-scale IQ, such that the best overall player (out of 2000) would be assigned a full-scale IQ of 150 and the worst would be assigned a full-scale IQ of 50.
If there really is a g factor, we should expect that while some people are great at chess but terrible at Pictionary, in general people who are good or bad at one game would be good or bad at any other.
Further, if g has predictive validity, we should find that 30 years later, those with the highest full-scale IQs would have more education, more prestigious occupations, and higher incomes (even after controlling for family background) than those who performed poorly.
Pumpkin Person 
Seeing a Brazilian woman make such a monumental scientific discovery was inspiring.
because peepee = santo?
she looks white to me.
here eric striker explains how latinos were used as literal scabs and the moral bankruptcy of the GOP establishment.
eric weinstein has explained how foreign engineers and scientists were used in the same way.
whoever is against immigration restriction relative to the current situation because racism is just a stooge of capital, what eric weinstein calls “dupes of the rent seeking elite”.
IMO for a really accurate test, you need to determine speed & retention.
So, the faster you learn, and the more/longer you retain, the higher your intelligence.
Puppy, the only way to objectively measure intelligence is to read Stephen Jay Gould and listen to his brilliant analysis. You would soon realise intelligence is a social construction and that indeed blacks may have been more advanced than the rest of the world despite not inventing the wheel or a numbering system.
Calm down pill. I realize IQ tests are valid, i was just doing a thought experiment on how one could prove it
There was a comment from someone in the last thread that Melo was ‘out of his depth’ here. These are false and malicious accusations. Melo has demonstrated again and again that even the most simple minded and naive of humans can engage in thorough scholarly debate with people of supposed ‘high IQ’. And anyways this is besides the point – we should be hoping to SHARE our knowledge with unfortunate people like Melo, not restrict it to only people likely to agree with us because they are smart.
And so that is why we need open borders.
You’re finally seeing the light. I’m so proud.
Keep this up and I may bless your daughter with a beautiful mixed baby.
As stephen jay gould and franz boas, both really objective ashekenazi jews have shown – even the most so called ‘primitive’ of socieites are secretly as smart. if not SMARTER than modern european or american ones because of a little something later scholars came to know as the ‘magic negro’ effect i.e every achievement by a black person is to be wildly celebrated as if a special oympics person did it.
Modern hunter gatherers would find it hard to adjust to living in civilization. That’s why they score so low. At the same time whites would probably starve to death if they were put out in the wild on their own. So they’d fail a different type of IQ test.
Have you seen naked and afraid?
“IQ tests are considered valid because they have both construct validity and predictive validity.”
(1) is false; (2) is circular.
https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.15252/embr.201744140
“They have construct validity because a statistical technique called factor analysis proves that all mental tests are influenced by a general factor dubbed g, and that IQ tests load high in g.”
No; this is built in due to test construction:
Further construction engineering compounds this artificial convergence to a general factor. For example, items are almost universally devised in the first place by people from a very narrow cultural background on the basis of ‘face validity’, with more or less intuitive reference to common criteria, such as school-type knowledge. This also applies to non-verbal items, such as the Raven’s matrices, as mentioned above. Cole (1999), indeed, describes the leap of psychological decentring that would be required on the part of test constructors to overcome this cultural bias. Then items are further selected/deselected to ensure test properties further consistent with a simple quantitative (biometric) trait, including: a normal distribution of population scores; a linear age-wise increase in scores; no sex differences; and so on. Out of this vast technology, it is, perhaps, not surprising that a common factor emerges, though it may be one in test designers’ presuppositions rather than one in nature.
Click to access 3398d781543cd0edcf51f181074f4c3ff35b.pdf
“Further, if g has predictive validity, we should find that 30 years later, those with the highest full-scale IQs would have more education, more prestigious occupations, and higher incomes (even after controlling for family background) than those who performed poorly.”
Again, circular:
View at Medium.com
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4557354/
Did you read the article? I acknowledged both your criticisms & proposed a way to circumvent them?
You proposed a way to circumvent it while still showing the circularity that Taleb and Richardson show is the problem with IQ while Richardson shows that ‘g’ is built into the test through test construction.
Circularity is only including tests/items that are known a priori to correlate with g/school grades. I’m proposing choosing from a random sample of mental tests such as board games, that were created independently of both criteria.
Read both Richardson and Taleb. I’m saying that “if g has predictive validity, we should find that 30 years later, those with the highest full-scale IQs would have more education, more prestigious occupations, and higher incomes (even after controlling for family background) than those who performed poorly” is still circular since, again, it is built into the test.
is still circular since, again, it is built into the test.
Which I why I proposed using board games instead of tests that were constructed to correlate with social class. You missed the whole point of the article.
How would that prove that ‘g’ is real and not an artifact of test construction—that is, a social construct?
Again, that ‘g’ correlates with ‘academic acheievment’ and whatever else is circular as Richardson and Taleb have pointed out.
Richardson’s hypothesis is that the selection process by which tests & test items are chosen for test batteries is what explains their g loadings & predictive power. That is, he argues only tests or test items that correlated with achievement (grades) or correlated with other tests (thus forming a g factor) were included in test batteries.
To his hypothesis we need to look at tests that were not constructed in that way. I proposed looking at board games because like conventional IQ tests, they’re cognitive tasks, but unlike IQ tests, they were not designed to correlate with achievement or g.
So if a battery of board games also shows a g factor & predicts achievement, then we’ll know Richardson was wrong: these properties are just an intrinsic function of cognitive tests & not a product of test construction
But if the board game battery show no or at least much weaker g loading & predictive power, Richardson was right
First para: right, that’s the argument.
Second para: Board games aren’t tests.
Third para: you’ve already explained the argument and Richardson and others have explained how ‘g’ arises from only intercorrelating tests that were based on the Stanford-Binet (see his 2002 paper).
Fourth para: Who will do the study? Even if it ‘shows a g loading’ (what ever that means), that doesn’t mean Richardson’s argument fails. Spearman’s g was falsified as was jensen’s.
I thought social construct were still real?
Did you even read Jensen’s response?
The g factor is a abstract statistical concept. General intelligence is a real physical phenomena via synaptic/ non-synaptic plasticity
Can you explain why circularity is a problem Fredo?
the only one I see is really that IQ scores are retrofitted to a normal distribution…but that’s ok for general purposes (ie. large aggregates and larger gaps). plus you can circumvent it anyway with things like the SAT.
“we can’t use information because the real distribution won’t perfectly fit a symmetric bell curve” is retarded.
“Can you explain why circularity is a problem Fredo?”
It’s not. That’s just how you create tests. By including/excluding items that fit a preconceived concept.
From a practical perspective circularity is fine because the tests work, regardless of why, but from a theoretical perspective, science should make predictions.
“but from a theoretical perspective, science should make predictions.”
And as you said IQ tests do have predictive validity. Confirming the construct validity of a test requires first defining the concept you wish to test. Assuming it’s not concrete but instead abstract. In this case it’s intelligence. If you think intelligence is novel problem solving ability and that the abilities required to carry this our are visuo-spatial, mathematical, vocabulary, etc. Then you’d devise a test to measure these aspects. IQ does this.
In the case of RR if you want to call these aspects measure of social class distance then whatever. At the end of the day if you and I believe intelligence is the mental ability to adapt and that social class is an accurate proxy of ones learning environment. Then “social class distance/knowledge” and “intelligence’ are distinctions without a difference, as IQ is simply a measure of the interaction between your nervous system, genes, and the environment. The only people these tests would be truly bias to are people who don’t live in civilization, like hunter gatherers.
yeah meLo. that’s exactly right.
taleb’s complaints are mostly stupid and confused. his “big” point is fine, but it’s not a strike against iq unless you worship it like pp does.
it extends to what is usually meant by intelligence…therefore not a problem.
Ya IQ is definitely not perfect by any means but I don’t think most of the criticisms I’ve seen on it are worth anything.
One day I’d like to help create and intelligence test based mostly on neurophysical properties.
“One day I’d like to help create and intelligence test based mostly on neurophysical properties.”
I’m pretty sure an Italian researcher uses a similar model to this. I’ll link it later.
That’d be interested to see. Hit me with that sauce homie.
purely physical traits of the brain != purely genetic traits
something hereditardians don’t be unnuhstanin.
No shit.
taleb and rr are right.
look at cattle from around the world.
they look different.
two possible explanations:
1. the cattle of the area look the way they do by chance.
2. the cattle of the area have been bred by man and selected by their environment.
2….
and milk and meat production are not environment independent…there is no one super cow for all environments…and steve show is [redacted by pp, 2019-09-03]
so the norms of reaction critics can test their theory without any ethical issues via domesticated animals.
“cattle” in the general sense means any domesticated animal used for meat or milk excluding pigs.
so “cattle” includes goats and oxen, not just cows.
so the norms of reaction critics would claim that a shoe super cow, goat, yak, etc. might be a little better in all environments, but NOT super.
Big chickens are several SD bigger than normal chickens in all environments
indeed. shoe loves that picture of the icelandic strongman chicken vs the desi chicken.
but is it true?
and…
would super chickens have other “issues” in other climates and other keepers?
that is, a yuge chicken is no good if it costs more than “yuge” to raise…costs more in feed and mortality/dead chickens pre-slaughter.
i was reminded of this phenomenon watching michael palin in brazil last night.
here’s a picture of cattle from the pantanal:
why do they look NOT-like american cows?
1. chance.
2. NOT chance.
btw, bordain’s season 12 in indonesia and the lower east side are worth watching.
i learned a new word…”rabbit punch”.
bourdain said he’d like to “rabbit punch” (oprah) henry kissinger, his fellow mongolian.
that is, a yuge chicken is no good if it costs more than “yuge” to raise…
Well size & utility are 2 different phenotypes.
The former may be environment dependent while the latter is independent.
Probably the same with ashkenazi (verbal) IQ. The verbal advantage would probably appear in every (human) environment but the economic benefits only in capitalist societies
taleb only even alluded to reaction norms on twitter iirc. his post is shitty data and bad stats inference.
if he just posted jorge’s old cactus analogy it would have been 100x better.
Wow, Race Realist can produce a ton of verbiage but he cant seem to understand why board games avoid the problem of circularity found in other IQ tests.
“I thought social construct were still real?”
It’s not biologically real. Gould pointed this out almost 40 years ago.
“Did you even read Jensen’s response?”
Factor indeterminancy was never solved which is why PC1 was renamed ‘g’.
“The g factor is a abstract statistical concept. General intelligence is a real physical phenomena via synaptic/ non-synaptic plasticity”
The g factor is a reified statistical concept forced through test construction.
And I’ll get you that source tonight Melo (the neurophys test).
Trivial Pursuit is a lot of fun. Im very strong in that game. Im also good at scrabble but only with a real dictionary, not the stupid scrabble one with dumb made up words.
Brexit is such a divisive issue amongst the elites in the UK. Much like trump in america. Tony Blair and the globalists/neocons want UK to stay in the EU while the private school set want to get out of the EU to basically deregulate Britain.
Its quite fascinating to see the elites fighting.
If the UK really followed the ‘Singapore on Thames’ economic model, I’d give it about 10-15 years before a gigantic banking crash of some kind came along. You’d also have the very real possibility, ironically, that a very left wing labour government could make the UK kind of like a nordic country – which would actually be better for the average Brit compared to the present.
I was looking at professional exams that are relevant to me – I have a prospective choice of becoming a solicitor, doing the accountancy exams and doing the CFA. The CFA is least relevant for my career now, but I’d imagine the most ‘fun’ to do.
Studying law looks so boring its unbelievable. I feel sorry for people that do it. Being a barrister is not that bad, but a solicitor is basically a bureaucrat.
Because of my prediliction for contract jobs, I’m now firmly down the compliance path but I’ve put a few applications out in alternative areas so we’ll see. Its very good money for the amount of work I do, but its a bit dull like regular law.
Puppy, as someone who thinks about morality from the POV of who the jews say, what is your stance on palestinians and how they are treated by Israel?
Are you senile? I’ve told you many times that I have great empathy for the Palestinians.
The only morality I agree with Jews on are stuff that non-psychopaths of all ethnic groups agree on.
I’m starting to think you’re a Jewish guy feigning antisemetism to make antisemites looks as idiotic and annoying as possible. Either that or you have all pervasive developmental disability that is being made worse by early onset dementia
Puppy you agree with jews on 99% of issues. I’m surprised you made an exception for Palestinians.
By Jews, you mean the organized Jewish community, and i disagree with their public statements on most issues that matter (foreign policy, immigration, HBD, Russia, etc). You just lack the Theory of Mind to know what I think & why.
I think Phil is referring to stuff like chicks with dicks, gays in the military, and institutional racism.
He thinks you agree with the Jewish intelligentsia on those.
I agree with them a bit on social issues but not as much as pill thinks
You have admitted numerous times to watching cnn for example.
I also watch Ryan Dawson on YouTube
…poor children are just as smart as white children…
sometimes being brain damaged helps.
uncle joe just expressed the entirety of american politics in 2019 in 9 words.
one of the greatest quotes of all time.
…
of course race has less influence than “is the person fat and disgusting or not?”
but even fat can be sexy…if it’s accompanied by an even larger lean body mass.
but reality is 99% of fat people aren’t as sexy as sumo wrestlers.
most white people are hideous.
Only way to break away from the war between SJWs and right-wingers is to have a group of people volunteer to have their brain hooked to a computer from birth, allow them to have total independence and freedom of choice on the Internet, and allow them to build a personality of their own. This would prove to others to us whether race, gender, etc. are social constructs or not based solely on genetics.
This would also prove to us how heritable intelligence is, how heritable all other traits are, and how much value environment actually holds on life outcome.
All what i see is
WHITE STUPIDITY STYLE everywhere
Incapacity to think beyond ideologies and have a diversity of facts on mind [rationality],
You can be critical and have personal dislikes about lgbtism without condemned us/them completely. to starts..
most of very partisan ones from both sides or any sides are white people…
But, SJW is considerably more correct than right winkers on most of these stuffs
what i said
fundamental stuff right winkers are mostly correct, without doubt, is
incontrolled immigration, and i’m not saying ”NO immigration”. It’s not the same thing.