Wow, did a takedown of IQ statistics? This should be 🍿
I basically don't trust a pop-stats idea until Shalizi has taken a run at it
bactra.org/weblog/523.html ht
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I genuinely don't understand the point in contention here. I get the positive manifold, which is a thing out there in the world. I get that it is a positive manifold across tests that it might be argued have an ambiguous relationship with what we subjectively call intelligence.
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Causality is the point of contention. g has no referent which could be studied via causal modelign. Even weaker in fact, there is no physical phenomenology. There is no part of the brain you can point to and say, "this is the g part of the brain" afaict. Phlogiston comp is apt.
I suspect because then it can become a sort of "constant of motion" in debates at the evolution level. Where you can assume that it is stable across periods of selection pressure and doesn't get refactored when environment shifts the current idea of 'fitness'
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And I think that should be taken as strong evidence that it is an ill-posed construct that is primarily of social and ideological utility. Trust it no further than mathified superstition. "Data without generalization is just gossip" etc.
Would you critique 'health' or 'GDP' in similar terms bc you cannot point to where they are? Yet these are valuable concepts and we can learn and make inferences about them


