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Twitter thread does a good sneer about people JAQing off about IQ (https://twitter.com/DocEdge85/status/1083059763624079360)
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What makes me mad is that “IQ has genetic factors” isn’t, by itself, a very interesting/controversial/debate-worthy hypothesis, by itself. What starts the debate is this stupid (and, it seems to me, very American) habit of instantly wanting to replace “genetic factors” with “race.”

Within- and between-population differences are the same thing and they all fortunately align perfectly with categories used by the US Census Bureau.
Evolution doesn't stop at the neck you fucking dingus, that's why I can eyeball a group distribution chart by continent of origin hard enough to prove that Sub-Saharan Africans are dumb because of the phrase "Sub-Saharan"
"The new creationism"
All of this plus Liam Bright on twitter is making me take very seriously the proposition of becoming a full Carnapian Logical Positivist
As this twitter thread points out, the debate starts a bit earlier than that. The methods of inquiry into the genetic architecture of intelligence are kind of stupid in their own right, and pretty much guaranteed to give spurious results.
Yeah, that's true. What I mean is that without the propensity to tie it to race the debate would (probably, mostly) have stayed inside the scientific community, rather than between scientists and Internet douchebags.
  1. But the energy that some of The Fixated bring to this is totally different. It’s more like talking to guys who really like measuring their dongs and want a dong-ruler for their brains.

That part is absolutely true for me. I have a small penis, and I would like to have a really huge IQ as compensation. Instead I have (based on Internet IQ tests, which I have no reason to believe are reliable) an IQ which is high, but short of genius, which is especially disappointing for reasons which I have to believe are common among the “rationalist” and SSC communities.

I even considered getting a proctored WAIS-IV IQ test done, but those are really fucking expensive. My cheapness won out over my intellectual insecurity. Who knows: maybe I’ll amuse myself and get one done once I stop drinking. Still, I’m not expecting the overall number to be high enough to impress anyone I actually give a shit about impressing.

No one would give a shit what your IQ is no matter what the number is.
Nor should they. But there is nonetheless a voice in the back of my head that tells me that if I were "genius-level IQ", that would mean something. I'm adult enough to know that it doesn't; that IQ isn't an accomplishment in and of itself. But that doesn't mean that the immature part of myself wouldn't exult in a "genius-level" result.
Individual level IQs are not very useful and also very noisy and also easily hackable. You can practice those tests and increase your score. It's not that good of metric to be proud of. StarCraft MMR or chess ELO are probably more concrete and unhackable and something worth being proud of.
> if I were "genius-level IQ", that would mean something. It wouldn't.
I used to go on local television as a child genius with a 200+ IQ. (I can't describe for you how insanely dull Perth was in the 1970s.) Thankfully I turned into an adult moron in due course. We will draw a discreet veil over my massive dong.
I used to be quite good friends with a kid who ended up on a BBC series about child geniuses. He ended up being "the troubled one", rejected from a prestigious Philosophy programme for being a nutter and switched to English Lit a year later etc. (pleb, I rejected a Philosophy offer from York and did Philosophy *and* English and I still only barely scraped a 2:1). I keep forgetting to track him down and find out what he's doing, and he's not on facebook so I'm all at sea (not strictly true, I'm on a mattress in a room).
this is why i'm so glad I successfully transformed into my full flowering as an adult moron
He apparently had something to do with making that execrable short film where Andy Serkis does Theresa May in the style of Gollum, so yeah.
He could be an MP now like the guy from 7 Up.
(1) I have found a photograph from December 2018 of the bloke in question. He looks thin. (2) I wonder what happened to the relatable young people in those early 2000s ads for Doritos or some other starch-based young people's snack
As cotton goes to seed in the field, so do relatable young people wither at the approach of a new demigeneration of youth. Just as the leavings of old crops can provide nutrients for the next year's field, so do the relatable but faded youths nurture their replacements. What do you think those Doritos are seasoned with, anyway?
Bullshit. No one with a massive dong would ever coyly talk about drawing a "discreet veil" over it. But I congratulate you on your tremendous IQ.
you would be amazed how large a discretion can get
Were you a Quiz Kid?
It seems much more relevant to focus on what you can actually accomplish in your life than on what score you get on a test. I've never taken one, or wanted to, or wanted to know anyone else's score, because it just doesn't actually matter in itself. I think you'll be happier and more productive if you focus on doing something that will impress people or yourself.

Affiliated with Rosenberg and Feldman – feel bad for those guys. Racists keep quote mining their papers no matter what they say. Feldman even wrote a debunking of Nick Wade but I doubt it’ll stop the racists.

https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1004817

The Fixated is a great description! I love his explanation of how “The Fixated” are actually the group sloughing off IQ from science into some exceptionalist framework