What swings it for me is the disparity between her boardroom babble about vague impressions she had that justify her gut instinct, “I’m smart this asshole dumb”, I can totally see a lot of people in r/ssc and beyond being her
In fact I’ve seen them do it about people from this sub, myself included
It’s just gravy she has that bit about her STEM job so I’ll gave it a pass here for the laugh
I understand the reaction against her, because she was rude and condescending in that video, but I am not very happy with the nature of said reaction.
You can see in the response to the video the evangelisation of IQ in action, as they act like her IQ score invalidates her achievements as a scientist, and is used to objectively label her as less intelligent. Like, I'm not an expert on intelligence, but maybe spending a large part of your life studying actually useful things about how cancers or viruses work makes you a bit slower on IQ puzzles, because your head is filled with this other shit?
It's interesting that you analogyze her to r/ssc, because I can also see it the other way around: r/ssc are all the people judging her solely based on her IQ, despite her supposedly being a good scientist. Plus I can see it feed into the reactionary theory(popular among rationalists as well) about how universities are corrupt and select against intelligence, because she's a "credentialist" that performed mediocrely on an IQ test (Scott Alexander also kind of touches on this in his leaked emails, where he suggests maybe IQ tests should be an alternative to college degrees),
I think what we have going on is a binary star of two kinds of insufferable people: those who overestimate their own intelligence and self-worth on the basis of their academic and career achievement, and those who overestimate their own intelligence and self-worth despite any sort of academic and career achievement.
The embarrassment of one is schadenfreude for and justification to the other, and this was an embarrassment for the former.
And, as usual, as higher education continues to be a cause of class stratification, this also picks up cultural and political character.
I would also add that if I’m coming up with a slatestarcodex style heuristic for “general intelligence” that isn’t exclusively about your IQ score, “measured IQ minus 10 points for every time you go on a tv competition to prove how smart you are” is gonna be up there
The very premise of the video is stupid and mean: ask people to judge each other's intelligence based on a glance, and then compare it to their IQ(the very premise of the video itself evangelises IQ actually). It's a stupid challenge that seems specifically engineered to generate *epic fails* for a viral video.
I don't know how Jubilee selects people for these videos, (did the people know what they were signing up for exactly before they showed up?), but Jubilee definitely knew what it was doing. The making of this video and the response to it, and not just the scientist's behavior in it, reflect a very reductive and very mean type of discourse around intelligence, and I thought it's something to be pointed out.
I had assumed that in the video they’re being asked to rank each other on perceived IQ performance, if not then stuff like achievements should come into the more general “intelligence” assessment and I’d have a different opinion
As for the reaction I’m not very interested what people have to say for or against her based on her measured IQ, and I don’t particularly care what her IQ is or how it reflects on her more broadly. In my version what I’m seeing is somebody making speculative judgements about other people, based in her existing prejudices more than anything else but dressed up in management speak, and getting owned for it by reality.
As for people on /r/ssc, I can see it going all kinds of ways both because there’s all sorts of people on /r/ssc and because I don’t usually expect any one of them to play by the rules with any consistency, I’m pattern-matching her satisfyingly asshole performance to a particular kind of behaviour I’ve specifically seen on /r/ssc
The test done in the Jubilee video was largely bunk to begin with although education actually corresponds to a substantial increase in performance on cognitive battery tests. So as someone who has a PhD in Cancer Biology, she actually has a comparative leg up due to the accumulated years of scholastic experience. “G” does happen to be a pretty reliable metric in psychometrics so it’s not something to overlook.
As for her personality, she does seem to be needlessly flaunting her achievements which could loosely fall under something “sneer” worthy or the rationalism movement to some extent. You don’t have to be a genius to make COVID-19 testing kits or get an advanced degree, and to act otherwise can make someone look like a bit of a twat according to many. Not casting aspersions on her, just pointing out why many criticize her.
Pretty much just wanted to share the absurd IQ thing here. I don't know any other subs where I can safely post about IQ being nonsense, or post things that highlight that, without being met with "well, actually, if you check this study that compares 47 different IQ tests against the Ink Blot, you'll seeeeeee....."
As for what this is- I have no clue, it popped up in my feed randomly, and I was just kind of hit with how stupid it was. I guess crossposts don't give you notifications though, or I'd have answered you sooner, sorry about that.
Now that you underline it, I wonder how they would receive it.
Like, it's so stupidly over the top, and yet they supposedly did an IQ test, so that's what establish alphas amirite?
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