HBDers are Idiots: Reason 3
One of the common HBD talking points is- “g-loaded tests measure ‘abstract reasoning’ and are thus more reliable proxies for intelligence”.
I say-
Bullshit! They measure the ability to solve problems within accepted worldviews, not intelligence.
A good example of this phenomena is seen in how the modern heliocentric model of the solar system came to prevail. Ancient greek philosophers (the ones that ‘western’ people fellate) believed that the heavens were a work of pure geometric perfection and symmetry. This lead to the view that the orbits of celestial bodies were always perfectly circular.
Therefore they continued to believe that the orbits of planets were perfectly circular, even when their observations said otherwise. They tried to explain this discrepancy with a complex system of circles within circles (aka epicycles). It was not until Kepler (in the early 1600s) came to the conclusion that only an ellipse could fit the known experimental data, that the idea of perfect circles, spheres and other pseudo-scientific crap started to be abandoned.
However, the formula and mathematical methods for fitting the observations to an ellipse were known for almost 1,500 years before him. So, were there no high g-loaded astronomers before his time? Or were they too busy constructing more complex epicycles to fit the data to the theory?
Another example of this behavior is seen in how famous doctors of previous eras bled and purged their sick patients, even though there was no evidence that such treatments did anything other than kill more people than otherwise. Were these famous ‘famous’ white doctors from eras prior to the 1880s stupid, sociopathic or just plain ignorant? Or could they have been clever morons who tried to solve problems with ever complex versions of their failed theories?
It takes intelligence to accept that you were wrong. Clever morons, on the other hand, try to paper up the gaping hole left after their credibility implodes.
Comments?
People make mistakes. Newton believed in alchemy, was he a clever moron as well? None of the people you mention have ever taken a g-loaded test, so you are just talking out of your ass. As for bleeding and purging, I majored in miasma theory, so that is not my speciality.
“However, the formula and mathematical methods for fitting the observations to an ellipse were known for almost 1,500 years before him. So, were there no high g-loaded astronomers before his time? Or were they too busy constructing more complex epicycles to fit the data to the theory?”
More likely anyone going outside the mainstream was ostracized. It’s not sufficient to be right, you also need to be a stubborn fighter, and lucky. It took Kepler to win the political fight, and persuade his fellow scientists that he was correct.
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So, you agree it is a popularity contest?
For instance, low-carb diets have been “discovered” multiple times, starting with William Banting in 1863.
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Quit giving some dead white man credit! The ability of carbs to cause weight gain was common knowledge, even in african cultures.
“Quit giving some dead white man credit! The ability of carbs to cause weight gain was common knowledge, even in african cultures.”
Well, the fact that carbs are unhealthy has been known since hunter-gatherer times. It’s just been forgotten and re-discovered repeatedly.
Just a matter of finding someone with a historical record.
“So, you agree it is a popularity contest?”
Sure, but not only. Politics is also about maneuvering.
Another good example is Blaise Pascal’s work on the vacuum. An old notion from Aristotle’s time was, “Nature abhors a vacuum”. IE, a vacuum is impossible, they literally thought the universe would sooner suffer its own non-existence than a cubic millimeter of empty space. When people started finding ways to create a vacuum experimentally, the very-well-respected well-learned doctors bent over backwards to try and explain it away, inventing all kinds of invisible “aether”, and other stuff you’d generally expect in Harry Potter. All those “learned doctors” who outranked Pascal in his own time are now utterly forgotten, their academic legacy is zilch…
What, pray tell, would be accepted world views required to excel in highly abstract tests in say, computational linguistics?
Quit giving some dead white man credit!
Sheeshm, you sound like a feminist. Good post though.
AD, your readers are still unable to grasp the idea of accepted worldviews.
Maybe you should explain to them that those tests are like testing if the CPU of a computer is working. Those tests test if this person is capable of logical reasoning, i.e. to process information and equations. But still this logical reasoning is independent of the accepted worldview which might be correct or wrong. So if in your accepted worldview you define 1 + 2 as 4, the CPU or your mind will always calculate 1 + 2 as 4, although 1 + 2 = 4 is wrong in the real world. In logic, even if A is wrong, the formula (A => B) is always right as long as B is right.
People who score low on IQ tests are either people who have different worldviews from those who are operating the test or people who have a problem in their CPU.
The rabbit hole runs deep.
http://www.lloydpye.com/flash/15-maps.swf
http://www.lloydpye.com/flash/12-megaliths.swf
http://www.lloydpye.com/flash/14-Domestication.swf
http://www.lloydpye.com/flash/2-In-the-beginning.swf
that explains my troubled childhood of trying to find greenland in the biggest countries of world in the atlas.
I don’t know what HBD is acronymonious with. Can someone help me?
I really dislike this line of reasoning, Captain Hindsight. It’s unfair to expect scientists 500 years ago to have known everything we know now. Scientific knowledge is a cumulative process and their failures are part of the reason we have much better models of planetary motion. We know that circular orbits don’t work because lots of people tried to make them work and failed. It is impossible to escape trial and error when you are searching for the truth. You have an idea, try to make it work, but often you tried the wrong thing and your theory falls apart. That’s how scientific discovery goes. And there’s no way to know if your idea is science or pseudoscience until you go through the experiments. It’s also hard to conclusively prove that an idea is wrong. But it’s easy to look back and think the answer was always obvious.
“It takes intelligence to accept that you were wrong. Clever morons, on the other hand, try to paper up the gaping hole left after their credibility implodes.”
This is just silly. You’ve fallen to the level of simply defining intelligence as whatever leads to good things and cleverness as whatever leads to bad things.