Models of IQ & wealth

Posted by on November 21, 2009; This entry is filed under Uncategorized.
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Steve Hsu has been interesting of late (interesting like Steve, not Malcolm). So, IQ, compression and simple models and If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?. For a theoretical physicist I find Steve to be eminently clear in his exposition of abstract topics (perhaps he has practice from having to talk to experimental physicists?).

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7 Comments

  1. Orion November 22nd, 2009 at 9:21 am

    Well, he is talking about a field heavily based on statistics (psychometrics), so you wouldn’t expect a theoretical physicist to have too many problems. His writing is also littered with numerical and visuo-spatial examples. Thanks for the links though.

  2. levy November 22nd, 2009 at 2:52 pm

    Other IQ news: 
     
    Wicherts, J. M., Borsboom, D., & Dolan, C. V. (in press). Why national IQs do not support evolutionary theories of intelligence. Personality and Individual Differences (link) 
     
    Wicherts, J. M., Dolan, C. V., & Van der Maas, H. L. J. (in press). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence. (link)

  3. M Stein November 22nd, 2009 at 6:59 pm

    Levy, you forgot possibly the most un-pc paper of the year? 
     
    Rushton, J. P., & Templer, D. I. (2009). National differences in intelligence, crime, income, and skin color. Intelligence, 37, 341-346. 
     
    http://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org/2009%20INTELL%20(Crime).pdf 
     
    In terms of recent publications the review of Richard Nisbett’s book by James J Lee is excellent.

  4. ben g November 23rd, 2009 at 1:06 am

    Comment I left there: 
    Ok, so it’s well established that IQ/g have strong predictive power, but what is the evidence that IQ/g is actually causing the outcomes its predicting? An IQ test is capturing many, many things that it’s correlated with (and not just some [limited] measure of SES). 
     
    The argument that g is a good measure of what most people think of as intelligence seems pretty strong to me, on the other hand. I haven’t read much on that part of the debate, but the fact that all of these cognitive tests are correlated with each other suggests that there is something called intelligence and that we can measure it.

  5. razib November 23rd, 2009 at 1:47 am

    It merits further research given the suggestion made by Jensen (2006) that pleiotropy (genes having more than one effect) may underlie both IQ and skin color. 
     
    from the rushton paper you linked above. when rushton brought this correlation up a year or so ago, i recall telling him that this just didn’t make any sense anymore. we know the genes which control continental-scale skin color variance, and they’re a few QTLs of relatively large effect. not only are they of large effect, they are common variants. if IQ variation is not due to common variants of large effect, then logically the pleiotropic connection should be marginal. researchers as far back as the 1960s inferred that the genetic architecture of skin color was due to a relatively small number of genes of large effect from family based studies. the fact that they couldn’t adduce the same about IQ should be suggestive. in any case, i immediately did a control-f to see if that part had been left in, and sure enough, it had. not that i’m surprised it was left in.

  6. steve hsu November 23rd, 2009 at 3:14 pm

    Razib, 
     
    Thanks for the compliment. The compression post was mainly for non-experts, but seems to have attracted comments from people who know a lot about psychometrics. The wealth post was kind of meant as a joke, but not entirely.

  7. M Stein November 24th, 2009 at 7:20 pm

    Thanks Razib, that’s interesting info.  
     
    btw. Just reading through the archives, does Godless Capitalist still blog here?

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