IQ Is Misunderstood - Spencer Greenberg

What was this study you did on intelligence?

Yeah. So some people say that IQ is a pseudoscientific swindle and other people think it fully captures everything about your intelligence and says who you are as a person fundamentally. And y- as you probably know, there was a big replication crisis in social science where many studies failed to replicate and so we thought, "Hey, we can do our part by trying to replicate a lot of claims about IQ and intelligence." So we recruited over 3,000 people. We implemented 62 distinct intelligence tasks, which includes everything from, like, memorization, puzzle solving, math problems, spelling, reaction time, sort of everything you could possibly think about that you could do online automatically. And then, uh, we tested about 40 different claims that are made about intelligence and we checked if they held up.

Right. Yeah, the, it is... Intelligence is kind of like the barbell chalk and cheese. It's the, uh, how would you say? It's like the cognitive Rorschach test.

(laughs)

It's like what do you... What... How you see it kind of tells me probably quite a lot about your priors coming into it. You're right. It's either the fundamental underpinning that explains all of the outcomes that you're going to get in life or it is a Nazi-ish policy that n- n- never had any basis in science and should be totally disbanded.

Yeah. It's, it's pretty wild. And so the question is like, yeah, what's really true about it? To what extent does academia write about it? To what extent do the lay public write about it? And so we explored a bunch of those questions.

Why do you think... Even before we get into that, why do you think it's so contentious?

Yeah. I think it's a few things. One, it does have a horrendous history. It was used, for example... Like, the idea of IQ or measuring intelligence was used for forced sterilization, so that's pretty horrible. I mean, the Nazis got into really s- some evil stuff around, you know, thinking about how intelligent people are and, and murdering people on that basis. Um, so I think that's part of it. I think another thing is, you know, everyone kind of thinks... It's like, yeah, it's good to be organized, but if someone says you're disorganized, it doesn't feel like it cuts to the bone, like, of who you are as a human or it doesn't make you subhuman, but I think some people feel this about intelligence. If you're told you're unintelligent, then it sort of, like, says you're bad in a kind of a fundamental way or you're lesser-

You're less of a person. Yeah.

Exactly. And I think that's... You know. And I think, um... So I think it, it feels different.

That's interesting. Intelligence is very close to our sense of self in a way that the cleanliness of our cupboards, uh, or, like, our obsessiveness or something isn't quite so much.