Yes, there are a few too many Lex Luthers in the IQ movement, and a large portion of society who intuitively know that IQ is an important cause of unequal outcomes between individuals and groups but they prefer to not talk about it and will even lie to maintain social approval.
Do you believe genes explain gaps between populations, and is race the best proxy we have for people who are part of the same genetic cluster? I'd say yes to the first part and no to the second.
I think genes are much better at explaining gaps within societies. I believe that gap between societies are largely explained by differences in the geography of genetic ancestors. Those geographical differences caused entire societies to evolve in very different directions.
Race is a high-level genetic cluster. I don’t know what “best proxy” means in this context.
We live in a society in which goodies are doled out by those same categories (white, black, Hispanic, Asian). Are those the best categories? Probably not. But they are the categories that matter in law and practice. So if IQ is important (it is) then it has to be looked at in those categories.
I think to answer your question—is race the best popular proxy for genetic populations—we’d have to know 1) what do you mean by proxy for genetic populations? Like, what purpose is this proxy meant to serve? 2) What are some alternative popular proxies for genetic populations that are in competition with race to be the best proxy?
Race is a bad proxy, but everyone forgets that race is a more advanced version of tribalism. The tribal ancestors were bigoted against MORE people than the racist ancestors. Dunbar is a tricky one.
1) groups of people with some meaningful genetic relationship beyond being humans or relatives and 2) ethno-cultural groups and country of origin are the only two I can think of.
You seem to be searching for a way to invalidate race as an important or useful category. But as I understand it, the big racial/ancestry groups, properly understood, are like big extended families. (By “properly understood” I mean avoiding mistakes like grouping Australian aborigines in with sub-Saharan Africans because perhaps they have similar skin tones despite different ancestry.)
So you’re stuck with race as a useful term for a certain level of genetic and ancestral connection in between being human and being related.
Country of origin isn’t very useful in this context because in the modern world, many countries include people from a variety of ancestries. E.g. Afro-Caribbeans in the UK.
Ethnic-cultural is fine but it is a more fine-grained distinction than race. Sure we could talk about Scots versus English and Japanese versus Chinese, and that’s also useful in some contexts. It just depends on what you’re trying to do. But if you want to group humans into 5-7 big groups based on genetic ancestry, well, the word for that is “race” and those groups correspond pretty well to common understandings of the big racial groups.
That's...insane. I also think IQ is mostly a real thing and that group averages differ.
So what? Even if it's all genetic (unlikely), lots of other genetic characteristics are equally important - honesty, cooperativeness, creativity, etc.
And averages are just averages - every group has its share of geniuses and idiots. The distributions overlap. So some groups will have more or fewer John von Neummans than others. All JVNs are *JVN*, just as smart as any other JVN. The fact that there's fewer of them doesn't change that.
If individuals are convicted of crimes, by all means punish them. Don't generalize to innocents who haven't done anything wrong.
It matters completely, it literally changes what conclusion to take and what to do about group disparities. I don't see how this is so difficult to understand.
I don't follow you. We don't need to do *anything* about group disparities. Such disparities don't cause harm. If the disparities result from some kind of unfairness (as many claim), we should do something about the unfairness. But the disparities per se are not a problem in the first place.
We do things about group disparities, like hire people we’d never hire but for their membership in a group with a lower average IQ. Is that good or bad? Justify your answer.
I agree that IQ realists lean crazier than the mainstream because of the stigma, but this does not lead to your conclusion that IQ realists should be nicer. If stigma leads to crazier IQ realists being the vocal ones, the solution is to lift the stigma so nicer IQ realists become more common and more vocal. The effect isn't going to help undo the cause
"Also, high IQ people should be a bit more humble and realize that a person can have many admirable qualities beyond IQ." Why do you assume this doesn't happen?
Frankly a big problem with IQ discourse is that nearly everyone seems to implicitly believe that IQ stops mattering after a certain threshold and that this threshold coincides with whatever their IQ happens to be.
Lot's of people talking about what to do about the problem of low IQ people. Hardly anyone notices that there are people from whose point of view he is "low IQ".
There’s a lot of nuts out there but I’ve never heard anyone advocate publicly for mass murder of the low IQ. They do call for mandatory remigration, which I suppose could imply murder for those who resisted. Is this what you are referring to?
I agree with Bryan that IQ realism is empirically solid and that none of the extreme policy proposals sometimes attached to it follow logically. One distinction that often gets lost is that IQ primarily measures cognitive breadth—general, rapid problem-solving ability—but it does not measure cognitive depth. Depth-oriented thinkers rely on structural reasoning, truth-seeking, and system-building, and this style is only loosely connected to IQ. In many domains, depth outperforms breadth because it focuses on underlying structure rather than surface-level speed.
Those differences in cognitive style—not differences in IQ—explain why some people handle intelligence research responsibly while others drift into misanthropy or category-based thinking. Keeping the breadth/depth distinction in view helps separate the empirical claims about intelligence from the moral principles that should govern how we treat one another.
Why do you anti-IQ people always just make up concepts that don't correspond to reality (you making your political point in the beginning doesn't change the fact that you are in fact anti-iq)?
“In many domains, depth outperforms breadth because it focuses on underlying structure rather than surface-level speed.” This is unfalsifiable mumbo-jumbo. You're just making up things through vibes because you don't like the actual implications of IQ.
You’re making several confident claims that collapse the moment you check them against what I actually wrote.
First, nothing in my comment was “anti-IQ.” I explicitly affirmed the empirical validity of g and the robustness of IQ measurement. If endorsing the psychometric consensus counts as “anti-IQ” to you, then your disagreement is with Carroll, Jensen, Deary, Gottfredson, and the entire field—not with me.
Second, the breadth/depth distinction isn’t something I “made up.” It corresponds to well-established constructs in cognitive science:
• algorithmic vs. reflective intelligence (Stanovich)
• Type 1 vs. Type 2 processing (Evans & Frankish)
• field-independence (Witkin)
• need for cognition (Cacioppo & Petty)
• cognitive decoupling (Stanovich & Toplak)
These are empirically studied, operationalized, and falsifiable. If you haven’t encountered them, that’s fine—but unfamiliarity isn’t a refutation. It just makes your confidence outpace your knowledge.
Third, the claim that depth outperforms breadth in certain domains is not “unfalsifiable mumbo-jumbo.” Reflective cognition and structural reasoning predict performance on long-horizon, system-building tasks that IQ alone does not. This is documented in the literature. Again, if you’re unaware of it, that’s a gap in your reading, not a flaw in the distinction.
Fourth, your assumption about my motives (“you don’t like the implications of IQ”) is pure projection. I explicitly endorsed the empirical findings. What I rejected were the non-sequitur policy conclusions some people attach to them. That’s not anti-IQ; that’s pro-logic.
If you want to disagree, disagree on substance. But dismissing established distinctions as “made up” because you haven’t studied them isn’t an argument. Come back when you’ve read something other than your own assumptions.
High IQ does not mean having wisdom which i will suggest to be more meaningful than a very high IQ ex performing some higher level tasks; and many with very high IQ's can be as inflexible as those with low IQ's.
I suspect it's less that IQ realists are typically bad than that the bad ones are most willing to admit to being IQ realists. Among intelligent people, IQ denial is more of a social pretense than a sincere position. They know the truth but would rather not say it.
They acted exactly the same as the intelligentsia today (it's literally the same progressive group). You just happen to agree with the intelligentsia today (and you would have agreed with the intelligentsia then).
I agree that "IQ tests aren’t perfect, but they’re an excellent proxy for what ordinary language calls “intelligence, and that IQ predicts not just educational success, but career success."
BUT ...
IQ predicts not just educational success, but career success because in education and careers we precisely value those skills that we test for with IQ tests. So, this doesn't mean that IQ tests are good proxy for "real intelligence" they are good proxy for education and careers success
But that doesn't mean IQ tests are good proxy for “real intelligence”. I'll give you one example: People good with maths typically score well on IQ tests and they also more often succeed in educational and career setups. Despite that large % of them (if not majority) would have harder time to survive and thrive not just alone in nature but even is societies that are not as developed (technologically advanced and interdependent) relative to some people who do less well in IQ tests and have similar physical abilities
This ability to adapt to social and environmental surroundings while trying to survive/thrive is often used as a better definition of "real human intelligence" then the one that makes us succeed in educational and career environments.
"Despite that large % of them (if not majority) would have harder time to survive and thrive not just alone in nature but even is societies that are not as developed (technologically advanced and interdependent) relative to some people who do less well in IQ tests and have similar physical abilities" This is simply false. Higher cognitive ability means you learn faster, it is literally about the ability to adapt. I don't know why you IQ-critics try to attack something about IQ that literally isn't real.
I fully agree with you about "Higher cognitive ability means you learn faster, it is literally about the ability to adapt."
Where we disagree is the point that IQ testing well measures that kind of cognitive ability.
I happen to know large number of people with very high IQ test scores and not so high cognitive ability to adapt - quite contrary, some of them have very hard time to manage even relatively small life changes.
"If someone says, “I’m more intelligent than other people, so it’s acceptable for me to murder them,” the sensible response isn’t, “Intelligence is a myth.” The sensible response is, “Are you mad? That doesn’t justify murder.”" Quite right, of course. My first thought was to Alfred Hitchcock's experimental film "Rope," which is framed entirely around this exact concept. Well worth watching for those who haven't yet.
Advocating the extermination of low-IQ people should make no more sense than advocating the extermination of low-IQ animals (lower animals, that is). No one criticizes a horse-breeder on account of horses’ relatively low intelligence.
But there is this difference: only people have socio-political influence and power. More intelligent people tend to contribute more to society, by their productivity, their example, and their influence on public policy. One would prefer to be surrounded by more intelligent people.
True, this effect is rather weak—weak enough to give some color to Buckley’s quip about the first 1,000 names in the Boston telephone directory,
Obviously, I am not Brian, but I’m honestly confused how your model as described in the linked article differs from IQ realism or what you call essentialism. You agree that performance on an IQ test is predictive of performance in school and at work in many jobs. You even agree that this is because the skills needed to succeed at school and in those jobs like abstract reasoning are also the skills you need to do well on an IQ test. You reject the idea that children have an essence called intelligence, but then agree that obviously children differ in how much instruction they need to pick up something. How is this skill of picking up more stuff from less instruction fundamentally different from the idea of intelligence or learning potential?
I am asking because I consider myself an IQ realist and yet, despite disagreeing with all your condemnations of essentialism, I could not actually find anything in your model that contradicted mine, which makes me worry that the difference is purely semantic or at best a difference in framing and presentation rather than actual substance, and there is no actual disagreement here, only the perception of disagreement.
The only part where I think there might be a substantive disagreement is when you argue that IQ doesn’t provide an explanation of for example doing well answering mathematics questions as having an IQ is just a description of being good at that. Even here, I am not sure we actually have a substantial disagreement since my objection is actually that explanations and descriptions are not mutually exclusive. If I say that something must have a large mass because it is difficult to move in some sense. this is circular because the only reason I think it has large mass is because it is difficult to move and having large mass just means having high inertia which is literally just difficulty in accelerating using a force. So even here, I think we don’t have an empirical disagreement, just a disagreement as to the definition of what counts as an explanation. Which is to say that there is no real disagreement, we just mean different things by the word explanation.
Of course to take my inertia example asserting that the object has large mass is implicitly ruling out, for example, a model where you applying the same force to the object will produce greater acceleration, but I don’t think you are actually suggesting that high-performance on an IQ test does not correlate with mathematical performance in general as opposed to just the specific mathematical questions in the IQ test, so I think the analogy works.
Thomas Henry Huxley was a eugenicist in a way Darwin simply was not.
Darwin did not coin the phrase "Survival of the Fittest", and I do not think he ever used it. Darwinian "fitness" is nothing more than the ability to survive until one produces offspring, and to produce a relatively large number of offspring that themselves survive.
"Survival of the fittest", when fitness is given the definition Darwin would have given it, is a tautology. Darwin had far to much respect for empirical knowledge, to make an argument from tautology the central thesis of his theory.
Thomas Henry Huxley, "Darwin's Bulldog", on the other hand, did coin and use that phrase. The first phase of acceptance of Darwin's theories took place in Victorian England. Victorian society already believed in heirarchy. They already relied on an ideology which held that the poor, and even the mildly well-off working classes were inferior, and ought to be ruled by "their betters".
Huxley may already have believed this, and he certainly made use of the existing ideology to promote his theory, which was conflated with Darwin's theory.
While Francis Galton, a first cousin of Darwin's was a eugenicist, and in fact coined the word "eugenics", his view were by no means universal within the family.
Others in the family were quite explicitly against the hierarchical model. This medallion was produced by Darwin's grandfather, who was an aboilitionist:
Herbert Spencer coined "survival of the fittest," but Darwin also used it. Darwin also endorsed, at least for a time, his cousin Francis Galton's eugenics: "you've made a convert of me." Most nineteenth century progressives were eugenists.
Yes, there are a few too many Lex Luthers in the IQ movement, and a large portion of society who intuitively know that IQ is an important cause of unequal outcomes between individuals and groups but they prefer to not talk about it and will even lie to maintain social approval.
The combination is very unhealthy for society.
Do you believe genes explain gaps between populations, and is race the best proxy we have for people who are part of the same genetic cluster? I'd say yes to the first part and no to the second.
I think genes are much better at explaining gaps within societies. I believe that gap between societies are largely explained by differences in the geography of genetic ancestors. Those geographical differences caused entire societies to evolve in very different directions.
Race is a high-level genetic cluster. I don’t know what “best proxy” means in this context.
Good answer. I meant: are modern American racial categories (white, black, Asian, Hispanic) the best popular proxy for genetic populations?
The answer is yes, race refers to ancestry and those broad categories still apply, validated by genetic testing
What do you mean by "best"? They're a useful proxy in that they're easy to observe.
We live in a society in which goodies are doled out by those same categories (white, black, Hispanic, Asian). Are those the best categories? Probably not. But they are the categories that matter in law and practice. So if IQ is important (it is) then it has to be looked at in those categories.
Stop being deliberately dense, in other words.
The answer is yes, race refers to ancestry and those broad categories still apply, validated by genetic testing
I think to answer your question—is race the best popular proxy for genetic populations—we’d have to know 1) what do you mean by proxy for genetic populations? Like, what purpose is this proxy meant to serve? 2) What are some alternative popular proxies for genetic populations that are in competition with race to be the best proxy?
Race is a bad proxy, but everyone forgets that race is a more advanced version of tribalism. The tribal ancestors were bigoted against MORE people than the racist ancestors. Dunbar is a tricky one.
1) groups of people with some meaningful genetic relationship beyond being humans or relatives and 2) ethno-cultural groups and country of origin are the only two I can think of.
You seem to be searching for a way to invalidate race as an important or useful category. But as I understand it, the big racial/ancestry groups, properly understood, are like big extended families. (By “properly understood” I mean avoiding mistakes like grouping Australian aborigines in with sub-Saharan Africans because perhaps they have similar skin tones despite different ancestry.)
So you’re stuck with race as a useful term for a certain level of genetic and ancestral connection in between being human and being related.
Country of origin isn’t very useful in this context because in the modern world, many countries include people from a variety of ancestries. E.g. Afro-Caribbeans in the UK.
Ethnic-cultural is fine but it is a more fine-grained distinction than race. Sure we could talk about Scots versus English and Japanese versus Chinese, and that’s also useful in some contexts. It just depends on what you’re trying to do. But if you want to group humans into 5-7 big groups based on genetic ancestry, well, the word for that is “race” and those groups correspond pretty well to common understandings of the big racial groups.
Sorry my comment was meant for Mont Pelerin Review
That's...insane. I also think IQ is mostly a real thing and that group averages differ.
So what? Even if it's all genetic (unlikely), lots of other genetic characteristics are equally important - honesty, cooperativeness, creativity, etc.
And averages are just averages - every group has its share of geniuses and idiots. The distributions overlap. So some groups will have more or fewer John von Neummans than others. All JVNs are *JVN*, just as smart as any other JVN. The fact that there's fewer of them doesn't change that.
If individuals are convicted of crimes, by all means punish them. Don't generalize to innocents who haven't done anything wrong.
It matters completely, it literally changes what conclusion to take and what to do about group disparities. I don't see how this is so difficult to understand.
I don't follow you. We don't need to do *anything* about group disparities. Such disparities don't cause harm. If the disparities result from some kind of unfairness (as many claim), we should do something about the unfairness. But the disparities per se are not a problem in the first place.
The unfairness can only exist when we deny group differences, which is what most people do and why many billions are spent every week to "solve" it.
We do things about group disparities, like hire people we’d never hire but for their membership in a group with a lower average IQ. Is that good or bad? Justify your answer.
I'd answer if you hadn't taken that demanding tone.
I agree that IQ realists lean crazier than the mainstream because of the stigma, but this does not lead to your conclusion that IQ realists should be nicer. If stigma leads to crazier IQ realists being the vocal ones, the solution is to lift the stigma so nicer IQ realists become more common and more vocal. The effect isn't going to help undo the cause
IQ realists can choose to become nicer.
They can not lift the society wide stigma.
You can only do things you actually can do.
Um, consider how IQ realists acted before the stigma was in place.
No the stigma isn't the problem.
He also doesn't think that it is crazy to want to steal 50% of someone's money, even though it is a mainstream belief.
The challenge is how to create a society that is IQ realistic while preserving the dignity of all human beings.
Also, high IQ people should be a bit more humble and realize that a person can have many admirable qualities beyond IQ.
"Also, high IQ people should be a bit more humble and realize that a person can have many admirable qualities beyond IQ." Why do you assume this doesn't happen?
You are right, I shouldn’t generalize, but I was refering mainly to “IQ realists” which seem to put most of the “value” of people in their IQ.
Frankly a big problem with IQ discourse is that nearly everyone seems to implicitly believe that IQ stops mattering after a certain threshold and that this threshold coincides with whatever their IQ happens to be.
Any examples of this?
Lot's of people talking about what to do about the problem of low IQ people. Hardly anyone notices that there are people from whose point of view he is "low IQ".
There’s a lot of nuts out there but I’ve never heard anyone advocate publicly for mass murder of the low IQ. They do call for mandatory remigration, which I suppose could imply murder for those who resisted. Is this what you are referring to?
I agree with Bryan that IQ realism is empirically solid and that none of the extreme policy proposals sometimes attached to it follow logically. One distinction that often gets lost is that IQ primarily measures cognitive breadth—general, rapid problem-solving ability—but it does not measure cognitive depth. Depth-oriented thinkers rely on structural reasoning, truth-seeking, and system-building, and this style is only loosely connected to IQ. In many domains, depth outperforms breadth because it focuses on underlying structure rather than surface-level speed.
Those differences in cognitive style—not differences in IQ—explain why some people handle intelligence research responsibly while others drift into misanthropy or category-based thinking. Keeping the breadth/depth distinction in view helps separate the empirical claims about intelligence from the moral principles that should govern how we treat one another.
Why do you anti-IQ people always just make up concepts that don't correspond to reality (you making your political point in the beginning doesn't change the fact that you are in fact anti-iq)?
“In many domains, depth outperforms breadth because it focuses on underlying structure rather than surface-level speed.” This is unfalsifiable mumbo-jumbo. You're just making up things through vibes because you don't like the actual implications of IQ.
You’re making several confident claims that collapse the moment you check them against what I actually wrote.
First, nothing in my comment was “anti-IQ.” I explicitly affirmed the empirical validity of g and the robustness of IQ measurement. If endorsing the psychometric consensus counts as “anti-IQ” to you, then your disagreement is with Carroll, Jensen, Deary, Gottfredson, and the entire field—not with me.
Second, the breadth/depth distinction isn’t something I “made up.” It corresponds to well-established constructs in cognitive science:
• algorithmic vs. reflective intelligence (Stanovich)
• Type 1 vs. Type 2 processing (Evans & Frankish)
• field-independence (Witkin)
• need for cognition (Cacioppo & Petty)
• cognitive decoupling (Stanovich & Toplak)
These are empirically studied, operationalized, and falsifiable. If you haven’t encountered them, that’s fine—but unfamiliarity isn’t a refutation. It just makes your confidence outpace your knowledge.
Third, the claim that depth outperforms breadth in certain domains is not “unfalsifiable mumbo-jumbo.” Reflective cognition and structural reasoning predict performance on long-horizon, system-building tasks that IQ alone does not. This is documented in the literature. Again, if you’re unaware of it, that’s a gap in your reading, not a flaw in the distinction.
Fourth, your assumption about my motives (“you don’t like the implications of IQ”) is pure projection. I explicitly endorsed the empirical findings. What I rejected were the non-sequitur policy conclusions some people attach to them. That’s not anti-IQ; that’s pro-logic.
If you want to disagree, disagree on substance. But dismissing established distinctions as “made up” because you haven’t studied them isn’t an argument. Come back when you’ve read something other than your own assumptions.
High IQ does not mean having wisdom which i will suggest to be more meaningful than a very high IQ ex performing some higher level tasks; and many with very high IQ's can be as inflexible as those with low IQ's.
I suspect it's less that IQ realists are typically bad than that the bad ones are most willing to admit to being IQ realists. Among intelligent people, IQ denial is more of a social pretense than a sincere position. They know the truth but would rather not say it.
Well consider how IQ realists acted during the first half of the 20th century, i.e., before the stigma.
They acted exactly the same as the intelligentsia today (it's literally the same progressive group). You just happen to agree with the intelligentsia today (and you would have agreed with the intelligentsia then).
> They acted exactly the same as the intelligentsia today
True, except the intelligencia today can't get away with outright involuntary sterelizations.
Really? They literally did it until just a few years ago in many western nations.
I agree that "IQ tests aren’t perfect, but they’re an excellent proxy for what ordinary language calls “intelligence, and that IQ predicts not just educational success, but career success."
BUT ...
IQ predicts not just educational success, but career success because in education and careers we precisely value those skills that we test for with IQ tests. So, this doesn't mean that IQ tests are good proxy for "real intelligence" they are good proxy for education and careers success
But that doesn't mean IQ tests are good proxy for “real intelligence”. I'll give you one example: People good with maths typically score well on IQ tests and they also more often succeed in educational and career setups. Despite that large % of them (if not majority) would have harder time to survive and thrive not just alone in nature but even is societies that are not as developed (technologically advanced and interdependent) relative to some people who do less well in IQ tests and have similar physical abilities
This ability to adapt to social and environmental surroundings while trying to survive/thrive is often used as a better definition of "real human intelligence" then the one that makes us succeed in educational and career environments.
C.S. Lewis had something to say on this topic
"Despite that large % of them (if not majority) would have harder time to survive and thrive not just alone in nature but even is societies that are not as developed (technologically advanced and interdependent) relative to some people who do less well in IQ tests and have similar physical abilities" This is simply false. Higher cognitive ability means you learn faster, it is literally about the ability to adapt. I don't know why you IQ-critics try to attack something about IQ that literally isn't real.
I fully agree with you about "Higher cognitive ability means you learn faster, it is literally about the ability to adapt."
Where we disagree is the point that IQ testing well measures that kind of cognitive ability.
I happen to know large number of people with very high IQ test scores and not so high cognitive ability to adapt - quite contrary, some of them have very hard time to manage even relatively small life changes.
"If someone says, “I’m more intelligent than other people, so it’s acceptable for me to murder them,” the sensible response isn’t, “Intelligence is a myth.” The sensible response is, “Are you mad? That doesn’t justify murder.”" Quite right, of course. My first thought was to Alfred Hitchcock's experimental film "Rope," which is framed entirely around this exact concept. Well worth watching for those who haven't yet.
Advocating the extermination of low-IQ people should make no more sense than advocating the extermination of low-IQ animals (lower animals, that is). No one criticizes a horse-breeder on account of horses’ relatively low intelligence.
But there is this difference: only people have socio-political influence and power. More intelligent people tend to contribute more to society, by their productivity, their example, and their influence on public policy. One would prefer to be surrounded by more intelligent people.
True, this effect is rather weak—weak enough to give some color to Buckley’s quip about the first 1,000 names in the Boston telephone directory,
On the other hand, horse-breeders don't let horses with undesirable traits breed.
Intelligence seems not to be considered desirable (in horses).
(More often reported as *two* thousand.)
I'd be curious to know what you think of Chapter 9 of my book, available here. https://bookshop.org/p/books/understanding-the-nature-8210-nurture-debate-eric-turkheimer/35f69096cae84699?ean=9781108958165&next=t. I would describe myself as an anti-realist about IQ, which doesn't mean I don't think it is a measurable behavioral property. I'm just an anti-essentialist. Unfortunately I'm not allowed to post the chapter online. This article with the cognitive scientist Dan Willingham covers some of the same ground. https://www.aft.org/ae/winter2025-2026/turkheimer_willingham
Obviously, I am not Brian, but I’m honestly confused how your model as described in the linked article differs from IQ realism or what you call essentialism. You agree that performance on an IQ test is predictive of performance in school and at work in many jobs. You even agree that this is because the skills needed to succeed at school and in those jobs like abstract reasoning are also the skills you need to do well on an IQ test. You reject the idea that children have an essence called intelligence, but then agree that obviously children differ in how much instruction they need to pick up something. How is this skill of picking up more stuff from less instruction fundamentally different from the idea of intelligence or learning potential?
I am asking because I consider myself an IQ realist and yet, despite disagreeing with all your condemnations of essentialism, I could not actually find anything in your model that contradicted mine, which makes me worry that the difference is purely semantic or at best a difference in framing and presentation rather than actual substance, and there is no actual disagreement here, only the perception of disagreement.
The only part where I think there might be a substantive disagreement is when you argue that IQ doesn’t provide an explanation of for example doing well answering mathematics questions as having an IQ is just a description of being good at that. Even here, I am not sure we actually have a substantial disagreement since my objection is actually that explanations and descriptions are not mutually exclusive. If I say that something must have a large mass because it is difficult to move in some sense. this is circular because the only reason I think it has large mass is because it is difficult to move and having large mass just means having high inertia which is literally just difficulty in accelerating using a force. So even here, I think we don’t have an empirical disagreement, just a disagreement as to the definition of what counts as an explanation. Which is to say that there is no real disagreement, we just mean different things by the word explanation.
Of course to take my inertia example asserting that the object has large mass is implicitly ruling out, for example, a model where you applying the same force to the object will produce greater acceleration, but I don’t think you are actually suggesting that high-performance on an IQ test does not correlate with mathematical performance in general as opposed to just the specific mathematical questions in the IQ test, so I think the analogy works.
I'll get around to replying to you directly, but this reply to Freddie deBoer, who I think qualifies as an "IQ realist", gets at some of the ideas. https://substack.com/profile/17078013-eric-turkheimer/note/c-186674455?r=a61h9&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web
Well put, as always.
It really a pity that IQ realists tend to be so toxic.
Thomas Henry Huxley was a eugenicist in a way Darwin simply was not.
Darwin did not coin the phrase "Survival of the Fittest", and I do not think he ever used it. Darwinian "fitness" is nothing more than the ability to survive until one produces offspring, and to produce a relatively large number of offspring that themselves survive.
"Survival of the fittest", when fitness is given the definition Darwin would have given it, is a tautology. Darwin had far to much respect for empirical knowledge, to make an argument from tautology the central thesis of his theory.
Thomas Henry Huxley, "Darwin's Bulldog", on the other hand, did coin and use that phrase. The first phase of acceptance of Darwin's theories took place in Victorian England. Victorian society already believed in heirarchy. They already relied on an ideology which held that the poor, and even the mildly well-off working classes were inferior, and ought to be ruled by "their betters".
Huxley may already have believed this, and he certainly made use of the existing ideology to promote his theory, which was conflated with Darwin's theory.
While Francis Galton, a first cousin of Darwin's was a eugenicist, and in fact coined the word "eugenics", his view were by no means universal within the family.
Others in the family were quite explicitly against the hierarchical model. This medallion was produced by Darwin's grandfather, who was an aboilitionist:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Am_I_not_a_Man_and_a_Brother,_medallion_modelled_by_William_H._Hackwood,_Wedgwood,_Etruria,_England,_c._1786,_tinted_stoneware_-_Brooklyn_Museum_-_DSC09289_(cropped).JPG
Herbert Spencer coined "survival of the fittest," but Darwin also used it. Darwin also endorsed, at least for a time, his cousin Francis Galton's eugenics: "you've made a convert of me." Most nineteenth century progressives were eugenists.
Excellent. High IQ doesn't translate into highly ethical or even ordinary morality.