The IQ Question
Recently there has been a bit of a debate in the heretical discourse space about IQ. Debates over IQ have been going on in the background for years, since the invention of IQ testing. So, this recent debate isn’t a new thing — it’s just a new iteration of a perennial debate. The latest iteration was started by Nassim Taleb, who declared that IQ is bullshit. He also declared that psychology is bullshit. See IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle . Is Taleb right? Is IQ bullshit? Is psychology bullshit? I will briefly answer the question about psychology, and then talk about IQ in more detail. Psychology is not bullshit, but there is plenty of bullshit in psychology. However, there is also plenty of bullshit in every scientific field, including the “hard” sciences such as physics and biology. To dismiss psychology as a field because of bullshit psychology would be like dismissing chemistry because of alchemy. We can and should develop theories of how the brain works and how human b