Meet the new right, same as the old right.
Becoming?
Becoming?
IQ is to intelligence as BMI is to obesity.
Loosely correlated at best.
It’s only a rough guideline. There’s Olympic athletes that would be considered overweight based on their BMI that are basically all muscle. It’s a decent guideline for your average person, but there’s outliers that don’t fit in that scale. After all, you’re making a judgment based on just 2 parameters.
No, BMI is directly a function of weight.
Overweight and obesity are defined as abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that presents a risk to health. A body mass index (BMI) over 25 is considered overweight, and over 30 is obese (From the WHO)
Obesity is quantified using BMI by medical organizations because there isn’t an effective way to quantify it otherwise, but it’s in the same way as using IQ is a shorthand for intelligence or the DSM is used to describe mental illness. It needs a qualified professional to use the raw data point in combination with other factors in order to tell you if your body fat is actually unhealthy.
High body mass does also add its own strain independent of fat, but the actual intent of the term obesity is about whether you have a level of excess fat that lowers health outcomes, not size by itself. (It also wasn’t actually ever intended by it’s creator as a measure of health, just as the broad stroke data point it is.)
It is strongly correlated. High IQ reliably predicts high performance in a variety of cognitive tasks (even ones not covered by the IQ test).
To pretend that IQ is a sham is dangerous, because that would suggests that definite proof to the contrary makes the fascists right. Which it doesn’t.
Firstly because statistical correlation is useless for individual outliers (e.g. high BMI Olympic athletes). It says something about a population, but can only suggest something about an individual (high BMI can mean someone is overweight, but further analysis is required to make a diagnosis).
Secondly and more importantly because using synthetic metrics as a proxy for the value of a human life is an abhorrent practice that has only ever led to misuse and dangerous if not catastrophic or outright genocidal policies. I don’t mind IQ tests as an indicator for psychiatric diagnoses, or for aggregate research on human cognition. But if, for any reason, someone’s IQ needs to be made public or handed over to an institution, then we’re on the road straight to fascism.
It’s correlated to a very narrow subset of skills that are a small part of intelligence. It’s a predictor of successful outcomes in the broad sense, but considering the strong correlation to access to education and other similar environmental prerequisites to healthy development, claiming there’s a particularly strong causal relationship between IQ and success is relatively bold.
My whole assertion is that using IQ as a value measurement is fundamentally not very useful. In the specific case of race (or cultural background, or whatever), there’s no functional way to control for the confounding factors, so you can’t really draw any conclusions about the “merit” of the relevant population at all, even if IQ did that.
The people who defend it use it because it’s racist. That’s why they want it used more.
Controlling for confounding factors is, like, half the point.
Racists will tell you [x country] is lower IQ than [y developed country]. Which is probably true. What they won’t say is that that average IQ is probably the same as [y developed country 100-200 years ago]. IQ being affected by education is the whole fucking point; widespread access to a good and long education provably leads to a more intelligent population, which we have seen time and time again with industrializing countries (including in the West since the IQ test is old enough that we can see the average IQ rising since the industrial revolution).
You’re getting push back because people loathe the idea than an intrinsic value like IQ might define them. Same reason the bullies kicked my ass up until high school. They thought I had something they weren’t born with, couldn’t compete with, thought I had an unfair edge.
Sorry folks, IQ is a large component of who you are, and no, you can’t control that number. OTOH, back to my childhood ass beatings, I wasn’t much smarter than the other kids. 119 IQ, tested the same at 6 and 16-yo, “bright normal”, nothing to write home about. I did well in school due to my parents drive and my love for knowledge. None of my friends took a diploma on graduation night and none had as low an IQ as I. Go figure.
IQ is a legitimate part of you, like it or not. Emotional quotient is as well. I know damned well that my IQ is far higher than my wife’s, and her EQ is stunning compared to mine, makes a nice balance. But does that mean I’m smarter than her? I would argue it does not. People called my last boss a “dumbass”, but only because his IQ outstripped his EQ.
tl;dr: IQ scores are important and defining, but there is much more to get the gestalt of a human being.
I guess when you’re all white and stupid, these things become important to you
“becoming”
Despite their important implications for interpersonal behaviors and relations, cognitive abilities have been largely ignored as explanations of prejudice. We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups. In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact. All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that cognitive abilities play a critical, albeit underappreciated, role in prejudice. Consequently, we recommend a heightened focus on cognitive ability in research on prejudice and a better integration of cognitive ability into prejudice models.
We report longitudinal data in which we assessed the relationships between intelligence and support for two constructs that shape ideological frameworks, namely, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). Participants (N = 375) were assessed in Grade 7 and again in Grade 12. Verbal and numerical ability were assessed when students entered high school in Grade 7. RWA and SDO were assessed before school graduation in Grade 12. After controlling for the possible confounding effects of personality and religious values in Grade 12, RWA was predicted by low g (β = -.16) and low verbal intelligence (β = -.18). SDO was predicted by low verbal intelligence only (β = -.13). These results are discussed with reference to the role of verbal intelligence in predicting support for such ideological frameworks and some comments are offered regarding the cognitive distinctions between RWA and SDO.
