The entire field of psychometrics is pseudoscience, as is >>90% of research with the word "heritability" in it.

The levels of pseudoscience in these areas, statistical malpractice, and the like is fairly obscene. Nothing is reproducible, and it survives only because academia is now a closed-system paper mill where peer citation is the standard of publication and tenure.

A discussion of statistical malpractice is difficult on HN, consider how easily fooled these idiots are by statistics. Researchers motivated to get into psychology are not rigorous empirical statisticians, instead they are given stats GUIs into which they put data and press play. These are the most gullible lot you'll ever find in anything called science.

The world would be better off if a delete button could be pressed on the whole activity. It's a great tragedy that it continues.

▲

liontwist 7 months ago | parent [-]

If it was really “pseudoscience” you would present the experiment that demonstrates it’s obviously false rather than name calling (asserting a label with a negative connotation).

The reality is not so clear and you have to contest with decade long studies in support. Maybe those studies have flaws, but it’s not a vacuum.

I have already stated I don’t believe IQ is intelligence.

▲

mjburgess 7 months ago | parent [-]

There is no experiment which proves its false. This is the problem with pseudoscience, it's "not even wrong".

Psychometrics presents summaries of data as if they are properties of reality. As-if taking a mean of survey data meant that this this mean was a property of the survey givers.

This applies only in extremely controlled experiments in physics, and even then, somewhat rarely.

All one has to do to show the entire field is pseudoscience is present a single more plausible theory than "mean of data distribution = innate property", and this is trivially done (eg., cf. mutualism about intelligence).

▲

liontwist 7 months ago | parent [-]

You’re softening your position, you agree it exists and is testable, you just disagree with the interpretation of those results.

> is present a single more plausible theory

A minority support for a workable theory is quite a bit different state of affairs than “false science” which the word implies.

It’s a form of name calling.

> There is no experiment which proves it’s false. This is the problem with pseudoscience, it's "not even wrong".

In other words it’s lost popularity in certain academic circles, but not because of overwhelming new evidence.

> This applies only in extremely controlled experiments in physics,

I agree, which is why you can’t casually dismiss developed psychological theories as if they are from a crank, and you are enlightened.

▲

mjburgess 7 months ago | parent [-]

There is a "positive manifold" of results across test we call "intelligence tests", this is a property of the test data. What "IQ" does is take the mean of this and call it a property -- no such property exists.

Consider athleticism: across all sporting activites there's a positive correlation of ability. Call it "athleticism". But people do not have "athleticism". If you break there leg some of these correlations disappear, and some survive. Atheticism is a result of a very large number of properties of people, which arises out of highly complex interactions.

Heritability measures the correlation of traits with genes. We have ~20k genes, and we share 90% with mice, almost no genes code for traits. The vast majority of trait-gene correlations are caused by geographical (and cultural) mating patterns. So scottish accents are nearly 100% heritable, since nearly all people with one share some genes; and nearly all people without one do not have at least some of these genes. So much for "heritability" -- the use of this statistic, outside of extremely narrow biological experiments where corrlation is the result of causing genes to corrlete (by design) -- is pseudoscience.

And so 1) there is no trait "intelligence"; and 2) all claims to trait-intelligence-gene correlation are confounded by massive non-genetic factors beyond causal control.

And so: psychometrics is pseudoscience. The vast majority of its popular results are by frauds, charlatans and just plain idiots. I have no pleasant words for them: I call them by their name. Fraud is rampent, and even if it weren't, given causal-physiological semantics to factor correlations is pseudoscience.

It wasnt very hard to see, many of the citations in these famous works of IQ research were conducted under extreme causal confounders (eg., black people in aprethid south africa, people selected for the IQ test by an IQ test, etc.).

There isnt any kind of scientific research which can today establish "IQ" as a property of people --- we have no experiments which can control for known, massive, confounders. We cannot breed generations of people with deterministic genetic variation, deterministic childhoods, (etc. etc.). This kind of science is as impossible today as microbiology was to the greeks.

▲

liontwist 7 months ago | parent [-]

If you're willing to agree "IQ" is in the same realm "Athleticism" in terms of realism and heritability, then I have nothing more to say. There would be no question studying IQ is incredibly valuable.

Sure, maybe there is no part of the human which is the IQ, and it's a merely a summary of other factors being expressed. I don't think IQ researchers ever claimed otherwise.

Are you familiar with "entropy"? Isn't that a statistical summary of a configuration of atoms? Wow! Emergent properties, with no physical existence are a big part of science.

	▲	tptacek 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		What do you think "heritable" means, and why does that make it "incredibly valuable" to study?