No, those statements aren't in tension at all! The idea that there would be reliable data for country-by-country or even state-by-state IQ comparisons is an extraordinary claim. Think about the amount of work that would go into generating representative samples. Globally? Forget about it.

It does not follow from the intractability of that problem that nobody's doing intelligence or behavioral genetics research. Plenty are, which is why there are front page stories on HN about the "missing heritability" issue.

Again, I think it's interesting that the notion of these data sets don't flunk more people's sanity checks, because most of us have no recollection of ever being asked to take an IQ test. I sure haven't. A mass testing regime none of us have ever heard of, apparently run in secret, is generating global IQ rankings? That doesn't sound weird to you?

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mapontosevenths 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I dont think the problem is intractable at all. We have the internet now and can just test people. We don't.

Yes, that would be less accurate than a test administered in office by a professional, but it would also be more accurate than basing it on educational attainment or standardized tests intended for other purposes.

With a little effort the tests true purposes could easily be disguised. These very clever researchers know this, they just won't.

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tptacek 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't know what to tell you about reducing this problem to an online survey and hoping for the best. There are people doing actual science --- including with modern IQ tests --- working on these problems. I think the bigger thing here is that, outside of message boards and Twitter, there just aren't that many people interested in a global country-by-country inventory of "average IQ".

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mapontosevenths 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> there just aren't that many people interested in a global country-by-country inventory of "average IQ".

Thats also a fair theory to explain the lack of real data. Given the frequency with which I've had similar conversations it feels off to me, but that may just be my bias.

It certainly seems to be a very interesting problem to researchers. Thirty years later it is still cited frequently enough that Elsevier is having to hunt and destroy papers that cite it.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/10/elsevier-rev...

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tptacek 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Again: there is active science being done at some of the largest research universities in the world on the questions you're talking about. What there isn't is a global country-by-country survey of representative samples of people to generate "average IQ", not because such a thing would be forbidden knowledge (we're awash in data that would be equivalently "forbidden"), but because the cost of such a project likely swamps any utility it might have. It's an idee fixee of message boards.

The data discussed in the Guardian article you cited there is fraudulent. They're hunting it down because it's bad data. It's exactly the same impulse as the Data Colada and Retraction Watch people, which is celebrated on HN. But now the wrong ox is getting gored, and people are uncomfortable with it.

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mapontosevenths 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> But now the wrong ox is getting gored, and people are uncomfortable with it.

I'm not mad the ox was gored, just that nobody replaced it after they were done sacrificing it. Bad science deserves to die, but in my mind it should always be replaced with better science. Not just left as an empty gap.

> Again: there is active science being done at some of the largest research universities in the world on the questions you're talking about.

I wish I could find it. Neither Google, Kagi, ChatGPT, or Gemini could point me towards anything relevant. They just keep spitting out the old discredited hogwash. Maybe that's more a failing of the search engines than of the science though.

Either way, I appreciate the conversation. It's a topic that fascinates me, even if it isn't particularly relevant to my own life. I hope you have, or are actively having, a great holiday!

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tptacek 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Sasha Gusev and Alex Strudwick Young are two good follows on opposing ends of the spectrum of research beliefs here, both link constantly to new studies. From a more psychometric and behavioral perspective, Eric Turkheimer is a good starting point. On the other end of the spectrum from Turkheimer is Richard Haier.

These are, like, high-profile names, but of course there are many dozens more people actually doing work in these fields.

	▲	mapontosevenths 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you!