In doing community building I have definitely used publicly available information about IQ distributions in a lot of different ways, and I do think things like SAT scores and top-university admissions and other things that are substantial proxies for IQ are things that I definitely use in both deciding who to respect, listen to and invest in.
That said, while IQ tests do have some validity outside the 135+ regime, I do think it’s a good bit weaker, and I put substantially less weight on the results of IQ tests being able to differentiate among the tails. I think it’s definitely still an input, and I do think I kind of wish there were better ways to assess people’s intelligence in various different contexts, but it doesn’t feel like a hugely burning need for me, and most of my uncertainty about people usually isn’t concentrated in being able to tell how smart someone is, but is more concentrated in how reliable they are, how ethical they are and how likely they are to get hijacked by weird societal forces and happy-death spirals and similar things, for which making standardized tests seem at least a good amount harder (especially ones that can’t be gamed).
Another huge problem with assigning status according to IQ test results is that IQ tests are not at all robust against training effects. If you want an official high IQ score, just spend a few dozen hours doing IQ tests, practicing the type of challenges you will be tested on. The SAT in-contrast is kind of useful anyways, because kind of everyone saturates on practicing for the SAT, at least in the US, but that test sadly also maxes out at an average that is below the average IQ test result in the LessWrong community, and so isn’t super helpful in distinguishing between the remaining variance. If there was a well-tested IQ-test that was made to be training-resistant, that could potentially provide a bunch of value, but I don’t know of one.
That said, while IQ tests do have some validity outside the 135+ regime, I do think it’s a good bit weaker, and I put substantially less weight on the results of IQ tests being able to differentiate among the tails.
I think this can be solved by creating an IQ test optimized for informativeness in the high range of ability. That shouldn’t be very hard to do, compared to the scale at which it could be applied.
most of my uncertainty about people usually isn’t concentrated in being able to tell how smart someone is, but is more concentrated in how reliable they are, how ethical they are and how likely they are to get hijacked by weird societal forces and happy-death spirals and similar things, for which making standardized tests seem at least a good amount harder (especially ones that can’t be gamed).
I agree, though this also raises some questions about whether OP’s post has all of the important points. Some resistance to objective metrics is likely due to those metrics not being appropriate.
Also, I can’t help but wonder, I feel like an organization that put effort into it could make a lot of progress testing for other stuff. It may be mainly about setting up some reputation systems that collect a lot of private information about how people act. Though in practice I suspect people will oppose it for privacy reasons.
The SAT in-contrast is kind of useful anyways, because kind of everyone saturates on practicing for the SAT, at least in the US, but that test sadly also maxes out at an average that is below the average IQ test result in the LessWrong community
Am I correct in interpreting this as you implying that the average member of the LessWrong community got perfect SAT scores (or would have had they taken it)?
This is an odd response from me, but, recently for my birthday, I posted a survey for my friends to fill out about me, anonymously rating me on lots of different attributes.
I included some spicier/fun questions, one of which was whether they thought they were smarter than me or not.
Here were the results for that question:
It was roughly 50⁄50 throughout the entire time data came in over the two days.
The vast majority of people responding said that they’d read the sequences (either “some” or “yes”). I’d guess that basically everyone had except my family.
So, this is some evidence that I am of median IQ amongst a large group of people who have read the sequences.
Something pretty close to that. We included SAT scores in one of the surveys from a long time ago. IIRC the median score was pretty close to perfect, of the people who gave their results, but I might be misremembering.
Getting a perfect SAT does sure actually look harder than I thought (I don’t have that much experience with the SAT, I had to take it when I applied to U.S. universities but I only really thought about it for the 3-6 month period in which I was applying).
I think this is an interesting idea!
In doing community building I have definitely used publicly available information about IQ distributions in a lot of different ways, and I do think things like SAT scores and top-university admissions and other things that are substantial proxies for IQ are things that I definitely use in both deciding who to respect, listen to and invest in.
That said, while IQ tests do have some validity outside the 135+ regime, I do think it’s a good bit weaker, and I put substantially less weight on the results of IQ tests being able to differentiate among the tails. I think it’s definitely still an input, and I do think I kind of wish there were better ways to assess people’s intelligence in various different contexts, but it doesn’t feel like a hugely burning need for me, and most of my uncertainty about people usually isn’t concentrated in being able to tell how smart someone is, but is more concentrated in how reliable they are, how ethical they are and how likely they are to get hijacked by weird societal forces and happy-death spirals and similar things, for which making standardized tests seem at least a good amount harder (especially ones that can’t be gamed).
Another huge problem with assigning status according to IQ test results is that IQ tests are not at all robust against training effects. If you want an official high IQ score, just spend a few dozen hours doing IQ tests, practicing the type of challenges you will be tested on. The SAT in-contrast is kind of useful anyways, because kind of everyone saturates on practicing for the SAT, at least in the US, but that test sadly also maxes out at an average that is below the average IQ test result in the LessWrong community, and so isn’t super helpful in distinguishing between the remaining variance. If there was a well-tested IQ-test that was made to be training-resistant, that could potentially provide a bunch of value, but I don’t know of one.
I think this can be solved by creating an IQ test optimized for informativeness in the high range of ability. That shouldn’t be very hard to do, compared to the scale at which it could be applied.
I agree, though this also raises some questions about whether OP’s post has all of the important points. Some resistance to objective metrics is likely due to those metrics not being appropriate.
Also, I can’t help but wonder, I feel like an organization that put effort into it could make a lot of progress testing for other stuff. It may be mainly about setting up some reputation systems that collect a lot of private information about how people act. Though in practice I suspect people will oppose it for privacy reasons.
Am I correct in interpreting this as you implying that the average member of the LessWrong community got perfect SAT scores (or would have had they taken it)?
This is an odd response from me, but, recently for my birthday, I posted a survey for my friends to fill out about me, anonymously rating me on lots of different attributes.
I included some spicier/fun questions, one of which was whether they thought they were smarter than me or not.
Here were the results for that question:
It was roughly 50⁄50 throughout the entire time data came in over the two days.
The vast majority of people responding said that they’d read the sequences (either “some” or “yes”). I’d guess that basically everyone had except my family.
So, this is some evidence that I am of median IQ amongst a large group of people who have read the sequences.
Also, I got a perfect SAT score.
Something pretty close to that. We included SAT scores in one of the surveys from a long time ago. IIRC the median score was pretty close to perfect, of the people who gave their results, but I might be misremembering.
Only like 10% are perfect scores. Median of 1490 on each of the two old LW surveys I just checked.
Thank you for checking!
Getting a perfect SAT does sure actually look harder than I thought (I don’t have that much experience with the SAT, I had to take it when I applied to U.S. universities but I only really thought about it for the 3-6 month period in which I was applying).
Interesting. I wonder how much selection bias there was in responses.