There is a unity to coherently tamed things, which comes from their tamer. If feral things have any unity, it comes from commonalities in the world itself that they all are forced to hew to because the world they autonomously explore itself contains regularities.
I don’t think this is always true, rather it depends on how uniform the applications are, and how accessible they are. Sometimes autodidacts teach themselves in an ivory-tower setting, whereas allodidacts at least has an ivory tower that has a social network guiding it somewhat towards practical tasks.
But then somehow, in the course of becoming a tenured professor of statistics, he ended up saying stuff like “iq is a statistical myth” as if he were some kind of normy, and afraid of the big bad wolf? (At least he did it in an interesting way… I disagree with his conclusions but learned from his long and detailed justification.)
I’d be curious if you have any good arguments for your disagreement. At least you seem to be thinking that IQ tests measure intelligence, which is a stronger assertion than I’d make.
However, nowhere in that essay does he follow up the claim with any kind of logical sociological consequences. Once you’ve become so nihilistic about the metaphysical reality of measurable things as to deny that “intelligence is a thing”, wouldn’t the intellectually honest thing be to follow that up with a call to disband all social psychology departments? They are, after all, very methodologically derivative of (and even more clearly fake than) the idea, and the purveyors of the idea, that “human intelligence” is “a thing”. If you say “intelligence” isn’t real, then what the hell kind of ontic status (or research funding) does “grit” deserve???
Intelligence and grit are differential psychology rather than social psychology. Social psychology tends to focus more on interventions (but also tends to have an order of magnitude lower sample sizes, hence replication crisis), addressing some of the objections that Cosma Shalizi raised.
I don’t think this is always true, rather it depends on how uniform the applications are, and how accessible they are. Sometimes autodidacts teach themselves in an ivory-tower setting, whereas allodidacts at least has an ivory tower that has a social network guiding it somewhat towards practical tasks.
I’d be curious if you have any good arguments for your disagreement. At least you seem to be thinking that IQ tests measure intelligence, which is a stronger assertion than I’d make.
Intelligence and grit are differential psychology rather than social psychology. Social psychology tends to focus more on interventions (but also tends to have an order of magnitude lower sample sizes, hence replication crisis), addressing some of the objections that Cosma Shalizi raised.