The major finding was that irrationality — or what Professor Stanovich called “dysrationalia” — correlates relatively weakly with I.Q.
RQ is predicted pretty well by IQ, correlating at 0.695 (according to Stuart Richie’s book review that I read), and it seems plausible that the rest of the variance is noise. IQ correlates positively with all important factors, and often heavily (google the ‘positive manifold’ for more info), which is why I put it so high on my list.
I conjecture that the reason why Stanovich’s research isn’t very useful, is that he tried to find some factor that was as broadly applicable to the population as IQ is. However, his assumption that IQ is missing something massive was just wrong, and so he just ended up with another measure of IQ. What would’ve been more useful would’ve been to try to find some factor that predicts success after conditioning on IQ—for example, Tetlock’s work is about figuring out how the very best people think differently than everyone else, and so his work comes out with great insights about forecasting, bayesianism and model-building.
Added: I used to be a big fan of Stanovich’s work, but when I discovered that RQ correlated with IQ at 0.7… well, that’s what caused me to realise that in fact IQ is a super great predictor of important cognitive properties. And then I read the history of IQ research, which is essentially people trying to prove as hard as they can that there are important metrics of success that don’t correlate with IQ, and then failing to do so.
Hm this is an update… I’ll have to think more about it. (The “added” section actually provided most of the force (~75%) behind my update. It’s great that you provided causal reasons for your beliefs.)
Actually, I think this claim is wrong:
RQ is predicted pretty well by IQ, correlating at 0.695 (according to Stuart Richie’s book review that I read), and it seems plausible that the rest of the variance is noise. IQ correlates positively with all important factors, and often heavily (google the ‘positive manifold’ for more info), which is why I put it so high on my list.
I conjecture that the reason why Stanovich’s research isn’t very useful, is that he tried to find some factor that was as broadly applicable to the population as IQ is. However, his assumption that IQ is missing something massive was just wrong, and so he just ended up with another measure of IQ. What would’ve been more useful would’ve been to try to find some factor that predicts success after conditioning on IQ—for example, Tetlock’s work is about figuring out how the very best people think differently than everyone else, and so his work comes out with great insights about forecasting, bayesianism and model-building.
Added: I used to be a big fan of Stanovich’s work, but when I discovered that RQ correlated with IQ at 0.7… well, that’s what caused me to realise that in fact IQ is a super great predictor of important cognitive properties. And then I read the history of IQ research, which is essentially people trying to prove as hard as they can that there are important metrics of success that don’t correlate with IQ, and then failing to do so.
Hm this is an update… I’ll have to think more about it. (The “added” section actually provided most of the force (~75%) behind my update. It’s great that you provided causal reasons for your beliefs.)
I appreciate the feedback! Very useful to know that sort of thing.