Does this imply that a majority of scientists would do better science if they took a pill which lowered their IQ without side effects?
No.
I know correlation does not imply causation, but do you agree that there is a positive correlation between IQ and quantity and quality of an individuals scientific publications?
Considered across all individuals? Only a very weak one. I suggest limiting the question to scientists. In that case, the answer for ‘quantity’ would be “not strongly at all”, and ‘quality’ is so difficult to define as to be useless for this investigation.
You claim higher IQ would hurt most scientists, but a lower IQ would not help. This implies a majority of scientists have the ideal IQ for furthering science. To me this sounds like an impossible coincidence.
I might look for research on what predicts a scientists research productivity. GRE scores may be more common than IQ. Can we make terms for a bet? I claim that net of all controls, GRE or IQ scores will having nontrivial positive relationship with research productivity.
“Quality” is difficult to measure, but you give up too quickly. e.g. citations, impact factor of journal of publication
I need to clarify. Quite a lot of ‘scientists’ are terrible at putting the scientific method into practice. I try to exclude those people from the category whenever possible. I do acknowledge, though, that this will frequently lead to confusion.
A lower IQ of scientists overall would make progress slower, but generally wouldn’t impede the self-correcting properties of the method.
The so-called scientists who don’t or can’t put the method into practice would have their ability to make clever but specious arguments impaired. Possibly the reduced nonsense-sensing of the scientists would still be more than enough to identify and exclude the reduced levels of nonsense.
With reduced IQ across scientists and ‘scientists’ both, it’s entirely possible that there would be more scientific progress for the field as a whole. There are a number of necessary but not sufficient factors involved, and non-lethal but cumulatively-damaging factors as well. It’s not obvious to me that the properties measured by IQ are equally distributed across the positive and negative factors; I suspect they lend themselves to the negative more than the positive.
No.
Considered across all individuals? Only a very weak one. I suggest limiting the question to scientists. In that case, the answer for ‘quantity’ would be “not strongly at all”, and ‘quality’ is so difficult to define as to be useless for this investigation.
You claim higher IQ would hurt most scientists, but a lower IQ would not help. This implies a majority of scientists have the ideal IQ for furthering science. To me this sounds like an impossible coincidence.
I might look for research on what predicts a scientists research productivity. GRE scores may be more common than IQ. Can we make terms for a bet? I claim that net of all controls, GRE or IQ scores will having nontrivial positive relationship with research productivity.
“Quality” is difficult to measure, but you give up too quickly. e.g. citations, impact factor of journal of publication
I need to clarify. Quite a lot of ‘scientists’ are terrible at putting the scientific method into practice. I try to exclude those people from the category whenever possible. I do acknowledge, though, that this will frequently lead to confusion.
A lower IQ of scientists overall would make progress slower, but generally wouldn’t impede the self-correcting properties of the method.
The so-called scientists who don’t or can’t put the method into practice would have their ability to make clever but specious arguments impaired. Possibly the reduced nonsense-sensing of the scientists would still be more than enough to identify and exclude the reduced levels of nonsense.
With reduced IQ across scientists and ‘scientists’ both, it’s entirely possible that there would be more scientific progress for the field as a whole. There are a number of necessary but not sufficient factors involved, and non-lethal but cumulatively-damaging factors as well. It’s not obvious to me that the properties measured by IQ are equally distributed across the positive and negative factors; I suspect they lend themselves to the negative more than the positive.