this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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SneerClub

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Hurling ordure at the TREACLES, especially those closely related to LessWrong.

AI-Industrial-Complex grift is fine as long as it sufficiently relates to the AI doom from the TREACLES. (Though TechTakes may be more suitable.)

This is sneer club, not debate club. Unless it's amusing debate.

[Especially don't debate the race scientists, if any sneak in - we ban and delete them as unsuitable for the server.]

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The Wiki page is voluminous enough to approach gish galloping, and the Talk page is almost as big https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

Asking because someone in another forum basically said that while IQ might be discredited, "g" is valid.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

Thanks for the link, I figured as much.

I decided there was no point in engaging the person in polemic on this matter (it's the kind of forum where that kind of behavior will just get the comment deleted) so decided to just add the person to my (literal) shitlist, only to discover they're already on it! Correlation or causation something something.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

What a beautiful set of sneers. Though it's sad how topical they still are.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

isn’t psychometrics the part of Talos I where you get the psychoscope?

the gish gallop that forms the majority of this article looks like an attempt to signal jam the criticisms section (which itself isn’t anywhere near as damning as it should be):

Research on the G-factor, as well as other psychometric values, has been widely criticized for not properly taking into account the eugenicist background of its research practices.[157] The reductionism of the G-factor has been attributted to having evolved from "pseudoscientific theories" about race and intelligence.[158] Spearman's g and the concept of inherited, immutable intelligence were a boon for eugenicists and pseudoscientists alike.[159]

[…]

Some especially harsh critics have called the g factor, and psychometrics, as a form of pseudoscience.[161]

fascists will do anything to feel superior about a number they made up, and renaming IQ now that it’s got a lot of fash stank on it and pretending it’s different and sophisticated now, you wouldn’t understand is one of the older tricks in the fascist playbook

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

that wiki article leaves my eyes bleeding. i think i'll leave it precisely where it is.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The vibe I always got is that it's somewhat more sinister than IQ, in that it's purported to be an Actually Real Property of humans that's measured by IQ tests, when IQ tests in themselves don't necessarily make claims beyond raw statistical variance.

It's like talk around IQ got too careful so they made this as a sort of anti-euphemism. Disphemism??

edit: wow it's a real word

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Man that wiki page is kinda shit, there's a section titled "Critique of Gould"[1], reference [178] is simply "Korb 1997", there's no link, and no hit for the name anywhere else.


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)#Critique_of_Gould

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

@gerikson

Korb is a tool
Carlito et al, 2024

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (3 children)

here's the Korb paper. Can you guess what department he works in?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (3 children)

every fucking time. what’s the Wikipedia term for “this source is barely qualified to touch computers, much less weigh in on this topic?”

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

oh that’s why he thinks he’s qualified to weigh in on psychological shit — he’s an AI researcher who specializes in Bayesian networks which is a pretty strong signal for him being a Rationalist, especially when you look at some of the topics of his research

e: god the titles of a lot of these papers sound like LessWrong or slatestarcodex posts

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

This but replace the references to stocks to references to IQ and the last panel with 'everybody thinks im a piece of shit now'.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

i tell you, i larfed and larfed

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Meta Wiki question, are "bare" citations (no hyperlinks) acceptable in the reference section? It's not too hard to find this paper just based on author's last name and year in this case, but in others it might be harder.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

yeah, absolutely. Some editors find it a bit lazy and annoying, but it's still a vast improvement over no reference. In fact there are bots that will attempt to turn URLs into nicely formatted references.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

JFC the abstract

Gould has no difficulty in demonstrating the influence of racism; where he goes astray is in his dismissal of such prior work as simply unscientific because the racist conclusions preceded the collection of data. Advancing hypotheses prior to experimentation is how all of science proceeds, and is no mark of inferior work. And no science is immune to influences - racist or otherwise -from the culture in which it is embedded, as Gould elsewhere readily acknowledges.

I mean, in that case the interest in IQ should have gone the way of phrenology except phrenology is still around.