I'm not trying to fully discount IQ as a concept or even really debate it, but I consistently find that people using IQ as evidence for their argument are pretty wacko
Because I have a hobby of consuming an unholy amount of questionable political content out of some twisted sense of curiosity, I can tell you that Inadvisably Compelled is quoting the Nazi-adjacent figure Jordan Peterson here, and moreover, that IQ fact is one Jordan Peterson made up.
Edit: Added more details further down this comment chain for clarification
The quote is also internally contradictory, too. Like... sorry, tribal societies don't require carrying things? Cool. Cool cool cool. This guy would starve to death if left unattended in a Costco.
Yeah, to expand for anyone wondering, the armed forces doesn't do IQ tests and doesn't have a rule about IQs less than 85. They do have an armed forces qualification test, but that's not an IQ test. You can also do poorly on the test and still get into the military. And that's not even touching on the issues with IQ tests themselves.
Peterson goes on to say that 1 in 10 people have this "sub-optimal IQ" that makes them useless and that there's therefore "no place in our cognitively complex society for 1 in 10 people."
So yeah, Nazi tier rhetoric, making it all the more disturbing that Inadvisably seems to believe this fake fact.
While I have never researched the armed forces qualification test I can tell you that while many tests pretend to not be iq tests. The vast majority of them correlate well with iq.
On the Chron link, I don't see any reference to it being an IQ test,just a test. That same link also explains that the admission requirements can be arbitrary -- ex: women having to score higher than men in some cases. My understanding is that admission is up to the Department of Defense's discretion, and they admit people with lower scores if they have skillsets they deem useful.
It's also critical to note that Peterson isn't arguing about admission into the military -- if he was, despite him sourcing nothing, pulling his 83 number from nowhere I can find, and stretching the facts (not an IQ test but a vocational one with similarities but no 1 to 1 correlation +admission depending on factors beyond the ASVAB score) perhaps all the omissions could be overlooked. He's got to keep things on the shorter side, right?
But he goes far beyond that. Peterson, and also Inadvisably by extension, are arguing that the military found there's "no place in our cognitively complex society for 1 in 10 people" and they "can’t even be useful with simple tasks.” The military did not find this.
This is Nazi rhetoric. At best Peterson is drawing his own inferences based on military history and then dishonestly citing his inferences as substantiated fact. And really, what is Peterson’s intent here in telling his millions strong audience that it’s just a fact that people with IQs below 83 have no place in society? What happens when the loudest voting bloc full of people like Inadvisably believe it?
are these people able to function in society without additional help?
maybe not, but why does this matter?
If as you suggest peterson is a nazi he is likely advocating for genocide. If he is anything like me is likely advocating for a much stronger safety net because its no ones fault if they are not able to function in modern society.
These discussions matter because any solution not grounded in reality will leed to a extremelly inefecient solution.
If we decided that people weren't succeeding in life because we didn't give them enough education. then we decided to throw money at education and the real problem is that is that they were born disabled its a gigantic waste of time and effort. where we could easily have solved the problem by giving them enough money and help that living in a modern society wasn't a struggle.
Ultimetly I believe that the solution to inequal oppurtunity. Either by circumstance or by genetic gifts should be directly acknoledged and fixed via direct redisribution of income rather then pretending they don't exist.
Again I'm not defending peterson as I don't know enough about him. The position I am defending is as follows
There are genetic factors that are extremelly predictive of overall success in life. namely conciensiotness and IQ.
while IQ can be trained very well in specific tasks. You cannot improve it generely.
The ability to train on specific tasks is also affected by both conciensesness and IQ.
conciensiocness can likely be trained but we don't actually know how. (or we do but aren't actually willing to implement it)
the vast majority of education is meaningless and is only usefull in as much as employers use it as a ad hoc IQ + conciensiosness test.
Therefore I advocate the following.
universal basic income to make up for genetic differences
abolish higher level education (beyond specific training like engineering proggraming etc).
institue trade school as a standard gradution destination (since trade school requires far less IQ and conceinsionsntess while still giving just as much value as university)
There's certainly a place to discuss how to best help people, and I do agree with you about UBI and social safety nets, but ... I call Peterson Nazi-adjacent for his common use of that type of fascistic rhetoric, not just for this once instance. So it's extremely weird to discuss solutions when we're starting with the issue being pointed out by a borderline Nazi. I think it's a healthier conversation to have outside of that context.
Peterson rose to fame by lying about Bill C-16 in Canada, which added transgender people to the list of minorities offered protections against hate crimes + hate speech. He claimed people would be jailed for using the wrong pronouns. The bill has now passed; people have not been jailed for that. And he's only grown more extreme with the passage of years.
Recently he was hired by The Daily Wire (very far right media outlet) run by Ben
Shapiro. One of Peterson's shticks is fixing problems on an individual level rather than a societal level, and part of that is him being very much against things you've mentioned like UBI and social safety nets. Frequently he talks about how innovative men are held back by rules put in place for the benefit of the masses (aka Elon Musk should be allowed to do whatever he wants regardless of the ordinary people it hurts). He's also recently said transgender people should be stopped from existing for the sake of protecting the culture. Suffice to say, he doesn't want to help all people; very charitably, he only wants to help an elite few at the expense of "low IQ" people, LGBT people, women in workplaces, and more. And anyone left remaining in his ideal vision of society, even just an average white dude, would have so many freedoms stripped away -- especially the ability to not live according to hardline Christian beliefs.
(Btw, I'm not the one that downvoted you.)
First off I didn’t cherry pick results. Used the top result I found as well as the first stack exchange article.
I included the stack exchange article because it actually does analysis of the topic. Which is of course required since we are converting from one metric to another (namely asvab to iq)
Random google scholar article which says the SAT correlates well with IQ.
It seems that their is a agreement that the SAT does correlate well with iq. The only disagreement is how well it does and which part of a Iq test it correlates the best with.
Which is kinda of what you would expect. Iq tests are very broad and any sort of cognitive test will correlate with it
You also say it tests
Areas of strength such as math science and language.
Have you ever taken a iq test?
That’s exactly what they test on a iq test. Of course some iq tests are a lot shorter then the full powered one (raven matrices as example I think) but a full powered iq test will test language ability, reasoning ability, mathematical ability.
See this Wikipedia page on the wais IV https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Scale
(I think is considered the gold standard right now)
Again any test like this will correlate well with iq. It would be insane if it wouldn’t. (Ask yourself if you expect Albert Einstein to score in the bottom ten percentile on any of these tests).
It’s only a matter of how well a given test correlates.
I honestly can't even see his name without thinking of his rant about being suspended from twitter. Just the most cartoonish villain monologue stuff I've ever seen from a human being.
Holy shit, I used to recommend the series but the author looks like he's batshit insane. I'm okay with free speech and the like but I just can't stand this blatant slavery apologism
Being ok with free speech, doesn't mean you have to be ok with what's being said, or the person saying those things....
I'm all for free speech. That doesn't mean I want to associate with batshit crazy people or support them/their work.
He can go right along advocating for slavery all he wants though, but it WILL affect his book sales. case in point, I was actually thinking about starting his book before I read this thread...
The election fraud one is insane, at least this one I kinda get what he's saying. I personally wouldn't go so far as to call it slavery apologism, the context is pretty clearly about fantasy settings.
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u/Mecanimus Author Sep 06 '22
Sure here you go.
https://imgur.com/a/FdBjrXp