Lord help me, let’s talk about IQ.

IQ stands for “the intelligence question”, and it refers in far right circles to the dilemma of what to do with all the smart people

It has long been noticed around these parts that IQ is the one and only robust, empirical discovery of psychological science, so it is natural that psychologists spend all of their time trying to discredit it

I cannot take credit for the above. IQ, as YOU well know, my friends, is a number derived from a kind of math test, which purports to measure intelligence. There are many things wrong with this

The first thing we note is that IQ is not exact. It does not precisely what it claims to, although it seems to be good enough for government work

Despite the many objections, we know that it correlates with many good life outcomes, such as earning potential, and that it is also associated with height, and beauty, and other attributes one ought not to name

And there is a certain kind of person who will tell you, oh, it doesn’t mean anything because it is not a perfect fit to intelligence. There are people who do not score well on these tests who are moral, and smart, and successful. We all agree

But it seems to me that while the substance of the objection to IQ measurement is always “it’s not accurate enough”, the true objection is always, “it’s far too accurate”

Forget about IQ; suppose I came out with a test for a metric called Z, and it suffered from none of the problems of IQ. People with high Z were always successful, people with low Z were always criminally stupid. Do we imagine even for a moment that IQ detractors would embrace Z?

Of course not! In fact it one could develop such a metric as Z, it would be outlawed immediately, in fact even its existence would be suppressed, lest the layman should discover it. Quite possibly this has already happened

The truth is that most people do not want a clear cut way to measure the value of a person. The fact that money is in some way a proxy of a man’s value already makes most people deeply uncomfortable. They don’t want this knowledge to exist, not even theoretically. Why?

It is not merely that such knowledge, whether by way of money or IQ or some hypothetical Z, would puncture their pretty egalitarian pretensions, though it would of course do that.

It is that in the course of being measured, one inevitably learns to assign a number to THEIR OWN worth as a person, and there is nothing more disconcerting or discomforting than empirical knowledge of self

Society is built on pleasant lies and polite fictions. It is necessary to pretend at all times that we are not smelly, sadistic, bloodthirsty apes who are an evolutionary hair’s breadth away from throwing our literal feces at each other

One of the most important lies in society is the ability to pretend that none of our friends is any better than us, nor any of our enemies. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1023550713811501057

As we visit our relatives this holiday season it is vitally important to act as if your high and low achieving relatives equally loved by you. This is known as dignity

Human relations are built on dignity; it is a vital atom of society and any psychometric which creates a mapping from human to number is a dignity shredder. Only someone as smart and as stupid as an IQ scientist could think otherwise

Suppose we take all of the objections to IQ and we grant them. It’s inaccurate, there are other measures of quality that it misses, etc. Why, then, would it be wrong to allow corporations to use IQ tests to screen potential hires?

Corporations do many foolish things, and these things create market opportunities for their competitors. If IQ is such a worthless measure as they say, then any company that tries to use it would be leaving money on the table, and a shrewd investor would find a way to collect it

No one actually believes that their objections to IQ are all that substantial. What the thought experiment of Z reveals is that, quite the opposite, there is nothing that terrifies a certain kind of person more than looking in the mirror

It can feel, in these anarcho-tyrannical times, as if no one has any respect for the rule of law. But there is one class of law that is deeply, deeply respected by the spirit of our age, and that is the class of law that suppresses excellence

As I have said before, my political aims, and the aims of my fellow travelers, transcend such a petty thing as mere “policy”, though there are a great many policies we could suggest. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1069698629256921088

Chief among such political ambitions would be to repeal all laws that attempt to equalize mankind by suppressing or counterbalancing excellence in the name of equality https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1075401034728562688

We do not desire an end of human dignity; and if IQ were rendered by your smart glasses as a floating number over your head, dignity would surely end. But idiots have a way of advertising their idiocy even without such extreme measures

Ironically it is not the reactionary who must struggle not to equate human worth to mere intelligence; we know fully that a person may be an idiot and also a cherished friend. It is those who wish to conceal the truth about intelligence who conflate it with moral worth

And yes, if you missed my joke on the thread head, you failed the iq test