To be frank IQ research is getting less and less relevant, and I suspect it has less to do with politics, and more to do with the fact that it has failed to further our understanding of human behavior and the human mind for the past 80 years.
Much more interesting research has come from other fields of psychology, including (in order of peak popularity) behaviorism, cognitive psychology, social psychology, neuro-psychology. Unlike IQ works from these fields have made predictions in unrelated fields and inspired lasting paradigm shifts inside psychology. For example social psychology has provided very useful constructs used in economy, behaviorism in criminology, neuro-psychology in medicine, cognitive psychology in computer science etc.
Scientifically IQ is a dead end. It only makes predictions inside the field of psychometrics, it correlates only with related constructs, the only place where it is used in an unrelated field is when racists are trying to excuse ludicrous statements.
Note: This is not entirely true. IQ was (is?) used to assess cognitive disability in individuals, but today we have a lot better tools for that (thanks to cognitive and neuro-psychology), so it’s usefulness has been surpassed by other fields.
> To be frank IQ research is getting less and less relevant, and I suspect it has less to do with politics, and more to do with the fact that it has failed to further our understanding of human behavior and the human mind for the past 80 years.
That's a fairly bold claim. Honest question: how did you come to that conclusion.
> Scientifically IQ is a dead end. It only makes predictions inside the field of psychometrics, it correlates only with related constructs, the only place where it is used in an unrelated field is when racists are trying to excuse ludicrous statements.
That's patently false. We already know it predicts academic ability (which is why MIT is reinstating the SAT requirement. It's an IQ test). And we also know it to be one of the best available[1] predictors of performance in cognitively complex work - like programming (Google's HR has publicly discussed this in the past).
[1]"best available" here doesn't necessarily mean great, just better than the competition. In domains like psychology that have a high degree of causal complexity, you rarely have any single factor that explains more than 50% of the variance in some subject - heck even 10% is pretty good.
> That's a fairly bold claim. Honest question: how did you come to that conclusion.
I didn’t conclude anything. This is merely a suspicion, I explained my reasoning below.
SAT being an IQ is a stretch. SAT is a scholastic amplitude, a far more narrowly defined construct. In fact IQ (according to psychometricion) should be immutable and somewhat inheritable, while SATs should reflect the work you put in during your school career and should be fair across demographics. IQ is also normally distributed while SAT has a negative skew (raw mean around 1050 with arithmetic mean of 1000).
You might have meant to say that SAT is correlated with IQ. While true, that is by design and is scientifically uninteresting on its own. SATs are far simpler and cheaper to administer. We have way more SAT data on the general population then IQ data. If your model includes scholastic amplitude but you measure it in IQ, you will not only have a less accurate model, but you will also make gathering data way more expensive and difficult.
> SAT being an IQ is a stretch. SAT is a scholastic amplitude, a far more narrowly defined construct.
SAT is an IQ test[1]. It was always an IQ test. There might be better (i.e. more g-loaded) tests out there, but the SAT still definitely works.
> You might have meant to say that SAT is correlated with IQ. While true, that is by design and is scientifically uninteresting on its own.
The SAT is correlated with g, which makes it an IQ test. You claimed that IQ doesn't correlate with anything other than performance on IQ tests. That is clearly incorrect with regard to academic performance. That you find this correlation 'uninteresting'is frankly beside the point.
> If your model includes scholastic amplitude but you measure it in IQ, you will not only have a less accurate model, but you will also make gathering data way more expensive and difficult.
There's not one 'IQ' test. Anything that correlates strongly with g is an IQ test. Yes, it also tests knowledge, but the ability to learn and recall facts is a heavily g-loaded activity.
Much more interesting research has come from other fields of psychology, including (in order of peak popularity) behaviorism, cognitive psychology, social psychology, neuro-psychology. Unlike IQ works from these fields have made predictions in unrelated fields and inspired lasting paradigm shifts inside psychology. For example social psychology has provided very useful constructs used in economy, behaviorism in criminology, neuro-psychology in medicine, cognitive psychology in computer science etc.
Scientifically IQ is a dead end. It only makes predictions inside the field of psychometrics, it correlates only with related constructs, the only place where it is used in an unrelated field is when racists are trying to excuse ludicrous statements.
Note: This is not entirely true. IQ was (is?) used to assess cognitive disability in individuals, but today we have a lot better tools for that (thanks to cognitive and neuro-psychology), so it’s usefulness has been surpassed by other fields.