letscomic asked: Why's the study of iq so interesting to you?

A whole lot of things are interesting to me, and often it’s hard to explain why.  That said:

There’s an obvious personal motivation in that I’ve taken two IQ tests in my life and I had an unusually large disparity between subtest scores on both, and I’ve noticed that some of the people I’m closest to in life have the same disparity (VIQ >> PIQ).  So even if a typical person’s intellectual capabilities are well-described by one number, apparently mine aren’t, and I’m curious whether this explains anything about my life and my relationships with other people / the world.  This also means I come into everything as someone who’s not well-described by the model – which is perfectly consistent with the positive manifold (the correlations aren’t exactly one) but gives me a reason to be especially interested in how the model can go wrong and what things look like when it does.

But even that is a bit misleading, since it’s not really my main reason for being interested in the subject.  My main reason, I think, is the same reason I’m interested in conflicts between mainstream economics and various critiques of it.  Things like economics and IQ testing are inherently interesting because they’re cases where academics say that they have, in a pretty rigorous way, demonstrated things which if true would have lots of implications for “how we conceive of human beings and societies” (I was going to say “politics,” but really the impact is broader, and just has politics as one especially important case).  And this holds out the tantalizing promise of getting definite improvements in this understanding, above and beyond what the average person knows, improvements that are supposed to be really well-grounded and “agreed on by most/all reputable experts.”  Like the social-science equivalent of things like germ theory.

But then we’re talking about big, real implications for real people which live or die on the validity of this idea that the discoveries are “rigorous,” that they rise to this "most people aware of the evidence agree” level, which is rare in social science, or in any discussions of psychology and society.  So it seems like the question of “how good is the methodology?” is extremely important here, much moreso than in most academic disputes, where the only upshot is what we end up believing about some deep sea creatures or something.

But at the same time, because these research fields deal with ideological issues, there is an incentive for people to either exaggerate or underplay methodological flaws for ideological reasons.  And sometimes the “mainstream consensus” looks complacent to me, like they’ve decided to dismiss all critics as ideologically motivated and thus are insulated from criticism moreso than other academics – meaning we end up doing this research less carefully than we do the research about deep sea creatures and ancient Roman folk beliefs and all sorts of other stuff that is cool but has few practical implications.  And this is really frustrating to me, because it seems so important to really know how much we know (or don’t about) these topics.  Like, there’s so much we could potentially gain, simply from talking about methodology here as carefully as we do in “irrelevant” academic subjects.  And I wish people were having those careful conversations more often than they do.  So that provides a lot of my motivation for talking about this stuff.

(I’m not claiming I’m more careful than most people, or more careful than the actual researchers.  It’s more that I think people should be able to ask subtle methodological questions and get responses that appreciate the human significance of getting the answers just right.  Even if the questions turn out to be ill-founded, it makes sense to be very curious about methodology in this way, and I wish the conversations had more appreciation of this and less suspicion of bad faith.)