Name: Intelligence
ISBN: 9781444791877

Intelligence

There is a strange disconnect between the scientific consensus and the public mind on intelligence testing. Just mention IQ testing in polite company, and you'll sternly be informed that IQ tests don't measure anything "real", and only reflect how good you are at doing IQ tests; that they ignore important traits like "emotional intelligence" and "multiple intelligences"; and that those who are interested in IQ testing must be elitists, or maybe something more sinister. Yet the scientific evidence is clear: IQ tests are extraordinarily useful. IQ scores are related to a huge variety of important life outcomes like educational success, income, and even life expectancy, and biological studies have shown they are genetically influenced and linked to measures of the brain. Studies of intelligence and IQ are regularly published in the world's top scientific journals. This book will offer an entertaining introduction to the state of the art in intelligence and IQ, and will show how we have arrived at what we know from a century's research. It will engage head-on with many of the criticisms of IQ testing by describing the latest high-quality scientific research, but will not be a simple point-by-point rebuttal: it will make a positive case for IQ research, focusing on the potential benefits for society that a better understanding of intelligence can bring.

What Hacker News says

sanxiynMay 2023

Yes, a ton. I recommend https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc...

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civilizedOct 2022

Genetics is a major driver of intelligence, and more intelligent people tend to earn more money.

Here's a book that covers the basics of what we know about intelligence and its correlation with life outcomes: https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc...

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civilizedOct 2020

It's depressing how conventional it has become for a relatively intelligent population, like the HN audience, to only know about criticisms of IQ and basically nothing about its positive value. But witness the credulous reception for Taleb's slapdash work in these comments, and the hostility to basic technical criticisms of that work.

If you are interested in knowing about the thing itself, and not just criticisms of the thing, I invite you to pick up, for example, Stuart Ritchie's book https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc...

And before you get upset about the title, the book is from a survey series called "All That Matters". It's not claiming that _intelligence_ is "all that matters".

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CaoCaoOct 2019

Those are still accurate. There's a short book by Stuart Ritchie called "Intelligence: All That Matters" that is a good summary of contemporary psychological understanding of IQ.

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barry-cotterJun 2019

It’s a wonderful episode and I’m sure it’s an interesting book but I’d take it with more than a pinch of salt. Most people can’t get to a world class level in anything, whether they specialise early or not. I’d be more inclined to read K. Anders Ericsson’s book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Stuart Ritchie’s Intelligence: All That Matters, or both.

For most areas of human expertise we don’t have the kind of knowledge about what to do and why, or the coaching infrastructure for youth prodigy breeding grounds like sports or playing a musical instrument. The number of doctors who started preparing for their career in any real fashion before they were twelve might be numbered in the hundreds, ditto financiers. Most things you can start at as an adult.

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onuralpMar 2018

Two comments:

- Lay people seem to have a very good intuition about the actual heritability of intelligence (taken to assess the genetic and environmental determinants of intelligence). [0]

- If you'd like to read an up-to-date and thorough literature review on human intelligence, I highly recommend "Intelligence: All That Matters" by Stuart Ritchie.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468694

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