Shaun
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 14 months, 2019–2025
2:39:46 · 4M views · Dec 4, 2019
Shaun's roughly 2.7-hour video essay on The Bell Curve. It covers intelligence, the g factor, IQ tests, IQ versus environment and the politics behind the book, with a critical reading of the sources.
HN commenters most often cite it as a thorough, well-sourced debunking of The Bell Curve and of popular IQ claims.
20 comments from Hacker News
this video It's a 2 hour video essay that covers psychometry generally as a lens to understanding a book called the Bell Curve that was a flashpoint for questions about the validity of IQ science generally (but most especially how it applies to race). It took a good chunk of my Sunday to get through it, but it was really enjoyable and gave me a ton of insight into a ton of buzzwords and studies I had heard of but couldn't really dig my teeth into. I think with this topic, getting a briefer, less nuanced summary than something like this would be a mistake because of how much misunderstanding of these topics permeates popular culture. The video also provides a number of studies and books to keep going beyond the relatively breif 2 hours of content it provides. It uses the famed/infamous book the Bell Curve as a case study and delves into how they were originally created, how they are updated, how the term hereditery when used in genetics means something that is sometimes counter-intuitive to the definition used in popular culture (for example whether someone wears earings has high heritability, whereas having 2 arms has effectively zero herritability) the statistical meaninfullness of factorization (G-factor) of domains of IQ into a single numerical value, how these domains came to be defined, the current state of understanding regarding the local vs enviornmental source of IQ for individuals, how the Flynn effect was observed, etc. But to answer a bit of your earlier question. Wh
This video about the problems with The Bell Curve (a book about IQ and other things) does a lot to explain a lot of the problems with IQ: this video . The video is well-researched; I've been a long-time fan of the creator for putting out quality stuff. >and it definitely has a large genetic component There's a number of studies showing that IQ is "heritable", but this is different from saying it's genetic. The video above (around the 39:00 mark) and [LINK] both get into this point. Wearing earrings is highly "heritable" despite being an arbitrary social custom, and having 10 fingers is not "heritable". It's also important to avoid falling into the conclusion that many people take about IQ that it being heritable means that educational efforts to improve it are worthless: >Think about the relative heights of men in a poor village in an underdeveloped country 100 years ago. The average height for these malnourished men might be 5 feet 2 inches. The heritability in observed heights within this particular society can be quite high; men of tall fathers are on the average considerably taller than men of short fathers. However, this does not mean that a program of improved sanitation and nutrition could not significantly raise the average height of this group in a few generations.
> For most people, performance on one type of cognitive task (e.g. verbal reasoning) is highly correlated with performance on the other types of cognitive tasks. It's cool that that's your understanding, but you're wading into territory that gets people sterilized and killed. I have a lot of trust in science, but not here. This video was informative for me: this video For example, here's an IQ test; let's say its given to 5,000,000 Canadians, and 3,000 Texans (1): * What is the capital city of Canada? * Which Canadian province is the largest by land area? * Who is considered the "Father of Medicare" in Canada? * Name the two official languages of Canada. * Which Canadian team won the Stanley Cup in 2017? * What is the national sport of Canada? * What is the name of Canada's national anthem? * Name the famous Canadian dish made with fries, cheese curds, and gravy. * Who was the first Prime Minister of Canada? * In which Canadian city is the CN Tower located? I would expect a normal distribution for Canadians, but for the Texans to score in the bottom quintile (regardless of "general intelligence"). (1) I asked ChatGPT to come up with this test. (edit: formatting)
>Ironicaly this is never mentioned, they just see this is a "many more men can have a higher iq distrubution wise due to the male gauss tail stretching out further than womens, so this is sexist to say that men are smarter". Because many advocates of GMVH are only interested in justifying the gender imbalance in leadership positions biologically, dismissing any well known social factors (e.g. competence rating on double blind fake CVs)? "Feminists say GMVH means men are all smarter" is a gross oversimplification of the situation. If you have 2.5 hours to spend on a video essay, I'd very much recommend "The Bell Curve"[1], a breakdown of the book of the same name. Not so much for the racism part, but for the background on the construction of IQ. [1]: this video
'Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said that most experts on intelligence “consider any black-white differences in I.Q. testing to arise primarily from environmental, not genetic, differences.” Dr. Collins said he was unaware of any credible research on which Dr. Watson’s “profoundly unfortunate" statement would be based.' [0] I think this video [1], does a good job of attacking a lot of race science and intelligence, though at 2.5 hours long it may be a bit too thorough. [0] [LINK] [1] this video edited for formatting