Boy, this modern obsession with IQ is no less intense than old Indian obsession with purity. The fact that IQ can't be measured or even defined any better than purity does not take the force away.
Fortunately, IQ based society looks less evil than prurity based. At least your place in society is not strictly fixed by your birth.
"Table 2 shows the extent to which IQ, standardized achievement tests, and grades explain the variance of outcomes at age 35 in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 (NLSY79) data. ... Achievement
tests and grades are more predictive than IQ." - https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18121/w181...
> Meta-analysis demonstrated that parental SES and academic performance are indeed positively related to career success but the predictive power of these variables is not stronger than that of intelligence (see Table 1). In fact, intelligence exhibited several correlations with the measures of success that were larger than the respective correlations for other predictors suggesting that intelligence is, after all, a better predictor of success.
Please bear in mind that what little I know about the topic is based on my limited, non-expert (I'm a programmer) readings over the years, eg, dipping into Google Scholar when this topic comes up on HN.
> Even then Borghans concedes that "Grades, scores on achievement tests, and IQ are strongly positively correlated", just not perfectly so.
Sure. There are also strongly positively correlations between how rich your parents are and grades, scores on achievement tests, IQ, and career success.
Before making my earlier HN comment I had found the 2007 paper you cited, and noticed the comment "but there is little evidence of any historical trend in the relationship."
Thing is, I had also found "Investigating Core Assumptions of the “American Dream”: Historical
Changes in How Adolescents’ Socioeconomic Status, IQ, and GPA Are Related to Key Life Outcomes in Adulthood" from 2019, at https://web.s.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&... , which did find a difference - IQ was becoming a less relevant predictor:
] In a nutshell, the U.S. has faced dramatic socioeconomic changes during the last decades. The present findings suggest that for two birth cohorts—born in the early 1960s and in the early 1980s inequalities in educational, occupational, and health-related outcomes, which can be assumed to increase in later adulthood and old age, can be predicted by individual differences in adolescents’ IQ, GPA, and parental SES. The patterns of associations between life-outcomes and parental SES did not vary much, and that of IQ remained largely the same or varied inconsistently between cohorts. However, the observed increased predictive utility of GPA suggests that combined effects of social, economic, and labor-market changes may have increased stratification processes due to individual differences in GPA for adolescents belonging to the 1980s cohort.
This is for the US. They argue that the transition to a service/post-industrial economy combined with the increasing need for a college degree, increases the measure of GPA as a predictive value over intelligence.
It also comments the earlier "studies could not answer questions about whether predictive relations could generalize across cohorts who grew up in different socioeconomic environments."
FWIW, this study was pre-registered, at https://osf.io/hm5pt/ , so there's less chance of p-hacking.
Because of that 2019 paper, I restricted my search to only include papers published in the last few years.
You could just replace “skin colour” with “ethnic privilege” or whatever (which is more the point). I don’t know of any societies that don’t have that sort of problem.
Statistics of course can't work if there is no deviation, but I can't think of a country which is ethnically homogeneous.
Countries with a high degree of homogeneity, like South Korea and Japan, still have their own forms of racism. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_South_Korea says many students "have difficulties maintaining relationships with students who do not share the same nationality background ... because of their classmates' different skin colors".
> Ukrainians resp. Rusyns, the largest minority group, are scattered in various northern districts. Lesser numbers of Belarusians and Lithuanians live in areas adjoining Belarus and Lithuania. The Jewish community, almost entirely Polonized, has been greatly reduced. In Silesia a significant segment of the population, of mixed Polish and German ancestry, tends to declare itself as Polish or German according to political circumstances. Minorities of Germans remain in Pomerania, Silesia, East Prussia, and Lubus.
> Small populations of Polish Tatars still exist.
That's not 100% ethnically homogeneous, which means in principle there could have been ethnic discrimination.
IQ(g-factor) can definitely be measured even though no single test measures it perfectly.
If you give reasoning tests of all kinds (verbal, spatial, mechanical, numerical, etc.) there is lots of data showing that the the results of those tests tend to be correlated positively.
IQ is well defined and can be measured relatively accurately. There is extremely little chance of someone testing 70 IQ vs 130 IQ is going to be "more intelligent" on pretty much any metric you come up.
At the highest level, it's difficult to argue that anything actually matters.
So being in a hurry is as pointless as pondering endlessly to make the best choice.
But since we create our own isolated realities, most of which are human-lifetime based, we tend to care about the passage of hours or days. And in that scope, sometimes being quick seems important, but also having perspective and time for reflection can.
There is a time (pardon the pun) for blitz chess, and there's a time for clockless chess. What matters actually is the experience, not the outcome. If we believe that our approach resulted in a better outcome, we are happier.
If we are looking at this from a business perspective (which might map), the actual wizardry is in knowing exactly when to push and when to sleep on something.
I think we can all agree that there are things you should think very deeply about before you even touch your computer or join the conference call. Things like what sorts of vendors and business partners you want to get married to for the next half-decade. If you want to be a Microsoft shop or some OSS champion (both valid in my view!). These kinds of things often times require starting a new company to fix after you commit.
In our domain - the thing you don't want to spend a lot of time worrying about is the entire scope of the actual code/development work. Assuming you are using source control, you have a superpower that allows instant teleportation to any moment in time. The consequences of making a bad choice and acting quickly are negligible, assuming you aren't trying to lose the game on purpose (e.g. master builds straight to prod on unprotected pushes). It only gets to be adverse if you are unable to separate the bad from good ideas afterwards. Not reflecting on your prior works. I believe we'd refer to this as the "technical debt".
I think it was Amazon that does the one-way/two-way door decision test. This is a fair criteria for deciding when to sleep on a proposal or when to shoot and then aim.
> it's difficult to argue that anything actually matters
> being in a hurry is as pointless as pondering endlessly to make the best choice
Only during times of abundance (very recently). Historically, survival would be thing that mattered, and time is very important for running away from things, finding antidotes to poisons/disease, social coordination etc..
What I was looking for, but could not find in the article, is some more information about time perception [1].
It amazes me to no end that time seems to be passing faster and faster now that I grow older. In my youth, 10 minutes used to take ages, but now a month passes in a blink.
If any of you startup guys can find a way to slow this down, I'll buy a subscription.
I've noticed that it slows back down to childhood levels when I am on a really fun vacation, especially one that involves heavy physical activity and fascinating new outdoor environments. I think the novelty, play, and lack of stress combined are able to 'fix' this.
I am convinced the slowing down is essentially cultural, and is a result of how our lives are different as adults- and can be fixed by understanding this.
I think this can be accomplished full time as an adult by not taking things so seriously, and taking a lot more (not physically dangerous) risks. Go on adventures, don't obsess over fear of financial ruin, don't care about status or 'careers' and time will slow down.
As a single dad, I can't really figure out how to do that full time given my responsibilities, but can manage it for stretches of time on weekends and evenings.
A lot of the reason that time seems to pass more quickly as we age is that we have fewer and fewer novel experiences; when each day resembles the one before it, whole months can disappear in lived monotony.
I like to think of memory as using a sort of compression algorithm. Repeated data gets compressed away; novel data takes up space.
So you can slow down your time perception by making your life less compressible. Do things differently; make bigger changes in your life more often; make more milestones; take more trips; change things up; be random.
>A lot of the reason that time seems to pass more quickly as we age is that we have fewer and fewer novel experiences
Experiential reference grows, reducing what "a long time" really means. At ten years old, a year is one tenth your life experience. At fifty years old, it is one fiftieth. Pretty simple.
Agreement on the novel experiences. They do seem to reset the clock.
Pretty simple, but that would mean that an experienced minute would go 50 times as fast, and that is not the case.
Also (as I tried to get at in a sibling comment), I don't see how this would work internally. Why would time perception be relative to all experience? What is the use of that, and how would it be accomplished? Why don't we have this with other sensory input, such as vision or hearing?
The way I think about it is by making an analogy with sleep: We perceive time to be fastest during sleep, i.e. when there is no sensory input. So the perception of time is actually linked to changes in sensory inputs. My hypothesis is that as we grow older, we become less and less sensitive to stimuli due to familiarity, so we perceive time to be faster.
One theory I like is that when young, we see the world in "high FPS" (a rough metaphor for some neurological phenomenon). As we age, the "FPS" slow down, which makes everything seem much faster.
At least in my subjective experience, I can tell that motion seems coarser now that I'm 40. I can still detect the "soap opera" effect when motion smoothing is turned on in a TV, but it's a bit harder to tell than when the feature was introduced.
Interesting. I (also in my 40s) sometimes experience the vividness of reality in a higher quality than usual, and I vaguely recall that my visual experience was always this vivid when I was younger. Most of the time now it seems to be a bit dulled down. I always thought that this is because I probably need glasses. It might also be stress related.
What would cause such a change, and would there be an evolutionary explanation for it? Could it be related to vision only, or does it apply to other sensory input as well?
Unfortunately, the question what causes time perception to speed up with age, remains a mystery to me. I don't buy the argument that when we grow older things are less new, and therefore time somehow appears to go faster. For one, I learn more now than I did in my teens, when there was no internet. I also get to meet more people, experience life events, learn about death, etc. All pretty new, yet time seems to only accelerate.
The article also taught me a new term: "Boredom-prone individual". I think it might be an interesting experiment to try to be as bored as possible over the course of a year, and try to become a BPI. Perhaps the lasting effects will make up for the investment!
Isn't it just the fact that every moment is somehow compared to our experience of the sum total of all our moments. As you get older, a day becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of time out of your total lived days.
This is a theory that makes some sense, but I don't understand how it would work in my mind.
If I watch a minute pass by, I am certain that it goes faster than in my youth, but the scaling does not seem to be a linear relationship.
Say at the age of 10, I experience a minute to take 60 es (experienced seconds for a 10 year old kid). At the age of 40, it probably takes ~30 es, but certainly not 15. If we rule out sleep and boring parts of the day, then the numbers may come close.
But how would this work internally? How come all my experiences somehow add up and are projected onto my time perception gauge? Why is this not happening with, say, vision, hearing, temperature, hunger, etc?
My years doing the digital nomad thing were pretty slow. 3 months in a foreign country is subjectively way longer than 3 months at home (approx. 2x longer). A change of career/vocation should work the same.
Funny, a career mountain guide just told me the same thing last week (slow is steady and steady is fast). And the story he used to illustrate it was about a group of typical amateur climbers he'd guided on Denali, passing a group of navy seals. The navy seals were in much better physical condition, but they weren't pacing themselves and they weren't using the rest step technique.
I dunno. For me it is a running gag when I go to a McDonald's in a distant city, particularly in a foreign country, and say to somebody who's been waiting in line "... I thought this was supposed to be fast food".
In software development it is quite official that a fast computer is a good thing, I mean, idle minds do the devil's work if your compile takes 40 minutes.
Your compile should take a minute or so, though. And that's arguably slow.
40 min is order of magnitude slower, but the goal is not to be as slow as possible.
If you have e.g. a hot reload (instant recompile), that's fantastic, but you probably don't actually want to constantly re-configure the code, rather check on various state etc.
You also want to eventually start over as the size of the state changes outside the normal running parameters increases, and that's when you may want a slower recompile.
If it takes only a second, you probably didn't have enough code to work on, and it provides incentive to avoid frequent recompiles and stay in hot-reload. Even in languages without hot reload, this generally holds true.
You want a bit of time to consider which issues to fix, and you want some reason to try to get it right...the tradeoff is generally better code. The alternative is expensive (memory/disk/time) activities such as excessive and incorrect (re)-testing.
Put another way, fast cycle times are only better than slow ones if the quality and feature richness of your codebase is better than slow cycle times.
I would prefer to take 40 minutes and have a compiler spit out a guarantee of correctness than spend two weeks hot reloading junk.
This is true, Some of the most creative ideas and groundbreaking innovations come from periods of reflection and unhurried exploration. Allowing thoughts to simmer and develop over time can lead to more innovative solutions than just rushing into things blindly.
Delving into a subject slowly and thoroughly often leads to a deeper understanding. This applies to learning new skills, absorbing complex information, or appreciating art and culture.
Taking time to explore nuances simply enriches ones experiences.
> The answer is surprisingly simple: Being slow is an incredibly successful strategy for survival. In fact, being slow has helped sloths to survive on this planet for almost 64 million years.
I have the opposite conclusion. Many things have existed for millions of years, the vast majority of which are not slow. Therefore, being slow is a pretty terrible survival strategy. And, in practice, you see evidence of this: faster animals routinely kill slower ones.
> I'm still embarrassed when I have thoughts related to that book
You shouldn't be. The book is rightfully considered one of (if not) the defining works of behavioral psychology and you dismiss it because one chapter's methods came into question?
There's 1 specific chapter that he has publicly acknowledged relied on weak data. You're significantly overstating your point. Here's the actual blog post, with Kahneman responding in the comments (publicly confirmed it's him) if you page back : https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
Debunked how? Got links? I'm curious because I remember quite enjoying that book and he did get a Nobel for that whole area of research whereas we're just random HN commenters.
Debunked might too harsh of a claim, but the book does not make any strong testable predictions so that it can either be validated or debunked. The book certainly is not fraudulent in anyway, but the research is of quite limited value. Claims about prospect theory, priming, endowment effects and happiness heavily center around what is referred to as WEIRD populations (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), and even more specifically middle class Americans. The work has not found much success generalizing to other cultures or demographics, either geographically or even within ethnic communities within the U.S.
For the most part, the book puts forth some interesting ideas and presents some interesting metaphors and it is certainly more technical than most treatments of this subject, but in terms of actually making concrete statements that can be used to actually understand human psychology, there isn't a whole lot to debunk to begin with.
Higher intelligence is thought to be linked with more efficient use of resources rather than just faster or slower thinking:
Diffusion markers of dendritic density and arborization in gray matter predict differences in intelligence https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04268-8
But, larger and faster neurons are found in people with higher IQ?:
Large and fast human pyramidal neurons associate with intelligence https://elifesciences.org/articles/41714
More intelligent people have better neurological integrity and their neural impulses travel faster:
Genetics of Brain Fiber Architecture and Intellectual Performance
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/7/2212
But, intelligent people take longer to solve difficult problems:
Learning how network structure shapes decision-making for bio-inspired computing https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38626-y