• jsomae@lemmy.ml
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    17 hours ago

    Unless you’re saying other metrics on people are also somehow eugenics like height, weight, or speed, IQ is not eugenics. Eugenics is the belief that one’s genes affects one’s life, and certain genes will lead to a better life in expectation. (This is in fact a true belief, since there are some genes which are known to cause horrible painful short lives.)

    IQ is just a measure of how well you do on an IQ test, which is known to correlate (maybe causally, maybe not) with various things such as income.

    How do you know there is no way to test how smart or dumb somebody is? Even if IQ tests aren’t to your standard, you can’t be sure there isn’t another test possible.

    • howrar@lemmy.ca
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      16 hours ago

      You would first need to define intelligence before you can measure it. We’re still nowhere near any kind of agreement on that first step.

      • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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        15 hours ago

        IQ is, at most, a notion of intelligence. Or it is simply a number. Regardless, it has correlations with other things, and that’s what’s interesting. Asking whether it is or is not “intelligence” is merely semantics.

        • howrar@lemmy.ca
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          5 hours ago

          I think you may have forgotten some of the context when you responded. We already have a consensus among experts that IQ isn’t intelligence. That’s not up for debate anymore. The question is whether or not intelligence can be measured, and the semantic question of defining intelligence is very important here. You can’t answer “how do we measure X?” without first defining what “X” is.

          • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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            5 hours ago

            Oh you’re right, I did. Sorry!

            As for a test of intelligence – maybe we’ll be able to define what that is at some point in the future. But, granted, until there is a consensus on the meaning of intelligence, there can’t be a test for it.