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Stephen Hsu
 Physicist, Startup Founder, Blogger, Dad Saturday, September 05, 2009

Some favorite posts

Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will. Mama said knock you out (learning how to fight).

Net worth , life satisfaction , happiness , the gilded age.

My lovely kids. Photos. Autobiographical.


Credentialism and elite careers , Defining merit , elitism , brainpower

These papers are somewhat technical:

Cattle genomics (an existence proof):

This is for popular audiences (Nautilus Magazine): anon said...

"Randomly sampled eminent scientists have (very) high IQs"

Like Feynman? I read this. It is difficult to believe you fell for this BS. Even if the made up tests were valid the stability of adult IQ for the population at large does not mean stability of IQ for those who make a living using their intelligence.


SAT: 1560
GRE: 800, 800, 800
GMAT: 770
 Steve Hsu said...

You make a valid point, but I believe it is answered in the Terman data. Adult IQs were not appreciably higher (relative to childhood scores) in the Terman subset that pursued challenging careers than in the subset that did not. Of course this point deserves more scrutiny -- the SMPY study could address it using their older cohorts.

6:05 PM 

For some reason, I have to tell you my Cal Tech story. I have always been a humanities type. In my high school in a small town in the Central Valley of Cal, the hardest and best class was chemistry. Everybody took it their senior year. Since I didn't care how I did, I took it as a junior with a female friend of mine who was our junior year science wiz, and the daughter of one of our science teachers. I also took physics that year.

Incredibly, in both the physics and chemistry class, I not only got A's, but the teachers told me that I had done the best in the class. The senior class included three people who went to Stanford, one as a chemistry major. My teacher also told me that I had done better than a girl in the previous year's course who went to Cal Tech.

I think that the reason this class was so excellent was that the teacher was a retired Army colonel who'd worked as a chemist in the army, and had undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics from Cal. Anyway, based on his statement, I decided to take the AP tests in chemistry, English, and history, very early in my senior year. I did good in history and English, but great in Chemistry. I think that it was the 98th or 99th percentile. I actually thought that it was a mistake. When I showed it to my chemistry teacher, he was quite pleased. So pleased, in fact, that he put my name in for a scholarship without telling me.

So, in the Fall of my senior year, I received a letter from an oil company or oil executive in Cal that informed me that I had won a very selective and lucrative scholarship for college. I was ecstatic, until I read the conditions. I had to major in chemistry or chemical engineering, and attend either Cal Tech or Harvey Mudd.

Now, I'd taken the SAT as a junior because a good friend of mine was being courted by colleges already. He became an NFL running back. I scored 600 in Math, which I considered fine. In other words, given my score and mediocre math grades, I wasn't going to Cal Tech or Harvey Mudd.

One final point. In the year that I graduated from high school, a Cal Tech grad from my high school won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Don the libertarian Democrat

2:49 PM 
Another thing Steve. The stability of adult IQ does not mean the stability of very high IQs or very low. There should be much greater variability in the IQ (in terms of IQ points) on retest at the extremes. A change from 130 to 145 is much more likely than from 100 to 115.

12:43 AM 
"Greater", yes. "Much greater" - I think not.

As I recall, the mean change upon retest is only four points. Your own scores seem to correspond to something a little above IQ 155. The mean for highly accomplished scientists in the data cited by Steve is also in this approximate neighborhood for math and verbal, quite distant from the mean for all scientists. 4/55 ~= 7.3%, leaving a huge signal/noise ratio.

I'm not familiar with the GMAT, but notice that your own extremely unusual SAT concords with your GRE. According to you this should be rather unlikely. (Granted, there is some loss of information since you maxed out the GRE; we don't know for sure that you wouldnt've got 900 900 900 were that possible.)

My total SAT = my total GRE and they were quite far from the mean.

No effort to alter IQ has ever altered adult IQ compared to a control group. (The IQ of subadults is a bit more malleable, and, notably, less correlated to that of the individual's parents, siblings, identical twin, etc.)

There simply isn't a single fact, to my knowledge, that really tallies with a robust environmentalist position, and I would in fact be grateful if you could point one out, because I am always ready to give up my views. The closest thing to that would surely be the Flynn effect - it's arguably at least something of a fig leaf for the whole business, but I don't think it really tallies with robust environmentalism as it's commonly understood. It's mostly just kind of strange.

2:14 AM 
A possible example: The difference between the mean IQ of British South Africans and that of Afrikaners. I don't remeber the source.

My scores mean nothing. I prepped.

5:32 AM 
What non-anecdotal evidence do you have that prepping substantially succeeds.

5:12 PM 
Is there any non-anecdotal evidence that it doesn't?

7:04 PM 
I tried scholar.google[SAT preparation]. Here are the top hits.

hit #1

"Special preparation resulted in an overall difference of eight points [...] between the treatment and control groups, corresponding to one additional correct item and stemming primarily from performance on analogy and antonym items."


hit #2 irrelevant

hit #3 you can read the first page for free - it's informative and rather concordant with hit 1:

#4 a cite only

#5 irrelevant

#6 Some stats jocks looking for something on which to test out their sophisticated observational study method. That's fine, but it's irrelevant to resolving the actual question, considering that randomized interventional studies on the question exist. Presumably the intended "real" use of this method is the examination questions where randomized study isn't possible.

10:11 PM 
ahem, examination OF questions where randomized study isn't possible.

1:19 AM 

Two things

1) I’d like your permission to (re)print your article on ‘Torchwood’for our website

2) I was hoping we could use your ‘scribing’ talent for our website.

The Best Shows Youre Not Watching (dot) com [all one word]
‘Torchwood’one of our featured shows. We’re hoping to round up a few people who can occasionally contribute perspective (via an article/blog) on the shows – maybe a recent episode, future direction, plot shortcomings etc.

What’s in it for you?
Primarily a larger audience back channeled to your blog. We don’t pay but the site has a lot of promise and we're pretty excited about getting it off the ground. Let me know what you think.
