Yep, vocabulary is pretty g-loaded. The reasoning is pretty straightforward. The size of your vocabulary (in whatever language you have grown up in) is a pretty good measure of your learning rate over basically your whole life, since people who are better at learning will have picked up many more words over the course of many years. This table showed up early in the google search results, but I’ve seen the same numbers in a bunch of other places (my favorite reference is this book). Ignore the highlighting, that’s just what the Google image gave me. The relevant test is obviously “Vocabulary”.:
The correlation also holds up under much less restricted conditions. Again, I recommend Macintosh “IQ and Human Intelligence” as a good reference on all this, which has multiple chapters dedicated to this.
And then there is my anecdotal experience with Mensa, where I have also heard similar stories from other people living in different countries. I shortly joined the local Mensa Facebook group, and then quickly left it, because it was a constant source of conspiracy theories, and people claiming to have disproved theory of relativity. (I suspect that intelligence also correlates with being a contrarian, and being a contrarian correlates with believing in conspiracy theories.) Maybe Mensa specifically selects for a combination of high IQ and low RQ, dunno. Then again, maybe rationality community specifically selects for high RQ.
My model of mensa is that it self-selects on the negative tail of IQ correlations. Since if you were good in more ways than your IQ would indicate, there is a good chance you would hang out somewhere else than Mensa. It also doesn’t really seem to deal well at all with the problem of performance on IQ tests being highly trainable, and I think I heard many Mensa members often took multiple IQ tests in order to get in, giving rise to natural goodheart’s law problems.
But overall my bet would still be that believe in conspiracy theories and general decision-quality is still much much better at Mensa than in the average population. Mensa simply isn’t that high of a bar, in particular if you get any substantial training effects.
Thanks, I appreciate you taking time to respond to my objections. Will read the book.
I agree that Mensa selects for “not having better ways to spend your time”. I think you probably overestimate the impact of retraining—there are many people who keep taking the test every year, and keep failing every year. (Perhaps retraining properly already requires some intelligence threshold?) I agree that Mensa isn’t high enough bar—it’s like a slightly above-average university, except that you can meet dozen people in local Mensa and hundreds in local university.
Yep, vocabulary is pretty g-loaded. The reasoning is pretty straightforward. The size of your vocabulary (in whatever language you have grown up in) is a pretty good measure of your learning rate over basically your whole life, since people who are better at learning will have picked up many more words over the course of many years. This table showed up early in the google search results, but I’ve seen the same numbers in a bunch of other places (my favorite reference is this book). Ignore the highlighting, that’s just what the Google image gave me. The relevant test is obviously “Vocabulary”.:
The correlation also holds up under much less restricted conditions. Again, I recommend Macintosh “IQ and Human Intelligence” as a good reference on all this, which has multiple chapters dedicated to this.
My model of mensa is that it self-selects on the negative tail of IQ correlations. Since if you were good in more ways than your IQ would indicate, there is a good chance you would hang out somewhere else than Mensa. It also doesn’t really seem to deal well at all with the problem of performance on IQ tests being highly trainable, and I think I heard many Mensa members often took multiple IQ tests in order to get in, giving rise to natural goodheart’s law problems.
But overall my bet would still be that believe in conspiracy theories and general decision-quality is still much much better at Mensa than in the average population. Mensa simply isn’t that high of a bar, in particular if you get any substantial training effects.
Thanks, I appreciate you taking time to respond to my objections. Will read the book.
I agree that Mensa selects for “not having better ways to spend your time”. I think you probably overestimate the impact of retraining—there are many people who keep taking the test every year, and keep failing every year. (Perhaps retraining properly already requires some intelligence threshold?) I agree that Mensa isn’t high enough bar—it’s like a slightly above-average university, except that you can meet dozen people in local Mensa and hundreds in local university.