So if a Rationality Quotient (RQ) became famous for only measuring skills that everyone can build regardless of where they start, rather than innate ability, it’d be less infected than the discourse around IQ?
If rich people can hire tutors that will reliably increase the RQ of their kids over the RQ of their peers, I can imagine RQ becoming quite popular and politically acceptable to talk about.
Similarly for IQ, once we have the technology that will let rich people genetically design their kids to have IQ around 200, while everyone else is stuck with IQ 100 on average.
So far, the only measure of intellect one talks about in a polite company is education. The thing that correlates positively with intelligence, but also can be bought. (In other words, where you can buy your membership among the intelligent.)
To make IQ more popular, I propose to establish a society called Excellensa, where you can get membership in two ways: either score IQ 150 or more on a valid IQ test, or pay $1,000,000 donation to Excellensa. The information about who gained the member which way will be forever kept secret. People who pass the IQ 150 test and become members will receive a one-time reward of $10,000, to incentivize smart people to take the test and join. The rest of the donated money will be used to promote the society as “a society of supreme intellect”. I predict that most objections against discussing one’s IQ or membership in Excellensa would disappear overnight.
I don’t agree with that model of acceptance noticing dimensions of variance among individuals. Education is used because it’s at least nominally available to everyone, even if it’s actually mostly caused by individual capability, effort, and parental resources (not necessarily in that order). It’s objective enough to be easy, and correlated enough to important things (how useful it would be to invest energy in a relationship with the person) that it makes a good proxy to more specific dimensions that are more problematic for various reasons.
I suspect RQ would fail in a lot of ways—it’s not simple and objective, so it’ll hit the IQ problem—people who don’t like it will claim measurement bias (they’re right, and it would be worse if it mattered enough for rich people to game it). I suspect it’d ALSO fail in predicting outcomes, if it’s somehow excluding “innate” (including genetic and early-environmental) strengths.
Seems unlikely, both because I doubt the premise that an RO, whatever it looked like, would be significantly more or less trainable than IQ measurements (based on the fact that supposed measures of learnable knowledge like the SAT and GRE are so strongly correlated with IQ) and because if it had any measurement power it would, like the SAT and GRE, quickly become embroiled in politics due to disparities in outcomes between individuals and groups.
So if a Rationality Quotient (RQ) became famous for only measuring skills that everyone can build regardless of where they start, rather than innate ability, it’d be less infected than the discourse around IQ?
If rich people can hire tutors that will reliably increase the RQ of their kids over the RQ of their peers, I can imagine RQ becoming quite popular and politically acceptable to talk about.
Similarly for IQ, once we have the technology that will let rich people genetically design their kids to have IQ around 200, while everyone else is stuck with IQ 100 on average.
So far, the only measure of intellect one talks about in a polite company is education. The thing that correlates positively with intelligence, but also can be bought. (In other words, where you can buy your membership among the intelligent.)
To make IQ more popular, I propose to establish a society called Excellensa, where you can get membership in two ways: either score IQ 150 or more on a valid IQ test, or pay $1,000,000 donation to Excellensa. The information about who gained the member which way will be forever kept secret. People who pass the IQ 150 test and become members will receive a one-time reward of $10,000, to incentivize smart people to take the test and join. The rest of the donated money will be used to promote the society as “a society of supreme intellect”. I predict that most objections against discussing one’s IQ or membership in Excellensa would disappear overnight.
I don’t agree with that model of acceptance noticing dimensions of variance among individuals. Education is used because it’s at least nominally available to everyone, even if it’s actually mostly caused by individual capability, effort, and parental resources (not necessarily in that order). It’s objective enough to be easy, and correlated enough to important things (how useful it would be to invest energy in a relationship with the person) that it makes a good proxy to more specific dimensions that are more problematic for various reasons.
I suspect RQ would fail in a lot of ways—it’s not simple and objective, so it’ll hit the IQ problem—people who don’t like it will claim measurement bias (they’re right, and it would be worse if it mattered enough for rich people to game it). I suspect it’d ALSO fail in predicting outcomes, if it’s somehow excluding “innate” (including genetic and early-environmental) strengths.
Seems unlikely, both because I doubt the premise that an RO, whatever it looked like, would be significantly more or less trainable than IQ measurements (based on the fact that supposed measures of learnable knowledge like the SAT and GRE are so strongly correlated with IQ) and because if it had any measurement power it would, like the SAT and GRE, quickly become embroiled in politics due to disparities in outcomes between individuals and groups.