YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Haier

lines on the record: 136
first: 2022-07-14
most recent: 2022-07-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Absolutely. Some people learn faster than others. Some people learn more than others. Now, faster, by the way, is not necessarily better. Long as you get to the same place eventually. You know, there are professional schools that want students who can learn the fastest because they can learn more or learn deeper or all kinds of ideas about why you select people with the highest scores. And there's nothing funnier, by the way, to listen to a bunch of academics complain about the concept of intelligence and intelligence testing. And then you go to a faculty. Who to hire among the applicants. And all they talk about is how smart the person is”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By having good reasoning skills, which cannot be taught. We know this, by the way, because there are many efforts. You know, the United States military, which excels at training people, I don't know that there's a better organization in the world for training diverse people. And they won't take people with IQs under, I think, 83 is the cutoff because they have found they are unable to train. People with lower IQs to do jobs in the military.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you doubt, see, another problem here is a lot of critics of intelligence research, intelligence testing tend to be academics who by and large are pretty smart people. And pretty smart people, by and large, have enormous difficulty understanding what the world is like for people with IQs of 80. Or 75 Is a completely different everyday experience. Even IQ scores of 85, 90, you know, there's a popular television program Judge Judy. Judge Judy deals with everyday people with everyday problems. And you can see the full range of problem-solving ability demonstrated there. And sometimes she does it for laughs, but it really isn't funny because People who are people who are very limited in their life navigation, let alone success.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now you've hit the key point about why we even want to study intelligence and personality, I think, to a lesser extent. But that's my interest is more on intelligence. I went to graduate school and wanted to study personality, but that's kind of another story how I got kind of shifted from personality research over to intelligence research. Because it's not just a number. Intelligence is not just an IQ score. It's not just an SAT score. It's what those numbers reflect about your ability to navigate everyday life. It has been said that life is one long intelligence test. And who can't relate to that?”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I talked about when you make a decision for an individual, statistically for groups, there are many people who have a disparity between their math score and their verbal score. That disparity, or the other way around. That disparity is called tilt. The score is tilted one way or the other. And that tilt has been studied empirically to see what that predicts. And in fact, you can't make predictions about college success based on tilt. And mathematics is a good example. There are many people, especially non-native speakers of English who come to this country, take the SATs, do very well on the math and not so well on the verbal. Well, if they're applying to a math program, Professors there who are making the decision or the admissions officers. Don't wait so much to score on verbal, especially if it's the non native speaker.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it really comes down to Which piece of information Maximizes your decision making ability. If you just use high school grades, it's okay. You will miss some people who just don't do well in high school, but who are actually pretty smart enough to be bored silly in high school and they don't care and they, their high school GPA isn't that good. So you will miss them. In the same sense that somebody who could be very able and ready for a college just doesn't do well on their SAT. This is why you make decisions with taking in a variety of information. The other thing I wanted to say.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whoever is interpreting the score has to take into account various things that would affect your individual score. And that's why decisions about college admission or anything else where tests are used are hardly ever the only Criterion to make a decision.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me say this there are two ways to approach the very real problem that you say that some people just get anxious or not good test takers. By the way, Part of testing is you know the answer. You can figure out the answer or you can't. If you don't know the answer, there are many reasons you don't know the answer at that particular moment. You may have learned it once and forgotten it. It may be on the tip of your tongue and you just can't get it because you're anxious about the time limit. You may never have learned it. You may have been exposed to it, but it was too complicated and you couldn't learn it. I mean, there are all kinds of reasons here. But for an individual to interpret your scores as an individual,”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if it's a reasoning test, it has to be related to G. But if people go in and take a standardized test, whether it's an IQ test or the SAT, and they happen to be sick that day with 102 fever. The score is not going to be a good estimate of their G. If they retake the test when they're not anxious or less anxious or don't have a fever. The score will go up, and that will be a better estimate, but you can't say their G factor increased between the two tests.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you get anxious taking the test, many people say, Oh, I didn't do well because I'm anxious I hear that a lot. Well, fine, if you're really anxious during the test, the score will be a bad estimate of your G factor. Don't mean the G factor isn't there. By the way, standardized tests like the SAT. They're essentially intelligence tests. They are highly G loaded. Now, the people who make the SAT don't want to mention that. They have enough trouble justifying standardized testing. But to call it an intelligence test is really beyond the pale. But in fact, it's so highly correlated because it's a reasoning test. SAT is a reasoning test. A verbal reasoning, mathematical reasoning.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that is why some of the best IQ tests have a timeline. Because if you have no time limit, people can do better. It doesn't distinguish among people that well. So that adding the time element is important. So speed of information processing and reaction time is a measure of speed of information processing. Turns out to be related to the G-factor.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That reaction time doesn't really correlate with IQ very much. But if you change the instructions and you say three lights are going to come on simultaneously, I want you to press the button next to the light that's furthest from the other two So, maybe lights one and two go on, and lights six goes on simultaneously, you take your finger off and you would press the button by light six. That's that reaction time to a more complex task. It's not really hard. Almost everybody gets it all right, but your reaction time to that is highly correlated with the G factor.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Here's another example of a different kind of test called the Hick paradigm, and it's not verbal at all. It's a little box, and there are a series of lights arranged in a semicircle at the top of the box. Then there's a home button that you press. And when one of the lights goes on. A button next to each of those lights. You take your finger off the home button and you just press the button next to the light that goes on. And so it's a very simple reaction time. Light goes on as quick as you can. You press the button and you get a reaction time. From the moment you lift your finger off the button when you press the button where the light is.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's hold ass Let's just talk about these. Examples now Some of those items seem very cultural. And others seem less cultural. Which ones do you think scores on which subtest are most highly correlated with the G factor?”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You were saying. Okay. So here's another subtest. I'm going to repeat a string of numbers. And when I'm done, I want you to repeat them back to me. Ready? Okay. Seven, four, two, eight, one, six. You get the idea. Now, the actual test starts with a smaller number, you know, like two numbers, and then it is people get it right, you keep going, adding to the string of numbers until they can't do it anymore. Okay, but now try this. I'm going to say some numbers, and when I'm done, I want you to repeat them to me backwards. Okay, now so I gave you some examples of the kind of items on an IQ test general information. I can't even remember all. General information vocabulary digits span forward and digit span backward.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Regatta mean. And I choose that word because that word was removed from the IQ test because people complained that disadvantaged people would not know that word just from their everyday life. Here's another example from a different kind of subtest. Regatta is a”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And some more than others. So, for example, let me give you a couple of things here. One of the subtests on the standard IQ test is general information. Let me just think a little bit because I don't want to give you the actual item. But if I said, how far is it between Washington, D.C. and Miami, Florida? Within 500 miles plus or minus You know, it's not a fact most people memorize, but you know something about geography. You say, well, I flew there once. I know planes fly 500 miles. You know, you can kind of make an estimate. But it's also seems like it would be very cultural. So there's that kind of general information. Then there's vocabulary test. What does...”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's called social desirability. But we're getting a little far afield because I only wanted to give that example of Dust Bowl empiricism. When we talk about the items on an IQ test, Many of those items in the Dust Bowl empiricism method have no face validity. In other words, they don't look like they measure anything. Whereas most intelligence tests, the items actually look like they're measuring some mental ability. So here's one”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What of all these, what does that have to do? And the point is the content of these items. Nobody knows why these items in aggregate predict anything but empirically they do. It's a technique of choosing items for a test that is called dust bowl empiricism. That the content doesn't matter, but for some reason, when you get a criterion group of people with this disorder and you compare them to people without that disorder, these are the items that distinguish. Irrespective of content. It's a hard concept to grasp.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sorry, a little bit of a tension. That's okay. I mean, this is interesting because you're right. It's been around for decades. There are a lot of scientific research on the psychometric properties of the test, including what it predicts with respect to different categories of personality disorder. But what I want to mention is the content of the items on that test. All of the items are essentially true, false items. True or false, I prefer a shower to a bath. True or false, I think Lincoln was a better president than Washington.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, your question is interesting because you want me to give examples of items that make good items. And what makes a good item is not so much its content, but its empirical relationship to the total score that turns out to be valid by other means. So, for example, Let me give you an odd example from personality testing. So there's a personality test called the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, MMPI. Been around for decades.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know this is in the book. I have the graph in the book, but there are essentially twice as many people alive in the highest IQ quartile than in the lowest IQ quartile. Tru in men and women So it makes a big difference. Now, why this is the case is not so clear since everyone had access to healthcare.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they did. And those records were discovered in an old storeroom at the University of Edinburgh by a friend of mine, Ian Deary, who found the records, digitized them, and has done a lot of research on the people who are still alive today from that original study, including brain imaging research, by the way. Really, it's a fascinating group of people who are studied. And not to get ahead of the story, but one of the most interesting things they found is a very strong relationship between IQ measured at age 11 and mortality. So that In the 70 years later. They looked at the survival rates and they could get death records from everybody, and Scotland has universal health care for everybody. And it turned out if you divide people by their age 11 IQ score into quartiles and then look at how many people are alive 70 years later.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are a number of statistical properties of any test. They're called psychometric properties. You have validity, you have reliability, reliability. There are many different kinds of reliability. They all essentially measure stability. And IQ tests are stable within an individual. There are some longitudinal studies where children were measured at age 11. And again, when they were 70 years old and the two IQ scores are highly correlated with each other. This comes from a fascinating study from Scotland. In the 1930s, some researchers decided to get an IQ test on every single child age 11 in the whole country.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what you can say is IQ scores are interpreted really as percentiles. So that if you have an IQ of 140 and somebody else has 70, the metric is such that you cannot say the person with an IQ of 140 is twice as smart. As a person with an IQ of 70, that would require a ratio scale with an absolute zero. Now you may think you know people with zero intelligence, but in fact there is no absolute zero on an IQ scale. It's relative to other people. So relative to other people, somebody with an IQ score of 140 is in the upper less than 1%, whereas somebody with an IQ of 70 is too standard deviations below the mean. That's a different percentile.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“IQ is a score. People use the word IQ to mean intelligence, but IQ has a more technical meaning for people who work in the field. And it's an IQ score, a score on a test that estimates the G-factor. And the G-factor is what's common among all these tests of mental ability. So if you think about, it's not a Venn diagram, but I guess you could make a Venn diagram out of it, but the G factor would be really at the core, what's common to everything. And what IQ scores do is they allow a rank order of people on the score. And this is what makes people uncomfortable. This is where there's a lot of controversy about whether IQ tests are biased toward any one group or another. And a lot of the answers to these questions are very. Clear, but they also have a technical aspect of it that's not so easy to explain.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I get that a lot about being uncomfortable talking about this. Let me go back and just say one more empirical thing. It doesn't matter. Which battery of tests you use. So there are countless tests. You can take any twelve of them at random, extract a g factor, and another twelve at random and extract a g factor, and those G factors will be highly correlated, like over 0.9 with each other. So it is a ubiquitous, it doesn't depend on the content of the test is what I'm trying to say. It is general among all those tests of mental ability. And tests of mental, you know, mental abilities include things like, geez, playing poker. Your skill at poker is not unrelated to G. Your skill at anything that requires reasoning and thinking, anything from spelling, arithmetic, more complex things. This concept is ubiquitous. And when you do batteries of tests in different cultures,”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“IQ is a score. An IQ score is a very good estimate of the G factor. You can't measure G directly. There's no direct measure. You estimate it from these statistical techniques. But an IQ score is a good estimate. Why? Because a standard IQ test is a battery of different mental abilities. You combined it into one score, and that score is highly correlated with the G factor, even if you get better scores on some subtests than others. Because again, it's what's common to all these mental abilities.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are test taking skills. There are specific abilities. Someone might be particularly good at mathematical things, mathematical concepts, even simple arithmetic. Some people are much better than others. You might know people who can memorize, and short-term memory is another component of this. Short-term memory is one of the cognitive processes that's most highly correlated with the G-factor. So”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seems to be very much influenced by genetics. It's very hard to change the G-factor with training or drugs or anything else. Don't know how to increase the G-factor.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Factor analysis a way of looking at a big set of data and look at the correlation among the different test scores and then find empirically the clusters of scores that go together. And there are different factors. So if you have a bunch of mental tests, there may be a verbal factor, there may be a numerical factor, there may be a visual spatial factor. But those factors have variance in common with each other. And that is the common among all the tests, and that's what gets labeled the G factor. So if you give a diverse battery of mental tests and you extract a G-factor from it, that factor usually accounts for around half of the variance. It's the single biggest factor, but it's not the only factor, but it is the most reliable, it is the most stable.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“about it. It looks like it's universal that you find it in all cultures. The way you find it, step back one step, the way you find it is to give a battery of mental tests. What battery you choose? Take a battery of any mental test you want. Give it to a large number of diverse people. And you will be able to extract statistically the commonality among all those tests. It's done by a technique called factor analysis. People think that this may be a statistical artifact of some kind. It is not a statistical artifact.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can. There's a lot about research in general, not just intelligence research that is poetic. Science has a poetic aspect to it. Good scientists are very intuitive. They're not just, hey, these are the numbers. You have to kind of step back and see the big picture. When it comes to intelligence research, you asked how well has this general concept held up? And I think I can say without fear of being empirically contradicted that it is the most replicated finding in all of psychology. Now some cynics may say, well, big deal, psychology. We all know there's a replication crisis in psychology and a lot of this stuff doesn't replicate. That's all true. There is no replication crisis when it comes to studying the existence of this general factor. Let me tell you some things.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely right. And people get hung up on this because they say, well, what about the ability to do X? Isn't that independent? And they said, I know somebody who's very good at this but not so good at this other thing. And so there are a lot of examples like that, but it's a general tendency. So exceptions really don't disprove your everyday experience is not the same as what the data actually show and your everyday experience when you say, oh, I know someone who's good at X, but not so good at Y, that doesn't contradict the statement about a, he's not so good, but he's not. The opposite. It's not a negative correlation.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The general factor I really started with Charles Spearman, and he noticed this is like, boy, more than 100 years ago, he noticed that when you tested people with different tests, all the tests were correlated positively. And so he was looking at student exams and things. And he invented the correlation coefficient, essentially. And when he used it to look at student performance on various topics, he found all the scores were correlated with each other and they were all positive correlations. So he inferred from this that there must be some common factor that was irrespective of the content of the test.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody has an idea of what they mean by intelligence. In the vernacular, what I mean by intelligence is just being smart, how well you reason, how well you figure things out, what you do when you don't know what to do. Those are just kind of everyday common sense definitions of how people use the word intelligence. If you want to do research on intelligence, measuring something that you can study scientifically is a little trickier. And what almost all researchers who study intelligence use is the concept called the G factor, general intelligence. And that is what is common. That is a mental ability that is common to virtually all tests of mental abilities.”
2022-07-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #302 – Richard Haier: IQ Tests, Human Intelligence, and Group Differences · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source