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0 pointsdavidguetta3y ago0 comments

I mean I understand and welcome you enthusiasm about science and research papers, unfortunately it's largely misguided in my opinion.

Even in actual scientific fields like computer science (In particular machine learning and reinforcement learning academic environement in which I work and hold a PhD) 'doubting' is necessary, since a large percentage of papers are unreproducible and largely biaised for publication... [0]

Regarding social sciences papers, I give 0 credit to any of them and that won't change soon.

First it's literally impossible define rigorously any term to differentiate (I mean seriously how are you going to "measure" emotional intelligence or entrepreneurship skills). Secondly there a large fraction of the field which is just pretending to do science and circlejkerking each other by accepting their own papers without rigorous due diligence, to the point they can't even detect hoax and fraud [1]

At the end of the day I am not here to fight you. If you don't believe me then be it but I stand by my assessment that various kind of intelligence are at best losely related. Some math genius are 100% clueless in emotional or business intelligence, some genius entrepreneurs are 100% clueless with math or girls, some really good artists completely clueless in business or academic stuff. Some athletes too... Of course some will have all but imo it's a lucky minority.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

0 comments

necovek3y ago

I am fine with doubting any particular study, and I certainly have my reservations about social science studies in particular (most of them try to categorise "poorly-defined problems").

But we can either doubt the entire scientific process and throw our hands in the air, or we can work to improve it and look at it critically. At the moment, it's the best thing we've got.

Thus, I dislike the generic "I don't believe results of any study disagreeing with my anecdotal evidence", which is exactly what our scientific process is set up to dispell with. Proper argumentation is about misinterpretation of data, misapplication of statistical methods, insufficient sample size, outright data fabrication or anything along those lines.

Eg. in all your anecdotal examples, you are misinterpreting what "correlates" means. In particular, all intelligences correlating does NOT mean that "some will have all" (a famous statistics observation that there is no representative ever matching your average/median result in any complex measurement: eg you can have an average height of a group of people being 170cm and nobody being exactly 170cm — yet you can still claim how people in the group are 170cm tall on average, and then we can debate if that makes sense depending on the distributiin, sample size etc).

davidguettaOP3y ago

> in all your anecdotal examples, you are misinterpreting what "correlates" means. In particular, all intelligences correlating does NOT mean that "some will have all"

No, i'm saying exceptional intelligence in a field didn't lead to a discernable increase of intelligence in other aspect of life in general, which would actually be the definition of "correlate", in a large sample of people and fields I have seen.

Now you may disagree, or make another generic authority argument which invoke 'scientific studies' that I have yet to see the existence, but respectfully, I'm not here to debate and I'm also quite sure my point of view will not change by reading such 'study'. I was just here sharing my point of view of someone who have seem various exceptional people in various fields and expressing my doubts the whole "intelligence correlate" thing..

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