Gwern's Reviews > Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own

Hive Mind by Garett Jones
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Mar 01, 2016

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Read on February 24, 2016

Pop sci, which reads more like overgrown blog posts. Very weak overview of IQ's connection to income: poor overview of what IQ is, all its correlates, the evidence establishing its causal role like the iodization historical studies (which I think are extremely important yet there's not even allusions to their results), and surprisingly brief coverage of the cross-national correlational and longitudinal regressions (which you would think would be discussed at length). Jones pretty much doesn't discuss core issues like measurement error of IQ and income, and he is shockingly naively optimistic about the prospects of boosting global IQ - he takes the Flynn effect fully at face value, ignores education signaling (this, from a colleague of Caplan...?), and totally ignores the technical issues about IQ gains typically resulting from loss of validity of the test, publication bias, short-term gains fading out, and the almost total failure to find meaningful intelligence boosts from anything other than parasite eradication and iron & iodine supplementation - which have been largely done for most countries...

I am not surprised that I learned little from the book, but I am disappointed that it is so superficial & scattershot and I cannot link it to other people as a good explanation of why IQs matter so much to people & countries and why we should put very high valuations on charitable projects like iodization.

See also http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/08/... / http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/10/...
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02/24 marked as: currently-reading
03/01 marked as: read

Comments (showing 1-3 of 3) (3 new)

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message 1: by Christopher (new) - added it

Christopher Galias Is there another book about IQ (and the above topics) you can recommend?


message 2: by Pablo (new) - added it

Pablo Stafforini I'm not Gwern, but Ian Deary's *Intelligence* is an excellent short introduction to the topic.


Gwern Haven't read Deary's yet, but everyone seems to like it.


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