The NNT IQ thread uses all the same arguments against IQ as fat acceptance people do about BMI- it’s not a perfect measure, fitness is more than weight, my granny was obese and lived to be 100, that triathlon guy had a heart attack at 30. It’s still bad to be fat, bad to be dim — Michael Story 🔱 🇬🇧 (@MWStory) December 24, 2018

Imagine a society obsessed by bird watching. Bird watching is not only a wonderful pleasure for the individual but also, let us say, the source of that society’s flourishing. Good bird-watchers are in high demand. Many people want to be bird-watchers. Aristotle has a section on bird watching in the Ethics. The National Academy of Sciences is named after John Audubon.

We worry about the next generation of bird-watchers. Can we identify them? Can we spot diamond bird-watchers in the rough? To help, some psychologists create a test. The test is based on introspecting on what bird watching is really about. The psychologists ponder it, watch some bird-watchers, and decide it looks like they’re really good at sitting still.

The test, therefore, is how long you can sit in a chair without moving. This is administered in controlled conditions. You have to put your hands in your lap, palms up, there’s a timer, and you don’t get to see the particular chair you’re sitting in ahead of time. Movement is judged by the person who administers the test, at first, but it’s now been upgraded to laser-ranging systems that eliminate sources of bias.

The test works! It turns out that if you can’t sit still in a chair for more than five minutes, you will never make it as a bird-watcher. Not only that, but if you can break the thirty-minute mark, you have an elevated probability of becoming a great bird-watcher. Sitting still captures bird-watching ability.

A bunch of other tests based on sitting still are created. They all strongly correlate with each other. Comfy chairs, couches, even a super-rigorous standing one used at Duke; they all seem to measure the same thing, s. It turns out that sitting still scores move a little bit with training, but if someone can’t sit still for ten minutes, there’s almost nothing they, or a Head Start program, can do to get them past the thirty minute mark, at least if you check a couple of years later. New sitting tests are created that are more resistant to people learning to sit still.

Even more than that, it turns out that sitting still is not just predictive of bird watching performance, it’s also predictive of a whole host of other life outcomes. People who can’t sit still for five minutes have more problems with addiction, for example. Conversely, someone who can sit still for twenty minutes is often able to avoid addiction, or to break it if he falls victim. Very, very few people who can sit still for three hours die of alcoholism. Same with divorce, automobile accidents, and being good at chess. Bird watching ability is protective. This fits with how important bird watching is in the culture.

Things start to get dark. For example, very few women are extreme performers on the sitting task. This is because sitting ability is bell-curve distributed, and the female variance is smaller than the male variance. Some men just can’t sit still, while others are massive overachievers and can sit still for days. Women just can’t hack it as elite bird-watchers because is very small for large

The psychologists caution that just because they’re saying that women are much, much less likely to be found in the elite sitting score percentiles, and that’s the best measure of true bird-watching ability we have, it doesn’t mean you should assume that any individual woman can’t be a great bird-watcher. That doesn’t make sense, they say. Most people realize that this is exactly what you should think given what they’re saying. If red apples are much less likely to taste good than green apples, you should cook with the green apple unless you’re racist. But everyone agrees to go along with the idea that this population-level stuff is super-innocent, and people who write papers on this get ruthlessly suppressed and there’s a whole Quilette thing.

Twin studies are done. Sitting task performance is genetically heritable.

Racial differences in the sitting task appear. Extremely sophisticated linear regressions are done to control for SES, age, educational background of parents, etc., and they refuse to go away. People write books about how the lack of black bird-watchers is due to their genetic inability to do well on the sitting test. (People notice that black female bird-watchers are over-represented in elite circles compared to black male bird-watchers, and that kind of clashes with the gender result, but explanations are forthcoming.)

There are some troubles in paradise, however.

To begin with, almost every great bird-watcher alive thinks the test is absolutely crazy. Bird watching is not about sitting perfectly still for hours, they say! No great bird-watcher wants to brag about their sitting score. A famously egotistical bird-watcher who writes books about how awesome he is at bird watching, how he totally crushed this other bird-watcher, etc etc., is also really proud of the fact that he was, at best, at the bottom of the upper-quartile of sitting still. Birdbloggers clamor to reveal their crappy sitting scores.

In fact, bird-watchers basically describe what they do in terms of anything other than sitting still. This is a dynamic, gestalt thing, they say. There are many different kinds of birders. Great birders are birders about birding. There is a world of Platonic birds I touch them with my mind at night. Bird-watching is ethological poetry, and I am Byron. Besides, those kids who do blow away the sitting task? We’re not surprised when only a small fraction of them actually blow away bird-watching.

What do bird-watchers know about bird-watching? the psychologists reply. A lot of the greatest bird-watchers are liberals who don’t like the race stuff which is totally true. Not only that, they add in a Parthian shot, but the sitting task test is actually a good, liberal thing! It really opened up bird watching back in the 30s. A lot of WASPs were getting grandfathered into the elite birding academies, and they couldn’t even sit still! If you oppose the sitting test, you are in favor of WASPy morons who scare away the birds. You oppose The Enlightenment itself.

Problems persist, however. When we actually look at the sitting still performance of the elite bird-watcher population, they’re actually not so great. Yes, these people are good at sitting still, and some are really quite good. But not crazy good at it, even among the ultra elite. If you go by elite scores, in fact, it looks like literally a quarter of the population might meet the sitting still bar for being a great bird-watcher, even though the test sample was admitted to the birding academies partly on sitting scores. Among other things, there’s basically no excuse for the differential representation of men and women in the birding world.

Crazy! A quarter of the population! We thought that there could only be a few great birders, but maybe there’s a huge untapped potential for a breakthrough in our species. The sitting still psychologists are not pleased.

Some well-intentioned educators show up. Could we at least split it, guys? We have this intuition that there are many different kinds of birders. Fine, the psychologists say. Make a test. The educators invent some tests, but in as much as they are predictive of bird-watching, they correlate with sitting score, and in as much as they aren’t, they don’t. Somehow, the other aspects of birding are resistant to isolated measurement in a test you take sitting down for a few hours. Grit doesn’t replicate.

What do people who teach bird-watching know about a person’s capacity to learn bird-watching? the psychologists say. Our best studies now show that we can isolate the ultimate essence of birding, the principal component of all the tests. It is a test conducted in a white room, with a chair of so-and-so-weight. All stimuli are excluded. It is totally silent. Nobody is present in the room. There are no windows.

Some birders hear about this test and are amazed. The test now excludes absolutely everything we think matters about bird-watching, they say: responsiveness to external stimuli, to other birders in the field, to dynamic upsets, false leads, the thrill of the chase, the intuitions, the third-sight. Doesn’t this disprove that the sitting-still task is a measure of bird watching?

Fine, if sitting still is not birding, the psychologists say, what else could it be? Could you define birding for us?

Many people think this is a good point, in part because the sitting-still score has been named the “Bird-watching Ability Quotient”. How could it do anything other than measure it? Parents tell kids who can sit really still, oh, you could make a great bird-watcher. In movies, bird-watchers save the Earth by sitting really really still while things explode all over the bird-watching complex. Young kids who are just mediocre at sitting still give up on bird watching and become psychologists.

We’d never do this kind of stuff in reality, of course. We’d never be so wrong about a thing we value so much. We’re a high-IQ society.