Is IQ Legitimate or B.S.?

March 25, 2025

Is the idea of IQ legit or total B.S.? With the replication crisis in social science, it's worth asking this since a number of major psychology findings didn't hold up under scrutiny. To find out, at Clearer Thinking, we ran a massive study. We tested thousands of people performing random subsets of 62 diverse cognitive tasks (vocab, math, logic, pattern recognition, reaction time, games, memorization, mental rotation, language learning, etc.) We successfully replicated a classic findi...

Testing a Theory Without an Experiment

January 25, 2018

You don't need to run an experiment to perform a valid test of one of your theories or hypotheses (whether informal or scientific). There is a technique, which I'll describe below, that can be far faster, and is used a lot less than it should be (especially when trying to test a theory in science, where it could save you an month long experiment, but also, with informal theories in daily life). I aspire to use this approach significantly more often than I do now. How to Test a Theory Without...

Are you a “credentialist” or “non-credentialist”?

July 21, 2017

Are you a "credentialist" or "non-credentialist"? Here's a test I designed so that you can find out. After noticing a number of times that people's feelings about formal credentials can differ dramatically and that this seems to impact their views on certain important topics, I've been working on defining a "credentialist" trait (or attitude). In a nutshell, the non-credentialist/credentialist spectrum, as I'm defining it, captures how important a person thinks formal credentials are, as ...

Testing Too Many Hypotheses

October 10, 2011

For each dataset, there is a limit to what we can use that dataset to test. Using the standard p-value based methods of science, the more hypotheses we check against the data, the more likely it will be that some of these checks give inaccurate conclusions. And this presents a big problem for the way science is practiced. Let's take an example to illustrate the principle. Suppose that you have information about 1000 people selected at random from the U.S. adult population. Your dataset includ...