116
votes
Accepted
Did the CIA blow up the Nordstream 1 pipeline, using BALTOPS 22 as cover?
There is a good OSINT (open-source intelligence) based assessment of Hersh's claims by Oliver Alexander, which you can read in full at Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream.
The executive ...
- 3,044
112
votes
Does the US Armed Forces refuse to recruit anyone with an IQ less than 83?
Our sister site, Law StackExchange, has this same question: Is it truly illegal for the US army to hire someone with IQ less than 83?, with a high-quality accepted answer.
The answer is not a simple ...
- 140k
99
votes
Accepted
Is low emotional intelligence associated with right-wing and prejudiced attitudes?
The short answer
The study in question (Van Hiel et al. 2019) has been published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal. It presents empirical support for the hypothesis that emotional abilities ...
- 9,539
59
votes
Accepted
Drop in IQ due to immigration?
The PISA results are available online.
The OECD also published a summary paper which described what PISA is:
[T]he OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, [is] the world’s premier ...
tim♦
- 51.4k
40
votes
Does the US Armed Forces refuse to recruit anyone with an IQ less than 83?
This popular science article, generally backs up Peterson's claims.
All military recruits must take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to qualify for enlistment. The ASVAB is ...
- 12k
36
votes
Is low emotional intelligence associated with right-wing and prejudiced attitudes?
Here are the relevant paragraphs from the intro to the paywalled paper justifying the first line of the abstract:
Over the years however, it has been acknowledged that right-wing
authoritarianism ...
- 57.1k
29
votes
Accepted
Has the U.S. Army been conducting IQ tests on their recruits, unintentionally discovering a racial hierarchy of intelligence?
The ASVAB (AFQT) is not technically an IQ test.
IQ Tests, per se, are not issued to recruits for the armed forces. The U.S. Army does test people's capabilities, but not in a standardized IQ test (at ...
- 413
28
votes
Accepted
Does James Woods have an IQ of 180?
No: these news are not credible at all.
The report was investigated by Daily Edge and found to be unreliable for two reasons:
it was traced to a single source, Sinembargo.mx and of course this makes ...
- 78.6k
26
votes
Did the CIA blow up the Nordstream 1 pipeline, using BALTOPS 22 as cover?
Not according to the Russian Ministry of Defense, whose spokesman accused "British Navy personnel" of having done it, back in October. Hersh in contrast is very specific that US Navy "...
- 57.1k
25
votes
Accepted
Did the average IQ score in France decline in recent decades?
Conclusion: Although the world as a whole has seen a positive Flynn effect in the past few decades, there have been multiple studies that show a negative Flynn effect in a few places. Dutton and Lynn ...
- 12k
22
votes
Accepted
Are liberal/left-wing people more intelligent than conservative/right-wing people?
A lot of the discussion on this topic was provoked by a peer-reviewed study published in 2012. Quoting from the abstract:
We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive
ability ...
- 7,194
18
votes
Does the probability of entering and remaining in an intellectually elite profession peak at an IQ of 133 and falls with rising IQ?
Executive summary of what follows:
No, Ferguson does not support the claim in the question title, nor the more quantitative one in the question body, with trustworthy data.
The claim is the result of ...
- 784
18
votes
Did the term "meritocracy" originate in a dystopian satire?
This question sent me down the rabbit hole, chasing incredibly bad references at Google Ngram, Google Books, and Google Scholar. Some notable supposedly early references that use the word meritocracy ...
- 14.5k
18
votes
Accepted
Do Japanese crows use traffic to crack nutshells?
This behavior has been well documented in Japanese crows, but Cristol et al (the contradicting paper in the question) did not observe it in American crows.
This Ph.D. dissertation discusses the ...
- 12k
17
votes
Does long-term marijuana use lead to a significant drop in IQ?
Since the original article wasn't mentioned in the question, here's a link with abstract:
MEIER MH, et. al. Persistent cannabis users show neuropsychological decline from childhood to midlife. Proc ...
- 1,576
17
votes
Are people with a high IQ not allowed to become police officers in New London?
The lawsuit reported on by ABC News did happen (Robert Jordan vs. the City of New London, CT). The court case can be found here. That page verifies many of the facts given in the article, including ...
- 30.2k
15
votes
Accepted
Does the gorilla, Koko, have an IQ in the range 70-95?
Evidence:
The tests given to Koko the gorilla were Cattell Infant
Intelligence Scale, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Ravens Progressive Matrices and Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of ...
- 22.7k
12
votes
Accepted
Do the Irish have on average a 8 point lower IQ then the British?
I cannot answer about the UK and Ireland specifically, but the data presented there is not reliable. It comes from books by Lynn and Vanhanen, that have been heavily criticized by other scientists.
...
- 12k
11
votes
Do long-time students at this particular school have an average IQ of 152.6?
tl;dr– No, the claim about high IQ's appears to be based on an early definition of IQ that's no longer used. It's misleading to use this outdated definition of IQ as the claim would be very ...
- 4,111
11
votes
Do the mother's genes almost exclusively determine the sons' intelligence?
No, this grossly summarised version of the paper overstates its conclusions.
The quoted media reports suggest that the mother's genes account for all of the (variation) in intelligence of male ...
- 140k
11
votes
Does meditation increase IQ?
The 23 points of IQ mentioned in the Inc. article trace back to this study performed with only two test subjects and employing EEG biofeedback, not standard meditation techniques. The headline of the ...
- 7,194
11
votes
Has the U.S. Army been conducting IQ tests on their recruits, unintentionally discovering a racial hierarchy of intelligence?
Differences between the average IQ scores of different racial groups have long been observed.
The AFQT has been used to as a measurement of intelligence, notably by the controversial book "The ...
- 7,136
10
votes
Do Australian Aboriginal people have low intelligence and sexual control?
Intelligence
Australian Aboriginal people have a lower intelligence
This is a very vague question. What is intelligence? And how do you measure it? Is this question about some sort of innate, ...
tim♦
- 51.4k
10
votes
Accepted
Do day-care centres lower the IQ of children?
In direct reply to the question, the study on which the comment seems to be based looked at children in Rumanian orphanages and does not provide any evidence to support the claim.
But: The concern ...
- 380
9
votes
Does having more women in a group increase its collective intelligence?
I was going to edit my question to make some clarifications on the question. which in retrospect could, perhaps, have been more focused, in particular with respect to the notion of "collective ...
- 341
9
votes
Accepted
Did Christopher Langan learn to speak when he was only 6 months old?
Unfortunately, without any conclusive audio of Langan speaking at 6 months we can't really prove whether he could or could not speak. However, it is possible, though unlikely, that he could speak very ...
- 11.4k
9
votes
Are fussy babies more intelligent?
It does not seem so.
The link at the bottom of the article points to this article by Schmidt, Fox, Perez-Edgar and Hamer.
My (non-expert) reading of this is that baby fussiness is largely ...
- 1,176
8
votes
Is this quote correctly attributed to Einstein? “Intelligence is not the ability to store information, but to know where to find it.”
Quote Investigator did an article on a similar quote and I think the answer applies here too.
It could be a quote that's a vague memory of someone else's vague memory of something Einstein actually ...
- 30.2k
8
votes
Does long-term marijuana use lead to a significant drop in IQ?
To complement Yisela's answer:
There is a more recent study (from 2016) that contradicts the results of the 2012 study by Meier MH et. al:
Impact of adolescent marijuana use on intelligence: Results ...
- 706
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible